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This paper is "Did Biela's Comet Cause the Chicago and Midwest Fires?"

Hmm.. It is a 1995 paper: 15. Robert M. Wood, "Did Biela's Comet Cause the Chicago and Midwest Fires?", Society for Scientific Exploration Annual Meeting, 15-17 June 1995, Huntington Beach, California.

Aha. Google for "Biela's Comet" Chicago.

The idea is in a 1985 book, Mrs. O'Leary's Comet: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire.

There also was a meteor shower associated with Comet Biela, but in 1871 of the October 9 Chicago fire the shower was around November 27.

... as space is the ultimate high ground on military thinking and United States is publicly touting to build space-based weaponry to maintain supremecy.

This is just the beginning of next arms race, even India is building nuclear attack platform in space.

Arms control is dead, welcome new instability.

There are currently moves to design the next generation launch system after Ariane 5. It is supposed to come online sometime after 2020. The Germans made a study called FESTIP. They studied several alternatives. SSTO and TSTO, winged, ballistic, etc. They identified two concepts as having the highest payoff and highest chance of success: a TSTO winged launch system and a suborbital so-called HOPPER space vehicle. They settled on HOPPER as the lower cost and risk approach and are currently doing a prototype.

In the meantime the French recently awoke to the necessity of an Ariane 5 replacement and have signed a deal with the Russians to develop two new reusable high performance engines. One using LOX/Hydrocarbon and another using LOX/LH2. They also started their own study, called FLPP. FLPP will build a test vehicle called Socrates using the Russian engines and the thermal protection systems pioneered in the yet to be launched EXPERT test vehicle. Talk about NIH syndrome. In their defense, the French are responsible for the Ariane 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 designs, so they probably think they have more experience to be able to pull this one off. That has some merit, but then again CNES was also responsible for the Hermes boondoggle... Not that the Germans are any better, with plans for expensive vapourware like this in the past.

In the aerospace annex of the Deutsches Museum in Munich there's a remarkable plane. Unfortunately I don't read German, but it's a transport carrying about 16-20 people in the fuselage. The two underwing jet pods look normal at first, until you notice there's no exhaust at the back - they're Pegasus engines as in the Harrier. As far as I can tell, it's a Do-31, with eight further engines on the end of the wings (which at the time I took for passenger pods, since they have "windows" and the inlet and exhausts were closed off.

Good management and policy by the FCC would allow in the near future many solutions.

However, donâ(TM)t expect â¦, do expect anti-competitive freq-hogging by telcos to keep control of local market.

In the near future, it should be possible to provide 100% wireless voice, data, TV, ⦠multiple carriers/providers over the most populated areas. Allowing the customers to swap (totally, 100%) providers/services for QoS or cost reasons. I look forward to getting rid of the wires in the house and the local-bell. The USA Government and businesses are not in the lead on these technology sectors.

PLEASE, check out these technology concepts: http://www.airship.com

REVOLUTIONARY AEROSPACE SOLUTIONS FOR TRANSPORT AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

There are other companies around the world (Europe) moving in this direction.

Take a look at http://www.cargolifter.com/2002/repository/splash_ e.html

Take a look at http://www.aiaa.org/images/about/01_TC_Highlights/ aiaa-lta.pdf

Take a look at http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/haa.h tm

OldHawk777

Reality is a self-induced hallucination.

So when is the mighty industrial combine that is stavatti going to have time to finish working the bugs out of this gun? After they complete their first sale of their F-16 replacement? Or maybe when their supersonic stealth bomber, is in "advanced development"? Or how about when the prototype supersonic sea plane/executive bizjet flies? My money is on just after the sale of the 100,000th Moller flying car hits the skies. But that's not bad for a defense contractor based at a Minnesotta general aviation airport founded during the sophomore year of a kid with a bachelor's degree

We are a little over a year away from the centennial of powered flight. The Wrights made their first successful powered flight on December 17th of 1903. The first run was something around 12 seconds... Later in the day they recorded durations of just short of 1 minute. The wing warping technique was used to control the roll of the airplane. The Europeans later developed the control surfaces known as ailerons to get around patents that the Wright Brothers had made on their wing warping technique. Ailerons eventually became the method of choice for future development for many engineering reasons.

An article on this matter was published and graces the cover of the September 2002 Aerospace America magazine. The plane this system is being tested on if not intended for is the F-18, the writer of the article was J.R. Wilson. Aerospace America page at AIAA.org

No doubt. I had the pleasure of speaking with the chief test pilot of the ATF program, Paul Metz (who was mentioned briefly in the article) at a chapter meeting of AIAA. He talked about how the flight test program was structured, and the performance of the F-22. He also had the opportunity to fly the Northrop YF-23, but when I asked him to compare the two, he declined. Pointedly. : )

He's gone on to be the director of flight test ops for the F-35. Lucky sod. Who do I have to kill to get his job?

AIAA article

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While that's a nice thing for Thagg to be doing, I can confidently say that he's talking out of his ass. NASA has been doing good things with its ever shrinking budget and the directions it is given. If you want to point to politics, look in the mirror.

The X-33 was a risk, but not nearly such a stunt as the Delta Clipper, which had a marked tenedncy to explode. Think about vertical landing for a minute. Parachutes and gliders can be made stable much easier than the DC. Vertical landers are also the least efficient of rockets. If it took a Saturn 5 to get to escape velocity, it will take a Saturn 5 to stop a vertical lander at escape velocity. Now what would it take to get a fully loaded Saturn 5 to escape velocity? Orion, that's what.

The X-33 was not all worked out when it started, what is? The technologies being tried are mostly involved with new materials. They have benifits that could greatly reduce weight and that equals cost to put things in orbit.

Carbon fiber technology has great promise and has worked it's way into all sorts of parts already. Fiber is to aluminum what aluminum was to steel. Parts can have 1/5 th the mass of their aluminum equivalent. I'm not sure why they have been having so much trouble with those tanks, but I know from a friend that works at Michaud that there have been problems like this for the last three years. I suspect heat curring just induces too much strain for cryrogenic tanks, and I wonder why they have not tried to use E Beam curring another Lockheed Martin technology. Oh well.

As for politics, we could have used Appolo technology to get to Mars by now, or Orion to get even further. But, we the public are full of bad advice.

To learn more visit and or join:

AIAA

SPE

AIAA-2000-3615 Design and Simulation of Tether Facilities for the HASTOL Architecture (Hoyt)

AIAA-2000-3866 Design and Sim of a Tether Boost Facility for GEO, Lunar, and Mars Transport (Hoyt, Grant, and Bangham)

AIAA-2000-3865 Computation of Current to a Moving Bare Tether, (Onishi & Martinez, MIT, and Cooke, AFRL)

AIAA-2000-3870 Future Application of Electrodynamic Space Tethers For Propulsion (Santangelo, Michigan Technic and Johnson, Nasa Marshall )

I apologize for not being able to link to the specific papers or give much additional information, since this panel ran at the same time as one I was more interested in and the papers are copyrighted by AIAA. The fact that technical publications are generally not available upon demand except in bulk or by federal express is increasingly irritating to me, since 1) they are available in .pdf format on CD-ROM at the conference anyway, and 2) many distribution systems exist which would allow the organizations to distribute them electronically and still get paid. Please complain (nicely) to Webmaster@aiaa.org about this, since my lonely voice is probably not loud enough to cause action.

Rev. Neh
propulsion geek