| February 2009 |
| VERTICAL GUN RANGE ENGINEER |
| When Chuck Cornelison gets ready for target practice, he loads his 3,7-metre
gun
and shoots projectiles in excess of 30 000 km/h. |
But he’s not firing ordinary shells: The manager of Nasa’s Ballistic Range Complex is shooting tiny replicas of meteors and spacecraft from three guns to mimic how craters form and how... |more| |
|
| September 2008 |
| Inventor |
| Mario Salazar has built everything from hearing aids to Space Shuttle hardware... |
But when he decided to create a line of furniture, he couldn’t find a tool that would make precisely angled cuts as quickly as he wanted. So the 44-year-old invented one: the ProMiter-100, which he... |more| |
|
| August 2008 |
| Palaeontologist |
| Don Esker has wanted to work with fossils since he was four years old. |
“My first polysyllabic word was dinosaur,” says the in situ curator of the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota. To map a bone at the indoor dig – a 26 000-year-old sinkhole that contains... |more| |
|
| July 2008 |
| Parachute tester |
| Jumping out of an aircraft is one thing; doing it with an unproven parachute is something else entirely. |
But for sport canopy companies such as Performance Designs, in DeLand, Florida, someone has to go first - which is where Rickster Powell comes in. The 41-year-old has 20 000 jumps under his belt,... |more| |
|
| June 2008 |
| Field mechanic |
| “These trucks take blasts that amaze me,” he says. “And the soldiers live to tell the stories.” |
Nearly 60 per cent of US deaths in Iraq are caused by roadside bombs, which makes Chris Mieras’s goal pretty simple: keep people alive. As a field mechanic for Force Protection, a military... |more| |
|
| May 2008 |
| Foley artist |
| Dan O’Connell deals with broken bones on a regular basis. Explosions, too. |
As a foley artist at One Step Up, his studio in Burbank, California, O’Connell creates the sounds that make films such as Gladiator and The Bourne Ultimatum feel like real life... |more| |
|
| November 2007 |
| Stunt driver |
| On Sobotker’s office wall, a photo sequence shows a minivan, with him at the wheel, rolling six times after a pipe-ramp jump. |
He’s also flipped an 8-wheeled tank at 55 km/h for the upcoming movie Doomsday and handbrake-turned a bus across a road. When we caught him at his panelshop in Woodstock, near Cape Town, he was... |more| |
|
| September 2007 |
| Bicycle wheel builder |
| In an age of machine-built wheels costing a small fortune, Johan Bornman builds bicycle wheels the traditional way. |
That is to say, he does it by hand, using simple tools and a dedication to his art that verges on the fanatical. Machines can’t tension the wheels properly, he says, and they can’t perform “stress... |more| |
|
| July 2007 |
| Crash-test technician |
| “This is a gearhead’s dream,” he says. “At home, I build cars. At work, I crash them.”
|
Wrecking a ride is harder than it looks. “It’s not just hitting a button,” says Jordan Haynes, a 24-year-old crash-test technician at MGA Research in Burlington, Wisconsin. America’s National Highway... |more| |
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| May 2007 |
| Paediatric transport doctor |
| “In flight, we make on-the-spot decisions with the resources we have,” says 31-year-old Wanderman. “If a kid’s heart stops beating, we can’t rely on teams of doctors and CT scans.” |
Before the army of specialists at the University of California San Francisco Children’s Hospital can save kids awaiting liver transplants or battling cancer, the patients must get to the Bay Area –... |more| |
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