The 2006 Midterm Elections Revisited - Remembering Sputnik & "The Space Race in the 1950s"

 

The 2006 Midterm Elections Revisited - Remembering Sputnik and "The Space Race in the 1950s"

November 9, 2006

 

Now that the midterm election is over, we can all relax and just enjoy the play-out of the new energies.  Will anything "really" change?  Probably not much will change, at least on the visible surface.  There will be some old familiar faces on TV - Carl Levin, Charlie Rangel, even that flaming liberal, Henry Waxman.  That should be fun. 

 

Just yesterday, #43 reached again into #41's old bag of advisers for a new Secretary of Offense.  Still, his pig-headedness and "take the fight to the enemy, even if we don't know who they are or where they live" will keep the lid on change at any easily accessible level (Faux News, etc.).  #43 has become sort of like Ariel Sharon (brain dead, to be sure), but always predictable in his use of force, in a "Dick Cheney" sort of way.  Rover tried to "lean 'em to the right" one more time, but a small majority of the electorate was more afraid of leaving #43 in unchecked power than they were of the "San Francisco-Liberal", "Tax & Spend", "Soft on Terrorism" Democrats.

 

The "fight" is not over, except for those who realize that "fighting" gets us nowhere.  The Democrats should run Jackie DeShannon and their theme song should be, "Put A Little Love in Your Heart".  On the other hand, wasn't she British, thus ineligible for the presidency?  While you are reading the rest of this article, let us all think of an American woman for whom we would vote in a presidential election.  OK?  You will find my choice at the end of this diatribe, but no fair peeking.  You have to think of at least one of your own.

 

The only problem, if there is one, is that we never seem to get (back) to the future.  By the time that we all have heated & cooled cup holders in a car that can parallel-park itself (comfort and practicality, all in one package); we laugh, shrug and simply accept it as normal.  If something transported you back to 1958 and visited the Auto Show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in LA, you would be impressed with such new technologies as "Power Steering", which was brought into play because automobiles were becoming as heavy as the hydraulically-control jet fighters that they were meant to emulate.  You may have noticed that SAAB has brought back their jet fighter lineage recently, proving that there is nothing new under the Sun.  

 

To continue our theme, do you remember the Rocket Oldsmobile?  You do not hear much about rockets anymore, unless they use 5000-year-old Chinese guidance technology, as fired by Hamas.  No hydraulic boost needed there!  Of course, do not forget the high-tech Israeli rockets that seem to reprogram themselves to take out apartment buildings full of (formerly) extended families in Gaza.  Is this the "Revenge of the Rockets" or perhaps the ultimate extension of the 1950s MidEast Crisis?

 

 

Do you recognize this "Old Friend"?  Yes, Sputnik is the one that started it all - the "Space Race in the 1950s" that is.  It is one of six spare Sputniks, left over after "bigger, better, more, longer, lower, wider" (kudos to GM for their last original concept) satellite technology took over.  We traded with the Russians (did we not call them the "Ruskies" in the old days?) for two Russian names to be placed in the Rocket Science Hall of Fame.  Ironically, she is not much bigger than the now infamous Michael Jordan-signed basketball that Madeline Albright supposedly bounce-passed to Kim Jong Il as an enticement for him to give up his nuclear arms if not his missile ambitions.  She (Sputnik, not Madeline) still looks good, after all these years.  Is anyone out there old enough to remember the fear that she (Sputnik) struck in the hearts of Americans?  We dreamed about stainless steel basketballs falling on us from the sky.  It was scary enough to have millions of us school kids doing drop & cover drills.  Be sure to cover your eyes so that you won't be "blinded by the light" as you are vaporized.

 

For whatever reason, I did not take any pictures of the bent/spent, rusty/trusty German V-2 Rocket engine that they had dug up out of the White Sands of New Mexico, but you would be amazed to see its gyro-controlled, vectored-thrust, multi-nozzle rocket engine.  This is not bad for 1938 "technology".  You gotta love the German sense of style, in those days.  Their WW-II (The Big One) combat helmets became the stylistic prototype for Darth Vader's "hat" in Star Wars (Episodes 1, 3, 5, 7 & 9, but not 2, 4, 6 & 8, where he sported a French Beret).  Sorry, I did not mean to bring up the French.  For those who are still hoping we find WMDs in Iraq, I know it is a sore subject.

