Found this on eBay today:
I have no idea if $1250.00 is a fair price for a first edition of “Wege zum Raumschiffahrt,” but I do know that it’s rather above my pay grade. Still, if the listing is accurate, it’d be a heck of an addition to a space history collection.
Past few days have seen some weather out here. Certainly nothing like what other areas have seen… a downpour in Utah is a pretty weak thing compared to the gullywashers I grew up with in the midwest. Still, for the area it’s been entertaining. Especially the sudden blast of hail that slammed my car today:
Hail about 3/8″ diameter hit with some considerable authority, and buried a small region about half an inch deep. Strange to see it so localized.
One upside to the weather was the visually improved evening:
Old-school on *two* fronts:
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Ye gods how I’d love to see and hear a B-36 fly overhead…
“Pershing Joins the Ranks”
Note that at 1:09, a Pershing missile is dropped from the bomb bay of a B-52 and the motor fired. I was previously unaware of this test. Anybody know anything about it? It seems odd that a USAF bomber would be used to test a US Army missile.
If it worked as well as it seemed to, I have to wonder what, if any, consideration was given to arming USAF aircraft with Pershing missiles. Not a concept can recall hearing of before.
It
Turns out that British Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt buys into the utter bilge that is homeopathy. If you somehow happen to not know what homeopathic “medicines” are, the idea is quite simple: they’re magic. You take a substance – some chemical that is thought to have healing properties, say – and you dilute a tiny amount of it in water. Call it a drop per liter. Then you take a single drop of that mixture, and dilute it in yet more water. And again, and again, however many times you want. Simple math shows that you could well dilute the mix so much that not a single molecule of the original substance remains within the final water… but that’s ok, because due to the miracle of magical thinking, the water “remembers” the healing property of the substance, and your bucket of H2O can now cure whatever the hell you want it to. It’s magic!
One can be forgiven for wondering why the water molecules “remember” that aspirin cures headaches, but they somehow forget about all the raw sewage and heavy metals they’ve rubbed up against over the years.
Homeopaths should be kept as far from medical policy decision making as Flat Earthers from space program decision making, or Creationists from biology decision making. On these topics at least these cranks have a demonstrated inability to exercise valid judgement.
I am at best unclear just how much power a British “Health Secretary” has on actual government policy, but any at all – no matter how diluted – would be too much in this case.
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Americans… don’t get too smug. Obamacare seems to provide for taxpayer funding of utter newage as well.
A Boeing PR video showing their “Bird of Prey” technology demonstrator from 1996. This was meant to showcase new materials, manufacturing, aerodynamics and stealth technologies, and was not meant to serve as a prototype for an operational vehicle. As the video shows, some of the design aspects did *sorta* work their way into the Boeing X-45 UCAV. The plane flew 38 times, and the total program cost about $67 million… chump change by normal aerospace standards.
It was slow, underpowered and incapable of carrying meaningful ordnance, but it’s still interesting to ponder what an evolved version might have been turned into.
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The Bird of Prey was unveiled in 2002. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but… has the US unveiled any other advanced manned military aircraft since then?
A clever use of available communications technology. I’d imagine that the concept could be extended around the world. The biggest issue might be time zones… some kid in Virginia wanting to learn Japanese by chatting with one of Japans many, many geezers may need to be up at 3AM to do it.
A British air-to-surface missile fired from the MQ-9 Reaper UAV. When the warhead doesn’t go off, it’s *kinda* capable of targeting a single person. When I say “kinda” I don’t mean that it might miss… I mean that it will indeed take out that one person, but you don’t want to be sitting next to him. I shudder to imagine the *mess* if one of these were to take out an individual…
It’s “dual mode” in that it has both Semi-Active Laser and Active mmW radar seekers.
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Seen near sundown this evening in Thatcher, Utah:
You can also download the very much larger version by LOOKING HERE (over at my photo blog), good for printing and such. Permission granted for personal use.
If you like the photo and want to toss a few coins my way… well, here ya go.
Slowing plugging away on the greatly revised X-20 Dyna Soar article. Shown below is what it currently looks like… something of a mess. There are still a great many more illustrations I want to add, including a bucket of my own CAD diagrams, but how many will end up here is uncertain. It’s already pushing 100 pages when you include the CAD diagrams; probably too big. Perhaps a later stand-alone version will have everything plus the kitchen sink…
And the CAD diagrams:
