Attn: 'über' space geeks...live play-by-play of a Mars probe entering orbit

[ztirffritz]

You would not believe what goes into making airbags. My company makes plastic covers that are sort of like the safety seal on the air-bags. They keep debris, bolts, nuts, etc out of the air-bag during and after auto assembly. When the bag deploys, one of our part tears down the middle and the bag burst out like a bag of jiffy-pop. The bag is sewn onto another of our parts. They x-ray every bag before installation to make sure that there are no stray foreign objects inside. We had an entire order rejected once because the company that supplies the color concentrate that we use in the plastic changed their formula. It had a higher metal content that set off the alarms on the X-Ray/metal detector machines at the end of the Air-bag assembly process. They could not figure out how a part made entirely of plastic was setting of a metal detector. Sory, I know it is a bit off topic, but I thought it was interesting.

[Racer X]

Where I work pioneered the airbag tech, and held all the original patents. Because of President Reagan, we were forced to sell of that part of the business. But we still supply almost all of the propellant used in the GGs.

We lost a lot of expensive camera gear at work years ago, as the propellant residue was corrosive long-term, and the dust got everywhere.