Social historians often measure progress since the Industrial Revolution in strange ways, tonnes of steel might seem understandable but tractor production per capita is actually an indicator of how important transport development is in the progress of a nation’s growth. Accordingly, Stalin was a major player in tractor production, boasting the kind of tractor manufacturing volumes in a decade that would normally take a century. Its only when the quantities are considered that the value of comparing tractor production volumes become meaningful, build 10 tractors and quit and history remembers you as nothing more than an ex-tractor fan. For the serious enthusiast however building a million tractors doesn’t just propel you into the tractor manufacturers top ten but by the way you just transformed your economy from agricultural to industrial. Like Stephenson’s steam engines you just put 20 people out of work per tractor but not into hunger. Those 20 went to work in the big smoke, creating big cities and modern economies and the general kniving that drives the global economy now.

I’m furious, we are still driving tractors with big exhaust pipes and planes aren’t much better. Concorde’s gone and now the shuttle goes on the scrap heap. NASA – the world’s greatest technology organisation in history has reverted back to inline stage rockets updated from the Apollo program. Literally updated, they are using the rockets commissioned by Werner Von Braun (opposite) for Apollo before his retirement as Director of NASA in 1975, before the Shuttle era. Werner developed the V2 rocket for Hitler, he had even designed a piloted V2 for use against New York. What fuel does the new NASA space rocket fly on – same as all the others – liquid hydrogen and oxygen. It’s a bomb, Werner always said that space exploration would not be feasible until a superior form of propulsion could be developed. The Communists, preferring centrally planned madness to the free market, tried cyanide based fuels which gave them more bang for their buck, so much bang in fact that it wiped out over 100 leading Russian Rocket Scientists in one tragically failed launch. The Russian Rocketeers were expected to observe nearby to prove their patriotism and faith in their work. The Russian space program

never recovered, although the heart of the Russian Space Program lives on at the Communist inspired Space City. In the space race, the Americans spent a million dollars developing a ball point pen to write in space and in the 60’s that was good buck. Cunningly, and symptomatic of shortages in Communist Russia they decided to go with the proven technology of a pencil. To this day, the advantages of using this versatile scribing implement continue to keep Space City in business. You see there’s one thing your rugged, fuel starved comrade isn’t going to do, and that is over-rely on his shiny Intel quad-core processor to design your space ship. Oh no, Vlad is old school and besides, the software to divide up the chores between four processors isn’t even on the market yet.

Back to the question at hand, Dude, where’s my [Sky] Car? You see the Russians did something peculiar with their space program that the West hadn’t counted on, probably because its completely ridiculous. The Russians conducted their Space Program on paper, literally, they wrote it out long hand and they did their designs on paper. We didn’t see it coming.

Now paper is good and bad, its good because you can’t just print out any old nonsense and stick it in front of the first minister for signing and end up with a bashed up Beagle on Mars. Doing things by longhand has certain other advantages, it avoids certain mistakes like the British collaboration on another failed Mars program because we didn’t tell NASA the measurements weren’t in imperial, oops. You see if you had to write it down on the same bit of paper rather than just email it you probably wouldn’t have these problems. Anyway, Space City remains anecdotally to this day, the world’s preferred design house for Space Ships because they actually do the long-hand working out themselves rather than preferring the Western Business Practise of “ Didn’t you read the email I sent on that”. Good old Vlad. At the end of the Deming Cycle of perpetual improvement will we conclude that the piece of papyrus is the ultimate central file and its wireless.