What's really sad is that 70s-era technology is better than what we have today. No more SR-71. No more Concorde.
Define "better".
The Concorde was a scam - middle class citizens were taxed by England and France to subsidize a supersonic luxury plane that only the rich could afford to buy (subsidized) tickets on.
The SR-71 was the best tool we could build at the time. Once technology got better, we replaced it with satellites.
The fact that it leaked fuel, flew at Mach 3, had a crew of 2, etc. are not features, they are flaws.
Yeah, it's cool as all heck.
...but don't kid yourself that it's better than what we've got now.
The reality is that it takes 6 hours to fly across the Atlantic now. The reality is that 10 years ago, it took half that. That's not progress, even if it is profit.
Think of the moon landing. Not everybody had the chance to be an astronaut on the Apollo mission, but I believe that US citizens were "happy" to pay taxes because they got something to be proud of.
And being french, I'm very proud of the Concorde.
Blackbird was black for a very long time.
As for one program that we do know a little (more) about, there's X-37B:
http://www.physorg.com/news189528362.html http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av012/100402x37update/
And the X-43D and X-51A Waverider and DARPA FALCON hypersonic aircraft, and various other X planes.
Various known and likely various unknown black UAVs.
And whatever Burt Rutan is up to.
An around modifier, IMO, is a terrible way to implement debugging functionality, because now everything that's not debugging also gets the side-effect that the method modifier adds. This is a better idea: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/contextl.html
Sadly, you can't do so with a Blackbird or a Concorde...
Oh... And they had no cursor keys.
Sadly, there is no way to legally emulate a Symbolics machine on a PC. Symbolics' intellectual property is basically in purgatory, the people who own it or have owned it apparently vastly overestimated the value of the IP and refuse to do anything with the IP aside from exchanging it for large sums of money - which nobody is willing to do.
There is a copy of a more recent version of Genera floating around on torrent sites, but from what David Schmidt tells me, it's pretty incomplete.
(1) I mean engineering oriented projects like train, cars, telephone networks etc. not academic research where the US clearly is great.
That doesn't mean we couldn't make a better B-52 or U-2 right now (and I don't mean a B1 or B2, I mean a big dumb cheap subsonic bomber), it just means that we couldn't make one sufficiently better to be worth the replacement cost. We could also build a better Brooklyn Bridge, but the existing one works just fine for now.
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/b52-strat/b52_5...
Mach 3.5 is a speed attained by two things: Space ships and aircraft built specifically to achieve it. The F-22 is neither, as cool as it is.
While I don't doubt (especially with super-cruise and such) that the Raptor is significantly faster than reported, I'd be very surprised if it is actually Blackbird fast.
I do agree that it "outperforms" anything I've seen, but performance isn't a speed thing alone.
Yeah, sorry for editing my post. I couldn't figure out how to explain what I was trying to say. But said former Lockheed engineers did specifically claim that the F-22 breaks both speed and altitude records. I don't really know what to believe. It does seem smart to release false information about that kind of thing though.
Do you know what percent of the weight of the shuttle is cargo?
2%.
It makes zero sense to loft tons (literally. tons.) of ceramic tiles, wings, engines, control surfaces, hydraulics, and more into orbit, just to bring them back down again.
Small capsules with ablative heat shields can ferry astronauts down from orbit for a trivial percentage of the price.
You're looking at all this cool technology and thinking it's a win, but it's not. It's a cost. It raises the cost of spaceflight to the point where you and I will never be able to afford it.
Kill the Space Shuttle and develop something more efficient. It might not stroke the egos of the engineers and the NASA administrators as much, but it will make space more affordable.
It also doesn't make sense to store all of those files in a mainframe when the filing cabinets do just fine.
It also doesn't make sense to spend the absurd amounts of money required to develop a packet-based communication network when telegraphs and telephones do just fine.
It also doesn't make sense to go to the moon with humans when we can just send a probe there.
Yes it does, flying is faster.
It also doesn't make sense to store all of those files in a mainframe when the filing cabinets do just fine.
Yes it does, mainframes are smaller.
It also doesn't make sense to spend the absurd amounts of money required to develop a packet-based communication network when telegraphs and telephones do just fine.
Yes it does, PBC is more mobile
It also doesn't make sense to go to the moon with humans when we can just send a probe there.
You're right, this one makes no sense. Kinda like the shuttle.
It wasn't at first.
Yes it does, mainframes are smaller.
They weren't at first.
Yes it does, PBC is more mobile
It wasn't at first.
You seem to have completely missed the point. Technology doesn't happen overnight. It's all about costly, seemingly stupid incremental improvements. The shuttle doesn't make sense in its current form, what does make sense is the shuttle as an innovation springboard.
I'm not missing the point at all. You, however have equated every innovation to be progress. Wise people realize that sometimes, despite our good intentions, innovations are sometimes negatives overall, and it's best to take a step back to take two more forward.
In fact, once you get by the "cool" factor of the shuttle, what you end up seeing is that is has in fact been a large step backwards. It has prevented the one nation that could actually dream of furthering space exploration from doing exactly that. The US basically uses the shuttle to do what the first Mercury flights did when we were all watching black and white tv's.
Think back to aviation. The wright brothers used a canard design on the Flyer. While ultimately proven to be safer and more fuel efficient, we needed to have a hundred years of non-canard aerospace development to realize everything between the Flyer and a Eurofighter. Fixating on canard designs may very well have held us in the balsa wood aircraft stage for 10-15 years.
Perhaps, one day, the innovation that is the shuttle will come full circle. That day is not tomorrow though, and no amount of emotional attachment to the idea stops it from being anything but a costly and inefficient nightmare.
(btw, both mainframes and PBC were smaller and more mobile right out of the gate, compared to the status quo.)
It never ceases to sadden me.