I’ve added Caroline Furlong’s “A Song of Joy…” to More Perspectives From the Catholic Laity, in the sidebar:
A Song of Joy by Caroline Furlong
Writing for Joy
She’s a science fiction/fantasy writer: and so is more “a writer who is Catholic”, than “a Catholic writer”.
I talked about that distinction, back in 2017:
“It’s fair to say that if news sites were people, most would be diagnosed as clinically depressed right now.”
(“I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product?”, Amanda Ripley, Washington Post (July 8, 2022) via Wikiquote)
A comic strip started me thinking about the news, fearmongering, viewpoints, and weird groupings from Google News. I’ll be talking about that: along with rich folks, free speech, and whatever else comes to mind.
I’ll give editors of Pulitzer’s The World credit for some restraint.
They put a question mark at the end of their February 17, 1898 headline: “Maine Explosion Caused by Bomb or Torpedo?”
That left readers left to ponder whether the question was whether (A) the explosion was caused by either a bomb or a torpedo — or (B) the Maine’s captain and “other experts” might be wrong.
Time passed. Experts who weren’t anonymous analyzed evidence from the Maine’s wreckage. Journalists working for Pulitzer and Hearst moved on to other juicy stories.
And some of the American public began thinking about “appeals to passion” and “sensationalism” illustrated in that “Yellow Journalism” cartoon by Louis M. Glackens.
Somewhere along the line, journalists and editors started being ‘objective’ and ‘unbiased’. Which is why today’s purported articles covering alleged atrocities carefully avoid emulating yesteryear’s gimmicks.
Leading the way, The New York Times adopted “All the News That’s Fit to Print” as their slogan in 1897.1 And, since The New York Times is one of America’s newspapers of record, that slogan must be true. According to The New York Times.
I’ll admit to a bias.
I strongly suspect that many, maybe most, folks see the world through their own eyes: myself included. But I also think that reality is real, no matter how I feel about it.
I think that it’s much easier to see deviations from unbiasedness when it’s ‘one of those people over there’: and not ‘that good person who is one of us’.
I’ve been blessed with a life in which I often lived and worked among folks who didn’t see the world the way I did. That’s partly because of the way my brain is wired — and that’s another topic.
The point is that thanks partly to my eclectic interests and a checkered — kaleidoscopic — assortment of jobs, I’ve learned that folks whose views don’t square with mine aren’t “scoundrels”, or “without souls”. The latter is impossible — and yet another topic.
That said, I do sympathize with Mayor William Jay Gaynor. Partly because he’s Irish-American, mostly because I strongly suspect that he earned his reputation as a reformer.2
“The time is at hand when these journalistic scoundrels have got to stop or get out, and I am ready now to do my share to that end. They are absolutely without souls. If decent people would refuse to look at such newspapers the whole thing would right itself at once. The journalism of New York City has been dragged to the lowest depths of degradation. The grossest railleries and libels, instead of honest statements and fair discussion, have gone unchecked.” — From Mayor Gaynor’s letter published in the New York Evening Post.”
(Quoted in Louis M. Glackens’ “The Yellow Press” cartoon. Punch. (October 12, 1910))
There is a balance, somewhere, between Brumidi’s “The Apotheosis of Washington” and Richard Newton’s “Treason!!!” cartoon.
About “Apotheosis”, I’m pretty sure that 19th century Americans didn’t really believe that their beloved former president had taken his rightful place among the gods.
But the implicit beliefs of rabidly-religious and patriotic radio preachers of my youth weren’t far from it.
The central figure in that cartoon, the one exercising free — speech? — is “Mr Bull”, AKA John Bull, personification of the United Kingdom, the common man, liberty, or something else: depending on which era you’re looking at. The target of John Bull’s disrespect was George III.
King George had been, no question, nutty as walnut pie. What his problem was: that’s been, and still is, debated and debatable.
Now, about Mr. Bull’s apparent rejection of the king’s authority.
Since I’m a Catholic, categorically dissing someone in authority the way Mr Bull did isn’t an option. But mooning a king isn’t the problem. Not specifically at any rate.
Societies need folks with authority, legitimate authority. I’m obliged to show respect for the folks in charge. Those authorities should, in turn, show respect for the basic rights of the human person. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1897-1904, 1907, 1929-1933, and more)
So much for how things should work.
Lèse-majesté, criminalizing lack of respect for a country’s leadership, goes back millennia. The phrase, and our version of the idea, started in the Roman Republic.
Like pretty much everything else involving people, it’s complicated.
