As would I !
Powers said:
Seems I misread what was stated. Carry on.
OK… 22 replies and everyone so far is FAIL. The OP doesn’t take exception to the use of the term “sadist”, but rather to the term “moron”.
IMO, anyone that thinks it’s a good idea, or even an acceptable idea, to drop 2 living, flightless animals from 800 feet up, is a moron. Just as anyone who thinks it’s a good idea, or an acceptable one even, to dry the baby in the microwave is a moron, or… I’m sure you can come up with your own examples. Stupid people do stupid things for stupid reasons, and we can safely call those people morons.
I may have initially missed it but I think posts #5 and #7 address that very point.
You may now grade yourself for reading comprehension.
It’s not necessarily “stupid” at all. It’s deliberately mean, or it’s recklessly so, but meaness isn’t limited to people with less intelligence, sad to say.
Sometimes, even Vice-Presidents are mean. :dubious:
Either this story is apocryphal or no one involved had ever been in an enclosed space with a scared cat. I’m going for the former. I have a great deal of difficulty believing that any one would be so stoopid as to not understand that releasing a live cat into a fighter cockpit would result in total panic and much clawing and that the fighter would be thereby endangered.
Yes, but if true, science was the true winner because now we know for certain what a cat will do in zero g. I hope those smart-thinking boys got a raise.
Ummm your post is almost identical to mine at #14… so I don’t think you actually read all of the 22 posts that you deem FAILED… later pointed out by Gyrate…
Neither of them got up enough speed to take off, I notice.
Powers &8^]
In the days before the internet, when fact-checking was difficut - pine trees polluted more than cars, my friend’s uncle had a 200-mpg Ford, NASA faked the moon landing so OJ never made it to Mars, and some guy with a hook was terrorizing the neighbourhood lovers’ lane where a cement-filled Cadillac was parked.
Still, it’s a good story, worth repeating for the laughs. Especially when the scientist tells the pilot “then just release the cat…”
There’s a current commercial for howstuffworks.com that shows a cat in a customized scuba suit, which I guess is a fairly good approximation of zero-g, or at least NASA considers (or once considered) it so.
The cat’s not really doing much of anything.
Yes, NASA routinely uses a pool for astronaut training. Neutral buoyancy is the principle of adding balloons or weights such that an object floats completely submerged at a constant height. The water supports the weight and resembles zero gravity in some respects. The biggest difference is the drag from the water preventing as easy of movement, and inertial effects aren’t quite the same.
The other problem is, you will still have the residual effect of gravity; your inner ears will know which way is up; nasal fluids etc. will figure out which way they’re going… the cat in the scuba suit will probably feel that it is resting on some cat-shaped bed that is holding it up.
I suppose for exercises like assembling space stations, or repairing satellites, it will give some good practice to float in a pool. But for the experience of free fall, probably nothing beats free fall.
YouTube vid on zero gravity cat:
There’s some footage of an astronaut or scientist trying to shake the cat loose from her arm.
Scientists observed four types of movement during kitty free fall, presumably a reflection of cat righting reflex.
They’re flinging that cat pretty hard - must be dog lovers. It also look like a declawed cat. In the vomit comet. I guessed they learned from the first iteration of the experiment.
You can see where it’s winding itself around a string or something, several times - it’s doing the V-Roll maneuver to change orientation, IIRC the Scientfic American article. Bend body about 45 degrees, roll both ends at the same time or whatever it was - a trick to changing orientation in zero-G.