Chuck E. Cheese Redemption
Cheese!
Ponder this. You must be 21 to gamble on the floor of a Las Vegas casino. Yet you don’t even need to be house-trained to gamble on the floor of a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant.
The Chuck E. Cheese business model has always fascinated me. As a child, there was something almost magical about it: the lights and sounds, the fun games, the unyielding drive to collect tickets, getting prizes, begging your parents for “just one more quarter”. This drive was undeniably a gambling-complex — one that was directly aimed and marketed toward children. Now in truth my uncle taught me Blackjack when I was 5, so those feelings weren’t new to me. But I still bought in.
LCROSS
LCROSS - Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite
“No, we’re not going to break the moon. But we’re gonna put a dent in it.”
It’s Thursday, June 18th, 2009 and LCROSS is patiently waiting atop an Atlas V-Centaur at Cape Canaveral Florida. Patience is the word of the day. 2700 miles away at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach California, James Wehner, the LCROSS Deputy Program Manager, is taking questions from a roomful of engineers and their families.
LCROSS, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, was a dual build between Northrop Grumman and the NASA Ames Research Center. What was described as a “fast-track, low-cost” project, LCROSS is billed as an overwhelmingly successful display of system engineering. A piggy-back to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), LCROSS was quickly designed and built by Northrop Grumman to fill excess space on NASA’s launch vehicle. Using many recylced and off-the-shelf parts, LCROSS was delivered early this year — on-time and under budget.
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