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Technological Flights Of Fancy That Fizzled
prostoalex writes "MSNBC's Alan Boyle takes a look at seven futuristic dreams for the past that never managed to materialize into anything substantial in this 21st century. At the top of the list are flying cars, with personal jetpacks, passenger airships, supersonic commercial flights, space travel and colonies, with propulsion breakthroughs completing the list."
It was a pretty good article, but very weak on the Hindenburg details, many people seem to aggree these days that it was not the hydrogen that exploded, but the fabric.
Of course the Hindenburg is a fine example of how important a picture could be. Only thirty seven people died (97 lived), yet the burning fireball caught on film managed to kill decent method of long range travel. Of course there are a couple of other problems with airships, like they don't do too well in strong winds, and they take a lot of "man handling" at the field, but in some applications they might make good sense.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Concorde was a huge financial failure.
And that's when the planes were *given* to British Airways and Air France, with the governments absorbing the huge R&D spend as well as the manufacturing costs.
It was that and the fact the supply of replacement parts was about to dry up which killed Concorde, not the accidents.
Sadly supersonic travel will remain the province of the military and the rich unless someone can work out a way for a plane to travel supersonic economically. Query if this is possible.
In the letters to the editor section, someone was wondering if it was worth taking a course in TV repair because with the release of the Phillips Modular design it will be easy for anyone to fix their own TV so the repair industry would become obsolete.
My dad was a computer technician, in the days when computers (and computer terminals in stores etc.) would actually get fixed, like in hardware. They'd get refurbished, bad solders would get fixed, radio tubes would get switched, replace a bad transistor, that kind of thing. Now, SOP is to cycle through the cards with replacements, or more and more often just swap the entire box for a duplicate. It's basicly gone from being a real technical profession to being a mindnumbing job with hardly any skill requirements. He's retired now, got out at early retirement with 55(!), just in time.
Judging by the cost of having anything repaired compared to new electronics, I think less and less gets repaired outside of warranty. Even warranty claims are often replaced, not repaired. There's simply no money in having a $$$ specialist going over a device, finding defects, getting replacement parts, replacing them and put it back together again. That is if they're not so damn small and integrated you simply couldn't fix them except with highly specalized tools.
In particular not when the cost is the same or even higher than the costs of industrial robots producing one more unit somewhere in Asia. Then you even get a completely new device, not an old device where something else is probably going to break soon. So yes, the repair business really has died down - but not in the way the letter-writer thought it would be.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1. Solotrek is no longer developing their Solotrek XFV. They auctioned off the existing prototype(s) after burning through their capital. At this point they're just a shell company making money licensing their vehicle for movie use. Mr. Boyle mentions the licensing, but not the near defunct status of SoloTrek.
2. The Breakthrough Physics Project always had tenuous status budgetarily, and it was finally killed off. Mr. Boyle doesn't mention the defunct status of this either. It's a shame the bean counters killed it, since it was mostly "thought experiments" performed by some of NASA's brightest and most forward-thinking scientists.
The information I mentioned above is right off the websites of Solotrek and the BPP, repectively.
A 1/3 chance of surviving a jet crash? Nope.
m .h tm
The new airships like the Zeppelin NT and the ATG machines can use vectored thrust to reduce the number of ground crew required, the power/size ratio and construction methodology is also enough to allow flight in much stronger winds than the first generation machines at the start of the 20th century. They can operate within similar weather conditions to other aircraft like helicopters and light aeroplanes.
http://www.zeppelin-nt.com/pages/D/bilder_u_thu
The airship wasn't killed from long range travel just by the film of the Hindenberg disaster, though it certainly didn't help. The much higher speed and lower cost of the aeroplanes did more damage and I don't see that changing for A->B travel in the near future.
I think however there's a niche similar to the one cruise liners operate within which I believe airships could fill. A world cruise on something like the Hindenberg would be absolutely fantastic. Then there's the obvious military/police patrol and observation platforms.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Our own history of Jetpacks and why they kinda went nowhere...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Come on, everybody knows that like several other companies, PanAM fell to the BladeRunner curse:
Someone once noticed that a number of the companies whose logos appeared in BR had financial difficulties after the film was released. Atari had 70% of the home console market in 1982, but faced losses of over $2 million in the first quarter of 1991. Bell lost it's monopoly in 1982. Pan-Am filed for bankruptcy protection in 1991. Soon after Blade Runner was released, Coca-Cola released their "new formula", resulting in losses of millions of dollars. It is interesting to note that since then, the Coca-Cola company has seen the biggest growth of any American company in history. Cusinart filed for bankruptcy protection in July 1989.
From the BladeRunner Faq (one of many copies)
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
Over a 3 year span following the first moon landing the US *did* go back a few (5) times:
Apollo Lunar Missions (w/successful landings):
Apollo 11
Launched 16 July 1969
Landed on Moon 20 July 1969
Sea of Tranquility
Returned to Earth 24 July 1969
Apollo 12
Launched 14 November 1969
Landed on Moon 19 November 1969
Ocean of Storms
Returned to Earth 24 November 1969
Apollo 14
Launched 31 January 1971
Landed on Moon 5 February 1971
Fra Mauro
Returned to Earth 9 February 1971
Apollo 15
Launched 26 July 1971
Landed on Moon 30 July 1971
Hadley Rille
Returned to Earth 7 August 1971
Apollo 16
Launched 16 April 1972
Landed on Moon 20 April 1972
Descartes
Returned to Earth 27 April 1972
Apollo 17
Launched 07 December 1972
Landed on Moon 11 December 1972
Taurus-Littrow
Returned to Earth 19 December 1972
Granted, it's been a while; but I wouldn't say "Never. Went. Back."
Any spoon would be too big.
We really don't know if we could terraform any of the other planets in our solar system into something human-viable in a reasonable short period of time, say just a few hundred years. We certainly won't know if we don't get more information. The best way to rapidly get more information is to send a bunch of humans to other planets and have them conduct studies. The primary target for such an endeavor because of its currently relatively earth-like conditions (compared to other planets in the solar system) is of course Mars.
Profitability is not the only criteria which should be considered in which government projects to fund and which not. The space program has helped advance many branches of science. Unfortunately it's been doing pretty much the same thing for too long now - the farther you reach, the more lies within your grasp.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At least one was.... (let me go to the bookshelf to pull out "The Great Dirigibles, their Triumphs and Disasters" by John Toland) ... thumb, thumb... There's a picture with the following caption: "Tail section of the Shanandoah, which was torn in three parts by a storm, near Ava, Ohio, on the morning of September 3, 1925." Another caption notes that the nose section landed 10 miles away.
I suppose if only they had had Internet service back then with the local weather radar updates they could have avoided a lot of grief.