Rockets 🚀 – Jake & Eddie’s Excellent Adventure 😎🐶

Billionaires in Space

New Glenn Second Launch

Bald, rich guy Jeffery ‘Dick Pic’ Bezos confirmed his status in the Ultra-Rich Guy Rocket Club this past week, launching the New Glenn rocket for the second time. I was impressed by the really loud roar the rocket produced on the crystal-clear lunch day. More like what I remember with the Saturn V and its huge engines.

Very impressive compared to his smaller Big Dildo Rocket, he uses to launch his harem and other interesting people like a 90-year-old Captain Kirk into space. This new one is serious fucking business.

Getting in the Way Back Machine, we go back to the early 1960s when Dad, working for General Dynamics, is involved in launching the first major rocket, the Atlas, into space. I would eagerly watch every launch.

Atlas Convair Team — Dad with the Convair Atlas Team in the late 1950s

At Cocoa Beach Elementary School (more commonly known as Freedom 7 after a name change), my class would regularly walk the half-dozen blocks from the school on Fourth Street South (less than a block from where I live now) to the beach. Right out at the end of Cape Canaveral stood Launch Complex 46.

A documentary about growing up in Cocoa Beach by local Nancy Yasecko. She briefly dated my friend Bill in high school. Her father was an eccentric missile man and drove a very odd car with a fiberglass bubble on it (I think it was a Corvair). Anyway, she talks about how we would walk in single file to the nearby beach to watch the launches. I now live a short walk from that beach.

We would watch the rockets launch, knowing that many of our fathers (and perhaps mothers) were responsible for what we saw. Sometimes they would blow up! That was cool. But it was very satisfying to see them disappear into the blue sky, which was more often the case.

As a young boy growing up in this setting, I was enthralled with everything space. I especially enjoyed reading about the adventures of Buck Rodgers in the 25th century!

I was very curious why Buck could land his spaceship and we had not. I guess we had not figured that part out yet.

That turned out to be true. But who would have thought that it would be done by a billionaire rather than my dad and his buddies!

When I first moved back to the area, SpaceX finally succeeded in landing their booster after six tries. Ten years later Blue Origin does it with their second launch. Still not sure what took them so long but I look forward to seeing more of them.

Sands of Mars

I love to read, but not all the time. I often stop reading, especially when I can’t find anything new and exciting in my genre: Science Fiction.

I started obsessively reading in college and continued for many years after that. I read all the greats, including Frank Herbert’s Dune (my all-time favorite) and works by Auther C Clarke, Issac Asimov, Larry Niven, Michael Crichton, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dan Simons. I was always searching for new authors and stories.

The oldest sci-fi book I have read up to that point was Asimov’s Foundation in 1951. It was the original space opera and took place somewhere a long way away in the future. I recently found one of Clarke’s earliest books, Sands of Time. It was one of his first published novels and describes the colonization of Mars from the point of view of the early 1950s. I found it fascinating and, at the same time, not a great story.

It’s taken me over three months to read the book, but I am determined to finish it!

The story is straightforward and perhaps prophetic for Clarke: A famous science fiction writer is offered a trip to Mars on the first interplanetary tourist spaceship. It’s a stunt to get him to write cool stuff about Mars and bring in the tourists.

Mars is a thriving colony at this point. The Mars envisioned had vegetation and canals. They discover some weird living creature before the story is over. Interestingly, this is how people thought Mars was in the 1950s.

Clarke’s vision of Mars was based on what was known or imagined in the 1950s. The Martian canals were long discredited, but Mars did not have mountains or craters. Seasonal changes visible from Earth were thought to be caused by vegetation of the sort the novel describes.

It led one reviewer to write:

In The Sands of Mars, Clarke addresses hard physical and scientific issues with aplomb—and the best scientific understanding of the times. Included are the challenges of differing air pressures, lack of oxygen, food provisions, severe weather patterns, construction on Mars, and methods of local travel—both on the surface and to the planet’s two moons.

Some of the technology described had not changed since the 1950s. For example, carbon paper and typewriters are used on the interplanetary ship, and cameras have film. Smoking and drinking during the journey are the norm. The white male-oriented social structures (good old boys) are similar to what Clarke wrote. While a woman engineer is mentioned, most of the females on Mars are assumed to be secretaries or receptionists. The only names given in the book are of European derivation.

Manifest Destiny? – perhaps a touch. It is the final frontier, after all.

Falcon Heavy 🚀

SpaceX fired off its 5th Falcon Heavy yesterday evening. It had been cold with very low humidity the past few days. Together with the sunset this made for mind-numbingly spectacular views of the launch. Particularly, the separation of the side boosters and their descent back to a near-simultaneous landing at the cape. My photo above – photos below courtesy of SpaceX 🚀.