[dissident]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

[Sixstrings]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

My favorite thing about Soviet Russia: their space program.

Russia was actually first to the moon, with a probe, Luna 2 in 1959.



Is that thing cool or what?

Russia was first to space with a satellite, first animal in space, first man in space, first woman, first moon landing, I think first Mars probe, first probe (and only, I think) to land on Venus.

That space race was great, Soviets beating us at every turn and forcing us to go big and do the Apollo missions. If Soviets had kept up the competition, we'd have been to Mars by now. We have so much to thank the Cold War for (along with being thankful we didn't destroy each other in nuclear armageddon) -- but without it, there'd have never been the Voyager mission. We'd never have known what our own planet looks like from space. And no Hubble telescope.

None of it would have happened. Without the Cold War, we wouldn't even have the internet right now. That was a cold war DARPA thing.

[ralfy]

One also has to keep in mind that millions died during the Cold War, involving genocide and multiple atrocities. If any, what we are seeing now was influenced by the same, with multiple nuclear powers, a multi-fold increase in armaments production, and more predicaments now coupled with peak oil, global warming, debt, and a large human population coupled with a growing global middle class.

[SeaGypsy]

Yeah brilliant bit of theater that Apollo stuff! Funny how now it could be done sooooo much better but just as the special effects have grown so has awareness of them and means of detection. Still, they bought it so the space race was won! Brilliant move! Funny all this blather about Mars & beyond when it's supposedlu 40 years since stage 1 moon development was achieved but stage 2 has never happened. Wonder why? Surely not because the whole story is a load of hokum?

[KingM]

Yeah brilliant bit of theater that Apollo stuff! Funny how now it could be done sooooo much better but just as the special effects have grown so has awareness of them and means of detection. Still, they bought it so the space race was won! Brilliant move! Funny all this blather about Mars & beyond when it's supposedlu 40 years since stage 1 moon development was achieved but stage 2 has never happened. Wonder why? Surely not because the whole story is a load of hokum?

Wait, do you really believe that?

[SeaGypsy]

Why? What's it to you?

[Sixstrings]

Wait, do you really believe that?

Just FYI to those who may or may not deny the Apollo program, NASA's lunar reconaissance orbiter just took pictures of China's moon rover. And previously, it has taken pictures of the Apollo landing sites:

Apollo 15 landing site imaged from an altitude of 15.5 miles (25 km). The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) is parked to the far right, and the Lunar Module descent stage is in the center. (M175252641L,R) Image credit: NASA Goddard/Arizona State

The Apollo 15 Lunar Module (LM) Falcon set down on the Hadley plains (26.132°N, 3.634°E) a mere 2 kilometers from Hadley Rille. The goals: sample the basalts that compose the mare deposit, explore a lunar rille for the first time, and search for ancient crustal rocks. Additionally, Dave Scott and Jim Irwin deployed the third Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) and unveiled the first Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV).

The ALSEP consisted of several experiments that were powered by a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) and sent back valuable scientific data to the Earth for over six years after the astronauts left. This new LROC NAC image taken from low altitude shows the hardware and tracks in even more detail.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-15.html#.Utku5xBdV8F

Those lines you see are the astronauts' footpaths.

I think SG asked if the moon landings weren't faked then why did we stop. Well, there were 17 missions total over a decade. The program cost $100 billion in today's dollars. Toward the end, they'd been there so many times it had become routine.

There were supposed to be a couple more missions after Apollo 17, but they were canceled due to budget cuts. NASA got into the shuttle program after Apollo.

[KingM]

Only a moron would believe the landings were faked. Tens of billions of dollars, thousands of eyewitnesses to the program, etc. You have to be a paranoid nutter to think it was all faked.

That doesn't mean that it would make any sense whatsoever to continue the missions. A Mars colony would be absolutely an ego-driven waste of time. Why not start with settling Antarctica first, or the Sahara? Both of these places have oxygen, relatively abundant water, and quite temperate climates compared to Mars. You could also trade with other nations, resupply easily, etc.

