Writing from the Starbucks down the street from my dad’s in Dallas. We heard the sonic boom around 8am. It shook the windows. WFAA had a crew out to shoot the reentry for the morning newscast, and they caught the whole sad incident on tape. Ironically, some of the debris fell in the town of Palestine. Dad and I watched the video with a self-imposed clinical distance, it seemed to be the best way to handle it.
My dad’s 80th birthday is this weekend, so I salted the database with some post-dated entries before leaving for Dallas. The following was one of them, and it’s a sad cosmic joke that I wrote the entry Thursday night.
Down the street from me at NASA’s Ames Research Center, they are testing a solid propellant rocket motor using paraffin as fuel. On its own, parafin does not burn rapidly, however, if you pump a stream of pure oxygen over the burning surface, the paraffin burns rapidly. And unlike the composite solid fuel used in the Shuttle’s boosters, you can turn the motor off by turning off the oxygen. Not as powerful as a nuclear rocket.
