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The End of the "Age of Speed"
DesScorp writes "'The human race is slowing down,' begins an article in the Wall Street Journal that laments the state of man's quest of aerial speed: we're going backwards. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, man is losing its fastest carrier of human beings (only single use moonshot rockets were faster). 'The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultra-fast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history,' the article notes. Astronauts are interviewed, and their sadness and disappointment is apparent. In the '60s and '70s, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace. And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707s. The last major attempt at faster commerical air travel — Boeing's Sonic Cruiser — was abandoned and replaced with the Dreamliner, an airliner designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency."
a couple of unrelated decisions are a sign of ending "the age of speed"?
at the moment China is constructing 17000 km of high-speed railways; *surely* the beginning of an age of speed.
sigh, media...
Partly because our infrastructure is fundamentally unmaintainable.
In many cases, we've simply tried to "upgrade" ancient track sections, so our trains have to deal with curves no other high speed rail systems do. This puts extra stress on the trains and rails.
In many cases our passenger rail is shared with freight - horrible performance-wise, great cost-wise. Everyone says we have a shitty rail system in the United States - I've heard from numerous sources that in terms of freight capability, we have the best rail system in the world. It is just that passenger rail infrastructure and freight rail infrastructure have vastly different requirements. (Apparently freight rail in many other countries that have great high-speed passenger rail is rather poor.)
In every other country, they build special track for their passenger rail lines that makes it easier to maintain.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
History catches us up. We don't have high speed rail because we had a large rail system laid out that has remained intack. Germany and Japan and a lot of Europe however got the hell bombed out of their rail systems during the war and had to rebuild. Newer beds and rails allowed them to have an infrastructure that supports putting in high speed rail.
Another historical switch, Russia captured more German rocket scientists at the end of the war and was able to build huge rockets and got into space first, but with big dumb satelites. The U.S. however could only put up something grapefruit sized so had to develop new technologies to pack it in. IC's were created which overnight killed the Japanese transistor radio market.
China did not have a big telephone wire network laid down, so when their economy started to take off. People just used cell phones with no need for land lines. Now they are getting land lines because they want to have internet access. Our old land line structure is like our railroads, but that is being transformed to higher speed digital types because it can ride the back of the cable TV upgrades, and it is easier to lay down new wire than new rail or roads.
Sometimes being first allows someone else to leapfrog into the next level of technology.