Rebooting our standing in our road

Back at reference 1, I noticed a way of rebooting my online profile. Today, I have a way to reboot our profile in our road. A fancy version of a stone gnome, as it were.

By way of warm up, a few days ago I came across a rather large watch on which I could spend £20,000, with some of that rather large sum going on a chunky looking red gold case. Then yesterday, the Guardian ran a piece about how awful it was that the Chinese were testing a hypersonic missile, for what they claim to be entirely peaceful purposes. While we and our friends over the pond are not at all sure that we know how to shoot such a thing down. Perhaps even whether such a thing appears on our radar at all.

Then this morning, a correspondent alerts me to the possibility of buying a piece of aviation history, perhaps for not that much more than the watch would have costed. The bit of history being a hypersonic missile from thirty years ago, rather oddly, a joint venture between the newly liberated Russians and the Americans. Perhaps I could ask our University of Creation to design me something in or on which the missile could be exhibited in our front garden? Or perched on the roof, like the suburban shark which once made the national media? Sufficiently notorious that Bing turned it up at the top of the search results for 'shark on roof of suburban house'. See references 4 and 5.

According to the auction website: 'CIAM-NASA Hypersonic Flying Laboratory "Kholod", 1991: Kholod was developed by the Central Institute of Aviation Motors (CIAM), USSR, and built after the dissolution of the USSR in a joint venture with the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), USA. It was used as a laboratory for newly developed systems, such as the scramjet engine. Special features: Unmanned flight laboratory, fastest series-produced flying object from 1991 to 1998, with a top speed up to Mach 6.47 (7,926 km/h or 4,925 mph), cryogenically cooled hydrogen propulsion. Length 12 meters, weight approx. 1.000 kg, static model without aggregates. Nine Kholod rockets were ever built, five of which were lost during test flights. Production cost in 1991: 2 million US$. A unique opportunity to acquire one of the fastest flying objects ever built and an important part of aerospace history'.

So given that we were doing this thirty years ago, and even though more than half the modest number built perished during trials, it is perhaps a bit of a cheek to complain when the Chinese do it today. But then, I suppose the US still believes that only they can be trusted with advanced weaponry, that only they can be trusted only to use such weaponry to good and essentially peaceful ends. And that all good people around the world are signed up to this self-evident truth.

PS: maybe the students of creation would have had proper regard to the need to stop the thing corroding or otherwise degrading over the years, but I think that it would probably be prudent to write that into the contract, just in case. 

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/rebooting-your-online-profile.html.

Reference 2: https://www.uca.ac.uk/. The creation people. The people with the accommodation blocks which are so productive of trolleys. For which see below.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/trolley-435.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headington_Shark.

Reference 5: https://www.headingtonshark.com/.