More Words, Deeper Hole

Somehow I knew you'd pipe up here.

I remember hearing somebody pushing a similar idea on some Usenet group (but I don't remember which one): that the X-20 DynaSoar was in some way an incremental step beyond the X-15 that would somehow lead to us just flying really fast airplanes into space, much more efficiently than a big Roman candle could do it. I had to burst his bubble by telling him the X-20 was supposed to be shot into space on top of a Titan. He took it pretty well.

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montedavis.livejournal.com

People go through some remarkable contortions to avoid accepting that we're in a deep gravity well and chemicals only offer so much energy. Most of the contortions assert in one way or another that access to space ought to be more like aviation... which would carry more weight if aviation itself hadn't hit a plateau in speed, for all practical purposes, not long after the space age began.

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jamiam.livejournal.com

That PART of the essay!

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avram

Who's children?

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dewline.livejournal.com

"Surrender to the bullies pre-emptively and maybe we won't get the crap beaten out of us. It's never worked, but it's got to start working sooner or later."

This is what get kids who fight back sent to principals' offices to this day.

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I also do not believe that Westerners were more functionally numerate prior to the New Math; it sounds like an argument out of a cartoon from 1971. If anything, all indications I've seen are that we got much more proficient in the hard sciences and mathematics at the expense of English composition and rhetoric. Anyway, most of the business with set theory, alternate number bases, etc. had shrunk to isolated remnants (treated as an occasional pleasant break from arithmetic drill) by the time I was in grade school in the mid- to late Seventies.

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It's another in the great list of Upsetting Things We Supposedly Did To Provoke The Religious Right Movement. The usual folk theory is that it was Roe v. Wade. Personally my favored theory is that it was more Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

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tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com

Loving vs. Virginia?

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heron61.livejournal.com

I saw an interestingly related series of facts on a 2007 PBS Nova episode about the American reaction to Sputnik. Several scientists and engineers working at that time claimed that the US could have put a satellite up before Sputnik, and they were ordered not to do so by the government, with the assumption that allowing the USSR to get into space first would provide massive amounts of funding for space, allowing some of that funding to be used to create the first spy satellites. Also, by allowing the Soviets to orbit the first satellite, the Soviets would be in far less of a position to object to American satellites orbiting above the USSR, thus giving the US the effective right to do orbital spying. The basic idea seemed to be that all this was Eisenhower's doing, and he was rather more clever than he seemed.

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montedavis.livejournal.com

I have no trouble believing that the Eisenhower administration -- after seeing an "open skies" proposal rebuffed by the USSR -- was relieved that Sputnik had set a precedent for global overflight. But that they planned it that way smacks a little too much of "FDR invited Pearl Harbor" for my taste.

Most accounts of Sputnik exaggerate the technical component of the "surprise" over the political. From 1955 on the USSR had given plenty of notice of its intention -- and by spring 1957, the likely timing -- to the few who were paying attention. What surprised Eisenhower was much less the fact than the intensity of public response worldwide as well as at home. (It surprised Khrushchev, too: Moscow's first few days' announcements were relatively flat, with "victory over capitalism" and "New Soviet Man will inherit the cosmos" being ramped up hastily thereafter.)

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roseembolism.livejournal.com

MacLeod's essay made my brain bleed.

For a start, I thought people were over the idea that the 1950's were some American Paradise era. For instance, that was the era when the terms "neurosis" "company man" and "ugly American" came into common use. Leaving aside minor incidents like the Redx Scare and the entire civil rights movement, America was hardly idyllic and complacent- one only has to look at the popular media to see that.

And then MmacLeod's handling of education, from blaming the evangelicals on biology education, to believing his lack of ability to learn algebra on "New Math". Perhaps he just wasn't very math smart?

Finally, on the list of Things MacLeod Gets Wrong, the space race WASN'T about planned economies vs. free-market economies. It's easy these days for academics to place the context of the Cold War in a contest between Capitalism vs. Communism, but it really wasn't: it was seen in terms of the Allies vs. the Soviet Block, Democracy and Freedom vs Communism and Totalitarianism. In these terms, asking why the space program didn't take a free-market approach is like asking why D-Day wasn't contracted out to the highest bidder.

