Why I Watch NASA TV.
So who doesn’t hate commercials? But NASA TV is even cooler, I mean what does a boob-tube episode cost? You want reality?!! I watched some footage from the late 60’s about the LLRV, aka “The Flying Bedstead.” Pretty same-old stuff: fueling with concentrated hydrogen peroxide, turning up a nearly un-housed turbo-jet, unleashing this analog-controlled monster. Yep, same tech, different day.** But when the pilot turned on the downward looking camera, it was electric. Sure, the peroxide motor firing on the foreground was pretty violent. Oh my god, the view. The appeal of thrust-born flight, the idea you could just translate in any axis. Wanna go left? Let’s go left. Wait, what’s back there...rrrrrr back you go. Sure, I’d like to fly a plane, it’s got a logic and set of rules that are so sound. But I really want to fly an air-car: Moller’s a real nut, I have no illusions that everyone’s going replace their Yuppie Short Buses, but I still want one. So I guess I need to find my local gyro-copter club and start lessons. Closest I’ll get: helo’s are just too freakin’ expensive.
**We have nothing like this flying today, though we are in a program with the Japanese.
2025 Note: Multicopters hadn’t been invented when this was written. (There were experiments in the 60’s with full-sized multicopters. Ended poorly.