Once you've done that, you've got another several million square miles in high altitudes, high latitudes, and even continental shelves, any and all of which would be vastly cheaper than settling Mars. For that matter, why not start with settling the moon? It's a lot closer in case there's an emergency resupply needed.

[SeaGypsy]

Rubbish! Those are plain as daylight ant track you moron!

(Hey guys since we are doin' the big show on the moon and all- what says we take a gad damned CAR with us!) Fucken hell, really...

[Sixstrings]

Rubbish! Those are plain as daylight ant track you moron!

(Hey guys since we are doin' the big show on the moon and all- what says we take a gad damned CAR with us!) Fucken hell, really...

USA already did that:



Anyhow, I hope my links to NASA's lunar satellite has finally convinced you. I get the feeling it has -- those geek engineers and scientists at NASA and Arizona State aren't still part of some grand conspiracy to fake moon landing evidence. The pictures are real. Yes, those are human tracks on the moon.

That really should shut this moon denial stuff down for good, along with the mountain of other evidence. Anyone with any logic and reason at all knows that nothing else up on the moon can make tracks like that. One could claim that a rover did it, but at that point the conspiracy theory is utterly outrageous:

1) You'd have to say NASA's current lunar observatory mission is a big conspiracy too, and all those scientists working on it are lying to you
2) You'd have to say that in the "faked" Apollo missions, we sent up rovers to carefully construct the scenes up on the moon so that now in 2014 when a satellite is up there taking pictures it looks like we really did it.

It's just nonsense. It's easier to do the darnned manned missions then use rovers to make faked manned landing scenes all over the moon. And somehow keep the conspiracy all secret, despite the fact that 400,000 AMERICANS WORKED ON THE APOLLO PROGRAM.

It's the greatest engineering project mankind has ever done.

Men died in the Apollo program. Several crews came very close to dying, Apollo 10 spun out of control and came within 2 seconds of crashing on the surface. The astronauts were crack pilots, the engineers were top notch, other than the one ground fire we got them all back safe. This moon landing denial stuff is really so offensive to the astronauts who did this, and put their lives on the line, and gave their lives.

The Chinese are all proud about their little rover up there, well don't take our Apollo legacy from us. Here's Jade Rabbit's crappy little picture of Earth that people are excited about:



Well we did it better over 40 years ago:


"Everything that I ever knew – my life, my loved ones, the Navy – everything, the whole world was behind my thumb." –James Lovell


The Earth seen from Apollo 17
"We went to explore the Moon, and in fact discovered the Earth." –Eugene Cernan

[Sixstrings]

Some in Congress are worried about the Chinese space program:



Source: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2013/12/checklist_why_congress_is_worr.html


Kind of a hoot, sounds like Cold War talk -- "communist China."

And we seem to have a "launch gap," China has done 19 launches last year while we only did 13 -- well we can't have that, do more launches.

The subcommitte is also concerned, and rightly so, that China's space program is combined civilian and military it's all one thing. China launched a rocket into geostationary orbit and that has people worried, *because it didn't carry a satellite*. So the concern is they could put weapons platforms in geo orbits that can take out US satellites.

Anyhow.. I'm all for the Chinese space program, if we don't do anything interesting then I'm glad somebody else does, and the more the merrier. The competition is GOOD. Congress may not care so much about science and exploration, but they can dig a Cold War space race.

Congress just passed a good NASA budget, really this is thanks to the Chinese competition -- one rep said that we can't have China up there with the only space station. So now the ISS life is extended another decade. The Keppler telescope (successor to Hubble) got its funding back too.

China's talking about a manned lunar mission next. So now that's back on the table for us too.

Seriously, there's some good things about Cold War and competition and we can feel pretty safe about China, they are cautious it's not going to get too heated. The competition will be great for space, this is the one thing that will keep the manned Mars mission funding in place and NASA's other programs. Without this competition we stop doing big things, and that's what happened after Apollo.

