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But no one doesn’t suffer. So the degree to which you can be aware of your own humanity is the degree to which you can accept, with open eyes, your suffering. To be grateful for your suffering is to be grateful for your humanity, because what else are you going to do—say, “No thanks”? It’s there. “Smile and accept,” said Mother Teresa. And she was talking to people who had it rough. That’s not how you make jokes, though.
Everyone Loves You When You're Dead
Neil Strauss
Kelly was pleased with our progress. On the drawing boards was a design for the dart-shaped CL-400 that would fly at 100,000 feet at Mach 2.5 with a 3,000-mile range. The body was enormous, dwarfing any airplane on the drawing boards. On the playing field at Yankee Stadium, for example, the tail would cover home plate and the nose nudge the right-field foul pole, 296 feet away. It was more than twice the size of the B-52 bomber. And the reason the body was so gigantic was that it would carry a fuel load of liquid hydrogen weighing 162,850 pounds, making it the world’s largest thermos bottle. Flying at more than twice the speed of sound, the outer shell of the body would blaze from heat friction above 350 degrees F while the inside skin would hold the frosty fuel at temperatures of minus 400 F—an 800-degree temperature differential that represented an awesomely complicated thermodynamic problem. Undaunted, Kelly promised to have a prototype ready in eighteen months. The Air Force allocated $96 million, and we were off and running. The code name was Suntan, and it was classified above top secret. That was a first even for us. Only twenty-five people at the Skunk Works were cleared to work on it. And around the time that the U-2 overflights of Russia revealed that no bomber gap existed, the CIA dropped a bombshell by presenting Eisenhower with strong indications that the Russians were crashing development of a hydrogen-powered airplane of their own. They had released from a Siberian gulag a brilliant scientist named Pyotr Kapitsa, who had been arrested by Stalin in 1946 for refusing to work on their atomic bomb development. Kapitsa was Russia’s foremost expert on liquid hydrogen. He was now back in Moscow working on a top secret program. Allen Dulles and Dick Bissell agreed that it was likely the Russians were rushing development of a liquid hydrogen–propelled interceptor that could easily climb to the U-2’s heights and shoot it down. The CIA came to Kelly and asked his opinion. “They might be working their tails off to get this airplane into production,” he told Dulles, “but they won’t have a prototype finished in less than three years or even longer.”
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
The phone company at the time had a bigger problem on their hands. Captain Crunch cereal was giving away free plastic whistles inside each box. Someone discovered that if you blew the whistle into the telephone receiver it was the same frequency phone repairmen used to make calls without being charged. So for a while, thousands of people from all
The Me Generation... By Me
Ken Levine
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