I mentioned Project Orion on an earlier post by Cats. Orion was sensible compared to this. This is the most gloriously batshit insane piece of Dr Strangelovian nutcasery I have ever heard of.
Ladies and gentlemen I present you with the Ling-Temco-Vought SLAM…
Apart from the thermonuclear warheads, SLAM itself was also a very formidable weapon. The sonic boom of a 25+ m long vehicle flying at Mach 3+ at 300 m altitude would cause severe destruction in non-hardened structures on the ground. Additionally, the nuclear ramjet continuously left a trail of highly radioactive dust, which would seriously contaminate the area below the missile. Finally, when the SLAM eventually crashed itself at the end of the mission, it would leave a wreckage of a very hot and radioactive (”dirty”) nuclear reactor.
I just love that, “Apart from the thermonuclear warheads” (note the plural - it could carry up to 26!). They seriously considered building something the size of a locamotive powered by a nuclear ramjet leaving a trail of sonic and radioactive devestation in it’s wake and it lobbed thermonukes.
I was born way too early and in the wrong country because that’s utterly brilliantly mad. 1950s America with Elvis on the radio and me with my physics degrees and taste for the subtle mathematics of blowing the fuck out of stuff* working on a nuclear ramjet (wow!!!) and cars with fins and wasp-waisted ladies and wasp-waisted fighter jets (NACA Area Rule) would suit me about right.
Yet, it’s 2010 and I still don’t have my sodding jetpack and they’re thinking of powering the country with fucking windmills!
I wannabe George Jetson and I’m going to end-up as Barney Rubble.
When did it change? I’ve seen kid’s books from the ’50s and they celebrated speed and adventure and technology. Nowadays they don’t tell you how to build a radio to listen to Sputnik going beep but how you must compost otherwise Gaia will drown an ickle polar bear or some similar nonsense. When and how did this all go wrong? When and why did we give the fire back to the Gods?
Bring back SLAM. Not to use it or anything like that (which would be Bond-villianish in it’s evil**) but just to see the effect the very idea would have on Jonny Porridge.
I want to see the stars. I want to have umbrella drinks with Cats and PA (y’all also invited BTW) by the crimson seas of a different planet served by a green-skinned lady with three breasts. I want a ray-gun. I want the future that existed in the past and composting can go fuck itself, frankly.
When I walk up the road at night from the local store, I see at the end of the lane the majesty of Orion directly in front of me whilst I’m weighed down at 9.81 m/s/s by milk, fags, beer, food, whatever. I think whilst trudging up the lane’s gravity well that I’d chuck it all in for five minutes of setting attack ships on fire off his shoulder.
That’s the problem with the Greens. They are obsessed with this planet when there is a whole fucking Universe out there. It’s the deliberate mediocrity and paucity of their vision that gets me.
See you at the Barnard’s Star spaceport. Starbucks? It’ll probably have a Starbucks. Everywhere else does.
*Apologies if that phrase is too technical.
**Just off to ride the monorail through my volcano lair to pet the cat.
Puts the awe! back in Awesome.
The project that really excited me though, even at that early age, were the so-called Enhanced Radiation devices, knowm more popularly as Neutron Bombs. The idea of blowing away anything that had DNA, and being able to march infantrymen in a few hours later with minimal NBC protection was revolutionary.
Of course, it was the kind of revolution that Jimmy Carter didn’t approve of, so he cancelled it. I have hopes that evil bastard Reagan re-instituted the project and there’s a little rogue cell of nuclear bombardiers sitting somewhere in a hole near Area 51 with a few dozen of them with some suitable delivery systems.
Bod,
Heard of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
Now that’s a thing to tote into a bar of a Saturday night…
Oddly enough, I met someone who was actually trained to fire one of those things.
Apparently the training was little better than ‘After firing, avert your eyes’.
Reminds me of the old ‘Duck and Cover/Protect and Survive’ guidelines.
Oh, I remember now what Project Pluto reminds me of now. The Reavers from Firefly would have loved that shit. Unshielded, flying death. Mmmmmm.
When I watched the Apollo landings as a kid I really thought I was seeing the beginning of something. Of course it was actually the end of something.
I feel cheated too.
