Thursday brought steady rain early in the day, but only occasional showers in the afternoon. We attended a “Tent Talk” session with Burt Rutan. He opened with discussing how the X-15 had two of its flights to over 100 km. He wanted Space Ship 1 to go higher than the X-15. On his flight, Brian Binnie let the engine run a couple seconds longer than necessary to achieve the X-Prize award in order to go higher than the X-15. At the peak of the flight, the ship was flying at Mach 3.3 with an indicated airspeed of 18 knots.
The rest of the session was questions and answers. Few were about aviation.
Alternative Energy-How do we know we won’t have higher reserves in the future. We will move to alternatives when it’s cheaper.
Climate Change-The Earth’s primary thermostat is cloud formations and precipitation. a 1.2% increase in those will offset a 100% CO2 increase.
Attention span and Jim Bede-Cap and trade proponents are charletons. They sell something without buying it themselves.
Health care-He was able to choose a doctor and got a defibrillator. He wouldn’t be able to under ObamaCare. He believes his dad wouldn’t be alive today under federal care since it wouldn’t be cost effective.
He has this info on a friend’s web site bobscherer.com
NASA should give engineers the opportunity to discover breakthroughs. There have been no improvements in safety or costs in getting people to orbit since the Gemini program
Transportation-He is a proponent of air taxis. The Eclipse didn’t have payload or range-only speed. Dr. Williams and Mr. Rutan left that project because of that.
Terrorist threats-Homeland security person appointed is not the right person. US is not increasing the population enough. Europe is even worse. The makeup of the population with have a major change in the next generation.
I’ll be posting more of the news summaries when we get back on Sunday.