El Paso’s history is, in part, best told through the army base Ft. Bliss, and by extension, its airfield. Goes back at least 400 years, probably much further than that, and with a timeline like that, modern-day airplanes are excluded.
One of the jokes off my joke list, one of those “funny tidbits” that’s been around for years in one version or another is about the space the shuttle. I’ve long since lost the original document, but I’m sure it’s out there, on someone’s web page, someplace. It’s about getting stuck in rut, and why things are done the way they are.
See: the space shuttle uses two booster rockets, one on either side. According to what I’ve been told, a single booster rocket would be more effective, so why the smaller twins?
It goes something like this….
The booster rockets are built in California and have to be shipped by train to Florida. Train tunnels in the Rockies are a certain width. The original train tracks are I could be wrong about this 4 feet, 8 inches in width. The booster rocket size is determined by the gauge of the railroad. The gauge of the railway was determined by the standard, set in England, during the 17th Century. In England, the width of the railroad was determined by Roman Engineers, from the First Century. Their roads had to accommodate a Roman Chariot, two horses wide, and that width became the Roman Standard. So the design of the Space Shuttle was influenced by Roman Hierarchy and engineering that is over 2,000 years old. Talk about what happens when a bureaucracy gets stuck in a rut….
This came up because we had a quiet dinner in a restaurant close the hotel and the airport, and the entranceway was decorated with pictures from the Blue Angels, various dignitaries, and, of course, Shuttle Pilots and crews.
Natrually, the first point I was trying to figure out was why the place was called “Griggs,” instead of something a little more Hispanic in tone. The Sagittarius server was no help with that question. But the food was good, except for one of those oddities, cole slaw was served as a side dish instead of anything else. Not bad, just different. Near as I could tell, that went back to the name for the place.
