Kill Devil Hills North Carolina December
17th 1903 cold and overcast sustained
northernly winds 20 miles per hour
Orville Wright lies flat on the muslin
and spruce body of their Wright Flyer
twin propellers buzz behind him he won
the coin toss to attempt the first
flight today Orville and his brother
Wilbur have flown 700 glider flights on
this Beach but this is a powered flight
they've tested the aerodynamics using
models but the real thing is often
different his brother unhitch is the
Rope restraining the flyer and it slides
forward on its takeoff rail seven miles
per hour
eight cold wind knifes through Orville
then a sense of lift he's airborne he's
been up eight seconds nine seconds he
struggles to keep the flyer level the
front rudder seems to have a mind of its
own it pitches the aircraft up and when
Orville corrects it dives for the ground
Wham
the flyer hits the earth breaking a
lever and cracking a skid but they've
done it the first powered flight 10 feet
of altitude a hundred and twenty of
distance and twelve seconds in the air
by the end of the day they're flying
lengths of 800 feet per launch
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the Wright brothers may not have been
the first to achieve powered man flight
a German immigrant named Gustave
Whitehead claimed to have flown his own
aircraft two years earlier sparking a
debate that continues to this day but
regardless of who flew first the era of
aviation had arrived indeed Whitehead
and the rights were only arguing over
who made the first manned powered flight
because glider flights had been
conducted since 1879 and the astronomer
Samuel Langley had flown unmanned
powered aircraft back in 1896 because
well history loves to celebrate firsts
in truth the world of aviation had
entered the era of incremental
achievement within a decade aviation
went from being a niche interest to a
world changing technology and it
happened
bit by bit better propellers designs
that moved the rudder from the front to
the rear of the aircraft and greater
understanding of the airfoil the wing
shape that deflects air creating lift
and drag that allows an aircraft to take
off and maneuver through the sky and
with these discoveries shared via
international science journals
themselves a new invention engineers
around the world could incorporate new
discoveries into current designs at a
rate never before seen five years after
the Wright brothers took their flight
outside Kitty Hawk French engineer Louie
Blair EO crossed the English Channel and
less than a decade after the Italian and
Bulgarian militaries were flying
reconnaissance and bombing flights it
was an omen of what was to come because
World War one would reshape the airplane
and end its optimistic reputation as a
symbol of peace in progress early in the
war aircraft were merely reconnaissance
craft what weapons they carried were
usually grenades lobbed at enemy
trenches or pistols that crews used to
blaze away at each other
then came the machine guns the bombs the
interrupter gears that allowed pilots to
fire through their own propeller
increasing accuracy in 1914 the Japanese
Navy bombed German possessions in China
with a raid launched from a seaplane
carrier in the rush of combat aircraft
went
from the clumsy kite-like design of the
Wright brothers to the lethal
dogfighting machines we know today
Germany was at the forefront of that
development it was the first to develop
the interrupter gear the Zeppelin and
the Junkers jae-won the first all-metal
aircraft in fact Germany's air forces
were so feared that the Treaty of
Versailles the document that ended the
war forbid Germany from having an air
force of any kind
and as a result German officers began
looking elsewhere for air power
Constantine Sal coughs key was a recluse
other villagers in his small Russian
town tended to avoid him due to his
strange ideas as early as 1903 Sal
Kowski began writing about humans using
multistage rockets to travel the cosmos
living on strange orbiting space
stations with airlocks and closed-cycle
air systems but unlike Jules Verne who
simply dreamed of space exploration Sal
Kowski did the math presenting it in
papers and testing designs in wind
tunnels these unorthodox ideas were
initially dismissed but in the 1920s
they gained credence as rocket science
developed as a field in France an
engineer independently discovered some
of Celle coughs keys equations and an
American engineer Robert Goddard
launched the first liquid fuel rocket
despite these advances many in the
academic world still considered
spaceflight and optimistic daydream with
one german pioneer even having his
dissertation on human spaceflight
rejected as too utopian but others
didn't see rockets as such a waste of
time in 1932 a group of German army
officers came to a private rocket launch
see the Treaty of Versailles may have
forbid Germany from having an Air Force
but it said nothing about rockets
if developed properly they thought
Rockets could be capable of a long range
to bombardment the rocket launch failed
but the officers were impressed
especially by the youngest member of
