Through that enabling of high technology for everyone he did change the world in a very real, very literal sense.

Goodbye, Steve Jobs. The world is worse off by your loss.

Artist’s impression of SLS

So it seems that Saturn was the way forward all along.

This is superb news, if it the decision was made several years late. It means that, after a thirty-year hiatus, genuine super-heavy lift capability will exist again.

This is why Constellation was cancelled. This is why private manufacturers – like Boeing and SpaceX and now ATK/EADS are working on man-rated LEO capability: so that NASA can concentrate on super-heavy lift, and on things that are not Low Earth Orbit.

Super-heavy lift is an enabling technology.

The Apollo Applications Program – using Saturn V or other, larger, Saturn variants as its basis – would have, (given appropriate funding), built a permanent moonbase, launched a space station in a handful of launches rather than the 26 STS launches required for the ISS, allowed humans to orbit around Venus, and landed humans on Mars. What we got was, due to a chronic funding shortage, and, possibly more importantly, due to a lack of political will, was Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

So it seems we come full circle. After a thirty-year hiatus being distracted with the STS* and the questionable goals of undefined science on orbit, we have returned to Saturn. The SLS is still a long way away – 2017 for the first unmanned launch – and one can probably make a good argument that if Constellation was cancelled due to a “lack of innovation” that the SLS hardly shows innovation either (ATK 5-segment boosters, SSME first stage engines, J-2X second stage engines…). Nevertheless, it seems more concrete than Constellation ever was, and with superior capabilities. If the programme goes through to the proposed five SSME variant, then we could be seeing some very exciting things indeed.

*Don’t get me wrong: I love the Shuttles. They are magical machines, and they have a place in history. But they were deeply, tragically flawed machines, which unfortunately could not quite do enough to be worth the risk.

I got a radio for Sasha, a Red Army R-105d. Apparently it still works, but I have yet to connect it to a power supply a check. It’s incredibly heavy, around 21kg, and some poor chap had to lug this unit around (it’s a man-portable unit).

Farewell to Discovery from cmdrfire on Vimeo.

I was there to see Discovery go up on STS-133.

Sasha came with a faux-BMW speedo from the 1980s calibrated in km/h (which wasn’t very accurate anyway – it zero’d on 20km/h..).
As part of the process to bring Sasha on the road, I had to change it with a speedo calibrated in MPH, but I also decided to hunt for one that was more appropriate.

After some considerable amount of searching, I found this Jawa speedo, made in Czechoslovakia sometime in the 50s and 60s, calibrated in mph. To top it off, the style was much more suitable for Sasha as a Soviet bike.

This past weekend, I took out the old speedo and fitted the new, slightly smaller one:

Despite the snow causing trouble in Hannover, back home it was quite good fun.

I recently was in Nordhausen for a business trip. We were flying out of Hannover, and got caught in a blizzard; our flight was delayed by 25 hours, so we left on Friday the 17th. I’m glad we made it out though, because the following weekend (18/19 Dec) Heathrow was effectively shut because of the conditions in the UK…