[ExI] rocket graveyard

[spike]

Here's a fun article about a discovery of some old-time shipwrecks off Cape
Canaveral.

 

http://www.livescience.com/55795-colonial-age-shipwrecks-found-off-florida-c
oast.html

 

Here's the reason why it caught my attention.  Comment from the article:

 

 

Rocket graveyard

Pritchett explained that his company had permits from the state of Florida
to explore seven areas off the coast of Cape Canaveral, where the wrecks
were found - an area littered with debris from
<http://www.livescience.com/32721-why-are-rockets-launched-from-florida.html
> rocket test launches at the U.S. Air Force base at Cape Canaveral,
southeast of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

"We've found hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of U.S. Air Force rockets
that they were testing from 1948 forwards, and also shrimp boats, airplane
engines, airplanes, " Pritchett said.

"We have found some of the actual rocket engines, and lots of rocket tubes -
some of these things are 30, 40 feet long," he said. "Some are sticking
halfway out on the surface, or sticking straight up out of the sand - there
are literally thousands of them out there. We GPS and photograph everything
we find, and we turn that stuff over to the U.S. Air Force, because one day,
it will be valuable to someone for a historical reason."

One of my childhood friend's family had a boat; they enjoyed going out
fishing off Cape Canaveral on weekends.  Theirs was one of the unusual
non-rocket non-space program families who lived in the area: his father was
an accountant rather than a space nomad like nearly everyone else in
Titusville.  This explains why their family could afford a boat and an RV.

 

One day he asked if I really knew rockets as well as I talked.  I didn't, I
admitted.  Assuming it was false modesty on my part, he invited me to go out
on their boat to see what they thought was a piece of a rocket from the old
days, late 40s perhaps when the Army air force was using Cape Canaveral as a
test range for the early multi-stage rockets, the jazzy new liquid fueled
rockets and such, just after the war.  The rocket stage his family
discovered was in shallow water a few miles off the coast.  

 

Like a silly fool, I passed up that opportunity.  In that area, there was no
need to go to the sea to look at old rocket stages, for there was an
excellent museum nearby where they had pristine examples.  Those museums are
still there to this day.  The local high school had a rocket out front which
they kept as a unique lawn ornament (not kidding.)  Like most opportunities,
it knocked but once and then only lightly.

 

I sometimes wonder what commonplace junk will someday be interesting
artifacts to whatever comes next.

 

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160820/e84fe018/attachment.html>