{"id":27712,"date":"2014-09-06T12:10:29","date_gmt":"2014-09-06T16:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27712"},"modified":"2014-09-06T12:10:29","modified_gmt":"2014-09-06T16:10:29","slug":"p-j-orourke-on-whats-wrong-with-modern-rocket-ships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/09\/06\/p-j-orourke-on-whats-wrong-with-modern-rocket-ships\/","title":{"rendered":"P.J. O’Rourke on what’s wrong with modern rocket ships"},"content":{"rendered":"

From his post at The Daily Beast<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

I was in the passenger seat of a small rocket ship when I realized what\u2019s wrong space travel these days: I can\u2019t do it yet. I\u2019m still flying on pokey old Boeings for six hours from Boston to LA. The trip would take 15 minutes at 17,500 mph low earth orbit speed.<\/p>\n

Also, rocket ships don\u2019t fly. Or they don\u2019t properly fly the way the rocket ships of Buck Rogers and Captain Video did. Buck and the Captain could use a hayfield with a windsock. A modern rocket blast-off produces so much shockwave commotion that the nearest safe viewpoint at Cape Canaveral is eight miles from the launch pad. That puts the Starbucks a long way from the gate when your rocket ship\u2019s final boarding announcement is made.<\/p>\n

Plus current rockets lack anything resembling Buck Rogers\u2019 style. They look like evil corn silos or upright storm sewers or a trio of escaped steroidal church organ pipes wearing party hats.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, at the moment, there\u2019s no such thing as a small rocket ship.<\/p>\n

The first rocket to reach space, the Nazi V-2 (which transported people only in the sense of transporting them to the next life) was 45 feet high and weighed 27,600 pounds. The 363-foot Saturn V used for the Apollo moon landing was 52 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty and almost 15 times her weight. And Lady L, tipping the scales at 225 tons, is no Mary-Kate Olsen. Now NASA is building a new Space Launch System (SLS) that\u2019s even bigger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All my rocket ship disappointments are the result of there not being enough private companies like XCOR Aerospace. I learned this at the Space Foundation\u2019s annual Colorado Springs Space Symposium exhibit hall, where there was a full-scale mock-up of XCOR\u2019s Lynx that I sat in.<\/p>\n

The Lynx\u2019s 30-foot fuselage and 24-foot wingspan would fit in a McMansion garage. And it\u2019s as prettier than anything a rich car collector has in there now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From his post at The Daily Beast: I was in the passenger seat of a small rocket ship when I realized what\u2019s wrong space travel these days: I can\u2019t do it yet. I\u2019m still flying on pokey old Boeings for six hours from Boston to LA. The trip would take 15 minutes at 17,500 mph […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,44,15],"tags":[69,716],"class_list":["post-27712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-space-science","category-technology","tag-nasa","tag-spacecraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7cY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27713,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27712\/revisions\/27713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}