this group of amateur researchers a
twenty-year-old graduate student named
Verner von Braun by the next year from
Brown's life had changed he was using
military funding to conduct research for
his doctoral thesis on liquid-fueled
rockets and he started prepping to
launch his first rocket the
four-foot-tall
a1 but that wasn't all that was changing
in January of 1933 the Conservatives who
hadn't won enough votes to form a
governing coalition formed an alliance
with the Nazi Party making Adolf Hitler
Chancellor within months the Nazis had
seized control of the government
stripped civil rights arrested political
opponents and began building
concentration camps von braun was under
no illusion of who he now worked for but
the government had the funding for his
beloved rockets so he kept his head down
building refining identifying problems
with rockets that blew up on the launch
pad or fell from the sky and soon his
launches became more stable and the Nazi
Party began to show major interest von
Braun
started feeling the political pressure
in 1937 he was given the choice to
either join the Nazi Party or give up
his directorship he joined in 1940 the
rootless SS made him the same offer and
again he joined soon the rockets he
loved would fire 55 miles in the air
reaching space before raining down on
the civilians of Britain Belgium and
Sweden the double crack of an object
breaking the sound barrier went from an
unknown noise to the stuff of
reoccurring nightmares Hitler had his
vengeance weapon as the propagandists
call it his v2 von Braun received orders
to concentrate fully on perfecting and
producing the v2 they were mass-produced
using slave labor at a nearby
concentration camp 12,000 would die
building the missiles a full 3000 more
than the missiles killed in allied
cities but by 1945 von Braun was
plotting his escape Germany had lost
he could hear soviet artillery and he
did not want to fall into the hands of
the soviets using forged documents to
justify their movements and pretending
to be part of an ultra secret SS program
von Braun's team stashed boxes of data
in abandoned mines and detonated the
entrances then they drove at night to
avoid Allied air power and made it to
American lines days before Germany was
scheduled to be divided into occupation
zones an American recovery team
surrounded a rocket Factory in what
would soon be the Soviet sector they
grabbed everything they could carry and
hightailed it back to the American zone
this data would serve as the foundation
of the American rocketry program but
once in the US
von Braun soon found himself
disappointed and frustrated
these Americans were no more interested
in space than the Nazis were and they
only wanted ballistic missiles to
counter the Soviets any research
satellite development or sending doomed
monkeys up in capsules was geared toward
military application and the funding was
scarce and yet there were interesting
things going on in the deserts of the
southwest
the US military contracted all of its
production to private industry making
for a better quality product their
development programs were a true mix of
civilian administrators and military
officers and in California they were
using rocket-powered planes to break the
sound barrier creating a Corps of
military test pilots practiced in a new
highly technical type of flying one
where the object was to push an
experimental craft to its limit while
remaining calm in control and able to
gather performance data this trifecta of
military civilian experts and private
industry were scattered between
different programs and departments but
not for long because on October 4th 1957
a new star would appear in the heavens a
star called Sputnik and in the panic von
Braun's Rockets the civilian
administrators and the daredevil
scientific pilots would reorganize under
a new organization NASA it seems as
though the most beneficial breakthroughs
humans made in their quest for the stars
are byproducts of them trying to destroy
one another it really makes you think
about the morality of progress and the
true cost of innovation Matt what are
you doing
what does it look like Lotus I'm
innovating I got into the orbiters mod
stash and there are a ton of cool things
I can do to the old lectern here check
it out redirection mod BAM 44% more
shield capacity why would your lectern
need shields air horn baud
I see now even I have the urge to
vaporize you
Oh but that's not all tanning bed mati
scratching post mod Froyo dispenser mod
stop wasting valuable resources we could
be using them to stop our enemies
incoming warships but I've got that
covered too gaming PC mods now I'm all
set to tackle warframes newest expansion
Imperium I can cruise around the stars
in my rail jack with up to 410 o
friendos along for the ride and we can
even divvy up tasks like blasting fatty
ships out of the stars filing boarding
parties and keeping our rail Jack in one
piece all at the same time that last
knot seems like the only one worth it's
required resources oh really
here you go raspberry my favorite
alright that mod can stay too
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