[ExI] rocket graveyard

[William Flynn Wallace]

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


spike

You do know that there are groups, presumably archaeology students and
prof, studying current garbage piles?  I guess they said:  why wait?  bill w

On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 10:01 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

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> Here’s a fun article about a discovery of some old-time shipwrecks off
> Cape Canaveral.
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> http://www.livescience.com/55795-colonial-age-shipwrecks-
> found-off-florida-coast.html
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> Here’s the reason why it caught my attention.  Comment from the article:
>
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> *Rocket graveyard*
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> 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 rocket test launches
> <http://www.livescience.com/32721-why-are-rockets-launched-from-florida.html> 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.
>
>
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> 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.
>
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> 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
>
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