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Your search keyword '"Vinsel, Lee"' showing total 3 results
Start Over Author "Vinsel, Lee" Topic history of technology
3 results on '"Vinsel, Lee"'

2. Introductory Note to “Seeking High IMP Reliability in Maintenance of the 1970s ARPAnet”.

Author

Vinsel, Lee and Russell, Andrew L.

Subjects
*HISTORY of technology, *TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, *INVENTIONS, *OBSOLESCENCE
Abstract

One popular way of viewing technological change is to see each technology as going through a lifecycle, which would include stages such as invention, innovation, maturity, operations and maintenance, decline, and, eventually, obsolescence. For some time, historians, including Svante Lindqvist, John Staudenmaier, and David Edgerton, have pointed out that the lion's share of the history of technology has focused on the early stages of this lifecycle. Indeed, the history of technology is in many ways a literature of invention and innovation. This reality is as much—and perhaps even more—true for the history of computing as it is for other subfields in the history of technology. The history of computing has primarily focused on how new things came to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published
2022
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3. The Steep Climb to Low Earth Orbit: A History of the Space Elevator Community's Battle Against the Rocket Paradigm

Author

Pearson, Derek J., History, Hirsh, Richard F., Winling, LaDale C., and Vinsel, Lee

Subjects
History of Technology, Rocket, American Rocket Societies, Space Elevator, Space Shuttle, NASA, Space Race
Abstract

This thesis examines the growth of the space elevator community in America from 1975 to 2010. It argues that the continued practical failures of the space elevator, a proposed technology for efficiently transporting payloads and people into space without conventional propulsion sources, resulted from a technological paradigm built around the rocket and supported by a traditional engineering culture. After its triumph in landing men on the Moon from 1969 to 1972, the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sought to advance novel concepts for further space exploration, but it fumbled in pursuing nontraditional notions of escaping the atmosphere such as the space elevator. Employing interviews with space elevator advocates Bradley Edwards and Michael Laine and other primary and secondary sources, this thesis also draws on concepts such as technological paradigms, engineering cultures, and the technological sublime. It concludes by demonstrating how success eluded the marginalized space elevator researchers who found themselves grappling with the vast social and technical system that supported the rocket's hegemony. Master of Arts This thesis examines the growth of the space elevator community in America from 1975 to 2010. It argues that the continued practical failures of the space elevator, a proposed technology for efficiently transporting payloads and people into space without conventional propulsion sources, resulted from a technological paradigm built around the rocket and supported by a traditional engineering culture. The technological paradigm of the rocket encompassed all of the people and practices that made the rocket work. After its triumph in landing men on the Moon from 1969 to 1972, the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sought to advance novel concepts for further space exploration, but it fumbled in pursuing nontraditional notions of escaping the atmosphere such as the space elevator. Much of this failure is owed to an engineering culture within NASA that looked down upon challenging the rocket. This thesis demonstrates how success eluded the marginalized space elevator researchers who found themselves grappling with the vast social and technical system that supported the rocket's hegemony.

Published
2022

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