Space tourism draws ever closer

Here's a great video of SpaceShipTwo's latest test flight over New Mexico.  It's scheduled to carry its first paying passengers later this year.  I recommend watching it in full-screen mode.

Wish I could afford to take a trip aboard her . . .

Peter

Splitting the pillars

I've posted wingsuit videos here from time to time.  This one's from the testing of a new design of wingsuit, and begins with splitting twin rock pillars on the Sass Pordoi in Italy.  It continues with a jump from Les Vuardes in France.  I recommend watching it in full-screen mode.

I still say you can't pay me enough to make me fly that close to a mountain at those speeds.  A highly experienced wingsuit jumper was killed last year on the Sass Pordoi doing just that.





Peter

A tomato in space?

I had to smile at this photograph of a freshly-delivered tomato, floating in mid-air in front of a window aboard the International Space Station orbiting the Earth.

You'll find a full-size version of the picture here.  It was taken by Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.  He's putting up lots of interesting photographs of his time aboard the ISS on his Twitter feed.

Peter

OK, that's impressive!

24-year-old graphic design student Decio Lourenco of Cape Town, South Africa, hit the headlines earlier this year when he rode his skateboard down Kloof Nek Road in Cape Town at insanely high speeds - at one point hitting 68 mph and triggering a speed camera. I know that road very well, having driven it umpteen times over many years, so I can only doff my hat to the courage - or foolhardiness - of anyone prepared to tackle its steep slopes and tight turns on a skateboard.  I recommend watching the video in full-screen mode.

Mercedes-Benz South Africa decided to make use of his skills, and the publicity surrounding them, by recruiting him for an advertisement highlighting the performance of their sporty A45 AMG model.  They took Decio and the car to the Franschhoek Pass, another South African road I know very well.  Over three days camera crews filmed the skateboarder and the car chasing each other down the pass, producing this extended advertisement that I find very attractive as a piece of 'performance art'.  Again, full-screen mode is recommended.

Kudos to Decio Lourenco for his amazing skills, and to Mercedes-Benz South Africa for having had the sense to see an opportunity like this and make the most of it.

Peter

Remembering a Cold War triumph

While searching for information about the Fulton Skyhook in connection with my current fiction project, I came across references to Project Coldfeet, a CIA operation during the early 1960's. I found enough information to put together a blog article about it.

The Skyhook had its genesis in World War II experiments to recover downed aviators from behind enemy lines. The early tests used a line stretched between two tall posts, which was snagged by a passing aircraft. The 'passenger', attached to that line, was jerked off the ground and into the air, to be 'reeled in' by an operator in the aircraft. It worked, although it generated strong enough g-forces to traumatize those picked up using it. Here's a video report on how Robert Fulton developed it into the system that was named after him.

A long, detailed CIA article about the early development of the system and Fulton's improved version of it may be read here. A short Popular Mechanics article on the testing of Fulton's system may be found here.

The system was dramatized in two successful movies of the 1960's. One was the James Bond thriller 'Thunderball', where in the final scene Bond and (inevitably) his love interest are rescued by a World War II-vintage B-17 bomber equipped with Skyhook - the same aircraft that was used during Operation Coldfeet, of which more later. You can see a series of stills from the movie depicting the use of Skyhook here, and a (rather poor-quality) video clip of it here.  The other movie was 'The Green Berets', in which a captured North Vietnamese commander is lifted out of hostile territory using a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft equipped with Skyhook. I've included the scene here because it's a good illustration of how Skyhook was operated.

So much for Skyhook - now on to Project Coldfeet.  A CIA article described it some years ago.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union battled for every advantage, including studying the Arctic for its strategic value. For seven days in May 1962, under Project COLDFEET, the US intelligence community pursued a rare opportunity to collect intelligence firsthand from an abandoned Soviet research station high in the Arctic.

The Soviet drift station – located on a floating ice island – had been hastily evacuated when shifting ice made the base runway unusable. Since the ice was breaking apart – and normal air transport to the island was now impossible – the Soviets felt the remote base and its equipment and research materials would be crushed and thoroughly destroyed in the Arctic Sea. Unfortunately for the Soviets, they were wrong.

Project COLDFEET was truly a joint venture bringing together the resources and expertise of the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. On May 28, using pilots and a B-17 from CIA proprietary Intermountain Aviation – accompanied by a polar navigator borrowed from Pan American Airlines – two intelligence collectors were successfully dropped by parachute onto the ice.

