benzman

That's quite O.K. I just happen to not be a musical person and I was expressing a personal opinion.. Please don't take offence.

Its a great video but, in my humble opinion, it is better without the music. Incidentally, play it as loud as you can stand. Just below pain threshold is ideal.

I know exactly what you mean. I was thirteen years old when I saw Sputnik fly over, The space age had so much exiting promise in its early days, but after Apollo eleven it all seemed to fade away.

At a guess, and it's only a guess, it is ice that formed on the cold fuel tanks being shaken off. You will see the same thing on an Apollo launch. The reason that I say that it is just a guess is because I haven't checked to see if that particular rocket even uses cryogenic fuel.

Grumman Cougar?

Well, they say that the language of the universe is written in mathematics, and that certainly seems to be true! Chaos theory, fractal geometry, the Fibonacci sequence, and who knows what else!

Well, I wouldn't try to pronounce it in German, that's for sure!

Golly! And I have trouble spelling 'yacht'!

syzygy Whats is one of those? asymptotic Easy to forget the 'p'. lagrange For some reason I always stumble over the spelling. fraunhofer Same again.

Juan Manuel Fangio, the greatest racing driver of them all. Fangio only spoke Spanish, which could be a problem, but hey! What is a Bablefish for? Abraham Lincoln. I would ask him what plans he had for post-civil war America and where he hoped America would go in the future. The Roman Emperor Constantine. I would ask him what caused him to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Neil Armstrong. I would get him to talk about his flying career BEFORE Apollo 11, especially about flying the X-15. Nicolaus Copernicus. I would tell him that his theory was was mainly correct, except that the planets orbits were not perfect circles but slightly elliptical, and that he did the right thing by delaying publication until he was on his deathbed, thereby avoiding the inevitable heresy trials. By the way, in 2004 I very briefly met and shook hands with Buzz Aldrin, I regard it as one of the high points of my life.

Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane is a well written, informative and often hilariously funny description of that it was really like to be a NASA astronaut in the shuttle ere. Decades ago I read Earthbound Astronauts, a fascinating book about the people who designed and built the Apollo spacecraft. It has many interviews with the project managers who built the sub-systems. It is still available st Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Earthbound-Astronauts-Apollo-Saturn-Beirne-Lay/dp/0132223074

Agreed. One advantage of being an old bloke is being able to marvel at the advances you have seen. It doesn't seem that long ago that astronomers were saying that we would NEVER see a planet around another star because the stars were much too far away to allow a planet to be resolved and it would be lost in the glare of the host star anyway. How things have changed!

This reminds me of a WW2 Catalina flying boat base over here called Lake Boga. You can find it on google earth. The lake is almost a perfect circle, so all takeoffs and landings could be made directly into wind.

Sigh.

Steampunk! 1950s style! Brilliant!

Pedantic me says it is spelled 'ventriloquist'.

I remember reading in either Chris Kraft's book or Gen Kranz's book that, had he lived, Gus Grissom would most likely have been the first man on the moon. Apparently, it had come down from Somewhere on High that it was desired that the first man on the moon should be one of the original seven Mercury astronauts. By the time of Apollo Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton had been grounded for medical reasons, Scott-Carpenter had upset people and been told that he would never fly again, Gordo Cooper was thought to be too much of a loose cannon, John Glenn had left to go into politics, Wally Schirra was loudly telling everyone that he was leaving NASA after flying the first manned Apollo flight, and that only left Gus, which is not as bad as it sounds as some people, including Chris Kraft, regarded Gus as the best, natural born stick and rudder man of them all.

The Law of Unintended Consequences will ensure that any of these massive projects will go horribly wrong, e.g. the destruction of the Aral Sea, the accidental creation of the Salton sea, the overfishing of the Grand Banks, the introduction of rabbits, cane toads and foxes to Australia, etc. Our one and only planet is not the place to experiment with massive, megaprojects like this.

Well - Golly!!

I have noticed that whenever the Japanese make an anthropomorphic robot it invariably looks like a teen-age schoolgirl. Does anyone else find this mildly disturbing?

The Buccaneer was designed to the Area Rule, which could give anti-instinctive shapes. http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/q0104.shtml

Before any annoyed Canadians burst into print I had better point out that the DH Chipmunk was a Canadian design. Very pretty, though.

post-war British fighters were designed almost purely for defense against high flying bombers, which is why the often had great climb to altitude ability but little fuel endurance. Some British aircraft were quite pretty. The original Comet, Supermarine Swift, Hawker Hunter and ,of course, the De Havilland Mosquito, one of the best looking piston engined aircraft ever.

The Vulcan was gorgeous!

I rather think you mean 'bugging me'. At least, I hope you do!