Charlie Duke, Former NASA Astronaut

In my Engineering Apollo class, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Charlie Duke, former astronaut during Apollo. I've listened to a lot of professors, CxOs, inventors, etc. this semester and I can say without hesitation that Charlie's talk was the best yet! It was informative, interesting, and intelligent. Imagine having a former astronaut recollect his personal (and very candid) experiences of being in space and on the moon to a group of about 30 people.

Charlie was an MIT grad (Course 16 of course) and best of all he is a North Carolina native (Charlotte)! His thesis advisor was Professor Young (who is one of our professors for this class), whose thesis advisor was Jim Nevins (who was present in the class for the Duke talk), whose thesis advisor was Dick Battin (who spoke to our class a couple of weeks ago). That means 4 generations of student/teachers in the MIT Aero/Astro department were on hand, all of whom had a significant impact on space exploration. Only at MIT.

Charlie's talk was filled with all sorts of interesting tidbits about being an astronaut and flying to the moon. I got wrapped up in his talk and didn't take many notes. Guess you kind of had to be there anyway. Charlie did show some footage they took while on the moon. Previously, I'd only seen mini-clips of astronauts on the moon. Charlie showed us a good 15 minutes worth.

And over on Yoav's blog, Yoav still doesn't get the usefulness of listening to someone like Charlie. Aside from the coolness factor, it is interesting to hear how people went about trying to solve large systems problems that had never been faced before. A good space story will make my ears perk up every time over the same ol' business and technology stories I've heard from so many CEOs time and time again. Throwing in a bit of the old with a lot of the new isn't a bad thing. I've learned several good lessons on engineering complex systems from the class.

I stole a picture of Charlie from Matti's blog: