Something you don’t see too often, clear views of the Galaxy’s landing gear folding into the fuselage after liftoff.
Nov 142021
Nov 132021
Don’t got to San Francisco until there is a complete overhaul of the city government, an overhaul that includes a draconian crackdown on criminality to the point where the city uses eminent domain to claim Alcatraz and drops thieves and muggers onto the island from helicopters.
Nov 132021
America’s gun infatuation is a threat. The Supreme Court could make it worse.
Behold!
I was one of 30 former national security officials to sign on to an amicus brief arguing that unrestricted access to concealable firearms poses a great threat to public safety. If states like New York are unable to restrict who may carry a concealed weapon, we will be at greater risk of gun violence, threats from foreign and domestic terrorism and political extremism.
Because current laws against concealed carry are stopping terrorists? Really? Someone who wants to carry out a political assassination will be dissuaded because he can’t get a concealed carry license, or because a place where he wants to shoot somebody has a sign on the door saying “no guns?”
The author is probably not actually so stupid as to believe what she’s saying. But she probably believes that a lot of the American public *are* that dumb. If you are on the political left or on the side of gun control… just bear in mind that people like this think you are a ᚠᚢᚳkᛁᚾᚷ moron, willing and able to believe the most patently stupid arguments imaginable. People like this use not only fearmongering, but fearmongering based on falsehoods and an utter lack of logic. They should be spurned and mocked.
Nov 132021
I say “that looks like a mockup.”
Hermeus Goes Full Throttle at Unveil of Quarterhorse Prototype
To me it looks like thin sheet metal riveted to some sort of structure. The vertical tail in particular looks… ummm…
The first test pieces of the SpaceX Starship also looked like cheaply constructed crap, so… maybe? But color me skeptical that this is an actual aircraft. That landing gear… yeesh.
Nov 132021
Heh.
Nov 132021
So, unsurprisingly, Disney is scraping every last one of their IP’s looking for anything they can make a buck on. Turns out they’re working on a “Willow” series, a sequel to the 1980’s fantasy movie. If this promo vid is anything to go on – and let’s face it, it almost certainly isn’t – at least *someone* involved has a good sense of humor.
“That’s the one Star Wars movie I haven’t seen.”
HA!
Nov 132021
Twenty years later, a lot of it not only holds up, it looks prophetic
Nov 132021
Some programs fade away; some die sudden deaths. The Saturn V, and the Apollo program in general, seemed to just sort of fade away; the public perception *seems* to be that as public interest in Apollo post Apollo 12 or so rapidly faded, interest in continuing Apollo faded, and thus the program was just allowed to die, finally killed off by Nixon.
Small problem with that narrative: the actual date of the death of the Saturn v can be precisely determined. in the NASA History office archive some years ago I found a memo by NASA Administrator James Webb, dated July 31, 1968, where the production of new Saturn V vehicles was cancelled. This limited the future of Apollo moon missions to only those Saturns already then under construction. Note that this is almost a *year* prior to Apollo 11 landing on the moon, and about four months prior to the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon could, perhaps, maybe, have restarted Saturn v production, but that’s not clear: when programs like this are cancelled, the staff vital for them *scatter.* Tribal knowledge evaporates. Equipment is sold for scrap, left to rust. Restarting production likely would have been fabulously expensive.
In mid 1968, the Apollo/Saturn program was obviously not facing post-success disappearing interest. The public was still thrilled. What NASA was facing was a slashed budget, with funds needed to further the progress of mankind being diverted to “Great Society” social programs. So instead of missions to the Moon and beyond, we got another fifty years of malaise, burdensome taxes and families being actively discouraged and dissolved. Thanks, LBJ. Thanks a lot.
Nov 132021
As a response to the video in THIS POST, here is a debunking of the idea that overpasses were built over Long Island parkways specifically to keep black and Puerto Rican people from going to the beach. The theory was that the overpasses were intentionally built too low to allow buses to pass underneath them. But it turns out that buses and other commercial vehicles were already prohibited from parkways *by* *law*… and the buses that *could* go to this beach anyway all came from *white* population areas.
Nov 132021
I stumbled across some paperwork that for no readily apparent reason I’ve kept for a quarter century. Shown below are two correspondence that might be of some amusement. They deal with my very first “real” job after graduation, when I was hired to work on a The Next Big Thing project for Orbital Sciences Corporation.
First up (some personal data redacted):
Neato! I’m hired! So I packed up my stuff (including my baby archive, which fit in two boxes), drove from Illinois to Virginia right smack in the middle of the Blizzard Of The Century, spent a bucket of cash for an apartment, and started an exciting new adventure, sure to be filled with excitement, career fulfillment and fair and reasonable treatment from my employers. What could possibly go wrong?
Gee, that was fun.
It was a short, sharp shock that gave me a good solid look at the aerospace industry in the US. Unfeeling corporations, sociopathic bosses, incredibly blinkered, short-sighted management *and* self-serving unions, all beholden to quite possibly the *dumbest* politicians in human history.
I shoulda gone into art. I have no real talent for it… but then, I’ve seen “Star Trek: Discovery” and it’s clear that talent and skill are no longer important or even desirable in modern artistic endeavors.