Re: The Warm Equations

On 6/24/2024 12:01 PM, James Nicoll wrote:

In article <v5c7ij$113u3$1@dont-email.me>,
Lynn McGuire  <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

On 6/23/2024 11:37 AM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

Interesting to note the way margins of a real-life space venture are run:
>
Two astronauts have been stuck at the ISS for an extra two weeks,
so far, because their ride has flat tires, and it's not a crisis,
and nobody has had to volunteer to step out the airlock.

>
For those who do not know, this is a play on "The Cold Equations"
awesome incredibly sad short story:
    https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equations/
>

Alternatively, it's a terrible story about people with extremely
shitty pre-flight safety procedures.
 https://reactormag.com/on-needless-cruelty-in-sf-tom-godwins-the-cold-equations/

One of my uncles was the navigator-bombardier on a B-52 back in the 1970s and 1980s in Fort Worth, Texas.  We were talking about refueling one day and he mentioned that the KC-135 air tankers would fly with them to the Bering Straits and give them every drop of fuel that they had. Then the air tanker would ditch in the Bering Straits or the leading edge of Russia as they ran out of fuel.
I was floored by that and he then said that was only enough fuel for their B-52 to make it to Moscow to drop their hydrogen bombs.  The eight jet engines on the B-52 are very thirsty.  They did not have enough fuel to make back to even Alaska.  Then he mentioned, they probably would not make it to Moscow as there were not enough fighter jets to escort them past the Russian interceptor jets on the other side of the Bering Straits.
The cold equations are very prevalent in today's society.
Lynn