Quite a sight, Blue Origin’s first rocket launch southeast of El Paso off I-10 near Van Horn in far West Texas. It’s the latest example of the Lone Star rising.
With SpaceX’s new launch facilities at Boca Chica Beach on a sandy peninsula just east of Brownsville on the Gulf Coast, expected to be ready for Falcon Heavy launches in 2018, Texas will claim an ever-larger share of space commerce.
If the federal socialists can only control their desire to tax or regulate everything that moves.
Posted in Science/Engineering, Space, Texana
Tagged Blue Origin, SpaceX, Texas space facilities
Apple is coming up in the world. Take that, gun controllers. Watch it and weep.
Via Mouth of the Brazos.
Posted in Blogosphere, Guns, Science/Engineering, The Culture
Tagged Apple phones, Mouth of the Brazos, the new iGun4
Whole Earth Africa was the first such photo and still is the most popular. But this one is of home. A bit north of the exact center. How we look from space anyhow.
Ever since the airlines eliminated the flight engineers on the flight deck, our lives have been in the hands of two people, the captain and the first officer. And when one of them leaves the flight deck to go to the toilet, there’s only one person up there in the pointy end.
Just one.
Whether the sensational NYTimes report is accurate or not (and heavens knows they’re not paragons of objective, accurate reporting about anything else) it’s plain the cost-cutting airlines have imperiled all of us who fly with them all the time.
Via PPRUNE.
UPDATE: The NYT report has now been seconded by a French prosecutor.
MORE: The Germanwings First Officer’s ex-girlfriend says he planned it. He was a psycho on the locked flight deck who flew 150 people into a mountain. That’s another airline to stay away from.
Posted in Science/Engineering, The Economy
Tagged Germanwings crash, one pilot airliners, PPRUNE
Andy, of MyOldRV, is finally out of the gate-guard business down near Cotulla. His frackin’ gig of two years and seven months has succumbed to low oil and gas prices. Good for us drivers but not for oil companies and such.
Andy smartly took off for the western Hill Country, for a little vacating. He’s pointedly not saying exactly where. It’s pretty out there, and will be more so once the bluebonnets start unfolding. When this damn cold weather loosens its grip.
Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, Texana, The Economy
Tagged Cotulla, fracking, gate-guarding, MyOldRV
I well remember Richard Feynman’s performance on the federal commission studying why the Challenger space shuttle blew up on takeoff in 1986. How simply he explained what no one else seemed to know, and thus wrapped up the precise cause spectacularly. On his own.
He died a year later, just 69. So I enjoyed this essay about Feynman, one of the men who built the first atomic bomb and later said of it: “It wasn’t a lion hunt, it was a rabbit shoot.” Just what you’d expect from the man who demonstrated, with a piece of rubber and a glass of ice water, why the Challenger went down.
Via A Brief History.
Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, Space, Weather
Our politicians are such lightweights who are more concerned with graft and repression than actual accomplishment that their space agency is content to build tinker-toys. The real dreams of space conquest are still only dreams.
Posted in Obsessions, Sailing, Science/Engineering, Space, The Culture, The Economy
Tagged a real space station, nasa's tinker-toys, still only a dream
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 