Retro Rocket

There's news out that India has test launched a mini space shuttle mounted on a rocket. This is just a prototype: the real one will be much bigger, similar to the American Space Shuttle. But building a shuttle isn't too trendy: the US is currently borrowing the (disposable) Russian Soyuz capsule, while working on building their own new spacecraft which is a throwback to the old Apollo design. And the relatively new Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft is a simple disposable similar to Soyuz.

So the Indians may be swimming against the tide. The Space Shuttle concept used to be popular: The Soviets built one (then quickly cancelled it.) And the Europeans and Japanese looked into building small shuttles. But the idea faded.

I guess it's because the American shuttle was disappointing, what with its accidents, expense, and overall failure to make space travel easy and routine. But I don't know that it's necessarily such an inherently bad idea. Whenever I've read anything about the shuttle's design, I've always been amazed at how the expectations where so out-of-line with the actual use. For instance, everyone involved had the assumption it would be going into space at least every week. But the reality was that it never got more frequent than once a month.

Also, the military was heavily involved in the design. You might think that would be because it's the U.S. and the military has to be involved in everything, but it was actually a political play to get congressional support for the Shuttle. The assumption was that shuttles would be constantly needed to launch new military satellites, so the Air Force specified minimum performance requirements. The reality was that there was little military use: disposable rockets were cheaper for launching satellites, and there was never much need for satellites to be launched on a quick ad hoc basis.

The point is that the Space Shuttle was designed for reasons that never came to pass, with abilities that were never used. Though it had to be built with those needs in mind, otherwise it never would have been approved. Confused? Welcome to the American government. So I wonder: if they had an accurate idea of what the Shuttle would be used for, and the political backing to build that, how would that have changed the design, and could they have come up with something far more efficient than what we actually ended up with?

I think it's possible that you could do a better job. The shuttle was always going to have difficulties because of the lack of flights that prevented economies of scale. But combine a nice simple shuttle with the SpaceX self-landing booster and you could have a new level of easy access to space.

Sub(stantial Con)fusion

Many people have observed that whenever someone starts a sentence with, "This isn't racist, but..." then you know that the rest of the sentence is going to be totally racist. But I'm hoping to be the first person to start a sentence that way and not be racist. Here it goes:

This isn't racist, but I've noticed that a lot of Subway® franchises are run by people of Indian heritage, or elsewhere in Southern Asia. What's up with that? Again, to emphasize: not racist, since I have no problem with anyone running a Subway. I'm just curious, since it seems surprising.

Of course, it's common for immigrants to set up a restaurant; it makes sense, since you come to a new land, and you don't know much about the customs and traditions. So you take advantage of what you do know, which is your own culture. That's a win-win, because they get established in their new home, and everyone around them gets to experience a new culture. But subs? Don't get me wrong; I enjoy both Subway and Indian food. But you've got to admit that on the spectrum of human food, they're at opposite ends. So I'm wondering how people say, "Let's introduce people to our marvelous culinary culture, with its elaborate language of spices... Nah, on second thought, let's make sandwiches with cold cuts."

I had always hoped this would lead to Indian influence in the subs, and at last, we have a butter chicken sub. So I rushed out and bought one. But I hadn't considered that of course this means I'm likely ordering it from someone intimately familiar with Indian culture, so I'm going to look like the Ignorant White Cultural Appropriator. Or at the very least, I'm going to break her heart when she realizes my sandwich will be such a mangled version of her culture. I mean, what appropriate toppings can you choose for a butter chicken sub out of what's available at Subway? You can't just put mayo on it. Raita isn't available as a sauce, so I chose Ranch dressing as the closest thing, and then felt very guilty over it (though it did go surprisingly well; I recommend it.) So it was weird, but we survived, both I and the Indian Subcontinent. I'll now feel confident ordering the butter chicken sub in the future, whoever makes it.
 
However it's become obvious that this is the direction that popular food is taking, where each culture is represented by one dish which becomes internationally famous. Then we think of that food as being the representative of its entire culinary culture. Don't sample all of Thai food, just try Pad Thai. And then we pick and choose combinations of those things and create new cosmopolitan abominations. For India, the dish is butter chicken. Sorry vindaloo, you're out of luck. For Canada, poutine is emerging as our representative. Want to put them together? Bam! There you go.