I never built a wireless to listen to Sputnik’s beep, but I well into electronics by Telstar’s time. Impossible to imagine for a twelve year old nowadays, soldering irons - serious risk of burns, solder - toxic fumes, valves - 250v HT, and all with my bare hands and no safety goggles, Wireless World at my elbow.
I remember visiting the Science Museum as a lad and being transfixed by the hydro-electric dam mural. (Strangely reminiscent of Soviet triumphalist art, now I come to think of it.) Look at all that future! Where did it go? I expected to see C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate, too.
Where it all went was a world run by old women of both sexes. No risks, no imagination, no adventure. At least communism tried to keep up. Socialism, the feminine of communism in many ways, scraps the project and builds a new council estate instead.
We are still big. It’s the world that got small.
If India can keep their Muslims down, I fully expect them to be the next superpower. You’ll know when they test a thermo-nuclear device on the Moon.
Meanwhile, we’ll carry on sinking slowly in the west while our lords and masters wank themselves silly over Health and Safety porn like Ice Road Truckers and Heli Loggers while dreaming up new ways to keep the peasants dumb and happy.
Agreed, tech isn’t celebrated as it was. An early episode of Dr Who - the first Dalek adventure - mentioned the concept of the neutron bomb. 1963, I think.
Do not despair.
There’s still cutting edge stuff going on underneath the eco-babble.
Like this:
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/skylon_overview.html
Allegedly it can fly into space and back down again.
“That’s the problem with the Greens. They are obsessed with this planet when there is a whole fucking Universe out there.”
/me stands, cheers.
And that 1950s world might be enough to entice even me into Physics and Hard Sums. Grinning actors farting about with drinking straws on DofE propaganda adverts sure as hell wouldn’t.
Amen to Kevin’s comment about Ice Road Truckers and Heli Loggers, too. They pose as exactly the sort of thing we’re talking about - adventurous, reckless, manly television - but they’re really Elfinsafety propaganda. (Not that I’d do either for a fucking pension even with the safety equipment, but then I’m a big indoors-ey computer geek jessie.)
Come on guys, don’t be so pessimistic. OK we don’t have everything that they dreamed of in the fifties but we have a whole lot of stuff that they never even imagined.
You are right about the greens though. If they really had to live in the kind of world that they would impose on us all if they could, they wouldn’t last five minutes before they were begging to have technology back.
see C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate,
Bastard.
I was about to say that.
Read ‘Prelude to Space’ by Arthur C Clarke (1953) for the atomic ram jet and go to http://www.martinjetpack.com/ for your jet pack - except they are only selling to large companies and gov at the moment.
Stonyground,
So my lack of a holiday home on Titan is made up for by the fact I could get an app for that?
I read a recent book by Freeman Dyson’s son about Project Orion. Fascinating. Some of the smartest minds of the Cold War era were on the case.
JP,
The sad truth about Dyson is that he almost certainly should have shared the Nobel with Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga but only three can share and he got bumped. Similar happened to Fred Hoyle. And then Dyson gets a berth on something as cool as Orion and then it gets cancelled.
But then Nobels are a lottery and the Peace Prize is a farce: Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, Al Gore and Barack Obama! If I was stuck in a lift in Hell with that lot then five would enter and only one would leave.
[...] NickM [...]
It all went wrong when technology got too hard.
I could (and did) build a radio in my bedroom. A friend at school built a TV, no less, so that we could all watch the moon landings (TV’s were officially not allowed at boarding schools in those days). Any one of us could, and did, mess about with our cars and make them go faster, or better, or (more likely) not go at all. It was easy; you could SEE how it worked, and you knew you were at least as clever as the guy who’d put it together in the first place. Thank goodness, my boat engine is still like that.
Now? Check out your radio, if you have such a thing: one chip with wires coming out of it. How does that work then? Not a clue. Look under the bonnet of your car: what are all those things? Not a clue. How does it work? A chip. How does the chip work? Nobody knows, certainly not the replacement-artist (nb: not mechanic) at your local dealership.
So everyone gives up, and the spark is lost. If hardly anyone in society knows how stuff works, and how to fix it, we become a community of dependants. As we see all around us.
It’s a tragedy I tell you.
