Smart Pump brochure

At the client meeting I talked to the engineers in the research department, who had been assigned to create a brochure that would show off their hottest piece of current technology for the next trade show.

The technology was a re-design of the hydraulic pump and motor system that controlled the aim of the Space Shuttle rocket engines. The suggested copy they gave me was a combination of deep Engineerese jargon about their product, and a puffy self- congratulatory section on their research department in general. They knew it wasn't right, but they didn!t know what was wrong. Their idea for the cover was to have a bust of Albert Einstein with a human heart on a necklace. A smart pump, get it?

I asked for all the documentation available on the Smart Pump; the ad agency hadn't done that. I took the documentation home and slogged through it, and found a key point: once the new pumps were installed, the cooling system would require 640 fewer gallons of water, because so much less waste heat would be generated.

A quick trip to the calculator showed me that 640 gallons, at 8 pounds per gallon, was over 5,000 pounds. And every ounce on a Space Shuttle is precious. I knew that they'd stopped painting the external fuel tank when they realized that the paint weighed 900 pounds, so 5,000 pounds was a significant benefit. Each Shuttle flight could carry the equivalent of two extra Volkswagens into orbit.