The B-17 – now rigged with Robert Fulton’s Skyhook – returned on June 2 to recover the team and their take. The Skyhook was a unique airborne pickup device that included a nose yolk and a special winch system.

The key measure of COLDFEET’s success was the unprecedented safe removal of the investigative team and many critical items.

The mission yielded valuable information to the US intelligence community on the Soviet Union’s drift station research activities. The team found evidence of advanced acoustical systems research to detect under-ice US submarines and efforts to develop Arctic anti-submarine warfare techniques.

This small team — incredibly courageous and resourceful — planned and executed a remarkable feat, capitalizing on a rare intelligence opportunity.

That must have been quite hair-raising for the two people dropped onto the ice. You can read more about it here, in the last two-thirds of the article, and at Wikipedia. Recommended reading.

Peter

The Epic of Gilgamesh and class discrimination

I was very interested (but also saddened) to read how the discoverer of the Epic of Gilgamesh was denied at least some of the respect and recognition that was his due - almost certainly because he was from the lower class, in a society that was class-conscious to a fault.  The Telegraph reports:

[George] Smith, an unlikely scholar, was the man for the task. Born of modest parents in Chelsea (his father was a carpenter), he left school at 14. He married young, moved to Crogsland Road in Camden, and had six children. Unsatisfied, he spent what spare time and money he had pursuing his interests of Assyriology and biblical archaeology. He was so often seen at the British Museum that Sir Henry Rawlinson (the discoverer of the Behistun monument, a “Rosetta Stone of cuneiform languages”) eventually employed him as a classifier. But even for such highly skilled and specialist work, he was paid little more than the cleaning staff.

On the evening he came across Layard’s fragment, Smith is said to have become so animated that, mute with excitement, he began to tear his clothes off. (Though much repeated, there is only a single source for this story, E A  W Budge’s Rise and Progress of Assyriology – published 50 years after Smith’s death.) Smith quickly prepared a paper to present to the Society of Biblical Archaeology.

. . .

... it was not until January 1873 that the Telegraph stepped in to offer the British Museum £1,000 for Smith to conduct further excavations. Taking travel advice from Arnold, Smith departed for Ottoman Iraq later that month.

His journey was not an easy one. Smith had never travelled before, and his letters home (illustrated for his children) demonstrate that he suffered chronic seasickness. On his arrival, Smith found himself beset by officialdom. His permissions were not valid, the papers had not been signed by the right people. He was delayed for months.

Digging began on May 7, and within three days he believed he had discovered more broken fragments of the “Deluge”. In fact, he had discovered another long-lost poem: The Epic of Atrahasis. In Smith’s own words, “The proprietors of The Daily Telegraph, however, considered that the discovery of the missing fragment of the deluge text accomplished the object they had in view, and they declined to prosecute the excavations further… desiring to see it carried on by the nation.” The brief excavation was over. The question of future funding would depend on Gladstone.

Permission was granted and on a second dig (in 1874) Smith discovered Babylonian accounts of the creation, the fall of man, the pestilence, the Tower of Babel, and fragments of many other legends. But it was on the third excavation in 1876 that Smith ran into difficulties.

He left England in 1875, and was so delayed by Ottoman officials that he did not arrive at Nineveh until July 1876. By then, with temperatures already in the mid-40s, it was too late to dig. He fell ill.

Smith’s notebooks in the British Library recount his descent into delirium, and the final pages make for heartbreaking reading. He set off for England, but died before he got as far as Aleppo. He was 36, only four years into his career as an Assyriologist. The newspapers mourned Smith’s early passing. They explained that he had died exercising a heroic commitment to the science. The dedications and obituaries, though, masked a slightly darker story; one where Smith may have been subject to coercion in his decision to delay.

Smith had previously written to request curtailment of the dig because “plague” was sweeping the lowlands of Syria and Iraq. Permission was refused. He was told by the museum secretary that the trustees would consider it to be “very objectionable” if he were to terminate the excavation early. It is impossible to imagine the same being said to Rawlinson or Layard.

There's more at the link.

How sad that a mind of such quality could be judged, not by its intellectual capabilities or accomplishments, but by the social class into which its owner had been born.  As the article notes, if Smith had been a member of the upper classes, he'd never have been pushed around as he was - and he'd probably have been allowed to leave the area of his excavations sooner, thereby avoiding contracting the disease that killed him.

