THE leading edge of technology moves in mysterious ways – sometimes more by luck than judgement. In the mid-1990s, when US aerospace giant Boeing was helping to create the International Space Station, its engineers had to make 50 small plastic boxes, each one a different shape. The engineers reckoned that to make them by a form of injection moulding would take nine months. But time was pressing, so they took a short cut.
To test that their design fitted together and would survive the low pressures of space, the designers used cheap copies of the boxes, planning to fit the real…
