Kerwood Floyd

<Retracted> Along an axis or about an axis?

Can you explain to me the difference between rotation and spin?

Boy it sure is a shame those Raptor engines are so darned unreliable (j/k)

Has anyone else heard anything about this? https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2024/08/21/bezos-blue-origin-suffers-fiery-setback-building-new-rocket/

I don't think so. I suspect my father was exaggerating. The post goes on to say that the plane in the picture was with the 9th Bombardment Group, whereas my father's plane was with the 3rd Photo Recon squadron, which I believe was directly attached to XXI Bomber Command and not to any Bombardment Group. My father's crew was a "floater" crew not associated with any particular plane, so I doubt he even would have remembered which plane he thought it was. Thanks for finding that, though.

In a combat zone in those days cold beer could be hard to come by. My late father told a story about selling cold beer to Marines on Iwo Jima. He had cold beer to sell because it was cooled while flying at altitude in an (unheated, of course) B-29 flying out of Tinian. [He claimed (a claim I've never been able to corroborate) that the plane he was top gunner in was the first Allied plane to land on Iwo Jima safely enough to take off again under its own power.]

Thanks. Yeah, that was my best guess, but I don't like guessing

Sorry. Can you expand SSSU for me?

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the vibrations from a centrifuge on ISS would mess up all of the experiments that are relying on the micro-gravity environment. Apparently you can have one or the other.

This sounds like the physicists' version of "Do bears [poop] in the woods?"

The silhouette is reminiscent of a Rebel X-wing fighter

Cool. I had a couple of problems with the book, but they would be easily fixed in a film

My son, my grandson, and I drove about 5 hours to Lake Wappapello State Park, in southeast Missouri. I would do it again in a heartbeat. Probably the most amazing thing I will ever see. It was dang near perfect. Great visibility. We saw the prominence on the lower limb. We saw Venus and Jupiter. And there was hardly any traffic on the way home. Totally different from our 2017 experience.

OK, I'm convinced. Thanks, all. Returning to lurk mode

I don't think anyone has actually answered my question, though. Did the FAA not considered the failure to land the booster (however unnecessary and experimental that was) to be a mishap that required investigation? In other words (to quote Tom Lehrer pretending to quote Werner von Braun) "Once the rocket's up who cares where it comes down?"