"Erik Anderson" wrote in message
...

* Now what sounds like a scaled-up version of the Avro Arrow
orbital-launch
concept, perhaps with a good dose of XB-70 Valkyre.



There was an Avro Arrow orbital-launch concept?

I've never seen this. Can anyone give me a reference?

I've never seen any actual documentation.

There is a motion picture (_The Arrow_, starring Dan Ackroyd as a
hard-drinking and wholly impolitic industrialist) that features a
sad-but-droll scene. After the plane has been cancelled and the Canadian
aircraft industry is destroyed, ostensibly by evil America (in the person of
Dwight Eisenhower threatening John Deifenbaker (sp?) during a fishing trip),
Ackroyd's potted industrialist blearily observes a grief-stricken engineer
demonstrating how Canada could have launched a satellite from a souped-up
Arrow. It a bizarre moment of pathos and irony, the engineer flips the
little Arrow model over and pops a little rocket launcher out of its belly.
This looks for all the world like a penis, of course -- the symbolism is the
emasculation of Canadian technological independence by Yanks acting in the
future tradition of Lorena Bobbitt.

So I guess America was the Evil Empire, even back in the 1950s. Dubya is
just putting the icing on the cake.

Jim McCauley