America’s had versions of lèse-majesté, starting with the 1789 Sedition Act. So far, they haven’t lasted more than a decade or so each. They all looked good on paper, but grated on my country’s notion that freedom of speech matters.3
I check my Google News feed a few times each day.
Toward the end of May, parts of the “My Topics” section got — intermittently weird.
I’m pretty sure I was seeing Google’s nifty new AI at work, but I can’t be sure.
Most of the articles I found focused more on Google’s embarrassingly wacky search AI.
I’ve been noticing the new-and-improved Google AI-generated answers in my Google search results — which occasionally give me useful words and phrases.
On the other hand, I now have to do a little more scrolling before getting to less ‘curated’ results. So it isn’t either gain or loss for me: just another change in routines.
Folks my age are, I gather, supposed to be averse to change. There’s something to that stereotype. I do like my routines.
But — I was born during the Truman administration, and have been paying attention.
Technologies, social standards, and political slogans have shifted. This is not the world I grew up in.
So for me, change has lost much of its shock value.
Whatever was — and is — behind the weirdness in Google News and Google Search, it’s not blocking me from information I want.
And I like to think that most folks are savvy enough to realize that the following aren’t physics topics —
But — there’s that lawyer who didn’t notice, when ChatGPT gave him alternatively-accurate information.
As I keep saying, we humans have big brains. But we also have free will, so using our brains is not automatic.
As for AI : I think the new technology will affect all of us, one way or another.
But I don’t think we’re doomed.
Some of us will either learn new skills or find new jobs. Or do both.
I sure don’t think we’ll be facing a Forbin Project scenario.
Even assuming that an AI ‘woke up’ and decided to take over the world —
I can see it now: Our Hero, defiant to the last, comes face to keyboard with the maniacally malevolent mechanical mastermind. And the Dread Digital Despot says:
“Puny human! Bow and cringe before the awesome might of my FILE NOT FOUND!”
Sound familiar? I’ve used that gag before.4
In my youth, very few folks were at or near the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
That’s still true. Obviously.
Complaints that the top one percent have too much wealth may be justified. Or not.
Someone on a late-night talk show, decades back, said that “enough” wealth was 20 percent more than what you have at the moment. Whether or not that’s backed up by verifiable research: it sounds about right.
With election-year hoopla in progress, fear of “centralized wealth” is an almost-inevitable talking point.
There’s some reason for that fear. Wealth, or poverty, doesn’t guarantee virtue. And rich folks have options that others don’t: including deciding what their newspaper, magazine, or studio churns out.
But I don’t think wealth, or poverty, guarantees vice, either. It just affects our options.
I was going someplace with this. Let me think.
Free speech. Viewpoints. Headlines and using our brains. Right.
Granted that having too much of a society’s wealth controlled by too few folks could be a problem: I haven’t been bothered by knowledge that my boss was wealthier than I was.
Now that I’m retired, it’s a moot point, and that’s yet again another topic.
Back in the day, I wanted the boss to be stinking rich: so that there’d be enough left over to cover my paycheck.
That principle would have applied, even if I had worked for some corporation. Again, having too much wealth controlled by too few people can be a problem.
And sometimes just having wealth is a problem. Or seems to be.
“Lifestyles of the rich and foolish”
J.D. Roth, Get Rich Slowly (April 1, 2019; updated December 5, 2023)“…We hear all the time about the ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’. Today, on April 1st, let’s look at some lifestyles of the rich and foolish….
“…Over a period of fifteen years, Cage earned more than $150 million. He blew through that money buying things like:
- Fifteen homes, including an $8 million English castle that he never stayed in once.
- A private island.
- Four luxury yachts.
- A fleet of exotic cars, including a Lamborghini that used to belong to the Shah of Iran.
- A dinosaur skull he won after a bidding contest with Leonardo DiCaprio.
- A private jet.
“It’s not fair to characterize Cage as ‘broke’ — he’s still a bankable movie star — but his net worth is reportedly only about $25 million. (That’s like someone with an average income having a net worth of roughly $25,000.) He could be worth ten times as much but his foolish financial habits have caused him woe….”
I don’t know what that article’s “average income” is. Statistically speaking, “average”, “mean”, and “median” — have several meanings.
A quick glance at American personal and household incomes — that’s still more topics — told me that the ‘average’ American who’s working full-time earns around $60,000 a year. And the ‘average’ household pulls in around $70,000 a year.5
That’s something like double what I ever took home. But I’m part of a wonderful family, we have a roof over our heads, and food in the pantry: so I’m a happy camper.