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I was going to complain about what happened to the term "Ugly American" despite this being pointless and doomed and inconsistant with other things that I have said but instead I will point out a bit of trivia that I only just learned: The actor who played Sarkhan's Prime Minister in the film version of The Ugly American later became Prime Minister of Thailand.

I can't resist: the Ugly American was the good guy.

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Thanks for linking to that James, I really really needed a laugh this morning.

Oh, wait - was that supposed to be serious?

>-----------<

Yah, the ongoing lovefest for Arrow is interesting - as an example how long a meme/myth can persist and how widely it can spread, while having only a loose connection with reality.

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The Arrow can never fail to meet our expectations. If it had been developed as planned, it almost certainly would have.

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Ayup. And most people don't know that it wasn't 'developing as planned'. I wouldn't say the program was floundering - but there were significant problems.

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That's remarkably similar to the fate of every untried method of space propulsion.

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tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com

I'm not sure that I agree that that's consistently the lament [insert suitable Scottish Ballad here]. From what I can tell, a considerable part of what is grieved about, is the loss of all the engineering talent (the bulk of whom, or so I have read, migrated off to the Benighted States of Murrica to put Apollo on the Moon, etc.), and, as important, the impression of being at the head of the aerospace pack. It's not the dumb jet, it's what it stood for.

It's sort of the way that Americans go scour the jungles of SEA looking for "MIAs" -- leaving aside the facts, whatever they may be, the semiotics of it is America looking around the jungles of the Mekong for an important part of Itself that it lost there, and has never been able to get back.

Well, I think essentially the same semiotics are at work in the Canadian collective psyche, when a bunch of us go dredge the bottom of Lake Ontario off Trenton in order to symbolically recapture What Might Have Been.

It's sort of like that moment in Riddley Walker (http://www.google.ca/search?q=ridley+walker), where they're wandering through the ruined power plant (I paraphrase):

Oh Wot We Was! Oh Wot We Mighta Bin!

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If 'Americans' (as opposed to a small fringe subset thereof) did go scour the jungle, you'd have a point.

OTOH, I've had Canadians who weren't even born when Arrow was cancelled complain to me of what a great injustice it is. Most of the time without even prompting.

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Complaining about the Arrow decision unites Canadians in one great mopey If Only.

Not just Canadians though. It's part of a bigger pattern. The British equivalent was the TSR.2, a highly advanced aircraft which was cancelled for political reasons in favor of the "cheaper" F-111, which turned out to be a relative failure, never living up to its design promises and never becoming capable of the rôle the TSR.2 was designed for (supersonic terrain-following deep-penetration strike missions).

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Not just Canadians though. It's part of a bigger pattern.

Canada is like St. Mary Mead, a small community [1] whose history can sometimes be useful as a model of the greater world.

1: I am sad to see wikipedia toned down its description of St. Mary Mead.

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I see I quoted it in 2006:

"Miss Marple is able to solve difficult crimes not only because of her shrewd intelligence, but because St. Mary Mead, over her lifetime, has put on a pageant of human depravity rivaled only by that of Sodom and Gomorrah."

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Of course paper aircraft are always extraordinarily successful in their designed role. Especially when they are 'highly advanced'.

Yet somehow the fact that real aircraft, especially 'highly advanced' ones, rarely do, escapes most people.

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The TSR.2 was not a "paper aircraft". If you look up the TSR.2, you'll find it was proceeding very well on its test schedule when it was killed by the Labour government. From their point of view, in fact, it was proceeding embarrassingly well. At the point it was killed, two flying prototypes were ready, the first of which had already gone supersonic over the Irish Sea.

Likewise the Blackburn Buccaneer, the English Electric Lightning, and the Avro Vulcan performed brilliantly (to name but a few). The Vulcan, at its operating altitude, outperformed most fighters of the day when it entered service; and the Lightning still held several time-to-altitude records as late as 2002. (Some, but not all, of its records were broken by the MiG-25 Foxbat in the late 80s.) Just a few months ago, a privately-owned Lightning in South Africa set a new time-to-altitude record of 70 seconds from start of its take-off roll to 6000 meters. The US was also rather startled on the occasion a Lightning successfully intercepted a U-2 at 89,000 feet.

So, in general, I find your skepticism unfounded.

