Actually, It Is Rocket Science

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Outside Online April 2002

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The Big Idea: CASE STUDY #3: Inside a High-Tech Skunk Works
Actually, It Is Rocket Science
At the First Church of What Happens Next—MIT— a NASA-trained engineer and his stable of whiz kids are jump-starting the future of outdoor gear

By Brad Wieners


	Brawn and brainiacs: CSI phenom Jennifer Blundo toys with gravity in an MIT classroom

FIFTEEN FEET UNDERGROUND, in a cluttered basement laboratory, Marianne Okal is systematically torturing carabiners to death. An unassuming 22-year-old senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she wears a gray zip-front hoodie, Carhartt painter's pants, and clear plastic safety goggles. She has shiny brown eyes, short brown hair, and a reassuring smile, but don't be fooled: She's killed before, and she'll kill again.

Mercilessly, Okal places one more helpless Black Diamond Light D carabiner in the vise grip of the MTS Tensile Loading Machine. The MTS is a hydraulic monster-gizmo that looks like two huge drill bits pointed at each other. Applying up to 100,000 pounds of pressure, the machine smashes or yanks objects apart. At the moment, Okal has it calibrated to simulate the force the carabiner would absorb if someone weighing 200 pounds fell ten feet while on a rope threaded through it—over and over again for hours, 3,608 "falls" in all, until, with a sad and final bplink!, it fractures in two.

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Okal dumps a box of busted carabiners on a table. It's an eerie sight, like the remains of a crushed bag of silver pretzels. Remarkably, they're all broken in the same place, at the top or bottom elbow of the D. Carabiners don't show signs of fatigue until they break, and when they go, they go completely—no slow unfurling like in Vertical Limit. Engineers call this "catastrophic failure." Wouldn't it be great, thought Okal and her lab partner, Jon Graham, if there were some kind of indicator to alert you that a carabiner should be retired to chalk-bag duty, well in advance of disaster?

"Our first thought was, the 'biners must distort a little as they get pulled on over time," Okal says. "If they did, we could put a little gauge where the spring gate fits into the side of the 'biner, and as the 'biner stretched, the more the gate would creep down the gauge."

She shrugs. "But that didn't work. They do deform, but never so you can see it."

Okal and Graham's next thought was to paint the elbows with something that would reveal the crack, but they quickly ruled this out; whatever they painted on would wear off during regular use. Only after busting 40 carabiners did an alternative solution occur to them: a plastic mold that carabiners could be placed in as a test. If the 'biner doesn't fit perfectly in the mold, that could indicate that its shape has been altered by heavy use or that an invisible crack may exist.

"We don't know if it'll work yet," Okal says. "But we will soon."

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