¶ Dome: Rationale for the Dome (1)
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Index Entry
Dome: Rationale for the Dome:
"When we got to World War II everyone knew alloys were very important. All the aircraft plants had incredible vertical bins of different kinds of alloys of different metals, of different sizes, all extruded of different sections. Just forests of them and designers then designed in terms of what was in the book. Really more than 50 percent of the metals shipped to the aircraft companies went into scrap. They cut out the heart of the sheet; they said it was weak along the edges.
"This is the theory of Donald Douglas. I met him right after World War II and he was thinking about going into producing my Wichita house. Just as he had said of the DC-3: 'I’m never again going to have a design engineer design anything if he hasn’t also been a production engineer because the production engineer had to understand how to design airplanes. He would dare to change the design so it could be made with the most appropriate tools.
“Setting up the new critical paths for the space program… all the things that had to be done before a blast-off! We actually got into designing alloys. We began to design a part with such a unique function in relation to others that it had to have”
