Thursday, July 7, 2022
On September 23, 1999, NASA’s 193-million-dollar Mars Climate Orbiter entered orbit around Mars—or was supposed to. Instead, it was lost, either by falling into the Martian atmosphere and disintegrating or by flying straight through the atmosphere and falling into orbit around the sun. Initially, engineers and officials at NASA were […]
On July 25, 2000, an airplane crashed near Paris France. But it wasn’t just any airplane. It was flight 4590, a famous supersonic Concorde. In the following months, investigators concluded that the crash was caused by two things: a strip of metal on the runway and a design flaw regarding […]
The Taipei 101, at the time of its completion in 2004, was on the cutting edge of engineering and technology, breaking the records for tallest building in the world and fastest elevators in the world. Another impressive engineering feature resides on the 87th floor: a 728 ton weight, called a […]
On Monday, September 14, 2020, Carrie O’Connor was killed when the elevator in her apartment building dropped with her in the doorway. The elevator in question had passed its most recent inspection less than six months prior to the incident, and up until then had given tenants little reason for […]
On August 14, 2018, the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed, killing at least 39 people and destroying an important highway linkage. A replacement bridge was inaugurated on August 3, 2020, but the question still remains: why did the 51-year-old Morandi Bridge collapse while 2000-year-old Roman aqueducts still stand? The […]