Hmmm.
Jun 072023
Jun 052023
It seems that the issues that caused me to both ramp up use of Twitter and get the “backup blog” continue. It now appears that every weekend the servers at the hosting service get overloaded and I can’t log into the blog until Monday morning when the staff get in and clean things up. Last weekend was a three-day weekend, and the problem persisted until Tuesday. Consequently… no new blog posts on the weekend, it seems. So if you want to make sure to keep up with my thrilling adventures and opinions, this isn’t really the place for it. Instead:
Jun 032023
An incident from December 2022:
And another MiG 31 comes in for a landing, spewing fuel at a prodigious rate…
There seems to be something wrong with the Russian Air Force lately, lots of planes seem to be having trouble. I’m sure we can all agree that the best thing would be for the Russian Air Force to ground their aircraft for a bit. Probably put them all on trucks and trains and send them to, say, Germany and Poland and Finland for inspection and disposition.
Jun 032023
Good news:
In a First, Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator Wirelessly Transmits Power in Space
This is *many* orders of magnitude away from a practical solar power satellite… but ya gotta start somewhere.
And on the other hand, bad news:
Boeing finds two serious problems with Starliner just weeks before launch
Problem one: bits of the parachute system aren’t as strong as they should be. Bad, but readily solvable.
Problem two: the wiring is flammable. This… is monumentally stupid, a problem that has been well understood since the Apollo 1 fire. this may well require that the capsule be largely disassembled so that *miles* of wiring can be replaced.
Good luck with *that.*
And while Boeing continues to struggle to get a capsule not fundamentally different from Apollo flying SpaceX continues to send crews to the ISS in Dragons.
19 years later… pic.twitter.com/2xead0zqaA
— Rare North American Space Koala (@culpable_mink) June 1, 2023
Jun 022023
Today I swung by “The Davenport,” the century-plus old apartment building that partially collapsed a few days ago. Roads were closed off for a radius of a block or two around it so I couldn’t get very close in my car, and I didn’t have the time to find someplace to park and walk. Ehhh, oh well. Anyway, a lot of information has come out about it; the city of Davenport has released a bunch of inspection reports and other documents going back several years showing that it has been falling apart for some time. Bricks have been popping out of the face of the building for years. It looks like the sort of place that your average person would have been able to look at and go “Nope” and run to some other accommodations.
Someone’s gettin’ sued.
The City of Davenport website with the documents:
https://www.davenportiowa.com/cms/One.aspx?portalId=6481456&pageId=19580321
In retrospect this sort of thing is not too surprising. A lot of the buildings around here are old brick structures, and The Davenport was only a few blocks from the Mississippi river. “500 year floods” seem to happen every few years now; this had *got* to have an effect. Whether water seeps into the ground that far inland I don;t know, but having tens of thousands of tons of new watery overburden from time to time has got to cause the ground to flex at least some. There are also the occasional earthquake; small by the standards of even Utah, but if you have a brick building not built with earthquakes in mind… that’s not so great.
In all honesty, “The Davenport” looks like a *lot* of buildings in this part of the midwest. Built a century ago, having seen better days. Like our roads and bridges, the infrastructure has not been well looked after. I won’t be surprised if the next few years are filled with increasing tales of buildings and bridges falling. Imagine if the dozens of trillions dumped down the black hole of welfare were instead spent on repairs, maintenance and replacements of structures that needed it.
Jun 012023
A recent Mexican TV news piece showed a cartel member wandering about with a shoulder-fired AT-4 anti-tank rocket slung over his shoulder. A number of commenters immediately leaped to one or both of two wrong conclusions:
1: It’s a Javelin missile
2: It’s a missile we gave to Ukraine, which they then turned around and sold on the black market.
Number 1 is easy enough to debunk; it’s simply not a Javelin. Number 2 is more troubling: but then there’s a little detail on the launch tube that makes it clear that wherever the cartel got this thing… it’s not something to fret about too much.
May 252023
Given the vast amount of money spend on Virgin Orbit to develop a rocket that promised to be cheap, the fact that the company failed is no surprise whatsoever (see HERE). But their failure is other companies gains.
No one should be surprised Virgin Orbit failed—it had a terrible business plan
Stratolaunch bought VO’s modified 747 with the intention of using it to launch things. This probably makes a lot more sense than their gigantic ROC carrier aircraft… too much airplane for many missions, and not exactly capable of landing on every runway in the world. Big as the 747 is, there are a *lot* of airports with decades of experience accommodating it.
Stratolaunch Expands Fleet with Virgin Orbit’s Modified Boeing 747
And the New Zealand/American company Rocket Lab has purchased a fair chunk of VO’s infrastructure:
Rocket Lab Bolsters Neutron Rocket Program with Purchase of Virgin Orbit Long Beach California Assets
Good for them. Instant growth, and, hopefully, continued employment for some VO staff. And if nothing else at least the ChiComs didn’t get it.
May 232023
… that the market for them is being filled by non-white people. There was the “white supremacist” Mexican, and now this guy who was supposed to have tried to ram his U-Haul into the White House:
19-year-old Missouri man arrested in U-Haul crash at White House security barriers
U.S. Park Police on Tuesday identified the driver as Sai Varshith Kandula, 19, of Chesterfield, Missouri.
That’s a weird name for a Whitey McWhiteGuy.
This is Sai Varshith Kandula, the Missouri man who drove a U-Haul into the White House gates
The media is referring to him as a “white supremacist” after authorities found a Nazi flag in the vehicle
Just wanted to share his driver’s license photo
PC: @karol pic.twitter.com/15PgcmsGTz
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) May 23, 2023
NEW: Investigators pulled what appears to be a Nazi flag out of the U-Haul, but they haven't provided any further details.
Here's what we know: https://t.co/cXt81Ji2NA pic.twitter.com/jBsb1uPJA3
— Troy Pope (@troycpope) May 23, 2023
Behold, modern “journalism:”
19 year old who rammed White House barrier threatened president
News of the arrest just feet from the White House comes amid a climate of fear and hostility as Republicans continue to demonize diversity programs while downplaying the threat of white supremacist violence.
Yeah. *THAT’s* the big problem plaguing society… white supremacy that’s so
May 222023
With the release of my latest book, I went to Amazon to see if my previous works are currently available (SR-71: yes; B-47/B-52: yes; Vol 1: currently no). In the process, I was surprised to see that there is a *hardback* version of my SR-71 book available. This is surprising for several reasons…
1: No mention of it was made to me by the publisher
2: It’s a relatively slim volume for a hardback
3: There has been some discussion, so far quite preliminary, of an expanded version of the SR-71 book at some point in the future, which would be more appropriate as a hardback.
Anyway, the listing looks like this:
“Huh,” sez I, so I click on the “hardback” link to see what it looks like. And… it looks like this:
Wait, what?
Now, that’s a perfectly fine book. I have a copy myself. But it’s not *my* book.
I also noticed that there are 187 reviews, which is substantially more than I recall there being. And that’s because the reviews for Goodall’s book are mashed in with reviews for mine.
Somebody hit the wrong button somewhere.
So if you want to get a copy or three of my book – an urge I wholeheartedly support – just make sure you order the right book. I’ve contacted the publisher about this and they’re baffled; they’ve contacted the people they need to to try to get this weirdness resolved.
Oh, and there’s this, for whatever it’s worth:
Woo, and, indeed, hoo.
May 212023
History is *filled* with astonishingly bad ideas. And who would have guessed that some of the worst would come out of collectivist totalitarian systems like Nazi Germany?
The Case of The Radioactive Toothpaste
Curiously, the toothpaste in question was filled with Radium, the radioactive element of choice for insane and/or stupid product manufacturers in the early 20th century, but Thorium. Why Thorium? Well… “why not” seems to have been the answer.