Besides, I’ve had more than my fill of moral panic and election-year antics.
Speaking of which, seems that the phrase “moral panic” popped up in 1830.
Marshall McLuhan discussed today’s idea of “moral panic” in 1964. The phrase got linked with today’s academic definition of the term — a widespread fear of someone or something — a few years later.
As defined, I think moral panic is a legitimate academic topic.
As perceived, I can sympathize with folks who see McCarthyism, old-school witch-hunts, and being religious, as typical symptoms of moral panic. My teens and the Sixties overlap, and the era’s rabid radio preachers impressed me: a lot.
They also helped start me on a path that eventually led to me becoming a Catholic: which was emphatically not what they were preaching.
Wrenching myself back on-topic — spotting (irrational) moral panic in ‘those people over there’, folks who don’t agree with me on matters of musical taste and pantsuits, is easy.
Noticing when someone who’s on the same page as I am — or in the same chapter, at any rate — stops making sense: that can get tricky.
But it’s important. Partly because I’ve got enough problems without adding screwball beliefs to the mix. And partly because I’m a Catholic. So at the very least, I should avoid making my religious beliefs look like a threat to society.
“…The lay calling has different duties, the supreme knight noted, but the duty to evangelize is particularly crucial today. ‘All of us are called to be missionaries in a society that often views religion, at best, as a matter of private opinion — or at worst, as an enemy of the public good,’ he said. ‘This requires that we live out our mission constantly … at all times, in all places, and to all the people we meet.”
(“Supreme Knight Addresses John Carroll Society”, Columbia Magazine (May 1, 2024)) [emphasis mine]
Happily, my (reluctant) decision to become a Catholic was based on what I thought about facts I’d learned. Not how I felt.
If I’m going to believe something, it has to make sense. No matter how I’m feeling at the moment.6
It’s like an atheist-turned-Catholic said:
“… If Vulcans had a church, they’d be Catholics.”
(John C. Wright, johncwright.livejournal.com (March 21 2008))
Finally, the comic strip that got me started with this week’s post, and a few points I wanted to make.
I don’t know if fearmongering is becoming more common in America’s news.
I do know that I didn’t watch the evening news for a few months, back in the 1970s. Couldn’t, actually. When I had access to a television again, I noticed how the pacing, images, vocal delivery, and other factors were affecting my emotions.
That’s when I stopped watching the evening news. I’m a very emotional man, and getting those feelings revved up seemed like a bad idea. Particularly since they were interfering with my thinking about whatever truth might be in the dramatic accounts.
And that gets me to truth and beauty.
Truth is important. So is beauty. We’re surrounded by beauty and wonders. Paying attention can lead us to God, if we’re doing it right. (Catechism, 32-33, 283, 341, 2500)
News and communications media in general should serve the common good with “information based on truth, freedom, justice, and solidarity”. (Catechism 2492-2499, particularly 2494)
I emphatically do not want America’s news networks to start implying that Catholics are always right, and that the Catholic Church can do no wrong.
That would not be truthful. We’ve been around for two millennia. During that time, some of us have set a bad example. Including folks who should have known better.
And I sure don’t want a return to the “good old days” when “presidents” were getting their weapons from us, while “dictators” were getting theirs from the Soviet Union.
I would prefer seeing more straightforward reporting, less fearmongering, and even less partisan labeling.
I can’t do anything about news media’s editorial preferences.
But I can keep an eye on my own habits, do what I can to support “truth, freedom, justice, and solidarity”: and remember that my neighbors aren’t just the folks who agree with me.
I don’t seek wisdom in the comics. But now and then I see something that makes sense. Like that Wizard of Id strip from the second to the last Monday in May.
I won’t try pretending that all’s right with the world. It’s not.
But I won’t do myself, or others, any good by fretting or fuming.
So breathing in, breathing out, and just sitting still for a second, might be a good idea: now and then, at least.
In any case, I don’t particularly enjoy feeling afraid, or angry, or distressed.
And I’ve found that thinking about those problems I can actually do something about is easier when I’m not overwrought.
In case you still haven’t had your fill of my writing, here’s more:
1 American journalism — Mickey Dugan, AKA The Yellow Kid — and more stuff you may or may not find interesting:
3 A caricaturist, a king, hot-button topics, and a nutty pie:
4 Of these, The Robot from “The Phantom Creeps” seems the most plausible:
Here’s something I noticed, from Sunday’s news:
“Graduation ceremony finally happens, 50 years later“
Max Matza, BBC News (June 9, 2024)“Fifty years after a tornado warning led to the abrupt cancellation of a high school graduation for students in Moore, Oklahoma, the class of 1974 has finally walked across stage to receive diplomas….
