| Like finding the perfect pair of shoes on sale, if all you wear is old, busted cowboy boots. |
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| | More headlinesSo I recently played the Cheeky Monk again with Rad Brad Weaver. A fine time was had. I did meet a girl who was a lawyer for Halliburton. We talked or did not talk about things or not.
But Bradley was pretty awesome and melted faces. I like gigging with the Brad. He plays stuff I like and lets me cover Amarillo by Morning every single time we play together. Every. Single. Time.
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| | | TVZI am listing to Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt these days. I agree that TVZ was a good writer, but he's always drunk in his live recordings, and I can't get past that. Steve Earle is the master. His rhymes always come together with a splash. I don't know if he wrote "Tom Ames' Prayer", but I am saying he did, and I love the line:
Well they sent the preacher down to my cell
He said the Lord is your only hope
He's the only friend that you gonna have
When you hit the end of Parker's rope
more later
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| | | That's Mach 5, kids
check out the article here
I think escape velocity is like Mach 15. But things get different in the upper atmosphere. And at least we are getting this thing on!! I have watched scramjets since I was in college, watched the day the X-34 fell into the Pacific, and I know what a struggle it has been figuring out this technology. I'm not gonna lie, I am excited about this. If they can hybridize the propulsion and get these suckers into orbit, we have ourselves a new technological epoch in spaceflight.
I think it would be sweet to have a ton of low orbit scramjets. You could go to Moscow in 20 minutes. I mean, you won't, but Air Force guys could. You could ferry up a ton of small payloads (and I think small payloads are the immediate future of spaceflight), or place in orbit a bunch of separate ones that could autonomously link to form bigger platforms (Voltron).
I guess I have always been a little anti-Space Shuttle, because it is really big. It's like a big old fairing for massive payloads, which I thought was odd (even as a kid) because the payloads weren't coming back. I guess you could use it to bring stuff down from space, and we did that a couple times.
Main thing: it relies on the external boosters and the big red guppy fuel tank to get anywhere. If they had a small crew module spaceplane I could get behind that, that's not what we went with. I mean, it was the most sophisticated machine ever built, and that is a good exercise, but I didn't see the point of making it plane-like when it had no internal propulsion. I'm rambling. I guess I am posting this because now the shuttle fleet is going to Jay's Garage, and it is timely that we have a fast little spaceplane waiting off stage right, nearly ready to go.
And it looks like a really cool shark
More later, especially John's "Theory of Small-Payload Efficiency and Responsiveness"
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| | About John Croghan
I live in a camper. I have a degree in Engineering. I have held cameras that were installed in the Hubble Space Telescope. I have met David Lee Murphy. I could listen to George Strait read a phonebook. I love my dog and blog about her all the time. Read More » |
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