By Park Kyu-tae
A nonstop flight from Incheon to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, is a trip that will take you around the world. And these days, it is a common experience for everyone.
The distance between the two airports is 6,882 miles (11,051 kilometers) and takes about 14 hours depending on wind currents. The eastbound routes take a shorter time on average, flying off the prevailing westerly winds and the spin of the earth.
At any rate, the typical cruise speed of the plane is 0.85 Mach _ close to the speed of sound. Having boarded the Boeing 747-400 jet, I, at all times, stand in awe of the vastness of the fuselage and how the huge aircraft jumps into the air.
The total passenger capacity of the typical 3-class configuration is 416 persons and the thrust is more or less 100,000 horsepower comparable to the roughly 1,000 horsepower of medium-sized cars. In reference to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S., the fuel cost of a round trip to New York is in excess of $1 million at present.
Fuel-efficient jets are crucial in cutting costs with the constant fuel price hikes. A penny saved is a penny earned. We have a saying ``Even wring a dry towel to get a droplet of water.'' The world is competing to make profitable airplanes such as the Airbus A380 to supersonic jets.
A plane filled with a passengers, and flying the shortest route to the destination with the friendliest winds is the most economical. The shortest distance between two global points is defined by a circle depicted by the meeting point of the surface of a sphere with a plane passing through the center of the globe. That is why a plane traveling to New York flies to Japan, to Alaska, northern Canada and to JFK but its navigated by computers automatically.
Imagine we are flying straight over the Pacific Ocean, we hardly see anything except oceangoing vessels and raging waves.
At the end of the Choseon Kingdom, Hong Youn-sik (1855-1884) went to the U.S. as a deputy ambassador in 1883. He sailed by ship and it probably took a month or so for him to arrive in Washington.
Self-made men like Dr. You Il-han (1895-1971) followed suit. In the mid-1950s after the Korean War the U.S. army offered Korean scholars and students to take an LST, a large military landing ship, back to Korea. The scientists and academics returned to Korea and contributed to setting up an industrialized nation and opened the way to a surprising information age.
As I travel over the earth I am under a hallucination as if I am an astronaut orbiting our great planet. Paying attention to the earth, it is as small as an atom in an ocean in comparison to the universe. For the most part, toxic contaminations and shortage of clean energies might ruin our living soil.
Over the course of history it has been man’s greatest desire to hunt more, to take secure bigger lands, to desire the deep-sea, and to look to space. Certainly we forgot ``Enough is as good as a feast.''
Regarding a recent KAIST forum on the present and future of aerospace development in Korea, Dr. Paik Hong-yul, president of Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), gave a presentation and pointed out the progress in space programs and the success of multipurpose satellites, but currently Korea is in Group C, a satisfactory grade among the world's space programs. Nevertheless, Korea is aiming to rank within the top 10 countries in space technology in the 2000s.
Interestingly, Dr. Choi Kyu-hong, professor of astrodynamics at Yonsei University, revealed in the discussion that helium-3 is in great abundance on the moon accumulated by solar wind over billions of years, but it is rare on Earth as the atmosphere absorbs it all.
When helium-3 goes through a fusion reaction with deuterium oxide (heavy water), without radioactive contamination, it produces 18.4 MeV of clean energy. This is more or less the equivalent to a hydrogen bomb with the same mass.
Having plenty of heavy water on Earth if we could bring helium-3 over here then we might be able to resolve a long-cherished dream to develop environmentally friendly energy. Furthermore, the moon has evidence of water and we could construct a helium energy factory there and build an intermediate space station to refuel ships to dispatch to other satellites.
This is now not at all coincidental that the U.S., China, Japan and India are in fierce competition to explore the moon. We are familiar with the digital divide but soon there could be a space divide. In the course of nature, the ruler of space is the master of the world.
Once through my lucid dream I realized the plane had touched down at JFK and I was now in America.