Boom!

"f86sabre" (f86sabre) 10/14/2018 at 17:57 • Filed to: Planelopnik

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The X-1 on the anniversary  of its sound barrier breaking flight.

AnalogMan > f86sabre 10/14/2018 at 22:54

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You have to respect and admire the balls Chuck Yeager had to climb into this thing and break the sound barrier. Must have had nerves of steel.  True courage.

LastFirstMI is my name > f86sabre 10/14/2018 at 23:14

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Do you think we’ve lost that trail-blazing spirit or is it just all secret  skunk-works stuff now? Maybe in 30 years we’ll find out all of the cool stuff that happened back in the 2010’s... Or it’s all cyber-warfare and happening in a building full of cubicles :/

facw > LastFirstMI is my name 10/15/2018 at 01:51

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I think mostly it was easier, and cheaper, to make progress back then. It’s no surprise that modern advances in existing tech are harder to come by. It ’s also the case that we are more risk adverse, but I don’t think that’s holding us back tremendously especially now that we are at the point where we can fly aircraft remotely/autonomously.

We are making rapid  advancements in other spaces, but in aerospace I think the tech is mature enough that there are diminishing returns making improvements expensive. Additionally, computer modeling has gotten to the point where we know whether things are good ideas long before we build them, so we don’t have to send a bunch of test pilots to their deaths just to find out if they work. That’s definitely a good thing, but it does seem less adventuresome.

wkiernan > LastFirstMI is my name 10/15/2018 at 11:42

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No more Soviet Union = no more “trail-blazing spirit” in the U.S.A.

Also, no more Soviet Union = no more lip service for “freedom” and “human rights ” in the U.S.A.; we’ll just revert to being the vicious self-serving racist bastards we were in the 19th Century, or as the thug Admini stration puts it, we’ll “M ake America Great Again.”