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...let me take you back to May 1961, to the morning the astronaut Alan Shepard lay on his back atop the rocket that would make him America’s first man in space. He was very brave to be there, as previous unmanned launches of the same type of rocket had shown a disturbing tendency to explode into stupendous fireballs. When asked what he had been thinking just before blastoff, he replied “I was thinking that the whole damn thing had been built by the lowest bidder.”

Paul J. Nahin: When Least Is Best (PDF),
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