BobHarris.com - Would you prefer the aisle or window on that bunker-buster?

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"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."

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Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

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— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

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Would you prefer the aisle or window on that bunker-buster?

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Wednesday, 17 November 2004

You no doubt saw the thrilling footage -- all ten seconds of it -- of the Illudium Q36 explosive space modulator X-43A scramjet breaking the known limits of speed, power, and common sense.

Gasp! Someday, we'll all fly from New York to Los Angeles in 20 minutes!

They actually said that out loud on TV last night, and it's in hundreds of papers this morning.

Wow. That's just clear-cutting whole new wide frontier vistas of stupid. I mean, you can see the ocean from here.

I guess it's too much to remember that yesterday's test lasted all of ten seconds. What you saw last night wasn't a segment -- that was the test.

And never mind spiraling fuel costs (which are never coming down very far, and are fairly certain to escalate steadily over the next ten years -- I'll be writing more about that, I promise).

Let's not for a moment imagine the limitations of strapping our wide-load loose-fitting-Dockers-wearing kiesters into a hypersonic wedge, or the impact of even mild weight shifts on the stability of something doing Mach 9 through an already-capricious upper atmosphere.

And never mind the likelyhood that your sister-in-law is gonna be all that interested in strapping the kids into a machine doing six thousand miles an hour fifteen miles over Omaha, with the air temperature just outside the skin approximating a kerosene fireball, just from all the friction.

I sure as hell wouldn't give little Timmy the window seat.

Um... a scramjet can't even work unless you're already doing four times the speed of sound.

(They kick-started yesterday's firework by dropping it from the wing of a B-52 at 40,000 feet and setting off a rocket in its ass. Then, only once it was already going faster than the top speed of an SR-71, America's fastest (known) spy plane, the scramjet was punched in via remote.)

So any commercial use would also involve strapping the plane and its payload of happy batik-wearing vacationers and tired business commuters in their rumpled two-button cotton/wool blends to the top of, yes, some sort of ballistic rocket, inflicting face-curling G-forces, shortly before the stewardesses go around handing out Bloody Mary mix and helping newcomers reassemble their intestines.

All before anyone even thinks about how to freakin' land this inaugural flight of Air Kohutek...

Meanwhile, over in 34A, Timmy is plastered to the window, enjoying a clean psychotic break, convincing himself that the sun is melting.

I mean, you think babies cry on airplanes now...

So. What's this really all about (read down in the link)?

In the near term, scramjets are more likely to be used on bunker-busting missiles.

Asked if scramjets could be used for commercial transportation, X-43A project manager Joel Sitz, said: "Absolutely." But he added, "Who knows when it will be."

Who knows, indeed. Who knows when it will be? Who can tell?

Probably sometime after Condi Rice leads the Baghdad Ice Vanities in a figure-skating version of Swan Lake, accompanying herself on melodion and crumhorn, one each through nose and mouth. (She is, after all, a skilled musician and a damned fine skater, and these are two of her main qualifications for a job making peace in the middle east.)

Forgive me.

But Holy bleeding Christ on a fruit roll-up. It's a goddam missile. Not an airplane.