Earliest four?

Way earlier though, the 1892 millet with a 5 cylinder rotary in the
back wheel.

http://www.moah.org/exhibits/archives/motorcycles/index.html

I suspect the later Spagthorpes were a shameless ripoff.

 

Rob Kleinschmidt schreef:

They must have been fun on a roundabout.
If you have one that revs to 12.000, it will be
fun on a strait course too. Who need wings.

My teacher used to say that a good designer was one
that glued together good ideas from others and left out
their bad ideas.
Some years ago I saw an article about a new type of
front suspension the Japs invented. I looked at the
picture and said: "He, a Webb front fork"

Back to the five-cilinders.
=============================
At last. You really set my mind at ease.
For a long time I had a conflict between memory and brain.
Memory said: "you saw it", brain said: "Nah. Can't be. You
even don't remember 5 exhaust pipes"

That Verdel comes pretty close. And I see no exhaust
pipes. Well, I see them now, but it is clear to understand
why I did not notice them almost 60 years ago.

This Verdel has a chain. The one I saw probably was
older. But this one comes verrrrrrry close.

Of course I copied the picture. There's memories attached
to it. A pity I did not hear it.

Thanks.
Rob.

 

<Bad form post>

By which I mean, of course, if he made a habit of it. Dead-stick
landings have been successfully pulled off since flying began, but I
can't se anyone wanting to do it each time, every time....

 

The earliest airplanes were little more than powered kites and their
coefficient of lift was often less than 1.0, so low they hardly flew at
all.

Bleriot's grandson tried to duplicate his grandfather's famous
cross-channel flight with a replica, but he didn't get out of France.
He tried to to make a climbing crosswind turn and lost lift and
spiralled in. His engine didn't help the poor airfoil profile at all.

But airplanes developed rapidly from 1903 to the 1930's, when the
future Luftwaffe pilots were training in gliders because they were
forbidden a powered air force.

Sailplanes have been designed to fly and land without power for over a
century.

High performance sailplanes don't "want" to land. You have to raise the
spoilers to make the wings stop flying.

The Me-163 Komet rocketplane had to glide to a landing. If there was
any appreciable amount of peroxide left in the tank, it would explode
on landing.

And, of course the Space Shuttle is designed to glide to a landing.
Every time. It has made almost 100% successful landing about 150 times.

 

Know many sailplane pilots?

Bob M.

 

Was that because one blew up on launch so it did not land?

Ian Singer



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Rockwell International grew like a fungus on the corpse of North
American Aviation. We all knew that it was a parasite that would
eventually kill the company...

NAA had experience with the ram-jet Navajo cruise missile which was
slung on the back of a liquid fueled single stage booster rocket.

So the Rockwell engineers did have some data on piggybacking winged
vehicles on rockets. The first shuttle launch went into orbit in that
configuration with no unmanned tests.

I wasn't a bit surprised when I learned that the Russian shuttle had a
jet engine for
in-atmosphere operation...

My 1963 version of the shuttle had a gas turbine engine and air intake
doors that opened after re-entry. But NASA wasn't paying any attention
to me...

 

These examples are indeed both true. Yes. Mea culpa. Heh. Brain in
nueutral.

Didn't the old experimental rocket planes (X15 and predecessors) have to
glide to a landing too?

However, Sopwith Camels certainly didn't.

Incidentally, and being reminded by the reference to the Komet, if
anyone wants to see examples of advanced aircraft that the Germans were
designing, developing or even just dreaming about, in the 1940s, I
strongly recommend www.luft46.com

 

Sadly, uninformed spectators cheered at the unexpected fireworks high
above the Earth as the astronauts died, just as they cheered when
Challenger exploded...

The artist Chesley Bonnestelle illustrated a fictional unmanned
satellite, burning up on
re-entry in a 1953 issue of Colliers magazine, which was doing a series
on the ideas of Wernher von Braun, et al. about a proposed space
program.

I knew that I would eventually see films of a manned spacecraft,
burning up on re-entry.
I was mentally prepared for such a disaster.

The Colliers articles, and science fiction novels by authors like
Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke aroused my interest in the
exploration of space. I was fortunate to get to see a lot of the
hardware close up, as I worked in the aerospace industry.

 

Oh, the reaction is completely rediculous. Spacecraft are experimental
and what is the most amazing is that we only lost a few shuttles. By
all rights we should have lost all of them due to crashes by now.

