Improving
Engineers, like most of us, are sometimes at their most creative when they are forced to be. Circumstances may require solving problems quickly or may place overwhelming constraints on what seems possible. To improvise is to create "on the fly," and the results can be most ingenious. Outer space exploration is one of the last places we expect engineers to improvise. Few activities appear to be so thoroughly planned from start to finish. But in space, improvisation becomes essential to the creative engineer's contribution. Whether planning and executing repairs on a device millions of miles away or devising clever ways to extend the work of multimillion dollar instruments, the spacecraft engineer may work with the most extreme constraints of all.