I count the space age from Mar 28, 1926…..When Goddard (PBUH) launched the first liquid fueled, gyro stabilized rocket.
The same way we do it today. Also, with fuel/oxidizer tanks pressurized with inert gas. And he was working on high-pressure piston pumps.
I don’t think he had gyros until much later- that first one had the motor up high in pursuit of the pendulum fallacy.
Only 43 years after Goddard’s first rocket, Americans walked on the moon.
And now it has been 54 years since the last time an American walked on the moon.
A depressing thought.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was responsible for most of the theory behind the engineering, 25 years before.
True. But Goddard was unaware of Tsiolkovsky’s work and independently reproduced much of it, including the Rocket Equation. His publications were greeted mainly with ridicule in the US and remained generally unknown, but the Germans were certainly aware of his work. Not sure if they knew about Tsiolkovsky or not.
OT but tangentially related. What do you guys think about this? I think if there was something nefarious, it wouldn’t be related to the alloy this lady created.
I don’t recall reading about Mondaloy when a lot of discussions revolved around the use of the RD 180.
“In the mid-1990s, at the Rockwell Science Center in California, a metallurgist named Dallis Hardwick and her research assistant, Monica Jacinto, cracked it. They found a nickel-based composition that could sit in that inferno without igniting and without cracking. No coatings. No liners. Bare metal touching gas oxygen at extreme temperature.
They called the alloy Mondaloy. The name is a portmanteau. The “Mon” belongs to Monica.”
Everyone dies eventually. I don’t think there’s any connection among these three deaths to metallurgical work all were involved with as much as a quarter-century previously.
The first of the three people mentioned died of disease over a decade ago. Nothing suspicious there.
The second disappeared while hiking. Unless one of her hiking companions actually killed her and hid the body well enough to elude casual discovery, clothing scraps or bones may turn up anywhere from soon to years from now. It wouldn’t take much of a declivity to hide the body of a small woman who fell into it. And falling leaves no scent trail for dogs. I’ve read several accounts, in recent years, of cold-case disappearances involving autos accidentally submerged in fairly shallow water and simply not noticed for as much as decades. It’s easy to imagine analogous situations on land. D.B. Cooper’s remains have never been found, for example, though some of the extorted money turned up – in poor shape – years after the relevant events. He made a hard landing, died and his remains have long since been consumed and scattered by animals and insects. That will most likely also prove to be the case for this unfortunate woman scientist/engineer.
The general seems, pretty clearly, to be a case of a well-planned suicide by a man who didn’t wish his remains to ever be found. No doubt the desert animals and bugs quickly obliged.
I tend to think it is just that the strangeness of reality applies to all people. It is a good story but creates lots of holes, some intentionally so that you can use your imagination.
The account has more stories now related to other deaths and disappearances.
It is kind of interesting but its like a soap opera or true crime podcast.
Yes. There is such a thing as coincidence. They occur all the time. That many people think they are rare and attach such significance to them is a matter of the general public’s poor understanding of statistics and probability. Ask any stranger randomly encountered on the street how big a group of people would have to be for the probability of two of them having the same birthday to rise to 50%. You’ll get a lot of answers, but nearly all will be far too high. The most common answer will probably be 183, just over half the number of days in a year.
The older people get, the more likely they are to die on any given day. That means the odds of any two of them dying – from whatever cause – within a short interval of each other also rises with age. This is the basis for the widespread notion that celebrities die in temporally-closely-spaced groups of three. This happens often enough to keep the belief going because of yet another widespread misapprehension of the actual probabilities of the situation.
“And now it has been 54 years since the last time an American walked on the moon.
A depressing thought.”
I’m trying to be optimistic. I think we’re now nearly ten years into a true movement into space. You know how we roll…next thing you know it’s a stampede.
I looked up Tsiolkovsky. He did a lot of stuff in aeronautics too and got recognition for it. I must wonder whether Goddard was really unaware of his work.
Read the article wodun gave the link to. Spooky!
It’s been almost 20 years since my own first flight on a liquid rocket. My how time flies.
