Completely Floored

They said it would need adhesive but as I said to the vicar, it fit like a condom.

On the strength of replacing this toilet end-to-end I have bid for the upgrade to the facilities on Artemis 2, which failed spectacularly only recently.

The bid required a name and they accepted 'Moonshine' only after rejecting my first suggestion, which was 'Moonshite'.

Transferable Skills

Used on the drones for many years since, an ideal way to drive holes through dodgy sheet material like alloys or carbon-fibre... or indeed vinyl flooring. To make holes for the piping, pre-drill a block and centre it over another before driving a spade-bit through. Access for pipes enabled here by running a Stanley knife from the edge.

Carpet Bombing

Blog's going great guns and there's even a faction out there with a forum discussing aspects of replacing bathrooms suites by my own methods. And whilst I could have patented this one here, it is intended purely for the benefit of humanity and funded by my philanthropic foundation.

Lacking the necessary carpet-fitting skills I found a get-around in the shape of this giant paper template of the bathroom, for a cut-out-and-keep vinyl floor using the bargain-basement off-cut that I shall soon be running around on naked.

There's a book out there somewhere about a man who planned to make a 1:1 scale map of the world, and once the floor is down I shall be offering this life-size map of the bathroom which ~ stitched together with your own contributions ~ can be used to bring his dream to life.

As I said to that pizza-delivery guy, 'It's all about what you can do for others' and 'Where's the fucking mayo?'.

Captains Blog Stardate 21-APR-26

Need to get the drone over to the car-park at the local playing fields for a PR shot for the website, but they've put a height restriction in at the gate. Options, re-design for a six-inch shorter cat or find an alternative way in... which looking at it on the way home yesterday evening looked eminently possible.

Thereafter it is waders on and over to the local fish-pond for a static flotation test ~ if the locals are still as hostile I shall threaten to block the straits. Expect the craft still to float nose-down at rest, which can be solved with more weight at the rear in shape of battery-packs. For aerodynamic reasons I do not want the C of G migrated rearward unduly, so shall look at options to up the buoyancy at the forward end.

On the domestic front in preparation for the new toilet ~ and you don't get pulled off projects for that at Lockheed Martin ~ I've put new flooring down myself at a cost of just £50, undercutting the original quote by nearly 90%. Yes, Elon Musk has done that with launch-vehicles... but can he do it with vinyl flooring?

Merchant Mania

A brief but honorary mention for one of my own favourites in the form of the Vickers Vanguard, it's sibling the Viscount in the background. The latter was altogether the more successful, its turbo-prop engines bridging a gap between stressed-out pistons and the jet-engine in the 1950s. Arriving too late on the scene, therefore, it proved altogether more popular flying freight at night when re-purposed for the role by the Canadians. Called the Merchantman, it was loudest airliner I ever heard as it taxied past our humble Shorts in the dead of night at Coventry Airport.

Ed. the airport is set to close after ninety years as a part of a government scheme to ready British society for a possible war with Russia, and who knows who else.

Mud Lark

My travels took me yesterday to the banks of the Mersey Estuary, its only traffic a pair of small craft circumnavigating a far-distant sandbank. They may or may not have been hovercraft, the nearest RNLI station known to operate at least one in the circs. The fire-service at Liverpool's airport appear not to employ one, though they did at Heathrow in view of the fact that you might come down in the reservoir at the end of its westerly runways.

But if you were going to deploy a drone hereabouts you would want a boat that may fly at least a short distance, and subsequently be able to unload its skids in order to plane with as light a tread as possible, if not skim the surface with clear air beneath.

For instance there's a drop of some ten feet from the quay here to the mud-flats, a place you don't want particularly to travel on even in shallow water: it conceals any number of obstacles like discarded scaffolding tubes that would hole a hull. A boat with lift- and cruise-motors could launch from land here and down to the mud-flats, where it could travel in ground-effect before entry into the water to plane or troll: a combined operation of helicopter, hovercraft and boat.

It has to happen, really, in one form or another but if you look at the introduction of anything new it invariably follows from the action of one (or two) individuals that fly literally in the face of scepticism or ridicule... whether it be search (Google), social media (Facebook), flight (Wright Bros), space (-X), reciprocating engines (Watt, Diesel) or automobiles (Mr and Mrs Benz).

And I've a horrible feeling that when it comes to the go-anywhere boat it may fall to me and ~ as I told every employer ~ I'm the last person you'd want to rely on.

The inset shows (lock-gates intact) that the quay here was once a dock, this being near the original crossing-point established by local monks with a ferry. I wondered if the people digging it thought: Fuck, it'll be filled-in eventually anyway?

It Is Rocket Science

The recent trip around the Moon did not arouse much interest in me at the time, it having been a case of been there ~ not personally you understand ~ done that as I recall being allowed to stay up late on a Sunday evening in 1969 so as to watch the red carpet event.

What is of note however is not so much the physics as the economics, this time. In 1969 it was the rush to prove the tech could improve on Soviet efforts, whilst now it is as much about conquest as anything else. Apparently a focus of attempts among a number of nations involved is the south pole of the Moon that may contain water, albeit in frozen form. This in turn might provide the means for a permanent station, from where to both mine mineral wealth beside stopping for a sandwich enroute to Mars.

So forget the thrust and consider the numbers. The Apollo program sucked up five percent of the federal budget, whereas now they get by with ten times less. Part of the cost-cutting involved includes the fact that Congress requires them to repurpose the original engines from the Space Shuttle, developed over fifty years ago: a little like planning to wheel the E-type out for a drive instead of the RV.

There are two aspects to this, the first being that much like your cappuccino stirrer these engines are single-use. The second is that all-in they cost between 100 million dollars and 140 million, whereas Elon Musk's reusable equivalent (pictured) costs a fractional half-million. You read that right, one individual and modern methods and means can reduce the price by a factor of some three hundred times.

It is interesting to note that even as regards space, the world is getting smaller in so far as we are making do in various arenas whether drones or satellites with large numbers of units taken effectively off the commercial shelf. With space-flight being the case that once you've developed an engine ~ no mean feat ~ the easiest way to scale is to simply fit more and more of them. The Artemis space-launch system uses four principal rocket motors, but I'll leave you to count how many Space-X use from the pic.

From our own point of view here in the UK, we can I think take pride in the fact that when polled a full half of the population said they would not wish to go to the Moon even if offered a free ride. In contrast we are the biggest users in Europe of mobility scooters, whose use has expanded by four times in the last five years.

It was PM Tony Blair who said prior invading Iraq that as a nation we look to the far horizons, though nowadays these stretch only so far as Gregg's for a bacon roll and Wetherspoons for a pint of lager to wash it down.

If you were confused like me by the fact the Artemis crew ventured further into the final frontier than ever, as we'd already been to the Moon, this is because they flew a further-flung orbit. I say 'we' because they also serve who only watch on TV over a bacon barm and a pint of lager.