So Orion is back after a flawless mission and NASA's abilities are clearly right back to where they ought to be. Hurrah!
But what slayed me - and why should it not have done, I might have expected it? - was that NASA's high altitude eyes on the event in the stratosphere were no more than a Canberra! An old English Electric pre-cold-war Canberra! Oooh-bloody-rah and then some!
OK, a much developed YB57 variant but recognisably and fundamentally a Canberra nonetheless, Britain's first ever jet bomber who's first flight was within 5 years of the end of WW2, a design that obliterated all US contemporaries (as Uncle Sam gratefully - and unprecedentedly - acknowleged by buying fleets of them) and was only retired from the RAF some 20 years ago so unique was its capabilities. Unique and essential capabilities the RAF thus lost altogether to this day, I hasten to add...
Von Braun and the V2 were a great and fundamental part of NASA's legacy but in the early '50s, contemporary with the Canberra you were still shooting V2s for test - and who'd ever have guessed that the same basic barely-post-WW2 pioneering first-generation jet airframe would still be at the cutting edge of NASA's inventory seventy years later. Rather unlike the V2...Imagine that being in any way a part of the new lunar or mars programmes?
I'm not crowing (much) about British technology, but you have to marvel that an airframe that was no spring chicken even at the time of Apollo is still, today, a vital player an entire lifetime later and still doing cutting-edge service in the most technologically advanced field known to mankind.
And like the Buff, being flown by guys whose grandfathers, almost great grandfathers could have flown the early models...
In the new Lunar progrmme! Just wow!
Feel free to correct me if my timescale is wrong, but this is roughly equivalent to Wrights, Bleriots, Deperdussins and Glenn Curtis's earliest efforts supporting the Apollo programme! Presumably the Sopwith Camel was being kept for the next decade for Mars landings? And as for the Vimy...maybe assisting some Saturn moon mission?
Imagine a Wright Flyer circling pad 39A or loitering at flight-level nosebleed over Hornet that momentous day in 1969 passing data back to Mission Control?...
We've just seen the exact equivalent today!
Just bloody WOW!
Last edited by meleagertoo; 11th December 2022 at 22:05.