Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "Curious Droid" channel.

  1. Lockheed Martin should restart this as a private project and smoke SpaceX. Do it all private, so Washington doesn't get to decide to kill it.
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  2.  @PiDsPagePrototypes  What you say ablut the F35 is what people said about the F111 in the 60s. Waste of money, too expensive, no need for advanced technology, etc. If it were up to them the 91 Gulf War would've been fought with Korean War weapon systems. The F-35 is the future.
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  3. Great video about a great subject, with a great fitting soundtrack and a shirt that looks fittingly like thousands of little nuclear explosions. Right on!
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  4.  @nitehawk86 The B-36 at the USAF museum is truly monstrous in size. Walking underneath it looking up into the bomb bay, you will notice there are hatchways that allow crew to enter the wings during flight. The wings are so big people can walk around inside them (hunched over, but still). In that same room is a B-52 which saw combat in Vietnam, and yes, the B-36 makes the B-52 look kind of small.
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  5.  @davebooth5608  Apollo 11 (2019)
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  6. The A-10's mission was pretty different from the Cheyenne. The two would've complimented each other nicely.
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  7. Not to get all nationalistic or whatever the term is, but when you say "Were 'we' right to abandon the moon?", that "we" is US citizens. Apollo was paid for by American tax money. Pretty much all of it. I realize that the rest of the West sees Apollo and even STS as belonging to us all in spirit if not in actual ownership, but it's US politics that drives whether these things get funded or not. Congressman Space-Hater doesn't answer to voters in England or Germany. Like you said, this was a government-funded project, free-market propaganda notwithstanding. The Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos' and Richard Bransons of today stand a better chance of getting back to the moon precisely because they don't have to answer to voters; they just have to amass the necessary cash to keep pushing their projects forward by other means. Yes, Musk's companies are either government subsidized (Tesla) or earn revenue from government contracts (SpaceX), but that is not the same as directly burning tax money allotted by Congressman Space-Hater. And the nice thing is that there is likely more opportunity for international citizens to invest in or take part in these corporate projects.
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  8. Look up the sounds of Saturn. Years ago when NASA first posted the recording online I listened to it at night with the lights off and it scared the piss out of me. Like a 1950s horror sci fi film.
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  9. And the SR-71 is so cool it needs muscle car V8 engines to start up its own jets.
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  10.  @evelghostrider  That's all been explained a million times. You might as well try arguing that water isn't wet.
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  11. Those eyes are super creepy. Never blinking. Dead eyes.
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  12.  @davebooth5608  It's weird, the footage is so clean and new-looking that at first it feels like you are watching a modern Hollywood movie set in 1969 instead of the real thing. Kind of like watching Apollo 13.
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  13. Where did Elon Musk get the money? From his successful Paypal business. Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup, etc. make tons of money off of defense contracts. Invest some of it. Once was a time when companies did that. The DC-X mentioned in this video? That came out of MD's pocket mostly. So did Lockheed's U-2. You want to succeed in private space? Find the capital, just like everyone else who doesn't live in defense contract Disney land.
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  14. Turn the Earth into a Death Star with a nuclear cannon? Sign me up!
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  15.  @RedLP5000S  LeMay may have been crazy, but he was certainly not stupid. Anti-American bigotry, on the other hand is as stupid as it is common.
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  16. I'm from America in the 2010's. What's this "rail travel" you speak of? BTW the music around 3:00 is pretty cool.
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  17. If you go to the Fighter Pilot Podcast channel and watch the episode on the B2 they mention it. The guy also says the rule for that little toilet is "Doing an inflight Number 2 is not cool", although 44 hours would be damn tough to avoid it. I imagine the crew might take laxatives the day before the mission and go liquid diet only lol.
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  18.  @flxrckt  They did it only once because they ran out of money. The whole country ran out of money actually.
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  19. Lana...LANA...LAAAANNNNA! What?! Danger zone.
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  20. Chuck Yeager's Air Combat was a killer combat flight sim in the 90s. If you screwed up a mission, Chuck would come up in the debrief screen and tell you about. Being told you suck by Chuck Yeager was a pretty good motivator to get better.
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  21. It got Sully safely onto the Hudson, and also saved the Gimli Glider.
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  22. He always wears wild shirts. That's half the fun of this channel!
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  23. Kickass book, best alien invasion story I've ever read.
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  24. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and everyone used to smoke everywhere all the time. It was gross but you got used to it because you couldn't get away from it. Don't miss those days at all, and never could understand why anyone would be so stupid as to start such a filthy habit.
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  25. Something about the P-51, especially the D model. Even today it looks as if it could handle itself in a fight against a MiG, it just has that look, like it was the perfect fighter design. When I was growing up I saw one at an airshow, and it blew me away. As it rolled down the runway in front of us on takeoff, the ungodly awesome sound of that Merlin engine and that giant prop is something I'll never forget, how I felt it in my chest, the thunderous roar and sense of power radiating from that beast, gleaming shiny metal in sunlight.
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  26. I have three of them, sometimes still use one at work when I'm too lazy to reach for my calculator.