 

 

The Lockheed X7A Ramjet test-bed pictured here was recyclable, unlike the multi-billion dollar single-use rockets we continue using to build Ronald Reagan's International Space Station.  Is anyone out there old enough to remember Ronald Reagan?  Let us talk about the subject of "Make Work".  One re-supply mission to the aging boondoggle "Space Station" probably costs more than Hoover Dam and the Lend-Lease of the Marshall Plan, put together.  Those references are for you WW-II fans, who find it odd that we could beat the real Axis Powers in about four years, but cannot remember exactly who the "Axis of Evil" includes...  Let us see; would that be North Korea, Iran...  Darfur? Afghanistan?, Nicaragua?, Venezuela?, Syriana?

 

Back to our yellow and black rocket:  After exhausting its fuel, this little jewel would parachute down and the spike on the nose would act like a dart, penetrating the sand, leaving the missile intact, to fly another day.  For those of us who grew up in Burbank, the name "Lockheed" on the tail makes for a wistful sigh(t).  For fans of jet fighter technology, our little yellow "bumblebee" seems to have the wings and tail of an F-104 Starfighter designed and built by Lockheed.  During the 1960's and early 1970's, the F-104 was our main defense against "The Red Menace".  NATO pilots, many of whom were Germans (didn't they used to be the enemy?) called it a "manned rocket".  Now we know why.

 

 

From the Saturn-V Moon-rocket motor on the right (note the full-sized adult next to it), to the early Nike Missile, shown in elevated (firing) position.  Later, the design morphed into the Japanese whale harpoon, used to blast the ocean's whales into submission and near extinction in what they called a 'fair fight'... the blubbering whales being reduced to a bumper-sticker-defense, as in "Nuke the Unborn Gay Whales"), to the forward-theater, nuclear-capable missile on the right (deployed in "Western" Germany, with red-blooded Americans ready to fire us all into Armageddon, if we so much as lost a single foot race in a USA/USSR dual track meet).  We can see how enamored of missile technology we really were in the 50's & 60's.  It makes you wonder how we made it out of "that life" alive.

 

 

I shot all these pictures at the Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, NM.  It is a mere thirty miles from the "Trinity Site", named for "ground zero" of the world's first nuclear blast, which occurred there in 1945. That event caused many witnesses to see "The Father, The Son and an image of their own Holy Ghost" rising to heaven on a mushroom cloud.  All of that aside, you can imagine how shocked I was to look out the window, only to see this ancient rocket achieving lift-off from what was supposed to be a static display area.  I caught this one-of-a-kind, ground-shaking event on camera, for you to see.

 

Meanwhile, back here on Mother Earth, and especially in Iran and North Korea, what will the "real future" bring?  (After six years with #43 as president, can you say, "Bring 'em on" with a straight face?) 

 

As Doris Day so aptly sang, "Que Sera, Sera...  What will be, will be.  The future's not ours to see.  Que sera, sera".  For you Arizona residents, please pardon the use of the Spanish language.  As of the time of this writing, your Official Language is English (the King's English?) and don't forget it.  However, back to Doris; any woman who can single-handedly land a DC-6 at San Francisco Airport on only two bounces has my vote for president (hometown girl Nancy Pelosi and New Yorker(?) Hillary Clinton, eat your hearts out).  With it being too late in the game to have Rock Hudson as her VP, is Tab Hunter still available for a draft as Doris' running mate?

 

 

As Gabby Hayes used to say, "Yep". 

 

 

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By James McGillis at 07:37 PM | Current Events | Comments (0) | Link

In the Arid West, It Pays to Know Your Water Source - 2007

  In the Arid West, It Pays to Know Your Water Source

The year 2007 marks the 85th anniversary of the signing of the Colorado River Compact. In November, 1922, delegates from the seven Colorado River Basin states met in New Mexico to discuss, negotiate and ultimately work out the compact.  None other than Herbert Hoover, who become President Hoover in 1928 presided over the conference.  Today, his name graces one of the two largest dams on the Colorado River.

Over the objections of the Arizona delegate, the compact, dividing water rights between the upper and lower basins of the river was signed in Santa Fe, on November 24. 1922. Until this week, the compact was considered the defining document in Colorado River management.  