I count the space age from Mar 28, 1926…..When Goddard (PBUH) launched the first liquid fueled, gyro stabilized rocket.
The same way we do it today. Also, with fuel/oxidizer tanks pressurized with inert gas. And he was working on high-pressure piston pumps.
I don’t think he had gyros until much later- that first one had the motor up high in pursuit of the pendulum fallacy.
Only 43 years after Goddard’s first rocket, Americans walked on the moon.
And now it has been 54 years since the last time an American walked on the moon.
A depressing thought.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was responsible for most of the theory behind the engineering, 25 years before.
True. But Goddard was unaware of Tsiolkovsky’s work and independently reproduced much of it, including the Rocket Equation. His publications were greeted mainly with ridicule in the US and remained generally unknown, but the Germans were certainly aware of his work. Not sure if they knew about Tsiolkovsky or not.
OT but tangentially related. What do you guys think about this? I think if there was something nefarious, it wouldn’t be related to the alloy this lady created.
I don’t recall reading about Mondaloy when a lot of discussions revolved around the use of the RD 180.
“In the mid-1990s, at the Rockwell Science Center in California, a metallurgist named Dallis Hardwick and her research assistant, Monica Jacinto, cracked it. They found a nickel-based composition that could sit in that inferno without igniting and without cracking. No coatings. No liners. Bare metal touching gas oxygen at extreme temperature.
They called the alloy Mondaloy. The name is a portmanteau. The “Mon” belongs to Monica.”
https://thesentinelnetwork.substack.com/p/the-green-burial-she-was-declared
Everyone dies eventually. I don’t think there’s any connection among these three deaths to metallurgical work all were involved with as much as a quarter-century previously.
The first of the three people mentioned died of disease over a decade ago. Nothing suspicious there.
The second disappeared while hiking. Unless one of her hiking companions actually killed her and hid the body well enough to elude casual discovery, clothing scraps or bones may turn up anywhere from soon to years from now. It wouldn’t take much of a declivity to hide the body of a small woman who fell into it. And falling leaves no scent trail for dogs. I’ve read several accounts, in recent years, of cold-case disappearances involving autos accidentally submerged in fairly shallow water and simply not noticed for as much as decades. It’s easy to imagine analogous situations on land. D.B. Cooper’s remains have never been found, for example, though some of the extorted money turned up – in poor shape – years after the relevant events. He made a hard landing, died and his remains have long since been consumed and scattered by animals and insects. That will most likely also prove to be the case for this unfortunate woman scientist/engineer.
The general seems, pretty clearly, to be a case of a well-planned suicide by a man who didn’t wish his remains to ever be found. No doubt the desert animals and bugs quickly obliged.
I tend to think it is just that the strangeness of reality applies to all people. It is a good story but creates lots of holes, some intentionally so that you can use your imagination.
The account has more stories now related to other deaths and disappearances.
It is kind of interesting but its like a soap opera or true crime podcast.
Yes. There is such a thing as coincidence. They occur all the time. That many people think they are rare and attach such significance to them is a matter of the general public’s poor understanding of statistics and probability. Ask any stranger randomly encountered on the street how big a group of people would have to be for the probability of two of them having the same birthday to rise to 50%. You’ll get a lot of answers, but nearly all will be far too high. The most common answer will probably be 183, just over half the number of days in a year.
The older people get, the more likely they are to die on any given day. That means the odds of any two of them dying – from whatever cause – within a short interval of each other also rises with age. This is the basis for the widespread notion that celebrities die in temporally-closely-spaced groups of three. This happens often enough to keep the belief going because of yet another widespread misapprehension of the actual probabilities of the situation.
“And now it has been 54 years since the last time an American walked on the moon.
A depressing thought.”
I’m trying to be optimistic. I think we’re now nearly ten years into a true movement into space. You know how we roll…next thing you know it’s a stampede.
I looked up Tsiolkovsky. He did a lot of stuff in aeronautics too and got recognition for it. I must wonder whether Goddard was really unaware of his work.
Read the article wodun gave the link to. Spooky!
It’s been almost 20 years since my own first flight on a liquid rocket. My how time flies.