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was his plan? Getting back from there
with new technologies and some know-
how to get a competitive advantage? Nah,
Ulysses knew he would have never come
back».
Motorsports and aerospace engineering
have always been tied: can you explain
how?
«The Dallara group of Sailors who
designed and build the drill was pretty
lean. We worked on this project in our
overtime. The production manager was
Italo Montanari, who has retired now, was
a man with great practical sense. I still
remember his countryman's metaphors
applied to the space exploration. Then
there was a young designer, a surface
specialist, a great mechanic, an
engineering intern and me. No managers.
Interesting isn't it? We managed ourselves
amidst many other projects that were so
urgent and important that now... nobody
remembers about them. The "space drill"
was a delicate and sober project, but with
such a strong depth in time that it might
now be remembered in the history of
mankind as a courageous act of
conscience. Like Galileo, who dared to
observe the moon and the planets to
discover that they weren't exactly perfect
and spheric like the philosophers an
theologists said. Like Werner von Braun
who, after spending some terrible years in
Germany developing the deadly V2 bombs,
was welcomed by America. Thanks to the
experience made with these instruments of
death, he led the Space Program aimed at
conquering the Moon».
How does an engineer get the idea to
design a remote-driving racecar... well,
spaceship?
«Maybe I had this temptation, or maybe
presumption, twenty years ago when I
thought that the credit for the race wins
were mainly to attribute to the engineers.
Then I had the chance to drive a small
racecar in an Henry Morrogh driving camp
and I realized that the driver is almost
everything. A remotely-controlled racecar
is not a racecar. It's a toy that excites
who drives it and bores all the others.
And there are drivers behind the Rosetta
Mission too. They are the Mission Control
men in Darmstadt, the people from
Politecnico di Milano and many others.
Alone, Rosetta is nothing, it's only an
object lost in space».
A brand-new blockbuster movie,
"Interstellar, has hit the theaters. It
tells about the research of an
alternative living habitat, far away
from us. Would we have the
technology needed to accomplish that
now?
«Of course, we have the technology, but
we need a dream. A beautiful poem by
Emily Dickinson said:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and
one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
If you think that a man walked on the
Moon almost fifty years ago without super
computers, Internet, GPS, carbon fiber,
real-time processors, what could we do
today? Looking for an habitat would
mean that we had to run away from here.
That we destroyed our own world, filled it
with waste and made it dangerous to
ourselves. Think about Easter Island. It's
so far away from any shore that there is
no chance to communicate. The
inhabitants destroyed all the trees and
reveries only to move their monolithic
idols until everybody died. Now extend the
same dynamics to the rest of us all. We
live in a limited and finite world. It would
be good to take care of it, "preserve what
you can't generate».
So why this mission started in the
first place?
«Because only by going back in time we
can understand who we are and slingshot
towards the future. With our means, all
alone, we will never get there. If we only
row, we are going to get tired soon. If we
spread a sail and learn how to navigate,
we are going to fly away with the wind.
Comets, like asteroids, are pieces of debris
dating back to the beginning of the solar
system. If the analysis of the comet's
ground will reveal the presence of amino
acids, which substantially are ammonia
under the form of dry ice, or the same
composition of primordial crystals that we
find on Earth, then we will understand
the substance of stars, of Cosmos (which
means Eternal Beauty) and ourselves. "We
are all mad of stars!"
Andrea Toso
and Stefano Semeraro