Tech that's just wrong

The internal combustion engine: Vroom vroom
Don't get us wrong: we're no ecovangelists, like those hippies over at SmartPlanet. Our objection to the internal combustion engine is nothing to do with greenhouse gases and Kyoto protocols, or even road accidents, speed cameras or Jeremy Clarkson.

The internal combustion engine is wrong because of how it works. It works by igniting flammable material. It's a little bomb! Unless it's the engine on the space shuttle, in which case it's actually a very big bomb, with some scientists strapped on top.

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe suggests that the US was well on the way to developing a space plane, when time ran out and the Russians made it into space first. Desperate not to lose ground in the nascent space race, President Eisenhower diverted all the money into the fastest way up, rather than the best. And so the idea was born to simply strap monkeys and fighter pilots to the biggest rockets they could build, light the touchpaper and stand well back. Which is, more or less, still the way it's done today. And that's just wrong.

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