"Oooh, look at the pretty!"
Back from vacay. It always surprises me just how much I enjoy driving two days to get there and two days to get back. I get to see so many pretties on the highway. My favorites still have names like Peterbilt. Kenworth. Freightliner. International. Volvo. Western Star. Ford. Mack.
I think they may have stopped making cab-overs. In four days and nearly 4000 miles on the road, I maybe saw 3. But the conventionals are shiny, literally and figuratively. And looking at them all, and enjoying the feeling of movement in my little car, somehow rekindled my interest in my job.
We are building a space ship. Say it with me, one time, real slow: ssspaacesshiip. Wow. I know it won't be in my lifetime, but at least I'm one of those people who will make it possible for there to be vehicles out there whose makers have names like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Energia, and Alenia. I was thinking as I was driving Sunday morning before Prowl got in my head again that the 'big three', the 'American muscle' of space will be LockMart, Boeing, and Northrop.
It made me cry a little, kinda like I'm doing right now.
Here's how it might play out. Alenia will produce a sleek, racy model that will only be purchased by moneyed individuals for 'Sunday drives' in the solar system. Energia will produce the work-horses, the tough, reliable, heavy-load-hauling ships that every country can afford and run so long and so far they'll be held together eventually with promises and duct-tape and bailing wire. One of the 'big three' will win in the market - maybe my own LockMart, maybe not - providing the ship that people choose to travel in, faster and more comfortable than the Energia vessel, slower and more affordable and easier to maintain than the Alenia sportster. That will leave the other two American companies to carve out niches in the market for dinghies, lifeboats and surface-to-orbit transport.
Until the Chinese get in gear and make everyone else look bad. But I say more power to them! Just give me a chance to learn Mandarin.
Then again, when the technology gets there, what's to keep Peterbilt, Freightliner and the others out of the space-freight markets? Powerplant producers (and automotive drive-train manufacturers) like Pratt & Whitney, Westinghouse, and GE won't care who contracts for their products so long as they can stay in business.
Maybe that mid-bulk transport won't bear a name from the defense and aerospace R&D industry, maybe it will be a Kenworth Firefly where what we have now are LockMart/NASA Orion and Energia/RSA Progress.
I don't care what badging they wear, they're all very pretty to me!
My mom gets aggravated at my dad for wanting to pull over at tractor dealerships and places where individuals have tractors for sale to look at them. They are his 'pretties'. I told her she has her wish-books (yes, that's what they were called while I was growing up and what I will always call a catalog when I'm not being particularly proper) because she likes to look at the pretty things. Just because he has a different definition of 'pretty' than she does, doesn't make the process any different.
Now, if I can just live to find that used space ship lot...
I think I'll go listen to my head-charas for a while now. Thinking about spaceships makes me happy, but also makes me very sad.