[Synapsid]

6, SG:

I'll bet you a dollar to a donut there's life on Mars.

In 1971 the Soviets sent two spacecraft, Mars 2 and Mars 3, to the surface of the planet. Mars 2 came in at escape velocity or thereabout and made a new crater, but Mars 3 landed safely (the first soft landing on Mars) and unhitched its camera and transmitted 20 seconds of grey before going dark. A friend I worked with at NASA maintained that a Martian had switched it off but never provided evidence to support his statement. At any rate, Mars 3 is still sitting there, and Soviet procedures for sterilizing spacecraft were less than thorough or effective. I expect that there is life on Mars and that it arrived in someone's dropped sandwich.

[SeaGypsy]

I'm not that invested in Apollo fakery. I'm sure plenty of stuff was faked, not so sure that the key parts of the story are b/s.
Still makes no sense at all to me that if the missions were really done as shown, colonization should be aimed at somewhere else. If people can land there and build stuff- why not go for it? Mars makes no sense. A few posts ago 6, you said these missions had become routine. In the above post you declare how dangerous they were.
KJ's thing about artificial gravity and the plausibility of putting 'trillions' of people in space in a situation which has never been replicated successfully on Earth- well, he's just kidding himself. The more realistic space nerds in my view realize that real gravity is a minimum mandatory requirement, as is effective long term radiation shielding. Just 2 of the glaring problems with KJ's fantasy.

Best I can say on the topic is- go back about 30 years and take up the Lunar program where it left off. First show the isolation system replicating as close as possible what would be required for a Lunar habitat. Then put one up there and make it work. The importance of which nation actually does it only exists in the minds of patriotic zealots. There is no reason why for a specific project like this- the US should not team with Russia, China, India, Japan etc. In my view such would be a rare great positive achievement towards breaking down national stereotypes and towards peace.

[dissident]

6, SG:

I'll bet you a dollar to a donut there's life on Mars.

In 1971 the Soviets sent two spacecraft, Mars 2 and Mars 3, to the surface of the planet. Mars 2 came in at escape velocity or thereabout and made a new crater, but Mars 3 landed safely (the first soft landing on Mars) and unhitched its camera and transmitted 20 seconds of grey before going dark. A friend I worked with at NASA maintained that a Martian had switched it off but never provided evidence to support his statement. At any rate, Mars 3 is still sitting there, and Soviet procedures for sterilizing spacecraft were less than thorough or effective. I expect that there is life on Mars and that it arrived in someone's dropped sandwich.

Aside from the high surface UV levels that would kill off any bacteria, the Martian surface is too acidic for Earth bacteria to survive thanks to all the iron. Mars even had highly acidic seas:

http://www.space.com/8208-study-suggest ... -mars.html

The Soviet probe got its best sterilization on Mars.

As for the moon landing controversy. It's NASA that is the source for all the conspiracy theories. Several years ago you could find plenty of photographs purporting to be of a lander on the surface of the Moon without any evidence of retro-rocket exhaust abrasion and still more photographs exhibiting bizarre linear transitions in focus (not something you could achieve with nonlinear optics) that implied these were studio prop shots. I don't know why NASA had these fakes on its web servers. The complexity of a Moon landing is overrated. Perhaps they couldn't arrange for Hollywood cinematography so they had to improvise to feed the insatiable demand for images.

But the Moon astronauts were lucky that they did not encounter any solar flares during their missions. The thin aluminum shells (quarter inch thick) of their craft would not have spared them significant exposure to high energy electrons. This would be like getting exposed to beta radiation and not much hope for future longevity. The Apollo astronauts did not drop like flies. Any trip to Mars via inertial guidance would take six months at the least and the risk of getting fried by a coronal mass ejection event increases substantially.

