News You Can Bruise for 2002 July 24

I'm a happy rabbit, because my spacecraft components have come in. For some reason I have been thinking of the hard drives and RAM I ordered as spacecraft components; possibly because I had the same feeling towards them as you have towards spacecraft components during a game of FreeCiv; you order them and are excited and they can't come in fast enough (counterpoint).

But I got to thinking that my new hard drives and RAM are probably better (in terms of raw power) than anything currently used in actual working spacecraft due to the long lag time involved in spacecraft design. So I decided that I should lead-shield my hard drives and RAM to protect them from radiation, incorporate them into a Gallileo-type spacecraft with a camera and radio transmitter, send it off into space, and reap the rewards (eg. pictures, and being the coolest person in the entire world).

This pleasant fantasy lasted only a moment before I realized that 1) it would take me years just to learn everything I'd need to know to build and launch a spacecraft, that 2) though I can afford amazingly huge hard drives and chunks of RAM, the sum cost of the parts neccessary to create a spacecraft is well beyond my budget, that 3) sending out a Gallileo-type spacecraft would probably violate some stupid law or UN resolution or other, and that 4) I bought the hard drives and RAM as part of a project to bring my computer back to life, and not as part of a nascent space program. So I abandoned the project before I led the taxpayer (viz., myself) down a garden path.