"Woah," a coworker says behind me, "look...missiles."
They are sitting on a rack in the dust, probably only the casings in reality. I'm slightly disgusted with my smug sense of pride to not be involved with those devices. The plane ceases to taxi and we begin getting out and getting our equipment.
"Only one person on the stairs at a time," the pilot says calmly. I reach between the netting on the cargo area behind the last seat and walk down the stairs in the door of the plane holding the prototype.
You don't sweat in the desert, you simply suddenly realize that your throat is dry. The sweat evaporates from your body long before you notice it. Thankfully we concluded all the mandatory tests early. We were driving at one point for fun but then a gear box stripped out. This is the perfect failure for a software test bed: completely not software, and the mechanical design was just a quick mock up and never meant to take that kind of damage anyway. We would have run it until it failed anyway, and this is a perfect failure mode.
"So you want to see Dryden then?" Crash asked.
We all nodded.
We weren't badged for Edwards so we wound up slipping in with a tour. One of Crash's friends met up with the group and removed us from it. We wound through corridors until we came out in a large room where a gleaming white robot greeted our eyes.
"This," Crash's friend said, "Is a MQ-9 Preadator B, also known as an MQ-9 Reaper, although we can't have things named Predator and Reaper around NASA so we call it Ikhana."
"And...what's it for?"
"Earth studies," the pilot says, "during the forest fires last year the governor estimates that this device saved 100,000 homes from fire with the data it gathered."
I'm terribly torn about my feelings on the existence of this object. In war we rarely even care to talk about the question of what we are spending money to buy for the troops anymore: we simply brag about how much we are spending. Then, at the same time, we hear reports of troops being killed in Iraq because their Humvees are unarmored.
Who cares about the dollar amount but not overly so much about the result? The manufacturers do. The military industrial complex frightens me in many respects, and the Predator is doubtlessly a product of this complex.
Yet, this is the way things are aren't they? The military develops technology which eventually is adopted and betters the quality of civilian life. This Predator is undoubtably doing good things. If you separate yourself from this cycle do you really lessen war any, or do you just make it so that less technology filters down to the people?
We're walking again into a room where another gleaming white plane greets us. The wings are so long that a spare set of wheels hangs from the undersides of them half way down their length.
"This is a U2, it flies 70,000 feet and... perhaps higher."
Another military plane that does scientiffic work.
Walking out the door to the hanger the heat hits you like a wave. Motion in the distance trains the lens on a coworker's camera to the sky.
"No cameras in that direction," the pilot says, "that's where the F22s are."
Bah-boom
One of my coworkers looks up somewhat incredulously at the sonic boom. The pilot laughs, "You know what that is?"
The pilot doesn't even wait for a response as he looks at the banking fighter in the sky, "That's the sound of freedom."
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