22nd May 2012
A historical day indeed! Spacex launched the first commercial payload towards the International Space Station. (ISS), and I transported my first truly Agricultural load in my second hand Bakkie. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted the Dragon cargo capsule into orbit carrying about 520 Kg of food, scientific equipment and computer hardware. In any good hour, the straight line delivery distance is about 350 Km, although the physics involved forces them to take a roundabout route. Whether the capsule gets close enough to knock on the hatch and deliver the consignment remains to be seen. In any case, the Invoice is going to come to about $133 million.
This morning I slogged for nearly two hours to heave almost as many kilograms of silt out of Boggy Pond onto the bakkie. I haven’t worked out a safe route to drive the pickup into the dam yet, so I had to heave each spade full well over head-height to get it into the load-bay. It’s tough, sweaty, mindless work, so my thoughts tended to wander. Mulling over the Falcon 9 launch, I realised that my pickup can actually carry nearly twice the payload of the Dragon capsule – on the “up” journey anyway. Even at our fuel prices, delivering that load would cost under R400.
Having got that dramatic example of “Horses for Courses” out of the way, I was left with figuring out an energy efficient way to toss dirt into a pickup. In spite of drawing heavily on the best examples of javelin-throwing and shot-putting I’ve seen, I’m not about to qualify as an Olympic dirt-chucker. Not even in the Veterans division!
Unloading at the field near the cabin was marginally easier, but still took me about forty-five minutes, after which I decided that I’d done enough physical work for the day. I needed to take the tail-gate latch apart anyway, because it has become almost impossible to open, but also tends to unlatch on the rough road to town. It wasn’t difficult to repair – just a matter of straightening and greasing the rather tinny components which had been bent out of shape. Getting them out of the confined space and then reassembling them was fiddly enough to keep me busy for the afternoon though.
I’m going to need several more loads to fill both compost bins though… Hmm… Getting the pickup into the dam is essential to improve efficiency, even if I have to remove one of the alien trees near the dam.
One down, more to go...