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http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/02/paulbrown

Oh I love this one.  I may call Lockheed to see what the status is, because the original article is from the turn of 2k, which puts it a touch out of date.

But it’s “clever”.  I love clever.  I love the idea of re-purposing things, of taking a technology designed for a single type of efficiency and adapting it for another.  I feel there is no f*cking reason that we can’t get our sh*t together and fix things when we break them.  That’s what we DO.  As a species, we solve problems.  If we can’t adapt, we make things adapt.

At the same time, I am fascinated by what goes WRONG when you try this as well.  This seems like a perfectly reasonable plan.  Laying down tree seeds instead of mines.  It was reportedly in testing and working well, the engineering had been done, the plans had been laid.

And then *poof*.  It’s gone.  Not another word.

I’ve got reasonably strong Google-fu, so if there is anything publicly available out there, I ought to be able to find it.  But nothing, nada.

Now I know it’s never pleasant to have to go online, or in front of a board, or to your parents or boss or best friend and report that this *really* cool expensive idea just didn’t pan out.  Fail fast and silently, that’s the Silicon Valley way.  But one of the benefits of transparency is that someone out there might just have the solution to your problem.