Think of how many drivers were killed while the auto industry was
figuring out how to make cars safer. And even today that happens
while the auto industry is figuring out how to make safe cars cheaper,
and still be just as safe.

Ted

 

Safer than horses ? OK, how many ?

 

No, safer than the models they sold 5 years earlier.

As far as numbers, well shall we talk about the folks that
died with the Wilderness ATV/Ford Explorer "experiment" or
the exploding side-gas-tank-outside-of-the-truck-frame
experiment, etc. etc. etc.

Ted

 

I think we can safely assume you're not prepared to
offer numbers.

 

It wouldn't matter if I did since all the major players have different
ones.

I think, though, we can safely assume for the auto fuckups I've listed,
that we've had fewer deaths in the space program. By comparison
to the auto companies, NASA's squandered far fewer lives figuring out
how to make space vehicles safer. It's a shame the general public is
as myopic as you are and seem to believe otherwise. As if that was
a reason to kill the program anyway - all the astronauts that did die,
knew what the risks were and still wanted to go. You can't say the
same for the owners of the Ford Exploder I mean Explorers, though.

Ted

 

I don't even see where any comparison between government space programs
and the automotive industry is worth seriously considering.

I think you would have to count astronauts who died in jet aircraft and
the Apollo I
fire victims to even get up to 20 fatalities in the American space
program, and that statistic can hardly be compared to the average
40,000 highway deaths per year for the last 50 years.

That's two million Americans dead from traffic "accidents", but
*nobody* is talking about closing the highways, or garaging all cars,
trucks and busses until all mechanical problems can be corrected and
all practical possibility of death to operator error prevented.

If you consider that mechanical failures might account for as much as
10% of all highway accidents, that still leaves us with an appalling
1.8 million motor vehicle operators dead from operator error, and that
error could probably be accounted for by
alcohol or drug abuse in half of all cases.

My admittedly simplistic analysis of spacecraft vs motor vehicle
fatalities is that 100,000 Americans have died for every astronaut who
died. An astronaut has about one chance in a thousand of dying in a
flight or test accident.

I worked at Cape Canaveral in 1963, on the Atlas Agena satellite launch
vehicle. I had seen two Titan missiles and a Minuteman blow up, so when
I watched Gordon Cooper take off on his Mercury X orbital mission, I
was prayed for him.

There are no sights and sounds quite as impressive as the crackling
roar of multiple rocket engines, exploding ICBM's, and sonic booms from
stage that did not explode on their own, but slowed to sub-sonic speed
before the Range Safety Officer final pushed the destruct button.

My fellow missilemen who were eating lunch at launch pad 13 said that
the sound of shattered metal and falling hardware caused them to take
shelter underneath the
launch tower.

The contractors went to great effort when they "man-rated" the ICBM's
that were going to hurl astronauts into orbit---or fiery oblivion.

I worked on the Apollo capsules during the fire abatement modification
program after
Grissom, Chafee, and White were incinerated in a capsule filled with
pure oxygen and over-pressured by 5 pounds to simulate the operating
conditions.

They were trapped in the capsule behind a simple metal plate hatch with
about 140 quarter-inch bolts securing it and the ground crew couldn't
have gotten them out alive if they'd wanted to. The ground crew was
running for their lives when the fire broke out, the
Saturn I rocket was fully fueled.

Rockwell had already submitted a proposal for a quick-opening hinged
hatch, but NASA didn't want to add $1 million to the cost of each
capsule. The new hatches were added to all capsules after the fire.

The general public is too busy living their lives and trying to improve
their situation under a staggering tax load to even want to know the
full schedule of a manned space flight program.

Even when I was actually working hands on Apollo spacecraft and seeing
dozens of space craft in various stages of completion around me, I had
no idea of the scope of the Apollo program, that there would be half a
dozen Moon landings or that Skylab or Apollo Soyuz was going to fly.

If NASA was as cautious in 1969 was they have been on the Space Shuttle
program, they would have grounded the Apollo vehicles after any
accident following the *first* successful Moon landing. Our national
pride was at stake before Apollo XI landed, and then the New York Times
headline for the Apollo XII landing was something like, "Second Moon
Landing---So What?"

The general public seems to have been under the impression that the
goal of the Apollo program was what JFK stated in 1960, to land *a* man
on the Moon and return *him* safely, before the decade is out. The
public thought it was a one-shot national glory stunt.