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  27.  @miroslavdockal9468  It's not like it's an expensive hobby; all you need is to buy a decent shortwave radio and spend a few minutes turning the tuner knob. Do that often enough and you'll run across a numbers station. I found what I think was the "Spanish Lady" not too ago just by random chance.
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  28. Curious Droid: that research into miniature nuclear explosives was also related to Project Orion, IIRC. Some of the Orion team were concerned that the same technology used to make nuclear propulsive devices for spacecraft also made it easier to construct small, easily proliferated weapons.
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  29. 6:11 Beijing looks like Los Angeles in Blade Runner 2049.
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  30. When the Iowa class battleships were brought back into service in the 1980s they still used the 1940s analog fire control computers for the main guns, despite having all sorts of modern electronics and computers installed. The machines are still very accurate and they are basically built into the ships, mechanically linked to the gun turrets and gun directors, so may as well keep using them. Plus they keep working after an EMP or if the ship takes a massive hit, and because they were made in the 1940s when everything was bulletproof and overengineered they are very reliable as long as you take care of them.
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  31. Another example: a century ago the Pennsylvania Railroad had its own research division and did a lot of work optimizing and designing steam engines and other rail equipment. Many of their locomotives were designed and built in their own shops or the designs farmed out to contractors, they did their own signal technology and had lots of smart people on the payroll. The company ceased to exist around 1970.
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  32.  @RedLP5000S  The U2 camera sees it too. It sees everything.
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  33. STS-51L was part of a larger problem that developed within the STS program. NASA had promised Congress low costs, and the only way to get the cost lower was to have a higher launch rate, which meant rushing everything and scrimping on tracking down problems such as O-ring burn-through. What happened to Challenger could have happened on several previous missions launched in cold weather, the crew of 51L just happened to win the bad luck lottery that day. Same thing with Columbia; NASA had problems with debris shedding from the very first shuttle launch, and incorrectly determined it would not be a problem.
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  34. Hasselblad made that model up util just a few years ago, and sadly they discontinued it. A friend of mine has one and it's a really sweet camera.
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  35. "Just a dancing toaster" Cylon Centurion has entered the chat.
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  36.  @michaelpcoffee  Calling 1812 America "imperialist" as they fought a nation known literally as "The British Empire" for impressing American citizens into the Royal Navy. Now that takes a lot of sand.
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  37. They are far from simple, though. That's always been one of the struggles. In sci fi people put space suits on and off like a set of coveralls, but in real life it takes forever and involves lots of moving parts, all very expensive and some of which are custom made for each user.
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  38. They are useless for cleaning, but they do a pretty good job of mapping your private home and sending all the data to the manufacturer's servers.
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  39. I don't think it's technically an acronym, though, unless there is a way to pronounce it as a word, is it?
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  40. And my flying car? At this point I'd settle for a robot that cleans my toilet and does my laundry and dishes. Without spying on me and sending all the data to the company/goverment/whoever.
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  41. Yes, same thing.
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  42. The Secret War is awesome. 1970s documentary featuring a lot of interviewees from both the UK and German side about WWII high tech. I had to go to Daily Motion to find the episodes, I think Youtube takes them down.
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  43. I read that there actually is a very slight wisp of atmosphere on the Moon, so thin as to be negligible.
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  44. SpaceX is only effective because nobody gives them money, they have to deliver to get paid. NASA has been giving money to private companies for half a century. Those companies grew dependent on it. Keep private companies hungry and they will perform.
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  45. NASA hasn't blown up a rocket in over 30 years? I guess when they killed seven astronauts in 2003 on the Columbia, that didn't technically count as "blowing up a satellite", since it didn't blow up so much as disintegrate around its crew, exposing them to hypersonic shockwaves and heat. But whatever makes you feel better.
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  46.  @atomicshadowman9143  I prefer "reused dozens of times, then retired to gather dust in a museum", which is what they were built for.
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  47. Colossus: "There is another system."
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  48. IIRC the orbiter's tile heat shield system was the biggest expense in terms of time between flights. All those tiles had to be inspected, many replaced, and it was painstaking manual labor that cost a lot of time and money. The main engines were expensive to maintain, too, but they had a rotating pool of engines to swap out after each flight; while some were being torn down and refurb'd there were good ones available off the shelf, so the engines did not cause as many headaches as the heat shield. There were also a lot of other, smaller things that added up; swapping the windshield glass after every flight, for example, or even the tires after every landing. These things were technically good for many flights but NASA was trying to eliminate as many sources of accidents as was practical, and compared to O-ring redesign or debris shedding, these little things were easy to do.
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  49. Paul, the answer is "yes", the Pentagon does often reach out to SF authors from time to time, particularly the future-looking agencies like DARPA. And Jerry Pournelle worked for the Rand Corp. and other defense contractors and was involved in the SDI studies in the 1980s.
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  50.  @johnsutcliffe3209  Nonsense, they could not only build an F1 if they wanted to; they'd build a better one since materials and other technology have advanced. An F1B design was even floated a few years ago by Rocketdyne. This myth of "lost knowledge" surrounding the Saturn V keeps going for some reason.
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