How I miss that car.

I was eighteen, bagging fiberglass at a local plant when I talked my old man into co-signing a loan. I wanted a sports car. It was a matter of watching the ads and waiting for the right opportunity. One fine summer day I called a guy and arranged to go see one.

We came around the corner and there she was, nicely arranged on an angle on the front lawn, with blue sky, sun and clouds overhead, a 1971 MGB Roadster. It was a soft, faded, sunshiny yellow colour.

I had to have it, as you may well imagine. At $1500 the payments were $75 a month for two years. With the benefit of hindsight, it was quite a bargain. I loved that car, and still miss it today. I’ve gone looking for MG’s once or twice when I had a little money, and backed out at the last minute. The world has changed, when you consider the size of vehicles people drive nowadays, and the speeds that some people go. Nothing’s worse than being tailgated at night in an itty-bitty little car; with some guy in a pickup with high beams on, right in the rearview mirror. Or maybe I changed…

To be young, with your whole life ahead of you, that first really good-paying job, to begin to know what manhood is, to realize you’re an adult and all that sort of stuff, I don’t know. There was just a kind of feeling about it. A time of innocence. In the 1970’s people still complained about young people and the music, the negative images.

Looking back, it all seems pretty tame.

To pull out the choke and fire up the boiler on an autumn morning, and listen to the burbling of Hooker headers and a free-flow exhaust system, was sheer heaven to a young guy. I modified my car, ported and polished the head myself, milled her down a few thousands of an inch. It had an aluminum hood from a 1968. I got rid of the two six-volt batteries and put in one twelve-volt, installed in the trunk for better balance. I cut the fittings where the oil cooler hooked up and put new hoses on with double clamps so I could take the engine in and out more easily. I had a fiberglass spoiler, and took as much unnecessary equipment out of it that I could—back then I would rather listen to the engine than the radio. I removed the air pump, and even the bumpers. I got so I could take that car apart and put it back together again on a long weekend.

It could beat any other MG in town, that’s for sure. We scared the TR-6 guys so they wouldn’t race us anymore. Too aggressive, they felt, but then they were mostly candy-bums, more interested in image than real street racing. You remember them guys, the ones with the briar pipes and leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets...

It’s funny, but I reckon I spent $10,000 on that thing over the seven years I owned it.

You may laugh, but I doubt if I ever would have gotten a girlfriend if I hadn’t bought that car! But that little car drew the eye. Back then sports car guys acknowledged each other on the road with a wave or a honk. We’d get together in an informal little club, turning up en masse at a local park, then cruise out Lakeshore Road. Hopefully we weren’t too dangerous, but there may have been a little friendly dicing in the tighter turns.

One time my buddy John and I just started chasing these three girls in an Austin Mini, and while they lost us by hiding in a British car lot—just like in the original version of the film The Italian Job, we eventually caught up with ‘em.

It’s really something to be eighteen years old, driving at a relatively high speed, on some darkened road, high beams illuminating the fences and the trees, grass and signs speeding past, and suddenly realize that you are a hundred miles from home and finally free.

To hear the rumble and roar of the exhaust, the beat of the wind on the back of your neck, to feel the hair lift at eighty miles an hour, touch the brakes and downshift, slide through a turn, the pale yellow glow of the tachometer reminding you she’s an old car…real seat of the pants driving back then. I suppose I thought I was Fangio or Tazio Nuvolari or something. I had a lot of hair back then, too.

I have such great memories of that car. In about 1980, the 402 highway was being built. When the road was paved, but not open yet, we’d drive around the barricades and drive on nice smooth blacktop—no signs, no lines, no cops. I remember going ninety miles an hour, with the top down. My girlfriend popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, it flew up into the sky and was sucked away. We got a little drunk, not so much the wine as just being young and high on life itself. She was a good girl, but some things are just not meant to be.

But God. I miss that car.

Yes, she was sitting right there beside me when I raced the Corvette. In the mirror, I saw the guy do a burnout at a stoplight, and then he came up beside us at the next stoplight. I looked over and revved my engine. The light turned green, and he dumped the clutch, and drove off at a high rate of speed and we just laughed. The light at the next intersection was red again, and we pulled up alongside of him. I revved her up again, but when the light changed, I hit her just perfectly. An MGB will do about thirty-one miles an hour in first gear. I did a twenty-foot burnout, and then a nice little squawk when I snapped it into second gear. I could see him still at the intersection, sitting there in a cloud of blue tire smoke, and I could hear the roar of his engine over the sound of mine. I got a little chirp out of the tires when I shifted into third gear, and just about then he passed us going like eighty or ninety miles an hour.

