Growing up in the high desert of west Texas such as I did, offered many advantages to interact with the world my city kids will never know. There was a freedom in that microenvironment. A freedom to explore, to individuate, and establish an intellectual foundation largely free of the hubris plaguing many of my metropolitan brethren. Before I get to back patting too furiously here, I'd like to say it wasn't because I was better than those more metropolitan kids, rather I/we had fewer choices when it came to our time. Hence, our simpler life afforded us entertainments and diversions which would have bored the hell out of our city counterparts. We all came to know, that at any time, any one of those diversions could be gone and perhaps we learned to appreciate them a little bit more.
While my Grandfather fed me Heinlein and Asimov, he'd temper that with Maupassant and Chekov. Occasionally, he'd share a Playboy Magazine article with me. Salman Rushdie, Ray Bradbury, and others. I'm sure he hoped this would foster a love of math and all things space and science, but honestly all I got was romance and a racy picture or two. Now, let's not confuse romance and sex. I'm talking about romance here, though my head is suddenly filled with puns I'll spare you my excited, yet whimsical, state.
I didn't know it then, but it was the romance which drew me into these novels and short stories. You see, if you take a person or object and put them in an improbable/impossible situation and have them/it give freely of themselves/itself for the betterment of the other people or objects in the story it's a romance. Trust me when I say it isn't that hard, go enroll in an English Composition program and spend a whole bunch of money and you'll know it too. Or.....Just take my word for it.
Getting back to that crystal clear desert sky; many nights I'd lay out and just watch the movement of the world. Occasionally, I'd spot a satellite orbiting the earth, but mostly I'd just contemplate the vastness and the what ifs hidden above. Somewhere along the way television and movies got involved. Star Trek was in syndication, Buck Rogers (horrible show), Battlestar Gallactica, etc. Then there were the movies like Star Trek The Motion Picture, Star Wars, Close Encounters, E.T., etc. Old movies like The Day The Earth Stood Still and TV shows, while not space oriented, still captured my imagination like, Night Gallery and The Twilight Zone. Suddenly, every time NASA farted, I wanted to watch.... This fascination with NASA really took hold of me one morning in Marana, Arizona. My Ex-wife and I were visiting her cousins and the Challenger flight happened that morning. I stood there watching the shuttle clear the tower and make it's quarter roll and then... well we all know what happened. For the briefest of moments, I felt like I let someone down. Then the Pundits (least favorite word) speculated on all manner of causality. Eventually, they fixated on the words Morton Thiokol and O Rings. Increasingly absent was the human side of the story. Our space launches had become so routine a catastrophic event had all but fallen away from the list of possible outcomes. As we know, the shuttle system was scrapped a number of years back due to the aging vehicles and the rising cost of maintenance. However, the space program has given us some pretty neat gadgets based on the technology developed from their work.
MRI, CT Scan, Programmable Pacemakers, and the list is awkwardly long, but one of my favorites has to be the use of LED's in brain surgery. These advances were all born on the back of heroes. Heroes like Gene Krantz and his homemade mission vest, Christa McAuliffe the school teacher on board the fated flight of the Challenger, and many many others. Faceless, Nameless, Dreamers attempting to convert the theoretical into the mundane only to discover a new definition of theoretical.
Enter Elon Musk. I'll start this by saying, Hell Yes!
Hell Yes! I'm a fan. I don't care that he has the worst track record in history for meeting deadlines or that some of his ideas are so far afield they just don't make any sense to the average Joe. What I do care about is his lack of "we can't do that". We, collectively, have enough "we can't do that" coming out of Washington on a daily basis to set our country back two hundred years just to reach equilibrium.
When I first heard that SpaceX was going to make the Falcon 9 and that it would be reusable and the cost per launch would go from 60 Million to 600 Thousand I audibly laughed. I made a joke out of a rocket that took off and landed like Marvin the Martian. Yet, here we are. The damn thing takes off and lands like Marvin's. This is incredible. The software for the computer controls has to be an amazingly simple and yet fully fleshed out product. Let's start with something basic in landing one of these rockets. THE EARTH IS MOVING. The earth is not a stationary target. It is spinning inside a bubble of air, so the software has to match the speed of the planet, control the pitch, roll and yaw of them and burn and shut off all at very precise times. That's on the landing pads at Canaveral. When they land one on the drone ship, the also have to compensate for the pitch and roll of the deck. There are other factors like wind, atmospheric pressure and other things, but pitch, roll, and yaw are the important ones, then elevation. I'm no rocket scientist, so don't beat me up over my simplistic assessment, but to me these would be the biggies in making this thing land and you can't reuse it if you can't land it. Landing is where the cost savings comes from. I love watching them land. This week after the launch of Falcon Heavy, I got to see two of them land at the same time. That was the coolest thing ever!!!
...And then...
Instead of a large concrete block, they really did shoot his Tesla Roadster into space!!!
This reminded me so much of the opening scene from the movie Heavy Metal when the guy returns to earth in a late fifties Corvette. It was exciting. It was romantic. It was just plain awesome!!!
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person to think so, but the (ugly word alert) pundits were not impressed. Some called this the height of hubris. Why didn't he fill the compartment with science experiments on the cheap? Why didn't he launch an armada of cube satellites? All of these highly educated professionals had the same blinders on and just couldn't see it for what it was. It was a test flight. There was a better than fair chance it could have ended in very large ball of fire. NASA used to send up large blocks of concrete as payload on test flights because it would shatter and burn up on reentry. Musk sent his own damn car into space to be the coolest art installation ever and had the whole thing blown up, the pundits would be talking about how foolish he was to risk his car like that.
So, when you go to bed tonight remember this: There is a Tesla Roadster 2.0 cruising through the galaxy 250 Million miles beneath the crap under your stove and that's romantic.
Until I write again, Peace be with you.
Dave
