Reaching for the sky

Be it what Americans think of as a short car journey (usually at least long enough to get one from London to Birmingham) or what they consider a light snack (usually enough to induce dyspepsia in most Britons), the relative size of things is one of the major cultural differences the visitor to the USA from these shores is forced to acknowledge. This phenomenon applies to questions of engineering as much as to everything else. At the recent SolidWorks World 2013 event in Orlando, Florida, not only was the event itself on a large scale, but many of the keynote speakers reflected this. Perhaps the person who brought this home most clearly was Tom Aicheson, chairman and founder of Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation*, an educational foundation dedicated to facilitating STEM education and competition as an enabler of civilian space explorers. Through its Explorers programme Mavericks offers high school students with a gift for STEM subjects the chance to participate in the challenge of conducting sub-orbital space flight missions. That's right: high school students build and launch rockets that fly to the edge of space. Sadly, it is difficult to imagine schoolchildren in this country – however gifted – being allowed anywhere near projects of this scale and complexity. And yet here were their US counterparts successfully launching both a space flight and their careers in engineering. The last thing I would want is for it to be thought that the efforts being made in this country to inspire the next generation of engineers, but this address did make one wonder if we might do better to think bigger.