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[i]The "return-to-flight" shuttle mission optimistically was set for July 1987, which gave NASA just a year to design the new escape system, test it, and integrate it into the existing orbiter. But before that could happen, someone had to figure out whether the idea of jumping out of the shuttle at high speed was even viable. That task fell to Ricardo "Koki" Machín, a young aeronautical engineer who had just been hired at NASA out of college. He put a scale model of the shuttle, about five feet long, into a wind tunnel, and out of its tiny side hatch he pushed a tiny dummy astronaut. "I just basically plunged the guy out the side," Machín remembers. "He went tumbling down. Sometimes he hit the back of the vehicle. Sometimes he cleared it. It was horrible looking."[/i]
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