Alan Bond (engineer): Difference between revisions

| caption =Alan Bond is notable for being one of the key people behind the [[Skylon (spacecraft)|Skylon]] spaceplane.

Alan Bond is an engineer, with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He worked on liquid rocket engines, principally the [[Rolls-Royce RZ.2|RZ.2]] (liquid oxygen / kerosene) and the RZ.20 (liquid oxygen / liquid hydrogen) at Rolls -Royce under the tutelage of [[Val Cleaver]], and he was also involved with flight trials of the Blue Streak at [[Woomera, South Australia|Woomera]].

In the 1980s, he was one of the creators of the [[HOTOL]] space plane project, along with [[Bob Parkinson (aerospace engineer)|Dr. Bob Parkinson]] of British Aerospace. Alan Bond brought a [[precooled jet engine]] design he had invented to the [[HOTOL]] project, and this became the Rolls -Royce [[RB545]] rocket engine.

In a self-published book<ref name="BondOther2008">Bond, A. and M. Hempsell, 2008, ''A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event'', WritersPrintshop, London, United Kingdom. 128 pp. {{ISBN|1-904623-64-6}}</ref> co-authored with [[Mark Hempsell]], Bond claimed to have deciphered an Assyrian clay tablet dated to 700 BC that they argued might describe an asteroid strike causing a landslide at [[Umhausen|Köfels]] in [[Tyrol (state)|Tyrol]] in 3123 BC. They relate this to the destruction of [[Sodom and Gomorrah]].<ref name="Fleming2008a">Fleming, N., 2008, [https://web.archive.org/web/20080403043352/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/03/31/scitablet131%2Fearth%2F2008%2F03%2F31%2Fscitablet131.xml ''Clay tablet holds clue to asteroid mystery''], Daily Telegraph</ref> The landslide is normally dated to about 9800 years ago,<ref>{{Cite journal | last = Prager | first = Christoph |author2= Zangerl, Christian|author3= Nagler, Thomas | title = Geological controls on slope deformations in the Köfels rockslide area (Tyrol, Austria) | journal = Austrian Journal of Earth Sciences | volume = 102/2 | location = Vienna | url = http://www.univie.ac.at/ajes/archive/volume_102_2/prager_et_al_ajes_v102_2.pdf }}</ref> long before the tablet was recorded and over 4500 years before the Bristol researchers' date.<ref name="PeterOther1998">Kubik, P. W., S. Ivy-Ochs, J. Masarik, M. Frank, and C. Schluchter, 1998, ''10Be and 26Al production rates deduced from an instantaneous event within the dendro-calibration curve, the landslide of Köfels, Otz Valley, Austria''. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. vol. 161, no. 1-4, pp. 231–241</ref> Bond and Hempsell have suggested that there was contamination, a claim that has been denied by other research.<ref name="Ivy-OchsOthers1998">Ivy-Ochs, S., H. Heuberger, P. W. Kubik, H. Kerschner, G. Bonani, M. Frank, and C. Schluchter, 1998, ''The age of the Kofels event. Relative, 14C and cosmogenic isotope dating of an early Holocene landslide in the central Alps (Tyrol, Austria)''. Zeitschrift für Gletscherkunde und Glazialgeologie. vol. 34, pp. 57–70.</ref> The impact theory had already been proposed in 1936 by the Austrian scientist [[Franz Eduard Suess]] and later on by [[Alexander Tollmann]], who hypothesized impacts in around 7640 BC and 3150 BC, respectively. The question of whether an impact caused the landslide has been researched by others and no evidence was found for an asteroid, meteorite or comet, and geologists consider it to have been caused by other factors such as 'deep creep'.<ref name=" Deutsch Others1994">Deutsch, A., C. Koeberl, J.D. Blum, B.M. French, B.P. Glass, R. Grieve, P. Horn, E.K. Jessberger, G. Kurat, W.U. Reimold, J. Smit, D. stoffler, and S.R. Taylor, 1994, ''The impact-flood connection: Does it exist?'' Terra Nova. vol. 6, pp. 644–650.</ref>