[Synapsid]

dissident,

Hey! No raining on my parade. That sandwich has been shielded from UV by the lander, and the lake in Gale Crater was water that would be drinkable--'course, that was a little over 3.5 billion years ago, but still.

There's glory for you, as Humpty Dumpty said.

[Sixstrings]

A few posts ago 6, you said these missions had become routine. In the above post you declare how dangerous they were.

They became routine to the *public*, the taxpayers paying for all this.

People stopped caring. TV stopped the live broadcasts -- it's like how it is now with the ISS, does anyone care? Is a docking breaking news? Nope, it's routine. But it's still dangerous -- recently that one astronaut almost drowned right in his eva suit.

Watch the movie "Apollo 13," in one scene the guys are doing their thing for the cameras but they don't even know none of the networks were carrying it. Then the whole world gets interested and on pins and needles after they had their emergency, and faced being marooned in orbit.

The issue isn't really that Apollo "ended," it was a finite program with goals just like any other space project and in the end they cut it short by 2 missions so it was always going to end. Lots of space projects get canceled anywhere along the way. The ISS was slated to be canceled, but now extended to another decade.

The issue is that we didn't return -- SG, this was all about keeping up with the Russians, and that's as far as we took it, when the Russians slacked off then we did too.

What's going to push space exploration forward in the next phase is *if money can be made out of it*.

Until then, we'll do another moon landing if the Chinese are going to. We'll find money for space if there's a military threat, like China going to geostat orbits with empty rockets.

And somewhere in between all the military stuff, cool pure science gets funded too.

KJ's thing about artificial gravity and the plausibility of putting 'trillions' of people in space in a situation which has never been replicated successfully on Earth- well, he's just kidding himself.

Homo sapiens spread out from a few thousands at one point in Africa, to many billiions all over the planet. Same thing will happen with space, eventually, if we don't devolve before that.

The more realistic space nerds in my view realize that real gravity is a minimum mandatory requirement, as is effective long term radiation shielding. Just 2 of the glaring problems with KJ's fantasy.

You can use a 2001 space odyssey movie centrifuge for artifical gravity. Or get a slingshot thing going:



It's just physics. Swing something around and it sticks to the other side. Do a tethered craft burn to get your motion going at the right direction and velocity and voila you have your artificial gravity.

Anyhow gravity's not such a big deal, they're getting better with exercise equipment and such to keep people reasonably in shape. I think the problem is that they're so cramped in the ISS -- I was doing some reading about these missions, and if I recall the old Skylab didn't have the bone loss rates that ISS does. Skylab was in a Saturn rocket stage -- it was huge and lots of space inside.

And you know what, the body adapts. People live in wheelchairs. They live without limbs. If you lose bone mass it's because you don't need it, your body is adapting, and would adapt to what's needed for space living and stop there. So then you go back to gravity, it's not the end of the world, you'd be weak for a while but it ain't gonna kill ya. You'd build bone mass up again. Too much is made out of this gravity problem, the body *adapts*.

Radiation is a potential problem. They have some ideas to handle that.

Best I can say on the topic is- go back about 30 years and take up the Lunar program where it left off. First show the isolation system replicating as close as possible what would be required for a Lunar habitat. Then put one up there and make it work. The importance of which nation actually does it only exists in the minds of patriotic zealots.

But that's what gets the funding -- the competition. Congress is getting a little stirred up right now over China. This is very helpful for space tech -- Congress wants to "maintain American dominance in space," well if we got no competition and we're dominant without ever doing anything new, then that's stagnation. We NEED the competition.

There is no reason why for a specific project like this- the US should not team with Russia, China, India, Japan etc. In my view such would be a rare great positive achievement towards breaking down national stereotypes and towards peace.

NASA does that. They've worked with Russia for a long time now. Canada's always been involved too, Japan, the European Space Agency, many nations.

The Chinese are going it alone, mostly. It's hoped they share data from their jade rabbit rover, but they may not. The ISS is an international program and it was supposed to end in what a year or two? NASA is now committed for another ten years, if the Russians and other partners want out then it will be an American station and NASA will run it alone.