Bang on Andrew and precisely the reason I object to the deranged idea of phasing-out analogue radio.
Even simple technology is no longer taught.
“Well you should be glad Paul - the schools are teaching your subjects, history, economics, politics and so on”.
But what they are teaching is all CRAP - and they can get away with it because of the division of the humanities and “social sciences” from ordinary life.
You could not get away with mis teaching car repairs, or general metal shop or woodworking (or whatever) - it could not be got away with because the kids would say “well I did what teacher told me to do and the car still will not run”. So metal shop (and so on) tend to be gone from the modern school (full of graduates from Progressive teacher training programs).
Whereas teaching “economics” on the basis of “more government spending is good for the economy” is not refuted at once by ordinary experience.
Also (even in these University of East Anglia days) physcial science (whilst still abstract) is in a different box from the humanities and “social sciences”.
A person teaching physics tends to want to teach the truth - or what he thinks might be the truth. The poltics of the situation tend to be a secondary consideration (if they are a consideration at all).
For (for example) a history teacher or history college lecturer things are quite different.
For them such things as “we better not teach too much about the Liberty League opposition to F.D.R. because the words of Liberty League types undercut the pro F.D.R. message we are trying to teach” or even “let us smear the Libery League types as Fascists or Nazis” are much more likely.
It is the same with economics - who thinks the reason that “Nobel Prize” winner Paul Krugman bangs on about the “Paradox of Thrift” is because he is just really interested in such matters for their own sake (in the way that a person who studies physics is interested in the universe for its own sake). On the contrary Krugman and co produce “scientific” works for their POLITICAL effect (for example undermining the defence of saving and pushing the case for government spending) - this is not something that a natural scientist (even today) tends to do.
For a natural scientist (again even today) the TRUTH is primary - the political effects of the truth are a secondary matter (if indeed they come up at all).
As for the Jetsons:
I am with you Nick.
And it made me sick that when Hollywood finally did a Jetson movie - they made it yet another “Green” attack on technolgy and human progress.
Paul,
What is truth?
Some folks think it’s what’s true. Others what is useful. And of course that utility is entirely geared to an agenda. The reality is that some people don’t know the difference between truth and “truth”. It’s very easy to fall into because you and me do it every day. We all tell white lies of the, “I was delighted to recieve the invitation”, “I put the cheque in the post”, “Of course your bum doesn’t look big in that” variety. This is merely the oil that greases the social wheels. When it turns into more though…
>1950s America with Elvis on the radio and me with my physics degrees and taste for the subtle mathematics of blowing the fuck out of stuff* working on a nuclear ramjet (wow!!!) and cars with fins and wasp-waisted ladies and wasp-waisted fighter jets (NACA Area Rule) would suit me about right.
Sounds good. Except for the bit about Elvis on the radio.
Of course it’s gone horribly wrong. It was starting to go wrong when I was a schoolboy in Upper Fourth at Eaton House in Sloane Square back in 1955. I was the son of a Yank who thought that while stationed with the US Navy in London, it might be a good idea if I soaked up the solid English culture, the Yank culture being headed down the slippery slope already.
Well, I tried to soak up that culture, and succeeded to a degree, but I didn’t get much of it at Eaton House, I got it at the theatre, at the museums, at Royal Albert Hall.
Now 66, I look back those 55 years and revel in the fact that the world was open to me to learn from. Sadly, that’s not the case today. Hell, my mother would give me 2/6p and I’d get on a bus or the Underground and go somewhere different, all day long, every day I had to myself. When I got back, I always related my adventure to my mother and father, who almost always approved. I was permitted to go anywhere but Soho.
Our respective societies are considerably dumbed-down from those days, and we’re all the poorer for it.
What is truth? Well truth is a woman, since a lie is halfway round the world before truth has picked out what pair of boots to wear. (Yeah, shamelessly stolen from the great Sir Terry Pratchett’s latest, Unseen Academicals.)
Any one interested in this stuff need to be aware of Scott Lowther of http://www.up-ship.com/blog and APR (Aerospace Projects Review) http://www.up-ship.com/eAPR/index.htm he has issue on Pluto (Evol 2 issue1), Orion (Evol 2, issue 2) and many many other projects.