But, hey, if it was, no one would bother to shell out a couple hundred thousand for the real thing, right?
Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane emails that they have a streaming video of a computer-generated movie of one of their suborbital flights over at Pure Galactic (apparently a new spaceline on the block). I was surprised to see that the modified Learjet has a “V” tail.
He’s interested in comments on the soundtrack. It’s a little too new agey and native Americany for my taste, and the musical transitions don’t evoke the visual ones to me. But what do I know?
Thomas James beats the eternally clueless Bruce Gagnon with a heavy cluebat. One could say that he beats him senseless, but it’s so short a journey that it would be pointless.
It does bring to mind an interesting issue. If we do ever achieve the desideratum of low-cost, high-volume launch, will it become a significant contributor to atmospheric pollution? As Thomas points out, Jet A and oxygen overwhelm rocket exhaust by orders of magnitude, so it’s hard to imagine lox/RP, lox-hydrogen or even lox-methane as being a problem, but I can see a point at which solids might be banned (though I suspect that they’d have long before that point been eliminated as unsafe and uneconomical).
Alan Boyle has an interesting story of the restoration of a lost Algonquin dialect. I don’t know whether or not the movie is any good in general, but I’m always impressed when a director works hard to get it right, even if few people would know the difference.
I’ve moved out of the Homestead Suites, and into the TownePlace Suites in Manhattan Beach. Ten bucks more a night, twice the room size, twice the number of burners on the stove, a dishwasher (the other place had a dishwasher, too–me). It also has fast ethernet. Last night, when I was futilely struggling to transmit packets on the net on the wireless at the Homestead room, I noticed that I had a signal/noise ratio of one: -79 dB signal, -79 dB noise. No wonder that it was dropping packets.
But this connection flies. I just used it to download Firefox 1.5 (I hadn’t upgraded this laptop yet), and it grabbed the few megs in less than a minute. So, now the only thing to keep me from blogging is all the other things that I need to do.
OK, I don’t have much time (or technical ability) to blog, but I do have a new piece up at TCS Daily, on collateral damage of intelligence gathering. The links in it are broken, but I hope they’re being fixed.
[Update late on Friday afternoon]
There’s a countersuit being filed against the ACLU. You can contribute here.
I’m struggling through my Internet issues to do a little posting tonight. Mike Griffin was interviewed by the BBC, and had some interesting comments. Think of this less as a fisking, than an analysis of what’s really going on in the agency.
It would be wise to ask the engineers behind the Exploration Systems Architecture Study, Was “The Stick” really better than Delta & Atlas, or did you just do what Scott Horowitz told you to do?