[Sixstrings]

Several years ago you could find plenty of photographs purporting to be of a lander on the surface of the Moon without any evidence of retro-rocket exhaust abrasion and still more photographs exhibiting bizarre linear transitions in focus (not something you could achieve with nonlinear optics) that implied these were studio prop shots. I don't know why NASA had these fakes on its web servers. The complexity of a Moon landing is overrated. Perhaps they couldn't arrange for Hollywood cinematography so they had to improvise to feed the insatiable demand for images.

Can you give a link for that? Are they photos from the current NASA lunar orbiter?

Every one of these conspiracy theories have been debunked. There's a scientific explanation for all of them.

But there was some minor disinformation in the Cold War.

For example, for many decades it was said that the dog (Leka?) they sent to space orbited for days and was then euthanized in orbit. Then finally after the Soviet collapse, it came out that in fact the dog overheated not too long after launch. So there's an example of a fakery, a lie, to make a mission seem more successful than it was.

There were a lot of other things like that with the Soviet program, hiding failures. But it doesn't matter -- neither side would have faked anything big or faked data, what's the point of that, that's just crazy. I believe we walked on the moon, and I believe Russia did land a probe on Venus and took that picture. There were minor lies and failure coverups and glossing over on the Soviet side, but the major accomplishments were true.

But the Moon astronauts were lucky that they did not encounter any solar flares during their missions. The thin aluminum shells (quarter inch thick) of their craft would not have spared them significant exposure to high energy electrons. This would be like getting exposed to beta radiation and not much hope for future longevity. The Apollo astronauts did not drop like flies. Any trip to Mars via inertial guidance would take six months at the least and the risk of getting fried by a coronal mass ejection event increases substantially.

That's all true. There were some solar flares within weeks or months (I think) of a couple of the Apollo missions. They lucked out on that. The van allen belts they passed through (there are two of them), proved to be no big deal.

According to Curiosity data, doesn't look like radiation levels on a Mars trip would be a big deal:

Radiation on Mars 'Manageable' for Manned Mission, Curiosity Rover Reveals

The risk of radiation exposure is not a show-stopper for a long-term manned mission to Mars, new results from NASA's Curiosity rover suggest.

A mission consisting of a 180-day cruise to Mars, a 500-day stay on the Red Planet and a 180-day return flight to Earth would expose astronauts to a cumulative radiation dose of about 1.01 sieverts, measurements by Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument indicate.

To put that in perspective: The European Space Agency generally limits its astronauts to a total career radiation dose of 1 sievert, which is associated with a 5-percent increase in lifetime fatal cancer risk.
http://www.space.com/23875-mars-radiation-life-manned-mission.html

So that leaves solar flares. They'll figure something out. Here's one idea:

Mars trip to use astronaut poo as radiation shield

The man and woman aboard the Inspiration Mars mission set to fly-by the Red Planet in 2018 will face cramped conditions, muscle atrophy and potential boredom. But their greatest health risk comes from exposure to the radiation from cosmic rays. The solution? Line the spacecraft's walls with water, food and their own faeces.

"It's a little queasy sounding, but there's no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding," says Taber MacCallum, a member of the team funded by multimillionaire Dennis Tito, who announced the audacious plan earlier this week.

McCallum told New Scientist that solid and liquid human waste products would get put into bags and used as a radiation shield – as well as being dehydrated so that any water can be recycled for drinking. "Dehydrate them as much as possible, because we need to get the water back," he said. "Those solid waste products get put into a bag, put right back against the wall."

Food too, could be used as a shield, he said. "Food is going to be stored all around the walls of the spacecraft, because food is good radiation shielding," he said. This wouldn't be dangerous as the food would merely be blocking the radiation, it wouldn't become a radioactive source.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23230-mars-trip-to-use-astronaut-poo-as-radiation-shield.html#.Uts-fRAo7q4