Didn't Sally K. Ride quit, disillusioned over her realization that the
Space Shuttle was not a bus ride into orbit? That seems to have been
NASA's representation of the Shuttle, quick turnaround, almost turn key
spaceflight.

The original schedule for the Space Shuttle included approximately 900
flights, believe it or not. 450 were to be civilian Shuttles and
military reconnaissance Shuttles from Vandenberg AFB were to complete
the other half of the ambitious schedule.

The actual number of Shuttles lost is only 2, for only about 150
flights successfully completed. That's a 1.33% loss rate or less.

My uncle was a tail gunner on a B-17 over Germany. Air crewmen had
about 30% chance of surviving a tour of duty in a bomber...

 

This is what gets me.

UK death rates are roughly 3500 annually, or less than one-tenth the
number of US casualties, for a population that's one-fifth the size.

(Your NASA reminiscences were fascinating, by the way. More please).

 

I was nothing important, just a so-called "space mechanic". I had
youthful delusions of becoming a space-suited mechanic building a Von
Braun-style donut-in-the-sky space station, or working on a Moon base.

In my naivete, I had no idea that all work done in space would be done
by "mission specialists" with PhD's, I thought it would be
Heinlein-style blue collar "Loonies" doing the work.

I realize that I was lucky to be a "fly on the wall" at Cape Canaveral
and at Rockwell International's Downy assembly plant after the massive
hiring that supplied "warm bodies" to do the fire abatement
modifications.

They would hire anybody. I regarded some of my co-workers as morons,
but they had relatives at Rockwell, and they were still there long
after I was laid off.

I was a very interested spectator, crawling around inside Apollo
capsules in my bunny suit and booties, but the Rockwell managers didn't
give a damn for my interest or curiousity or contributions.

If I needed to know something, they would train me, but if I didn't
need to know it, they didn't care to discuss it with me. I picked up
some pieces of information from those who needed to know.

NASA was paying Rockwell a dollar for every dollar they paid me, so
they were getting my labor for free as well as getting the cost of the
contract, plus an incentive bonus.

Naturally, Rockwell wanted me to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The United Auto Workers union saw that money was being thrown around
and they assessed all the Apollo mechanics $20 out of each paycheck and
that was really pissing us off.

Some of the mechanics tried to withdraw from the union, but it was a
closed shop, so they had to be satisfied with the assessment and their
$400 to $500 a week paychecks.

That would be like making $1600 to $2000 a week in today's dollars. But
the space program fed the local economy. For every aerospace job, there
were three people working non-aerospace jobs to feed and clothe and
house the aerospace workers and supply whatever they needed.

It was a tough schedule, coming in every day and trying to find some
small detail that could be completed to move each spacecraft along on
its schedule to complete assembly and the lunar mission simulation.

The US aerospace industry and NASA were staffed by career engineers and
managers who expected to complete their thirty years and retire and
play golf or sail their boats or whatever they wanted to do, and they
felt their pensions were seriously threatened in the aftermath of the
Apolo fire.

NASA career people were shitting their pants over the fire.

NASA inspectors wore brown bunny suits, Rockwell inspectors wore blue
bunny suits and lowly space mechanics wore white bunny suits.

If I found a production planning document that called for the
installation of a single screw in an instrument panel, I had to obtain
the screw, a calibrated torque wrench, the blue prints and all
engineering orders, find a blue suit who would give me the OK to
install the screw, wait for access to the capsule, which might be full
of astronauts practicing time critical switching sequences, and maybe
get into the capsule and screw my screw in and torque it while the blue
suit watched.

Then I would have to get the blue suit to "buy" my work and he'd have
to go get a brown suit to stamp the paperwork. If the NASA inspector
was the least bit worried about the paperwork, he would stamp it with
his NASA "hex" stamp, and then NASA would meet with Rockwell management
to discuss whether or not they would agree to accept the installation
of that one damned screw!

Of course, if I had to wait until the end of the shift to install the
screw, the blue suit was going to go home without accepting the work,
and then I would theoretically have to start all over the next day...

At one point we had space mechanics all over the place, swarming the
capsules with warm bodies. NASA declared that the work would get done
faster if we had six space mechanics inside each capsule at all times.

So six of us would go and sit inside an empty capsule with our backs to
the walls and discuss the Apollo program. Or Bigfoot, or whatever.

