The Longest Night & Crossing the Rubicon

Trivia

Volume Three and Four side tracked me with the details of commercial and military satellite operation. There are a fair few dead satellites up there but as it would cost more to refuel them than to replace them. Their technology has been superseded anyway and therefore there are two disposal options, up or down. Down requires vastly more fuel to accomplish safely than boosting to a higher orbit but there are two places that spacecraft go to die. A graveyard orbit of about 403km above the Earth and a cemetery, of sorts, 3900 km South-East of Wellington, New Zealand at the following coordinates 43°34′48″S 142°43′12″W. Even if you could dive that deep it would not be advisable to visit. Aside from the exposed nuclear reactors of military satellites that were guided to splashdowns there, it is a toxic dumpsite for chemical weapons and old Soviet nuclear reactors.

I found the potential for new stories lying about everywhere I happened to research. For instance, there was a tiny coral atoll in the Pacific, six hundred miles from anywhere, but a hundred feet deep in inedible crabs, bad tempered sea birds and nitrogen rich Guano. (Bird poo.)

That atoll became at various times, a pirate base, a significant fertilizer resource, a retreat, a military base, the scene of several shipwrecks, and also of serial rape and murder.

The atoll’s sole financial asset is long gone, but the crabs remain. (Isn’t that just like life?)

French Guiana was a place I knew virtually nothing of until an attack upon the ESA facility by either China or Russia seemed to be a necessity. It is a place that was much fought over by the old European empires.

When Wolfe brought an end to the French rule in North America, France was in a quandary as to where to relocate those colonists who wanted to leave. Return to France was not an option for a bunch of losers, but they were good Catholics in the clutches of the heathen Protestant British, they had to have their souls protected if nothing else. French Guiana was the eventual site for those who had lost ‘New France’ to end their days.

Has anyone seen ‘Papillon’?

Henri Charrière, ‘Papillon’, was a prisoner in the colony but not on Devils Island, that was a fabrication. Only people convicted of treason went to Devils Island.(Good movie though!)

There are whole websites dedicated to fans of Henri Charrière, and discussion groups debating the type of crimes the fans would consider committing in order for them to be incarcerated and live out their fantasy of being a Henri Charrière, and escaping from somewhere on coconuts.

Suggestions that, 1/ The book was intended as a novel, and not a memoir, 2/ That Henri is dead (Born in 1904 so he’d be pushing 110 at the time of writing), or 3/ That he really was a murderer and deserved to be a convict, can lead to expulsion from the various groups.

Papillon makes life imprisonment Cool!

The F14 Tomcat was without doubt a phenomenal war bird and one that arguably still had a decade or so left of useful life. Aircraft, like champion boxers, one day meet the young hungry wannabe who hands them their ass. No one stays at the top indefinitely. The mystery is however, why did Dick Cheyney order the F14D production halted when it was still on top of its game, and why was it so important to have the tooling destroyed so none could ever be built again, without a huge cost implication?

The F111D of the Royal Australian Air Force was quite iconic but getting a little long in the tooth. Of the forty three aircraft in the fleet, eight have crashed since 1973, twelve have been sold to museums or put on static display, but twenty three were chopped up and buried.

Now that wasn’t very polite!

(Since the publication of edition 1 I have since learned that the original purchase agreement specifically prohibited resale of the aircraft by Australia and consequently the sale of the aircraft to a major arms dealer was cancelled after the US Government intervened. Apparently the aircraft could only be returned to the USA or rendered permanently unusable. Those they could not give away to museums and airbases as gate features were stripped and buried.)