We were laughing like crazy as I backed off and slowed her down to something less than ludicrous speed. Right about then a cop car zoomed out of a side-street and started chasing the Corvette. Victory is sweet!

***

A general rule of thumb with MGB’s is that they will go about 106 miles per hour, and then you throw a rod, and then you have to walk home.

I hope to own another 1971 MGB Roadster, but I’m not sure if it’s the car that I’m after, or maybe it’s just an attempt to recapture a sort of feeling.

You know what’s fun? Take the top down on a snowy winter’s day, bundle up with hoods, parkas, snowmobile gloves, and go for a little toot through the park. Everyone thinks you’re crazy, but they smile and wave just the same.

All those old British cars had a certain smell inside, a smell of oil, and burnt antifreeze, and wet rugs and gasoline. The heaters and electrical systems were bad, sometimes the roof didn’t fit too well. Most of them leaked, although mine was pretty dry inside. Some were designed around tractor engines and transmissions. A multi-coloured stain on the driveway was a registered trademark.

But they inspired a kind of love that is missing in modern cars.

End

Photo: Wiki Commons, released into Public Domain by the original author. This car is Harvest Gold, mine was a kind of sunshine colour.

The Next 25 Years of Spaceflight.

The next twenty-five years in spaceflight will be fascinating.

At time of writing, Chris Hadfield circles the Earth in the International Space Station.

The next period of microgravity experiments in physics and chemistry, medicine and botany, microbiology, entomology, (yes, ants in space!) crystallography, will bring results we can’t foresee, for many of the most important discoveries in history were accidental. But there will be results.

More powerful motors needed

With Hubble finding new exoplanets almost weekly, there is more of an incentive to do the research into interstellar drives. The power units we have now make for slow trips within our solar system. They’re simply not suitable for interstellar flight. While a Moon base is often bandied about as an alternative to Mars, it looks mostly like a military proposition. For that reason it is more likely to happen than an immediate Mars expedition. Mars doesn’t command the high ground of a terrestrial battlefield. The Moon does. The Moon offers certain advantages for surface-based telescopes of any wavelength. Mars has none of these advantages, its only attraction is for long-term colonization. It has an atmosphere,  the Moon does not.

Here’s the thing with Mars colonization. It’s completely unnecessary assuming we learn to manage and conserve our terrestrial resources of air, water and topsoil. As a backup to Earth, maybe there is some logic in it. Looking for life on Mars does not require colonization, only probes of increasing sophistication.

A colony on Mars

A colony on Mars would in some ways be a lot easier than a Moon colony. While there must be ice or water somewhere under the Moon’s surface, the fact is that the Martian atmosphere has small quantities of water vapour, surely an easier proposition in terms of harvesting it. Mars has tons of water in a hundred cubic kilometres of the Martian air. All you need is an air pump. You would need to process hundreds of tons of Moon rock or soil to extract one litre of water. The difference is a technical challenge—the Moon is a lot easier to get to. It’s quicker, two days as opposed to two or three years.

We already have the technology, which is part of the attraction.

Several companies have been formed for the commercial exploration of space, more specifically the asteroids. At an economical Delta-V, an accessible asteroid might take four years round trip for a sample to be returned to Earth.

433 Eros

The elements we take for granted in modern industrial processes, platinum, gold, antimony, and others, will possibly run out in the next sixty years. Mining the asteroids, processing the materials in space, and then shipping the refined product to the Moon or to Earth could be profitable for the firms involved. With modern industrial growth, even at one hundred percent efficiency of recycling, stocks will eventually run out. Totally robotic ships could be designed to mine and refine the ore. I recall an Isaac Asimov story with Martian colonists engaged in ice-mining and asteroid-finding. What was once science fiction is now within the realm of possibility, if not immediate probability.

The space elevator

A space elevator might be feasible within a few years. The cost per ton of getting materials into low orbit would be phenomenally low compared to chemical launch vehicles. Building it might be like trying to build a spider’s web—a lot harder than it looks. The first filament makes all things possible. Initially, we would either have to unroll a filament on launch from the pad, and keep it intact until orbit is achieved, or anchor one end somehow in space and then descend to Earth, again keeping the filament intact. Once one filament is in place, it must be strong enough to haul up one that is twice as thick, the full length required to be properly anchored or counterbalanced on the ends.