If you're interested, you can download an e-book version of Smith's translation of 'The Chaldean Account of Genesis' in several formats, or read it online in HTML format (click each chapter title to read it).  Recommended.

Peter

Downhill racing - in a kayak???

That's what this looks like, anyway.  Kayaker Ben Marr and some friends decided to take their kayaks down a steep and very shallow drainage ditch near Lions Bay, British Columbia.  It's a wild ride!  I recommend watching in full-screen mode.

Sooner them than me . . .

Peter

Has a missing pre-WW2 Soviet bomber been found?

It's been reported that Russia is searching for the remains of a Bolkhovitinov DB-A aircraft that attempted to fly non-stop from Moscow to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1937.  It disappeared near Alaska and was not located at the time, despite an extensive search for it and its crew.

The 1930's saw many Soviet attempts at aviation records.  Two long-range aircraft made it from the Soviet Union to the USA, both Tupolev ANT-25's.

One flew from Moscow to Vancouver, Washington, and the other from Moscow to San Jacinto, California.  The latter aircraft is shown below after arrival, followed by a film report about its journey from a later newsreel.

There have been claims that the Tupolev ANT-25 was no more than a rebuilt or modified French Dewoitine D.33 aircraft (pictured on the ground here, and flying here), and that the aircraft's alleged record flights were hoaxes.  However, despite obvious visual similarities between the two aircraft, there's no solid evidence to suggest that their record flights to the USA were in any way staged or falsified.  Furthermore, the ANT-25's engineering and construction can be easily confirmed as Soviet from contemporary sources - see, for example, this article, which includes many photographs.  Also, ten ANT-25 bomber aircraft were inducted into the Soviet air force, although they weren't very successful as combat aircraft.  This would tend to argue in favor of Soviet construction, and against the record-setting aircraft being two modified French planes.

Two replica ANT-25's are in Russian museums to this day.  Here's one in the famous Central Air Force Museum in Monino, near Moscow.

Stalin, head of the Soviet Union at the time, wanted aviation records to be broken as an expression of Soviet and Communist technological superiority.  Those who succeeded were rewarded.  Those who failed were consigned to the dustbin of history (sometimes all too literally).

The Bolkhovitinov DB-A's genesis is curiously similar to the early history of Boeing's B-17 Flying Fortress, except that only 14 of the former were produced compared to almost 13,000 of the latter.  Both aircraft were designed to take advantage of the latest technologies available in their day:  stressed skin all-metal construction, cowled (i.e. enclosed) engines, fuel tanks in the wings, retractable undercarriage, etc.

The DB-A was tested with skis as well as wheels, to see whether it could operate from unprepared airfields during the long and severe Russian winters.  It reportedly performed well.

The DB-A first flew in 1935, and before its journey to Alaska had broken several records in its class.  A detailed account of its Alaska flight may be found here.  It makes interesting reading.  To my surprise, YouTube has this video clip showing the DB-A during test flights in the Soviet Union, and departing on its abortive flight to Alaska.

I was also fascinated to learn that someone may already have found the missing aircraft.  The Seward City News reported yesterday:

Lucky Wilson, a longtime Alaska pilot and Healy Helicopter warrant officer in Vietnam, who owns the aircraft storage hanger at Seward Airport, says he knows where the famed Russian bomber plane, missing since August of 1937 can be found. He saw the historic bomber in 1978, a couple of miles east of Oliktok Point off Alaska’s Arctic Ocean Coast while overflying the area on a clear, sunny day. It was shining through the shallow water in which it was submerged. He could tell it was Russian by its curved wing tip, and its engine pod. American bombers have rounded wing tips, Wilson said.

The bomber is directly to the east of the early warning Dew Station at Oliktok Point, and when he saw it, it was submerged under less than 20 feet of water, he said. Wilson could clearly see the plane because the water was so clear, he said. It was still shiny-red.

He informed the men working at the Oliktok station, and has since seen it during the 80s, while flying out of Prudhoe Bay for a private North Slope contractor.

There's more at the link.

If Mr. Wilson's discovery proves to be the missing plane, it'll be the end of a search that's lasted for over three-quarters of a century.  The aviators of those earlier years were certainly brave men, setting out in such primitive aircraft to attempt feats of endurance flying that were unprecedented.  They frequently failed . . . but their attempts paved the way for the aerial armadas of World War II, and the explosion in commercial aviation that followed.  The DB-A has a small, but honored place in that history.

Peter