An Oasis

Regress: The End of Concorde

The furore about Concorde is hitting home with me for some reason. I think it is because we live in an age of technological progress evidenced by ever increasing speed and efficiency, Moores Law holds that computers double in power every couple of years (the succession of Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IIII so far seems to hold it to be more or less true). Cars get faster, use less fuel, ride smoother, have more functionality. My first modem was 1200bps in one direction, 300 in the other! Then I got a 2400bps, 9.6, 14.4, 28.8, then 56k now ADSL at 512k, what once took hours now minutes, what once took minutes now takes seconds. It's a way of life and the Concorde thing is just fubar. Sure it might have been uneconomical but it was Cool. And that it is now retired is not cool at all. We've gone from supersonic to subsonic and the flame of progress in the skies has been blown out by the cruelness of economic reality. And thats not right and I'm not happy :-(

The age of grand conceptions,
The "cable of the deep!"
It "snapped," but we will mend it,
We have no time to weep.
The great Pacific Railroad!
'Twill not be long before
The railroad cars are flying (hieing),
From the golden shore.


From The Age of Progress, 1860

Posted by Paul at October 25, 2003 06:51 PM |