Hey, I was there. The gas crisis didn't hit until 1973, when the Arabs put on the oil embargo. The muscle cars peaked in 1970 and by 1973 there was only one real contender left -- the '73 455SD Trans-Am and they only sold a couple of hundred of them. Go compare published power outputs from the engines of 1970 to those of 1973. In 1971, General Motors reduced the compression ratios of their engines across the board in anticipation of the phase out of leaded gas, and in 1972 Chrysler and Ford did the same. Emissions restrictions brought in lean mixtures and exhaust gas recirculation in the early 70's which killed engine output. Safety regulations added a couple of hundred pounds to each car. The insurance companies and the government had killed the muscle car by 1973; the oil crisis just put one more bullet in the corpse. Hi tech (ricecars, etc) did not bring performance cars back until the late 80's and early 90's.

This is going to sound harsher than intended, but ... from younger days I already have owned a couple of Trans-Ams, Corvettes, a factory 455 cubic inch Buick GS Stage 1, 69 Camaro with a L-88 engine swap, big block El Caminos, etc, all big blocks at least 400 CID and they are all crap compared to what you can get for about $30K now in a new (or much less used) Mustang, Camaro, or Challenger. The old cars weren't that fun to drive because no matter how much power the engines made (and it wasn't as much as everyone 'remembers'), the suspensions could not put the power to the road. If you really want to enjoy a ride, go buy a 2015 Mustang GT which will outrun any old muscle car and do it with full emissions equipment, safety equipment and air conditioning. By the way, if you want 500 HP, don't try it with a Pontiac 455 -- that long stroke motor was a POS -- if you have to do it the hard way with 1960's/70's tech, go with a 427/454 Chevrolet, even then the factory race engines(427-L88 and 427-ZL1) were only making about 550 horses with open headers. Oh and those mid-70's Trans-Ams couldn't take all that much horsepower anyway -- their crappy bodies with the partial subframes twisted all up under real torque, especially the T-Top cars. I was a huge muscle car guy and went through the 70's when "government regulations" killed the muscle car, but the cars now are supercars compared to the best from back then and you don't get a lungful of lead, hydrocarbons and CO from behind them. I'm convinced that this would not be the case had the government not forced the automakers to clean up. If cars can be this good and this clean now then there is no excuse for anything else to be dirty either.

Bad example -- Dr. Aldrin was not just provoked by the dumbass moon hoaxer saying something offensive, but the hoaxer was following Aldrin and his daughter around, harassing them after he was asked to leave the couple alone. Aldrin had a plausible defense that he and his daughter felt physically threatened.
"Beverly Hills police investigated the incident, which occurred 9 September, but said that the charges were dropped after witnesses came forward to say that Mr Sibrel had aggressively poked Mr Aldrin with the Bible before he was punched." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ame...

I stand corrected on the state of the Dragon. Still, I don't feel the angst about the US space capabilities which is often expressed around here. Having lived through the 70's with the abandonment of the Apollo/Saturn hardware, with two flyable Saturn Vs left to corrode away on the ground, and then the long, slow disappointment of the STS, the rebuilding situation in crewed capabilities we have today just doesn't seem so bad, and that doesn't consider the golden age of interplanetary programs going on now. And, come on, you can't really stand by your statement that the US couldn't build a system equivalent to Mercury-Redstone in a couple of years if some billionaire wanted to do it. Anyway, thanks for the (nearly) direct info on Dragon.

"returning to the moon" -- Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA spacecraft, is operational in orbit around the moon right now and has been there since 2009. NASA just makes it look so easy that when they do it, nobody notices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

During the period 1975 to 1981, the period between the last crewed Apollo flight and the first crewed Space Shuttle flight, the US did not have an operational system to launch crewed spacecraft. I was around during that time and don't remember any of the wailing that "America has lost the ability to go into Space!" like is common now. The Russians could still do it then (with pretty much the same hardware as they use now) so that wasn't the difference. I think it is just trendy now to bash American technical prowess in space which is uninformed as proven by rovers on Mars, probes on the way to Jupiter, Pluto, and Ceres, and orbiters around Saturn and Mercury. Unlike the 1975-1981 period there are currently THREE (four if you count Dreamchaser) crewed American spacecraft in advanced development, two of which have already flown in uncrewed configuration. So by any standard the US space program is stronger now (far stronger on the robot side) than it was in the late 70's. And, to be blunt, the statement that "America has lost the capability of being able to reproduce the original Mercury flight of Alan Shepard," is just ignorant -- Space-X could reproduce the orbital flight of Apollo 7 (first crewed flight of Apollo) tomorrow if there was a reason to, using the Falcon 9/Dragon system.

