Bye-bye monkeys, hello stiffs?!

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1296
My favorite is still the live black bears used to test the B-58's
ejection capsules.
Boy, I'd have liked to be the person who first opened the escape capsule
after recovery.
I would have demanded a full suit of armor and a _really_ big pistol to
do that.
Anyway, back to the "Zombies Of The Exosphere"*:
There's a problem with this concept; living people are going to tense
their muscles under emotional stress or in anticipation of landing...and
that's going to affect the amount of energy required to cause bones to
break under high G loads.

* Let's do the initial flights of Orion with _corpses_ aboard... and
send the spacecraft into....THE VAN ALLEN BELTS!
Just to see what would happen... I'm sure _something_ interesting would
almost _certainly_ happen.
Van Allen belts on fire....brain-eating Zombie Space Fire Corpses
walking the Earth!
This could bring the excitement back to our space program that's been
missing since Project Apollo.
NASA may have trouble getting funding for a Lunar base, but I can
guarantee you they'll get funding to battle the Radioactive Space Fire
Zombies and the horrible "half-life" they exist in.
Some of those show up in Tehran, and President Mahmud
Ahma-What's-His-Name will be putting on lipstick just so he can kiss our
ass.
And we'll tell him if he really loved us, he'd use his tongue.
And if that's not worth funding the VSE for...nothing is! :-D

Patrick Flannery - Patriot

Pat Flannery wrote in
news
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1296

There's a precident of sorts for this; seems like a head was
flown on a Shuttle mission for radiological experiments or
some such. Possibly to study the effect of cosmic rays on brain
tissues? I think it was sliced up afterwards. (Enjoying
your lunch sandwich, Pat? Are you SURE you know what's in the
deli meat?)

I wonder how many of the bears survived to tell their tales?

--Damon "Brains...BRAINS--pass the mustard, wouldya?"

"Damon Hill" wrote in message
...
Pat Flannery wrote in
news
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1296

There's a precident of sorts for this; seems like a head was
flown on a Shuttle mission for radiological experiments or
some such. Possibly to study the effect of cosmic rays on brain
tissues? I think it was sliced up afterwards. (Enjoying
your lunch sandwich, Pat? Are you SURE you know what's in the
deli meat?)

I believe that a skull and skull with a skeleton of a human torso were both
flown to examine radiation effects on human tissue. Instead of using tissue
on these, there was some sort of tissue substitute on them with radiation
meters embedded inside the skull and torso.

This isn't quite the same as using an entire cadaver as part of a drop test
for Orion, but I understand there is precedent for this sort of thing.
Crash test dummies don't always tell the whole story.

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein

On Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:26:05 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1296
My favorite is still the live black bears used to test the B-58's
ejection capsules.
Boy, I'd have liked to be the person who first opened the escape capsule
after recovery.

....Actually, Pat, we know what happened. After the bears were
discovered to have been altered by the high-altitude radiation and
could now talk, they were sent to Jellystone Park.

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

Pat Flannery writes:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1296
My favorite is still the live black bears used to test the B-58's
ejection capsules.
[ ... ]
Anyway, back to the "Zombies Of The Exosphere"*:

Oh. I thought we were getting to preemptively dismissing
'Space Chimps' by now.

--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Damon Hill wrote:
There's a precident of sorts for this; seems like a head was
flown on a Shuttle mission for radiological experiments or
some such. Possibly to study the effect of cosmic rays on brain
tissues?

Here's a photo from the flight, showing the effect the cosmic rays had
on the brain:
http://i1.iofferphoto.com/img/item/4...Face_(1958.jpg
The chief doctor on the project found the results "unexpected":
http://www.cinematographers.nl/Fotos...tree-fiend.jpg

Pat