To The Moon! (In a Minivan)

Fast Company, December, 2007 by Charles Fishman

T he essential technology America's space-shuttle astronauts depend on, which almost no one outside NASA knows about, is paper. Not just a file folder of vital checklists but actual piles of paper--stacks and stacks of it. Every minute of flight, every experiment, every space walk, is scripted. The routines are rehearsed in advance, manuals in laps, over and over. The loose-leaf sheets--called FDFs, or flight data files--are organized into functional sets, held together with three metal rings.

When the day comes to pull on the orange go-to-spcae suits, the paper goes too--250 pounds of it. Astronauts, strapped in for launch, have critical FDFs Velcroed to their legs for easy access. When you're hurling a 30-year-old spaceship into orbit, some things are not going to feel...