For maintenance personnel in the aerospace industry to do their jobs effectively, they need to be able to get physically close to the equipment they are working on. This statement sounds obvious, but in order to meet this requirement, it is very important to utilize quality work platforms. Although most people are familiar with the basic uses of work platforms, there is not always much thought given to everything that goes into their design and fabrication.

Jet engines can have up to 25,000 individual parts, making regular maintenance a tedious task that can take more than a month per engine. Many components are located deep inside the engine and cannot be inspected without taking the machine apart. This problem is not confined to jet engines; many complicated, expensive machines like generators and scientific instruments require large investments of time and money to inspect and maintain.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), under construction atop 8,737-foot El Peñón peak in northern Chile, is a partnership project of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). The goal of the LSST, scheduled to be fully operational in 2022, is to conduct a ten-year survey that will deliver a 200-petabyte set of images and data addressing some of the most pressing questions about the structure and evolution of the universe and the objects within it. The LSST will conduct a deep survey over an enormous area of sky and do it with a frequency that enables images of every part of the visible sky to be obtained every few nights. This mode will continue for ten years to achieve astronomical catalogs thousands of times larger than have been previously compiled.