Hulu.com is a brand-new, free, ad-supported streaming video service which combines content from more than fifty providers including FOX, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and more. Although Hulu has been live since October, the site just emerged today from its private beta-testing phase and is now open to everyone–as long as you live in the United States.

Hulu lets you watch full-length feature films like The Big Lebowski or The Usual Suspects, or recent television episodes of Family Guy or The Office. Plus there’s a fair number of canceled cult classics like Firefly.

Both shows and movies are interrupted with brief commercial breaks, but these can be –ahem– suppressed, and they are definitely less intrusive than those on regular commercial television. Content on Hulu is certainly limited, but they’re just getting started, and I must say, with respect to the movie selection, I’d be inclined to browse Hulu for decent flicks before I’ll suffer the crap from the Netflix “Watch Instantly” archive.

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“Home isn’t what it used to be.”

It’s all over the place, in every sense, as more and more of us are. We live on planes, in fast-food courts and hotel lobbies. True to the spirit of the times, I haven’t had a place of my own for almost a decade now; I simply shuttle back and forth between my mother’s house on one side of the Pacific and my girlfriend’s apartment on the other. The only piece of property I’ve ever owned is inward – in the friends and loyalties and values I carry around with me, as a snail transports his house or the Konjo people of Indonesia bear their shelters on stilts, centipede-like. More and more of us, I think, are going tribal – either living in the crevices between cultures like jet-age Bedouins, in homes as mobile as our spirits, or hiding out in the corners of the world in flamboyant, idiosyncratic fancies that look like nothing on Earth (almost).

~ excerpted from “Jet-Age Bedouins,” by Pico Iyer, WIRED, Aug, 1998.

Somewhere in our mid-twenties, we each decided we’d had enough of life on the ground, so we came to flight school. We left behind our old lives and our good friends and our familiar towns. We abandoned jobs and careers that, for reasons we didn’t understand, had become empty. We packed our cars and headed south, to Vero Beach.

We spent most of our time over the next several years at a large and intimidating place called FlightSafety Academy, with its carefully manicured lawns, perfectly polished airplanes and military-like discipline. Following a time-tested curriculum, its Air Corps roots still palpable, we learned to fly airplanes, and, perhaps more importantly, we began to understand the lore of what it meant to be an aviator.

Training was relentless and challenging. There were endless classes, sweat-drenching hours in low-level flight, and many failures. We began to bond in the off-hours, drinking Coronas in seaside cafes or grilling burgers in the warm, breezy evenings. Always the talk was of flying.

When finally we believed ourselves masters, we learned to teach it. Everything we thought we knew was painstakingly revisited, and thus we discovered the depths of our own ignorance. Slowly, the secrets became clear. The science of aerodynamics was no longer just a topic to be endured and shoved aside, but a state of mind, and the wing not just an appendage on the fuselage, but a part of one’s soul.

Then someone flew a jetliner into the World Trade Center, and everything stopped. We were officially grounded for a while, but even when those restrictions were lifted, there was very little flying to be had. The great engine of the entire industry had ceased to operate. Airline pilots were furloughed, hiring froze, and we felt the backlash all the way at the bottom of the ladder. We were told to wait.

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by Robert C. Truax, January 1999

Copyright © 2000 Aerospace America.   Reprinted with permission.

The story of turbopump rocket development is an interesting one of trial and error. Many sidelines were explored before the objectives of light weight and high performance were finally attained with the main engines for the Shuttle. Russian rocket development followed a somewhat similar path, and the end result was very similar: a topping cycle with high combustion chamber pressures.

But turbopump engines, whether high pressure or low, were a mistake from the very beginning. They simply are not worth what they cost in time and money. In all the early development efforts, pump-fed systems were preceded by a pressure-fed version. In every case, the mission was accomplished and the program goals met before the development of the pump system was completed. After the X-I broke the sound barrier with its pressure-fed rocket engine, who ever heard of the D-558-2 — powered by a pump-fed engine?

Technically simple two-stage launchers with pressure-fed engines and ocean recovery offer the economical operations that have escaped our high-technology turbopump rockets for more than four decades.

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