Yet ultimately, I think that’s how it will be done. Much like a cable-laying ship of the nineteenth century, with no need to join short lengths. It will all be one piece. I see something like a tungsten leader—just like on the end of a fishing line. This will take the heat of the rocket exhaust, and the actual filament, likely of nano-carbon tubes or something similar, will be attached to the end of it. The actual cable will be on a motor driven reel, unwinding as the rocket climbs out so as to reduce drag and directional input from the towed filament.

The only other way to do it would be to build the full structure from the ground up, stabilizing the top with gyros, or even drive units holding it in place against the winds, which would be variable at different altitudes. It would take a lot of computer power, super instrumentation and a flexible control system just to keep the thing upright. If the cable is 38,000 miles long, the problems seem insuperable. Different types of flying machines, including high-altitude helicopters and airships need to be developed for construction of this type.

New kinds of flying machines

Part of the weight initially could be borne by tethered balloons, with drive units of their own to help maneuver and steady the structure on the way to completion. My big idea, which seems more practical than hot chemical rockets, is to use a machine shaped much like a jumping-jack to get that first filament into space. The central spindle has the cable or filament attached at the bottom end. The central spindle is the working body of the ship with propellant tanks and small reaction motors for later use in space. Once the cable is up and self-sustaining due to centrifugal force, the ship itself is useful on its own. On the arms of the jumping-jack are a minimum of four laser targets. The ship is propelled by a ground-based array of laser machine guns of great power.

They must go through the charge and discharge very quickly and the pulses would be controlled by computer software. The people of North America might be willing to give up electricity for a day or so to get the thing up to its destination. And that first filament makes all other things possible…we need to avoid heat transfer from the targets to the body of the ship. Here’s the interesting thing mathematically. Once you push your package to the halfway point, the power required, which was increasing at an exponential rate, begins to taper off in terms of increasing power requirements. It originally went up due to the increasing weight of the cable.

But gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance. One end of the cable is weightless, but it still has mass. What that means, at the halfway point, centrifugal/centripetal force begins to tug some portion of the cable away from the earth, like a ball on a string swung at arm’s length. At that point you are away to the races. By doubling the size of the cable, each one strong enough to pull up its replacement, you eventually end up with cables not unlike those used to suspend the Golden Gate Bridge, and by having an array of launchers, all using a common laser array, you can build a structure that looks ultimately like an Eiffel Tower made of carbon cables, one that doesn’t stop with an antenna and a flag on top, but one that just keeps going up and up and up…until it gets all the way out into space.

Photos: Wiki Commons, NASA.

The Malpractice Guys.

(Staff Writers.)








Mambutu got back to his own hut and hung up his things on the pegs by the door. He sat in front of the hearth, reaching for his bundle of scrap yarns, with every colour under the rainbow represented there.

Mwali’s string was on top of his work tray.

Selecting a blue yarn, he tied it first into a sheep-shank. That was for the Oedipus complex. Then he tied a bit of yellow string, very thin, next on the record for the inferiority complex. Then came a red leather thong, for the irrational fears. His patient had a lot of phobias, which Mambutu thought related to being over-indulged as a child.

This was indicated by the yellow and green bits tied on last week after a particularly tough dance and drums session. For some reason, Mwali wasn’t responding well to the disassociation therapy, nor to the dream guidance. He must keep trying, otherwise he would never successfully reintegrate into the village social structure after his unsuccessful bid to become deputy chief and the resulting puncture wounds which, taken on their own, were healing nicely.

As for the incipient anemia, famine stalked the village this season every year and it was nothing new medically. It was troubling that the incense and herbs weren’t doing much good. He resolved to keep him on that regimen for another month or so and then gradually wean him off of them.

Mwali had eaten enough magic clay to choke a horse, but that wasn’t working either.

He sat, lost in his thoughts. There was still the smoke-up-the-ass treatments, that and the hot-sulphur and molasses enemas.

He would keep that on hold for a while, as it was expensive and required a lot of prep time, especially in terms of magic and spell-casting for maximum efficacy. Mwali was a strong man. He should have been doing better than this, and he wondered if his own mental purity was the fault. What he needed was a little shot of strawberry extract, which was not only good for an ague, a fit or a quinsy, but humours of the brain.

It was also an excellent laxative and had some beneficial spiritual side effects. He tied on a thin black string and Mwali’s record was all up to date. It was important to keep accurate records in this business or the malpractice guys would be all over him.