We had a fancy dinner at the faculty club for the Mercury MESSENGER people, who were here for a team meeting. I gave a talk about volcanoes despite my bad cold which I was certain must be a strain of the swine flu.

I got to talking with Dr. Chapman, a senior researcher out at the Southwest Institute, and I learned that he's secretly a Trekkie and that it was secretly his birthday.

After dinner, Nikita Kruschev's son Sergei (who is a research fellow at Brown) gave a talk about the Soviet Union during the space age.

You see, after World War II, the Americans and the Soviets divided up all of the German rocket scientists and carted them off to their respective countries. At the time German rocketry far outpaced anything that the Allies had invented. These germans became major players in the development of US cruise and ballistic missile theory. The Germans in the Soviet Union were taken to a resort on a remote island in the middle of nowhere (better than prison!) and given the same task. However, the lead Soviet rocket scientist at the time resented the presence of the Germans. They would submit their reports directly to him. He would decide that their plans were "inferior" and put them in a file, only to steal ideas from them later. Soon enough Kruschev announced that the Soviets were turning out missiles "like sausages". Shortly after this, President Kennedy offered to start a joint space program between the Americans and the Soviets to go to the Moon. It was the early 60s. Kruschev declined, knowing that if they started working with the Americans on the space program, they would have to reveal that they only had three missiles, not the hundreds that they had insinuated that they had. Sergei hypothesized that this was one of the great mistakes made by his father.
In what is perhaps a great irony, the Soviet nuclear engineers gave the rocket scientists a minimum weight for the warheads to go on nuclear missiles that was many times what the American warheads weighed. The Soviet rocket engineers had to engineer a rocket that would carry this ridiculous weight, and to this day the Russians possess the strongest rockets. The US still purchases rockets from the Russians in order to send up their heaviest payloads.

After the dinner I downed my untouched glass of wine in one gulp and Zebo and the Welshman took me to the graduate center bar, where the Welshman made fun of me for talking to my "boyfriend" Dr. Chapman during the "entire dinner" while Zebo bought me a very tall Hefeweisen. The Hefeweisen and two Mike's Hard Lemonades later, the Welshman walked us home. We dropped off Zebo at her house and walked to my house, where I hugged him, walked away, came back, hugged him again, stifled my cough to save him from certain death by swine flu, exhorted him to get home safely, and then went inside and tried to figure out why the Germans were such excellent rocket engineers and how exactly it was that Madame Sobriety herself had become drunk on a Wednesday.

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» Jason (178.173.128.11) on 2011-06-08 10:05:09

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