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It wasn't in service, it hadn't completed prototype testing - let alone operational evaluation, etc. It was a paper aircraft.

WRT other aircraft the performed 'brilliantly' - so what? In the same time frame, you'll find multiple British aircraft that didn't fare so well.

My skepticism is based on fact, and actually studies of aerospace history. Where you have introduced nothing to the discussion but irrelevancies and cheerleading. (Hint: Time-to-altitude isn't a useful measure of combat capability. Nor is the holding of records.)

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My skepticism is based on fact, and actually studies of aerospace history. Where you have introduced nothing to the discussion but irrelevancies and cheerleading.

Well, thank you for that cavalier and completely baseless dismissal. I now know the value of your opinion to me: which is to say, very little.

By the way: the word you want is "actual".

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How is my dismissal baseless? Either there exists evidence that the aircraft would have performed well in its designed role, or there does not. This isn't a matter of opinion, it is a matter of facts. Or their absence.

Since you fail to introduce evidence that it would have performed well in its designed role... (And there cannot be any such evidence, as the aircraft was never tested in that role.) Your cheerleading can be summarily dismissed.

Since the aircraft you laud aren't the aircraft under discussion... Your cheerleading can be summarily dismissed.

And frankly, I don't care the value of my opinion to you. You've proved yourself an ass with zero to contribute to an adult discussion.

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Since the aircraft you laud aren't the aircraft under discussion... Your cheerleading can be summarily dismissed.

See, and there you go again. You know precisely nothing of my knowledge or background in aerospace or aviation, but you've chosen to simply dismiss anything I have to say as "cheerleading", simply because you consider yourself an expert and I have the temerity to disagree with you. I cited several brilliantly successful examples of the British aircraft industry, and all you could say was that time-to-altitude is irrelevant to combat effectiveness, thus proving that you understand nothing whatsoever about the design role of the aircraft being discussed at the time and the requirements of its mission. I repeat: "Cavalier, baseless dismissal." Next time, if you don't want to sound like a complete idiot, at least make the minimum effort to do some background research.

And frankly, I don't care the value of my opinion to you. You've proved yourself an ass with zero to contribute to an adult discussion.

Pot. kettle. Black.

I have no further time to waste on you. Enjoy your sense of moral superiority.

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It's interesting that once more I bring up the issue the TSR2's flight testing - and once again you go off on a tangent. I don't care what your background is - because, like the aircraft you cite, it is irrelevant to the topic under discussion. (A topic which you studiously avoid actually discussing once I insisted it be placed on a factual basis..)

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armb.livejournal.com

> It wasn't in service .... It was a paper aircraft.
Nice backpedalling.

> Hint: Time-to-altitude isn't a useful measure of combat capability
Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interceptor_aircraft#Point_defense

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It's not backpedaling, it's the plain and brutal truth. The aircraft never flew in it's designed role, even in testing. Thus any claims as to its suitability in that role are nothing but groundless assumptions.

Hint: 'Point defense interceptors' (using the defenition cited) don't exist - because outside of a scant handful of Nazi designs, no aircraft was ever designed to 'take off and climb to altitude as quickly as possible, destroy the incoming bombers, and then land'. (Well, not one that reached service anyhow.) The list of 'point defense interceptors' they provide is arrant nonsense.

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chrisweuve.livejournal.com

First, it's not a paper aircraft if it is flying. Yes, it may not have gone through OPEVAL and reached IOC. But that doesn't mean that they did not have a chance to judge its performance at the earlier stages of the test plan. A full performance appraisal may not be possible, but claiming this means it's a "paper aircraft" says more about your ignorance than the plane's capability.

Second, there are a lot of people who fly (or flew, in the case of the Lightning) point defense interceptors who would be really surprised to discover that they don't exist. The point [sic] about point defense interceptors, as opposed to area defense interceptors, is that they are deployed to defend specific targets, which means they launch when a specific target is under threat and are usually recalled (to rearm, refuel, and reset) when the threat goes away. This may or may not involve flying CAP for some period of time -- that "launch / attack / land" profile mentioned is very general and by no means implies a brief flight. And in that scenario, time to altitude (either from the ground, or from patrol altitude to higher altitude, if the plane's radar performance against low-level targets requires it to stay low while on patrol) is very definitely a (but not the sole) measure of combat capability.

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