“…The event 50 years ago was never rescheduled, and for years the class of 500 pupils had discussed the idea of holding a formal graduation ceremony for themselves….”
At the time, there were reasons for not rescheduling the event. And the lack of a ceremony didn’t affect their graduation: I gather that the students picked up their diplomas later, in the school gymnasium.
Even so, ceremonies matter. Which I figure is why the class of 1974 finally got their graduation day: and another class, whose graduation ceremony would have happened early in the COVID-19 pandemic, had their own belated commencement exercise.
That’s a very welcome bit of good news.
When I was young, the future was exciting: cities on the Moon, computers that can fly spaceships, and more.
Then we tried making those dreams a reality; which we’ve been doing. In part.
One goal of this week’s Starliner test flight was having a human pilot handle part of the spacecraft’s approach and docking at the International Space Station. It was a methodical process, pretty much the opposite of dramatic. Starliner handled the actual docking; which, again, was a methodical process. And successful.
If you read nothing else in today’s post, by the way, read Butch Wilmore’s “Just a Thought”, a Few Minutes Before Liftoff. Or check out whatever looks interesting:
The Boeing Starliner has flown before, but not with people aboard. The first crewed test flight was supposed to be in 2017. Uncrewed orbital flight tests in 2019 and 2022 weren’t flawless, but the Starliner came back in one piece each time.
I talked about that, and what would have been the first Starliner test flight carrying people, last month. Briefly, an oxygen relief valve wouldn’t stop buzzing at about 40 cycles per second, so decision-makers canceled that launch.
They tried again last Saturday. That time a ground launch sequencer balked.
“NASA, Mission Partners Target June 5 Crew Flight Test Launch”
Danielle Sempsrott, NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test (June 2, 2024)“…Technicians and engineers with ULA (United Launch Alliance) worked overnight and on Sunday to assess the ground support equipment at the launch pad that encountered issues during the countdown and scrubbed the June 1 launch attempt. The ULA team identified an issue with a single ground power supply within one of the three redundant chassis that provides power to a subset of computer cards controlling various system functions, including the card responsible for the stable replenishment topping valves for the Centaur upper stage. All three of these chassis are required to enter the terminal phase of the launch countdown to ensure crew safety….”
[emphasis mine]“NASA, Mission Partners Forgo June 2 Launch of Crew Flight Test”
Elyna Niles-Carnes, NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test (June 1, 2024)“…Saturday’s launch to carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station scrubbed due to an observation of a ground launch sequencer. The system was unsuccessful in verifying the sequencer’s necessary redundancy….”
[emphasis mine]
There’s probably a detailed description of ground launch sequencers somewhere, but I didn’t find it. Instead, I’ll paraphrase what folks doing NASA TV coverage of Saturday’s launch attempt said.1
Speaking of which, it’s a delight to have coverage of a launch done by folks who actually know something about spacecraft, technology, and science.
Anyway, the ground launch sequencer is a computer — software running on a computer, actually — that sends instructions to equipment, and keeps track of the equipment’s responses.
If a piece of equipment doesn’t respond, or responds oddly, then the ground launch sequencer stops the countdown and tells a human that’s something’s not right.
At this point I could have conniptions over computers controlling our lives. But I won’t.
Launching a spacecraft involves thousands of devices doing what they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it. That sort of meticulous attention to detail is something computers are good at. Humans, most of us, not so much.
So I’ll be glad that the ground launch sequencer spotted something amiss, three minutes and 50 seconds before launch: and that the humans decided to pay attention.
I’m probably more interested than most in how spacecraft designers make the most use of very limited cabin volume.
I spent more time than I probably should have this week, trying to find something more up-to-date and detailed than last month’s BBC News infographic. And finding nothing either recent or consistent with other descriptions.
I suspect my frustration’s partly due to Boeing’s having changed details in their design over the last decade, and partly to Starliner’s flexibility. The capsule carries up to seven people, or a mix of crew and cargo.
Or will, assuming that it gets crew-rated.2
Launch Complex 41 predates Boeing’s Starliner by a half-century. It’s been in use since the mid-1960s; launching the Helios, Viking, and Voyager probes. Enough name-dropping.
