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Crappy picture in the article, here's a video of the concept vehicle.

At Space Access, after the grumblings about being trumped on the LLC, Carmack made the pledge that this year they'll be doing something new. Here's hoping it involves *people*.

I'm not a geologist, but the fact that the crater is described as being oblate -- 30x40 miles -- puts it out of the vast majority of impact craters, which are circular; it takes an impact at a very low angle (under 10) to get significant distortion of the crater. Interestingly, if you look at the map of the crater location and compare it to a map of the previous eruptions of the supervolcano hot spot now under Yellowstone (larger image here), you could also draw the conclusion that it was the crater from an eruption of the hotspot around 18-20 million years ago. The violence of a supervolcano eruption compared to a normal eruption could account for the presence of shatter cones. Comparing this site to the other known calderas from that hot spot.

I don't see the original author having posted it yet, so here's a link to an interesting theory regarding the possibility that what we're looking at is in fact just the upper stage of a rocket launched some time ago.

~Lake

I posted this on my personal web site at http://www.kluft.com/~ikluft/opinions/2004mn4-surv eyor3.html . If there are any updates, I'll put them there.

Bear in mind that the launch site is far away from populated areas on purpose. Over there in the deep desert, that presents a survival issue for anyone who comes unprepared. There is no city infrastructure that most people are used to - it's a wilderness. If you wander off and get lost and stuck, you may survive for days but not be discovered for weeks. That's why you should take this seriously.

Cell phones do not work out there. It's well over an hour's drive from the nearest cell site. Amateur Radio and satellite phones are the only reliable communications out there. If you don't have those, don't wander away from the paved roads and the launch site.

So if I haven't scared you away yet, here's some info that hopefully will help you survive out there. Remember that in the desert, bring your own drinking water - and lots of it. I have a web page about the Black Rock Desert. I have a page with a minimal camping checklist. Even if you're planning to stay in a motel, bring enough camping gear to survive overnight and wait for a rescue if you get stuck. (Overnight temperatures are usually in the 20's and 30's this time of year.) But don't go wandering off where no one knows to look for you. And lastly, see our page about "How to avoid needing a rescue at Black Rock", which we wrote after participating in many rescues of stranded people out there.

I'm going to be out there with the Stratofox Aerospace Tracking & Recovery Team. We consider it an enormous privilege that CSXT has invited us to assist at their launch.

Bear in mind that the launch site is far away from populated areas on purpose. Over there in the deep desert, that presents a survival issue for anyone who comes unprepared. There is no city infrastructure that most people are used to - it's a wilderness. If you wander off and get lost and stuck, you may survive for days but not be discovered for weeks. That's why you should take this seriously.

Cell phones do not work out there. It's well over an hour's drive from the nearest cell site. Amateur Radio and satellite phones are the only reliable communications out there. If you don't have those, don't wander away from the paved roads and the launch site.

So if I haven't scared you away yet, here's some info that hopefully will help you survive out there. Remember that in the desert, bring your own drinking water - and lots of it. I have a web page about the Black Rock Desert. I have a page with a minimal camping checklist. Even if you're planning to stay in a motel, bring enough camping gear to survive overnight and wait for a rescue if you get stuck. (Overnight temperatures are usually in the 20's and 30's this time of year.) But don't go wandering off where no one knows to look for you. And lastly, see our page about "How to avoid needing a rescue at Black Rock", which we wrote after participating in many rescues of stranded people out there.

I'm going to be out there with the Stratofox Aerospace Tracking & Recovery Team. We consider it an enormous privilege that CSXT has invited us to assist at their launch.

From this link, slightly less authoritative than I'd like (though this is 'common sense' to any morse operator)...

A "dah" (-) should last three times a "dit" (.); the pause between character sequences should last the same.

So using this 'beat' principle,

. - -
1131113 = 10 beats

. - - . - .
11313111311 = 17 beats

Yeah, not so efficient. But I'd expect a human operator to add extra padding around the ad-hoc "at"-as-word prosign, so it probably works out evenly, and the merge of two easy-to-send characters means a skilled operator can bust it out with a "rhythm" that should make it more copyable, while a rushed or actual attempt to prosign "at" would conflict with the character "g."

You aren't going to get big payloads into space this way as the heavy balloons can carry on the order of several tons. I'm not sure if, in the end, this would be any cheaper or easier than launching a Pegasus from an airplane.

One thing certainly would be neat is if they used hygrogen in the balloon, that would make quite an impressive fireball then the rocket is ignited.

I photographed it out the window of a Delta Airlines Boeing 757 at 38,000 feet on a flight from Atlanta to San Jose. The flight went to the north of the base.

At 7.5 miles in altitude, you can see the base from unrestricted airspace. Look for a round dry lakebed with a straight line (runway) across the southern third of it. There is also a shorter parallel runway that doesn't go onto the lakebed. It's north of Las Vegas and east of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains. It helps to have some practice spotting runways from the air - ask any private pilot for help with that.

Back in 1997, I was able to see the base (but didn't have film in my camera) from the south on an American Airlines 757 from San Jose to Dallas around 39,000 feet. I saw sunlight glint/sparkle off the windows of buildings south of the lakebed indicating a small city's worth of a base there. (Couldn't see the buildings themselves but reflected sunlight can give away stuff like that.) So I know it can be seen from both the north and the south from unrestricted airspace.

Personally, I'm not interested in the conspiracy theory stuff. But as an aviation enthusiast, I'd be curious to find out some day what airplane needs/needed a 4-mile-long runway. Was it just the SR-71 or were there more? :-)