Be Excellent To Each Other

It's hereand a a bit sad, to be honest.

I remember it when it happened (I was in a taxi, leaving Southampton station) and was sad then.

mind you, space exploration has a fairly good safety record.

i was at the hospital visiting my grandfather when this happened. This just reminded me how much i miss him.

I wonder if an ejectable crew module (such as on the F-111 fighter-bomber) would be an idea? Anything goes wrong, it detaches from the rest of the vehicle with the crew safely inside.

The fact that the designation of that fucking mud-moving tank of a plane retained an "F" in it is fucking laughable, but there we are. A hangover from it being unsuccessfully designed to be a fighter, and then kept on as a strike bomber.

Yeah. You can see a lot of it as an influence in later aircraft, such as the F-14 (which ended up filling its role as a Phoenix-armed fleet defender) though. I love reading about these 1960s-era aircraft, and how bizarrely rubbish so many of them are.

The B-70 Valkyrie has to be one of my favourites. A billion dollar Concorde-a-like, then they realised it would get shredded by SAMs if it ever went near Russia.

My wife and I were on honeymoon in Florida in December of 2002 - we saw Columbia on its launch pad about six weeks before it blew up.

I didn't Gnomes it, honest.

But NUCLEAR ENGINES, man!

That was the NB-36, wasn't it? (and that was only a test bed) I didn't think the Valkyrie ended up nuclear powered.

And you called Kern a nerd.

I think it was planned to carry nuclear AAMs for self-defence though. Kaboom!

What's the point of that? An aircraft isn't exactly a well-armoured beast - you hit it with any kind of AAM, it's fucked.

I think they were going for the "5 mile blast radius" effect. Radar and tracking computers weren't good enough to get a Mach 4 missile launched from a Mach 3 fighter to hit a Mach 3 bomber head on.