quattro digest, Vol 1 #4557 - Columbia

[Larry C Leung]

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Bob, et al,

First off, the tragedy of the loss of the shuttle and it's passengers,
devastating. And as other lister's had noted, once they started off,
they were committed. Apparently also, the engineers did not feel
at launch that the debris that hit the shuttle on take off (happened
once before in the last 3 launches) was of much concern. There
was a short period during the launch that the ejection seats added
after Challenger could've been used (basically below Mach speed).
After that as the other listers had noted, they were totally commited.
On re-entry, there really was no way to escape the shuttle, the
heat of re-entry was such that it is not survivable. As also noted, an
escape capsule that would work would be improbably large and
possibly heavy, and would've required a structural redesign that they
chose not to make back in 86-88 based upon feasibility and cost and
potential survivability. Beyond that, all we're doing is idle
speculation.
At this point, let the experts research this, and pay your respects to
those who we've lost.

As for Bob's question. Dumb luck is how a majority of the economically
feasible oil (there is other oil out there, it's just not economical
enough
to extract to be thought of as sources) ended up in the Middle East.
Believe it or not, (don't have my paleogeographic maps handy, not
home, so I can't say exactly the time period) during the Carboniferous
Era, the region now known as the Middle East was at temporate latitudes,
and filled with swamps that were prolific. Plants died. Sank to the
bottom.
So prolific the plant life, that more plants died than could be
decomposed.
The plants that died and got buried eventually got covered over by
sediments
that became rock. The plant stuff that was left eventually became the oil
that
is drilled for today. As an additional point of info, during the
Pennsylvanian
Period, (late Carboniferous), much of Pennsylvania was in the same
situation,
thus yielding Pennsylvania crude. It is a misnomer that we call what we
put
in our Audis (mAC) is the result of dead dinosaurs, there is no way that
there
ever could've been enough dinos to sacrifice in order to produce the
amount of
oil that has existed in the last 2 centuries. That we have managed to
deplete
much of the economically feasible oil in 200 yrs, that took around
200,000 years
to form says something about us. Just don't know exactly what though.....

LL - NY

BTW - 2 centuries ago, NO ONE would've given the middle east any
thought whatsoever. Even those who lived there. They were just trying
to survive.

> Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2003 09:59:32 -0500
> To: s-car-list at audifans.com, "Quattro list" <quattro at audifans.com>
> From: Robert Myers <robert at s-cars.org>
> Subject: Shuttle Columbia
>
>
> Turn on CNN or the like.  The Shuttle has gone down - terrible!
>
>
> ____
>
> Can someone explain - just how did our oil get under Iraq's sand in
> the
> first place?
>
> Bob
> *****
>   Robert L. Myers   304-574-2372
>   Rt. 4, Box 57,  Fayetteville, WV 25840 USA   WV tag Q SHIP
>   '95 urS6  Cashmere Grey - der Wunderwagen    ICQ 22170244
>   http://www.cob-net.org/church/pvcob.htm
> *****
>
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