OK, I was harsh on the unnamed "planetary scientists" and the ones I know are not like that so should have been less direct in my implied accusation. Sorry about that.

Except that interplanetary missions and NASA in general are not ALL about science. I would even venture a guess that much of the support for NASA's interplanetary programs among the American public (the people paying for it) is based on a romantic vision of "exploration", not hard science. Little add-ons like this, and the on-board DVD's with thousands of people's signatures, don't cost much and add a lot to public support. Unless the planetary scientists are going to fund these missions by themselves they had better be sensitive to their other perceived values beyond the science published in journals read by 0.01% of the American public.

Sounds like the aircraft you are describing is the De Havilland Comet, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Maybe the astronauts know and accept the risks of their chosen profession but their families don't seem to. Google up "Apollo 1 Lawsuit", "Challenger Space Shuttle Settlement" or "Columbia Space Shuttle Settlement". In every case either NASA or a NASA contractor paid off the families, $26.6 million in the Columbia case. Legal actions were initiated after each disaster.

Let me tell you, as someone with a lot of experience fixing cars (most recently, pulled the engine and transmission from my '96 Volvo to fix a transmission input shaft leak), the fact that they aren't as easy to fix is not a problem. That's because they don't need to be fixed nearly as often. The old (make that "classic") musclecars from the 60's and 70's I grew up fixing, swapping engines, etc. needed something all the time -- points replaced, carburetors rebuilt, overhauls at 75,000 miles, brakes rebuilt every 15,000 miles, etc. You haven't lived until you have rebuilt a Quadrajet four barrel carb from 1975 and gotten all the little springs, metering rods, and gaskets back in correctly. Nowadays, except for oil changes, you can pretty much weld the hoods shut for the first 100,000 miles. And they run far better in every respect than the old,"fixable" ones. I do it as a hobby, but nope, I'll take the new cars any day. That Volvo engine pull will be my last. Same goes for electronics -- the old TV's, the "fixable" ones -- every few years it was down to the electronics stores for new tubes, if you could figure out which tube was bad, and didn't electrocute yourself on the high voltage supplies and capacitors in the process -- no thanks. Things are just better now -- if loss of fixability is the price, it's well worth it.

Well, I realize this is going way off topic, but previous executive and management experience/training has not been an indicator of being an effective US President (or good one, whatever the definition of that is). Example number one: G W Bush -- Harvard MBA, campaigned to "put a CEO in the White House", governor of Texas for two terms -- none of that seemed to help much when he hit the presidency. I know, bringing up Bush when discussing Obama's failings is a new kind of Godwin's law, but in this case the facts of the argument are germane.

I going to take shot at this and press my luck, as I've already posted a comment about cosmology which is beyond my real understanding -- but ... The apparent mass increase you refer to is a Special Relativistic effect and Special Relativity only holds strictly in a flat, non-expanding space-time. Once you bring in General Relativity and curved or expanding space-times then your notions from Special Relativity don't hold, especially at cosmological distances. And the relation of velocity to red shift is not the same as in Special Relativity, since the cosmological redshift is caused by an actual expansion of the space between objects which is somewhat different from the notion of just relative velocities of the two observers' (flat) reference frames in Special Relativity. So the short answer is: General Relativity, especially at cosmological distances, is really strange and any intuition you (and I) have from a reasonable understanding of Newtonian physics and Special Relativity don't hold. Sorry, I can't do any better.

I'll probably get busted by some cosmologist for this, but -- there is no "edge" to the Universe, at least not one a photon or anything else can can travel to. For one thing, if you try to look far enough in any direction, from anywhere, you will eventually see space expanding away from you faster than light so the photons at the speed of light can go forever without catching up. More philosophically, because the Universe is "practically" (this is where I will get busted) defined by the space-time manifold which provides the coordinate systems to measure any events in it, there is no definition of an "edge" where there is space-time on one side and something else on the other, at least which anything in this Universe can get to or observe. Any notions of Galilean motion where you go far enough for long enough in one direction and you will eventually get to the end of any bounded region is defeated by the structure of space-time.

So, as a Brit, have you ever visited Dresden? "In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...