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They were mostly in their 20s and 30s, and, with a few exceptions, were playing a major role in a program for the first or second time. In many ways they resembled the teams that made up the Apollo Project: young engineers, often right out of school, with seemingly limitless confidence and energy. NASA people who worked on Apollo and stayed with the agency for twenty years or more hold the fondest memories for that frantic period and time of their life. In interviews for this book, there often was a similar sense of nostalgia and accomplishment among the F-8 DFBW alumni. However, if for many of those immersed in Apollo the rest of their careers seemed anti-climatic, this is not true of the F-8 engineers. They went on to several more projects before many of them landed on the administrative floor of Center Building 4800, each with challenges comparable to those of the fly-by-wire program.
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