More on building a rocket ship

05/09/2006

Rick Wayne sent me the following comments about building a rocket ship that I thought you might find interesting:

“The person you really want to talk to about building a rocketship is Darryl Greenamyer. You may have heard that he scrounged for a decade or so until he had enough parts to build a working F-104 Starfighter. Bagged the low-altitude land speed record with it, too, which stands to this day (no one since has been sufficiently insane to go over 900 MPH within 100’ of the ground, at least no one who has officially admitted it afterward. Or been around to do so).

Unfortunately he had a landing-gear failure and had to punch out of the thing before he’d put 50 hours on it. Next project!

Greenamyer is quite a character all around—ex-U2 pilot, SR-71 test pilot, Reno Air Race winner in big warbirds and hopped-up production A/C (IIRC, he’s currently racing a Lancair 320).

He was also featured on a Nova special, leading a team who attempted to recover a B-29 from Greenland. After an incredible amount of work, which actually killed one team member, they got it running, and taxied out for takeoff…only to have a fire break out that consumed the entire aircraft, the new engines they’d put on, all their tools.

Since they’d taxied onto a frozen lake for the takeoff, anything left dropped to the bottom next spring.”

As much as we complain about software projects that go bad, at least we generally don’t end up in charred ruins at the bottom of the lake.

That will take a hell of a lot of refactoring…