On Wed, 02 Jun 2004 21:29:48 GMT, "nauga" wrote:

Bill Phillips wrote:

BTW - what did YOU do that weekend?

...Would you believe that I was with Jim
Campbell at Mohave just as Burt Rutan's boys were
about to make a 55 second burn and attained
212,000 feet msl at apogee in their space
ship?

Cool story but irrelevant to the question at hand
since there was more than a week between the two events.

Spaceship One Flight #3, the high altitude flight: 13 May 04
The weekend Michael asked about: 21-23 May 04

Related: The first space attempt is scheduled for 21 June
and is open to the public. Don't need a press pass or
an invite to be JAFO.

Dave 'calendar boy' Hyde

Yep, you are right Nagua it was the week before. When you get my age,
you are lucky if you can remember what year it is or if you took a
**** today or not.

Since all of you find my life so interesting as you sit at home and do
nothing, I have to apologize for getting the days confused. I should
have known that some anal retentive engineer would take issue with
such a post and bounce me on it. Here's an accounting of my time. Of
course I feel obligated to do this for all of you who have no lives.

Actually after the Mohave run, my buddy Jim Campbell and I were at
that Air Traffic controller's convention here in Vegas. Those were
the days following Burt's run. However, you won't expect this, so I
have to tell you the following:

The famous weekend of the PJY picnic I was in Sierra Vista, Arizona
just south of Tomestone on the Mexican border working with some
engineers and the Border Patrol on the design of special seismic
sensors. Since all of this is the business of RAH, I must pontificate
further.

I have a great solution to protecting the border using R-44 Raven
II's. The problem is, that it doesn't cost enough. Homeland Security
hands out billion dollar grants like popcorn but 100 , R-44 police
helicopters at $500k each puts 100 observation platforms in the air
for $50 million. It's just too cheap to get their attention. Also,
you can run them 2000 hours a year for another million each. So, for
$50 million in equipment and about another $100 million per year to
operate them, you seal the Mexican-U.S. border.

During Viet Nam, I had buddies who flew P-3's over the Ho Chi Mhin
trail dropping sonobouys. The sonobouys had parachutes on them and
would land in the upper canopy of the jungle and start recording
sound. We'd fly back by the next day and interrogate them. In this
way we could find out where the gooks were building up for a big
offensive.

The borders can be monitored in the same way. You bury a geophone
every 500 feet along the whole border. When you get a hit, you fly
out in a ($0.5 million) Robie R-44 instead of a ($8 million) Black
Hawk, and take action. you get 16 aerial platforms for the price of
one that way. You can even use the internet as your relay network.
The geophones transmit to a repeater that sends the data up to Hughes
99 west and puts it on the Internet. In that way, you can listen to
the whole border at once. No fences, no walls, and even if they
tunnel, the geophones will hear them. You don't even need to put
geophones along the entire border, you can start out putting them just
at the hot spots

If Homeland Security wanted to put these sensors along the entire
border, it would only cost about $4 million bucks. That plus the
helicopters which are all factory equipped with FLIR and video
xmitters to ground stations, gives you live video of the border over
the Internet too. It's all so simple because of the Internet, it's
actually a trivial thing to implement.

The real problem with my solution is that it just doesn't cost enough.
Even if you include Canada you are only looking at about $150 million
in helicopters and $200 million per year to opperate them. It's just
too cheap and DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security) would never buy it
because they want to give away billion dollar grants to study the
problem. Others want the borders to be open and that's why there are
2 illegal aliens coming across the Mexican border each minute of each
day.

So, go figure.

And that's what I was doing and where I was on the weekend of the
famous annual PJY picnic. I hope this meets with all of your
approvals. I was trying to do something positive for my country, but
I have no idea how much I did or how much they listened.

BWB