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Next month just might be the month it finally happens: a non-government rocket may finally cross the boundary into space. Ky Michaelson’s Civilian Space eXploration Team (CSXT) has got the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed with the bureaucrats and are now ready for the easy part: sending their rocket up to 62 miles from a Nevada test range. The officially defined altitude at which space begins is 50 miles. I wish them luck and godspeed. August 30th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Nice piece by fellow blogger Patrick Crozier on Tuesday about the tale of a group of passengers using low-cost British airline Easyjet who refused to leave a plane and make way for a different set of customers. It centres around the wrong-headed idea that a consumer has a “right” to something beyond the specific contents of a contracted service, such as a flight taking one from A to B at a set time. Enforcing such “rights” via government intervention will inevitably mean higher costs on the rest of us. If folk want to be able to fly at flexible times, then that entails a higher cost, since airlines can’t be sure exactly when their planes will be full. The price mechanism is a great way to let consumers and providers balance the pros and cons of flexibility versus cost. I should know. I just booked a return flight to San Francisco from London on the Web for just 450 pounds. It is non-refundable and requires me to fly at a set time. If I turn up late and bawl about my “rights”, I’d rightly be regarded as a fool. July 31st, 2002 | Comments are closed
 de Havilland Mosquito I am a near-religious reader of the Daily Telegraph obituary page, full of larger-than-life aristocrats, obscure explorers and dozens of extroardinary men and women who served during the Second World War. A classic of the genre is in today’s paper about the late Group Capt John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham, a famous night-fighter pilot and post-war civilian test pilot who was associated for many years with the de Havilland aircraft company, and no doubt Perry has heard all about his exploits*. I met him several years ago in Hatfield to see the restoration of a 1950s British fighter plane called the Venom, which my father worked on as a navigator around the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Anyway, give it a read. A must for aircraft nuts like yours truly. * [Note from Perry: I also met John Cunningham many years ago] July 23rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
NASA Glenn has selected General Electric Aircraft Engines (Evendale, Ohio) for a Revolutionary Turbine accelerator (RTA) demonstrator as part of the Revolutionary Aerospace Engine Research contract given to GE in 2001. Propulsion is perhaps the major driver in the world of aerospace. If the demonstrator project succeeds in pushing turbine propulsion based systems up to Mach 4, it will be a major step toward airline style access to space. While I’d rather see NASA get out of the way, I must in all honesty commend this type of work. If they are going to spend our money at all, they should at least be applying it to the commercially high value high-risk research which was their original remit as NACA. July 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I was reading Aeroplane over what might charitably be called “lunch”. Some crisps and a cup at the approximate time of a normal lunch… but this is just making a short story long. Castle Bromwich is well known in aviation circles. It’s where a large number of Spitfires and Lancasters were built (for the non-aviation minded, that places it in World War II). Each airplane had to be taken up and run through some rough testing before being handed over to the ATA (the men and women who delivered aircraft to the RAF bases). The test pilots were there to ensure manufactruing mistakes were found at the plant and not in battle. Now Castle Bromwich had miserable weather, lots of fog, a rather short runway that was half paved and half grass. I remembered reading much of that before. What I didn’t know was the interesting bit about the approach. You see, there was a sewage treatment plant just before the threshold. It really has to be asked. Did the test pilots at Castle Bromwich originate the phrase…. “landing us in the shit”??? I couldn’t resist it. July 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I’ve just been in a discussion on the Artemis Societies digest in which one person bemoaned even after the commecial flight of Dennis Tito people still think of space as a “government thing”, an expensive thing. That attitudes haven’t changed… Well I didn’t expect them to: at least not yet. Dennis was the very first commercial tourist and in the public’s mind his flight was a one off stunt. For most it’s already forgotten. “Tito who?” is the likely answer you’d elicit from the man or woman on High Street. But I’m more interested in the long term effect, the ‘meta-context’ as Perry puts it. Imagine a little needle in everyone’s head, one scaled zero to ten on two opposite viewpoints. Day to day events move each person’s needle a tiny bit one way or another while not necessarily being remembered in their own right. Over the next few years that needle is slated for a steady push to the view of space as a place for Joe Bloggs as well as Buzz Lightyear. At this moment I’m aware of three tourists who are going to fly within the next one to two years:
I understand there are quite a few more serious customers in the queue. To top it off, NASA’s new administrator has approved Barb Morgan, Teacher-in-Space Christa McAullife’s backup, to finally go up. She’s only been waiting 16 years for the go ahead. We’re on the edge of a time when a continuos stream of the rich and famous, the energetic fund raisers and the lucky lotto gamblers will be travelling to the Space Station. It will be the “in thing”, the oughties thing to do. The place to see and be seen. It is going to be the punchbowl talk at the exlusive Hollywood parties. I can imagine gossip columnists will be overhearing snippets like, “oh yes, when I was up at the Station…”, “You just won’t believe what you can do in zero G”. Is there anyone who thinks when Lance comes back down there won’t be space themes sneaking into his music? Artists mine their experience for their creativity. Kids are going to get songs about floating in zero G from singers who’ve been there and done that. This is going to go mainstream guys. Not filk: Top 40. When Society and Celebrity news regularly cover People in space; when teenage girls read popstar mag articles about their heart throb idols while laying on their bed amidst walls plastered with posters of Lance Bass and others floating in space… Where’s that little needle gonna go? April 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It had to happen eventually. Someone has finally gotten a space lottery “off the ground” as it were:
I hope the Internet Is With Them and that millions of people take them up on this. It gets even better. They are out to water the sprouts of the new space tourism industry:
Among the beneficiaries will be Mir Corp, the company which tried to save Mir, the Worlds first permanent manned space station, the true “Alpha Station”. The space lottery idea has been around for perhaps twenty to twenty-five years. In all that time I know of only one truely serious attempt to do it, and that was by Jim Davidson when he still lived in Houston… before he went off to enjoy life in the anarchy of Somalia where he now resides. Jim unfortunately was taken on by a Texas Prosecutor who had political designs. In the end the entire incident was nothing except extortion and a shake down by the State. Jim was “allowed” to not go to jail so long as he didn’t complain about the money they stole from him. Thus ended the first Space Lottery attempt. But good ideas never die, so here we are another 14 years on with the idea finally up and running. I’m not the betting sort. I can walk through a Las Vegas Casino, put one coin in one slot machine… and walk on. Just so if someone asks me if I gambled in the casinos, I can truthfully say “yes”. I know far too much Probability and Statistics to enjoy gambling unless I wanted to put in the time to learn card counting strategies in Blackjack. This is different. Even though I’ll “lose” my money, I’ll be directly helping companies build the infrastructure that will one day take ME up. I wish them Godspeed and lotsa money. April 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
There’s an old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. Well, what do you call a Navigational Positioning Satellite designed by a committee? Galileo.
Ah yes, the ‘last obstacle’ being a blank cheque for the mind-boggling amount of taxpayers money that they are going to throw at this thing. The report estimates the cost at a laughable 3.6 billion €uros but who are they trying to kid? It’ll cost more than that to supply the EU ministers with a set of custom-made luxury ‘space slippers’ for when they attend the ceremonial launch. Or, rather, when they don’t because if this thing ever actually makes it into space then my name is Buzz Lightyear. Just like that other grand EU project the Eurofighter the damned thing will be lucky if it ever emerges from the assembly line. The Eurofighter has had public money hosed it at for lord knows how long, it was obsolete 2 years ago and it hasn’t even been built yet! The exhausted European taxpayer would have had to have forked out far less money if the EU had simply ordered a squadron of F-16s (as HM Government was advised to do by the Ministry of Defence). But, oh no, we don’t want that. We have to have a ‘European’ combat aircraft to express our distinct ‘European’ identity. Looks like they got it. So, cue another round of horse-trading, bickering and monumental waste as each part of the Galileo project is apportioned out according to who makes the most noise. The French will build the electrics, the Italians will build the housing, the Belgians will make the navigation system, the Germans will make the rocket boosters, the Spanish will make the launch platform, the Austrians will make the sandwiches and Sweden will provide the environmental protestors. And you can guess, I mean you just know that none of the bits will fit together, the rest of the bits won’t