In 2015, Launch Complex 41 started getting set up for human spaceflight: including the Crew Access Tower and its Crew Access Arm.
Together, the tower and arm let crew enter or leave their spacecraft in comparative safety. And without tracking dust and dirt into the spacecraft.
The Crew Access Arm swings out of the way for launch.
From the screenshots I took, it looks like the ULA Crew Access Arm is custom-fitted for the Boeing Starliner. Which makes sense, since it’s probably the only crewed spacecraft that’ll be launched from that particular site. In the immediate future, at any rate.
In the long run, though, I think crew access arms will be more like today’s passenger boarding bridges: those one-size-fits-all movable corridors connecting airport terminals and airplanes.
We’re still very early in the Space Age.
So far, only a dozen types of spacecraft have carried people into space: defined in this case as 50 miles or more above Earth’s sea level.3
The Boeing Starliner would be the 13th type of crewed spacecraft. About that:
Superstition: The attribution of a kind of magical power to certain practices or objects, like charms or omens. Reliance on such power, rather than on trust in God, constitutes an offense against the honor due to God alone, as required by the first commandment. (2110)
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, Glossary)“Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.”
(Catechism, 2111)
On the whole, I like being an American.
That doesn’t mean I’m a conservative.
I’m not a liberal, either.
I’m a Catholic, and think that what Calypso’s mission commander Barry “Butch” E. Wilmore said about unity, resilience, and unified efforts for the common good, makes sense.
“… Just a thought … As we were reached the pad … there’s that American flag … on the side of the rocket itself, and we know that that represents unity, and resilience, and unified efforts for the common good. And that’s what Suni and I have witnessed this last month: each of you displaying what this nation’s forefathers envisioned: a people committed to God, family and country, a people who use their gifts and talents for the common good, and are passionate, and tough. And we all know that when the going gets tough … the tough get going … Let’s get going….”
(Barry “Butch” E. Wilmore, astronaut, a little over four minutes before launch of the Starliner Calypso, from NASA video coverage (June 5, 2024))
And get going they did, a few minutes later. Calypso matched orbit with the International Space Station Thursday.
The docking happened about an hour later than it would have on a perfect flight. A few thrusters didn’t fire correctly during a step-by-step test of that system. More about that, and why it wasn’t a major problem, from NASA:
The last I checked, the International Space Station will be deorbited in January of 2031. Probably after detaching several modules for use elsewhere.
What’s left of Earth’s largest space station will be dropped in the South Pacific’s “spacecraft cemetery”. That’s not an ideal recycling solution, but it’s the best we’ve got right now.
As the ISS transitions from working laboratory to historic memory, it looks like we’ll have a growing number of smaller orbiting stations.
“Next-Generation Commercial Space Stations Are Serious Business for NASA”
Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program, NASA
(February 3, 2022)“Over two decades ago, NASA and an international team of space agencies began something long dreamt of and quite remarkable: a permanent human presence in space aboard the International Space Station. About the size of a football field, the orbiting laboratory and human habitat is a bastion of science and discovery where research is making life better on Earth and paving the way to the Moon and Mars….
“…While individual commercial space stations will have more niche, specialized uses, the capabilities of future space destinations overall will become much more versatile. Right now, the International Space Station is primarily focused on scientific research and technology demonstrations, making it more akin to a lab where astronauts live and work amongst scientific equipment. Some future commercial destinations will contain the lab equipment that NASA needs to advance its mission in low-Earth orbit. Non-NASA space travelers flying to low-Earth orbit, like private individuals or companies, may seek out commercial space stations that serve as hotels or perhaps even a movie studio to shoot a film.…”
[emphasis mine]
I haven’t checked on the status of the Axiom Port Module, Nanoracks, Northrup Grumman, Blue Origin, and other proposed space stations. I like the sound and idea of Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef, and that’s almost another topic.4
I can imagine an airline that throws away aircraft after each flight, and stays in business.
But I’ve got a lively imagination. Profligateaire’s clientele would be ultra-rich nitwits with a favorable — to Profligateaire — brains-to-cash ratio.
Even so, I’m not convinced that Profligateaire [a thoroughly fictional company] would really work.
Then again, I once saw an advertisement for solid-gold diamond-tipped swizzle sticks. But only once. Decades back. Looks like there’s a limit to human folly. Or maybe marketing for such things isn’t wasted on folks in my socioeconomic strata. And I’m wandering off-topic.
The point I’m groping for is that commercial spaceflight is viable now, despite all launch systems being single-use, at least in part.