In 1922, the compact figured its allocations on hydrologic data from the Bureau of Reclamation that indicated annual Colorado River flow at Lees Ferry, Arizona to be 16.4 million acre feet per year (maf). In truth, however, Colorado River flow was a good deal less than that. Historical data from three centuries indicate an average flow of about 13.5 maf. Also, flows are highly erratic, ranging from 4.4 maf to over 22 maf.  With our current eight-year drought, the 16.4 maf looks more like a hydrologist’s dream every year.

The December 2007 elevation of Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam is 1112 feet above sea level. Just eight years ago, in 1999, the lake’s elevation was 1212, exactly 100 feet higher.  Water levels in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at less than fifty percent of capacity.

 According to an article this week in the Los Angeles Times, “The federal government has ushered in a new era of shortage on the Colorado River, adopting a blueprint for how it will tighten the spigot on the West's most important water source”.

In discussing the first signed Colorado River compact in 85 years, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said, "We have had good news and bad news.  The bad news”, he said, “is that the drought shows ‘no sign of ending’”.  The good news was that all seven states had agreed on how to share the ever-dwindling supply of Colorado River water.   

So, what does all of this mean to you?  It really depends where you sit.  If you sit anywhere in the Colorado River Basin, or in places like Phoenix, Arizona and Los Angeles, California, the legal concept that early water rights take precedence over more recent development helps protect you from a cut off of supply.

Anthem, Arizona is one of those impossibly beautiful suburbs that developers have created in the Sonoran Desert, just twenty miles north (and uphill) from Phoenix.  The architecture is contemporary, the lifestyle is idyllic and the vistas are grand.  Because of its many amenities, in the early part of this decade, housing prices shot up like rockets in Anthem.

The rockets fell to earth in 2007, when the real cost of water in Anthem hit home for its residents.  As the build out of the town was completed, the deferred cost of water infrastructure was suddenly added directly to homeowners’ water bills, resulting in an initial 66% increase in water and sewer rates.  The reasons that Anthem residents were hit so hard included several factors. 

First, as a new community, with no prior water rights or even an “uphill”, gravity-fed water source available, Del Webb, the developer of Anthem (now Pulte/Del Webb) took what they could get, which was water that had already been pumped uphill to Lake Pleasant, approximately ten miles away.  Securing that water source was expensive, but made doubly so by the fact that Anthem, unlike Phoenix, was uphill from Lake Pleasant.  Each time Anthem residents opens their taps, they are paying for initially high priced water, plus the energy cost of “double pumping” that water to their high desert paradise.

Despite grumbling about the unfairness of it all, like gasoline, we all have to use water, so we simply pay the price.  To carry the fuel and water analogy a bit further, what if the supply of either were curtailed or eliminated altogether?  Although we do not like to contemplate such outcomes, we know that there is a finite amount of fossil fuel available on this planet.  Despite being a “renewable resource”, water is renewed in the desert only if rain and snow fall on the high country, thus feeding the rivers and reservoirs from which we draw.

According to that same LA Times article, “Scientists also predict that climate change will worsen Western drought patterns and reduce Colorado River flows by increasing evaporation and decreasing snowfall. One study released this year warned that global warming could thrust the Southwest into a state of permanent drought by 2050”.

The lesson to be learned from all of this is to research before you buy property, what is its water source and how reliable and expensive will that supply likely become in light of the near-certainty of continued drought in the Southwest.

Now I will let you in on a little secret.  There is a place near Moab, Utah where the local water source is a deep valley aquifer, fed from the high mountain snows of the Sierra la Sal Range.  With no other mountains between there and the Sierra Nevada, the  La Sal Range scrapes the air clean of moisture, depositing it as snow, which feeds into the aquifer as the snow melts in spring and early summer.

(Author's Note - April 17, 2014) All of the Pueblo Verde Ranchettes have now been sold.  Located in the Spanish Valley, their water rights stem from that deep aquifer.  Anthem, Arizona is “twice uphill” from its water source at Lake Pleasant. Moab, Utah is uphill from the Colorado River and downhill from a reliable source of clean water.

By James McGillis at 05:41 PM | Environment | Comments (0) | Link