work and all the bits will be behind schedule, ludicrously over-budget and held up by strike action. And, naturally, nobody will wish to complain because to do will cause a diplomatic incident and the launch site will be located in the country that agrees not to vote against French agricultural subsidies (and guaranteed to be the one furthest away from the Equator – Finland probably). The Galileo project will, again, graphically illustrate everything that is wrong with the EU. The Soviets managed to get into space because they had a command economy where a Kommisar for Space simply ordered that a satellite be built and it was duly built. Mind you, they had to work with a wooden crate, a leaky old battery and a tube of glue but, by golly, they did it. But there will no such bullish positivity for Galileo, proving that the EU is riven with all the drawbacks of a totalitarian state and none of the advantages. This whole debacle could have been avoided if they’d simply taken up the American offer of buying bandwidth on America’s own GPS system. It would certainly have saved a mint. But, no, the EU has to have its own satellite system so it can cock a snoot at those imperialist ‘Yanquees’ and get on with doing lots of, er, ‘European’ things in space. Besides, the European taxpayers have got far more money than they need. There is some small chink of light at the end of this particular worm-hole, though. The US government has expressed concern that should Galileo become operational it could be used by terrorist cells to plan attacks on the US. Now, personally, I think that the Americans, the Russians, the Indians, the Israelis, the Australians, the Japanese and just about everybody else will have functioning colonies on Mars before that happens, but, in the event that it does, the US just might find itself in a position where they have to shoot the bloody thing out of the sky (chortle, snigger, stuff handkerchief in mouth). What a tragedy!! April 2nd, 2002 | Comments are closed
On Friday the DOD reported a successful midcourse impact of an Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) from Kwajalein with an ICBM launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB). On this flight only actual system tracking components were used to control the EKV trajectory. The dummy warhead was picked out from the two decoy balloons. This is another in a long series of engineering tests. Each test checks out certain capabilities and finds problems to be solved in the next. Earlier flights, for example, used simulated targetting data rather than the actual ground based targetting radar. They seem to be making quite steady progress towards a working system, although such is some years away at present. March 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The April issue of Aeroplane reports an XF-90 was found on Frenchman Flat. It was used during the nuclear testing series there in the early 1950’s and apparently was just forgotten. Not that surprising I guess. One wouldn’t expect a lot of hikers wandering about one the most heavily A-bombed spots on Earth. It has been recovered and is being decontaminated (after 50 years in the desert I suspect that means hosing the dust off it) and will be displayed at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio. I would imagine it needs “a little work” done on it as well. Here’s a USAF picture of one of the two of them back when they were new. That makes it 50/50 this is the same plane: March 5th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The name Hollings rang some bells, but I just couldn’t place it. I Googled him and nearly drew a blank… except I found his name is Ernest “Fritz” Hollings. That clicked. I dug back into my old email queues and notes from the days when I ran Pittsburgh L5 and found a cryptic lead. I had angrily called Hollings office on February 21st, 1986. All I could tell from the phone log was Hollings had done something I’d considered utterly despicable at the time and that it had to do with the Challenger disaster. What else to do but call on friends like Glenn Reynolds to do a quick Lexus search? And now I’ve got it. Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (D, Times-Warner) tried to grandstand on the corpses of 7 dead astronauts. While submarines were still looking for key bits of debris on the ocean floor and the Rogers Commission was starting the long difficult job of sifting the evidence, Hollings was trying to grab headlines by calling for Senate Investigation. As reported in the MacNeil Lehrer Report transcript of that day:
Within that context the log entry for my phone conversation with Gary Oleson (head of the Washington DC-L5 chapter) makes it clear why I was ticked off enough to call a Senator in another state:
So this isn’t my first run in with this…. person. And by the way… there’s a new Hollingsgate article over at Instapundit. March 3rd, 2002 | Comments are closed
40 years ago today John Glenn rode his Mercury-Atlas rocket into the pages of history. His short mission in the Friendship 7 capsule was the first American manned orbital flight. February 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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