An Apollo capsule is surprisingly roomy without the acceleration
couches installed, but it got funky in there with six guys that had
been wearing the same booties for three weeks playing footsie with each
other.

And then there was the temperature inside the capsule. Cold air was
blowing into the capsule at all times, to blow any dust out. And we
were being careful not to touch anything we weren't working on. Six of
us just sat there and shivered until we learned to wear long underwear
under our street clothes that were under the bunny suit.

Occasionally, somebody would come along with a requirement to close the
quick-opening hatch. Since anybody operating the hatch had to be
certified to operate it, and nobody else was allowed to touch it, I
would always get out of the capsule when the hatch was closed.

There was no other way out, as the escape tunnel would be filled with
test cables. I didn't want any replay of the Apollo I fire that
involved my own body.

The lowest grade inspector was called a "hatch guard". Their duty was
to check everybody in and out of the capsules, and to account for every
tool or bit of hardware that went into the capsule was either declared
to be removed or installed permanently.

Woe befell the space mechanic who went into the capsule with his little
plastic suitcase tool kit and was unable to show every serialized
socket or wrench in its little niche behind the plastic cover when he
exited the capsule.

After the Apollo I fire, a socket had been found tied up in a wire
bundle, and NASA wanted no repeat of foreign objects being left in
space capsules.

One space mechanic went into a capsule with an incomplete tool kit, and
managers had to meet and discuss whether to fire the mechanic for being
short one wrench in his kit when the hatch guard challenged him upon
exit.

"Where's that @#$%^&* 9/32 combination wrench, bub?"

"Er, ummm, I never had it, going in...."

We saw the writing on the wall in late 1968, after Bobby Kennedy was
assassinated. Wise employees knew that the Democrats had nobody to
stand up to Richard Nixon, and that the Apollo budget would be cut when
Tricky Dick took the presidential oath.

Hundreds of thousands of workers were laid off from the aerospace
industry, and that included engineers and professionals and flies on
the wall like me. I got to watch all the Apollo Moon landings at home
on TV, while collecting unemployment insurance.

There was even a movie made about the bitter aftermath of Apollo, I
think it starred Cliff Robertson who was telling astronauts that they'd
gotten all the glory, while the engineers that made it all possible got
the shaft in 1969.

Of course, Nixon and his globalist capitalist friends kept meddling
with the economy, dissolving the Breton Woods Agreement in hopes of
balancing trade by floating the dollar against world currencies and
opening new markets in China and hopefully the USSR.

When NASA approached Nixon with a $100 billion budget for building the
Space Transportation System, that budget included building re-usable
Space Tugs that could go to the Moon ten times and would be parked in
orbit between flights.

Nixon told NASA that he would only give them $50 billion. NASA
countered by
re-designing a smaller Shuttle and and eliminating the Space Tug from
the proposal.

Nixon OK'd $53 billion for the project, and told NASA that that was all
they would get.

And that is why no American astronaut has been to the Moon since 1972...

 

Panem et circenses ;-)

 

Well, let's see now.

Speed? We tend to drive reasonably fast outside the cities where (I
suspect, as in the US) speeds are, erm, low. Speed limit is 60mph on
main roads, 70 on motorways, and nobody (not even the speed cameras)
minds if you commonly exceed those by 10mph. Away from cameras, make
that 15-20.

Miles driven? Dunno. Probably less than the US in the country, similar
in urban areas.

<Googles>

Globalnet says the average UK motorist drives 12,500 miles a year.
Carbonfund says average US mileage is about 14,000. Another source says
23,000. Whatever.

UK drivers drive smaller cars, and less powerful cars, but then I doubt
that the performance/weight equation is wildly different. We like small
sporty cars rather than slobbering unstable SUVs and pick-up trucks, as
a generalisation. Even a moderate family hatchback is 100+ bhp for a
not-very-big car. So your referneces to size and power, hinting that the
US drives much faster cars, is meaningless (to use your own word)

Hunting around gives a wiki entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_safety

which rates the UK as the second-safest country (7.6 killed per million
vehicle/km) and the US in ninth place (9.4)

So yes, the US does seem to have a markedly worse casualty rate,
although not as bad as I've painted it.

Incidentally, this little treatise makes you out to look a bit of a
fool, because unlike your assertions, it's backed up with some data.

 

I believe that the UK driving test, at least, is more stringent than the
US. I don't know about the rest of Europe.