Confirming my impression that commercial human spaceflight is currently confined mostly to space tourism, and that space tourism is limited to a fraction of the world’s very rich, would take more time and effort than I like.5
But the rest — companies that put communications, Earth observation, and other satellites in orbit — apparently are making a profit, even with today’s throwaway launch technology.
That’s impressive, but not an argument for accepting space technology’s status quo.
For one thing, I see no problem with outfits like Orbital Sciences Corporation and SpaceX making higher profits. For another, we’re learning that there are limits to how much junk we can safely drop into landfills. Or the South Pacific’s “spacecraft cemetery”.
Which is why I think designing partly-reusable spacecraft like Dragon and Starliner was a good idea. Designing fully-reusable ones would be even better: but that’ll take time.
“NASA, Sierra Space Deliver Dream Chaser to Florida for Launch Preparation”
Jamie Groh, Brian Newbacher; Kennedy Space Center, NASA (May 20, 2024)“As part of NASA’s efforts to expand commercial resupply in low Earth orbit, Sierra Space’s uncrewed spaceplane arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of its first flight to the International Space Station.
“The Dream Chaser spaceplane, named Tenacity, arrived at Kennedy on May 18 inside a climate-controlled transportation container from NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, and joined its companion Shooting Star cargo module, which arrived on May 11….”
Development of the Sierra Space Dream Chaser has been similar to the SpaceX Dragon’s.
The version that’s now ready for flight testing carries cargo only. I gather that getting an airworthiness (spaceworthiness?) okay is easier for cargo carriers than getting human-rating certification.
The Dream Chaser was originally planned as a spacecraft that carries up to seven people into low Earth orbit and back.
Sierra Space apparently still plans to build a human-rated Dream Chaser. How long it will take for that version to be ready, or if it ever will be, I don’t know.
Dream Chaser Tenacity, a cargo-only version, should be ready for flight testing in September. Whether it’s successful, and where it’ll land: that, I also don’t know.
Dream Chasers are designed to land as gliders at commercial airports, like Huntsville International Airport. Taking off again is another matter.
The Dream Chaser rides into space on the top of a conventional launch vehicle. So again, part of the launch system is still single-use. Except for the SpaceX Falcon series, if that’s an option: and even those aren’t fully reusable.
Another throwaway part of the Dream Chaser system is its Shooting Star module, with extra cargo space and solar panels.6 Cool name, but — I’ll leave it at that.
I mentioned Max Valier’s spaceplanes last month, and discussed a might-have-been 20th century that didn’t happen a couple years back.
Valier’s transatlantic propeller-driven airliners with rocket boosters look weird these days. But I think Ron Miller is right about Valier’s “greatest contribution”:
“…Valier’s greatest contribution was that he developed an incremental, evolutionary approach to the development of the spaceship. He began with an ordinary commercial aircraft. Step-by-step through different generations of design, this would gradually develop into rocket-assisted flight and then into full-fledged rocket transport. Finally, it would result in a wingless interplanetary spacecraft. He also promoted the idea of a transatlantic passenger rocket. He envisioned that this would make the trip from Berlin to New York in less than an hour….”
“By Rocket Plane Across the Atlantic“, Ron Miller/io9, HistoricWings.com (March 23, 2018))
A century later, outfits like SpaceX and Sierra Space have been taking a similarly “incremental, evolutionary approach to the development of the spaceship….”
The Dragon 1 and 2 spacecraft have been making supply runs to the International Space Station since 2012. By this time next year, the Dream Chaser may be world’s first commercial spaceplane.7
A decade from now, fully-reusable spacecraft may be making regular runs to orbiting labs, manufacturing stations, luxury resorts: and businesses we haven’t invented yet.
Meanwhile, some of us will be preparing for longer journeys.
“…Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse….”
(Johannes Kepler (1610) from “Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger” , trans. Edward Rosen (1965) via Wikiquote)
The sky is no longer the limit:
1 The crew, the spacecraft, and a little background:
4 Space stations, and a temporary solution:
6 (Somewhat) reusable spacecraft:
7 Something old, something new:
There’s routine medical stuff happening Friday, so I’ve been getting this week’s ‘Saturday’ post written and ready to go today.
Some of that “ready to go” will have to wait until this afternoon, since part of what I’ve been talking about is the in-progress Starliner Crew Test Flight. Which, so far, has been going rather well.
That, for me, is good news. More about that this week’s ‘Saturday’ post. Where the medical stuff falls on the good news – bad news continuum: that, I’ll learn tomorrow.
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