[Synapsid]

6,

Laika was the dog's name, poor pooch.

Venera 8 was the Soviet lander on Venus, I believe. Earlier Veneras failed during descent because a skirt had been mounted round the lander in order to slow the descent; that turned out to be what you did not want to do, as it gave the conditions in Venus' atmosphere time to destroy the lander. After they stopped mounting the skirt they finally made it to the surface.

[Keith_McClary]

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..

I don't personally think it was faked, but "billions of dollars, thousands of eyewitnesses to the program" could describe a number of "black" programs. What we know about the NSA operations would have been paranoid nutter stuff before Snowden.

[Keith_McClary]

gas giant planets where oxygen, water vapor, and various gasses can be scooped up on a flyby that dips into the atmosphere.

Do you have a reference for that?

[dorlomin]

In terms of the 'moon hoax', the devil is not in the nitpicks the conspiracy theorists think they can find but the ones they cannot even begin to address.
Firstly the doppler shift of the lunar vehicles would have been easily measurable from any decent radio telescope. So where ever the transmissions were made they were being transmitted from a lunar orbiting vehicle and the surface of the moon. Russia, China, most Eastern Block nations and even western telescopes like Jodrell Bank (and Eifelsburg, that was commissioned just in time) would have been able to measure this.
The occultation of the vehicle by the moon would have been measurable by any competent amateur radio ham.
The USSR and other states would have been able to use parallax to measure the exact location of the transmissions in space.

So for the theory to work the transmissions have to have come from a vehicle. This then means that the US had mastered automated space flight to the point of rendezvous around the moon and landing on it. And the flights had to go exactly to plan and exactly to location otherwise the transmissions would not have matched up to the position.

Whats more everyone expected follow ups in a matter of years. So the sites could have been visited by manned Soviet expeditions in a couple of years. And the Soviets had robots on the moon around then anyway so the slightest bit of doubt and they could have had their own vehicle inspecting the sites.

A conspiracy that requires far more advanced technology than merely landing a man on the moon, could unravel with a single engine failure in 7 flights, had to fake the Apollo 13 incident, will be blown apart as soon as someone looks at the sites, can be blown apart by a decent space based telescope and now even earth based telescopes......

And how did America sneak so much lunar material back to earth? Did they have a giant, shadow project of stealth probes rapidly brining all that rock back? Because no one seen the launches in the US, on their radars or transmissions from it as they communicated with them.

A conspiracy that requires dramatically more advanced technology than the mission it is supposed to be covering up for due to its lack of technological progress!

No one doubts the US had working boosters capable of getting to the Moon. No one doubts they had landing vehicles capable of landing on the Moon. No one doubts they got those vehicles around the Moon and on the Moon.

[Sixstrings]

With all the excitement surrounding SpaceX, and the success of PayPal and Tesla Motors, one might expect Elon Musk to take SpaceX public. So why hasn't he?

"The reason I haven't taken SpaceX public is the goals of SpaceX are very long-term, which is to establish a city on Mars," Musk said at a press briefing on September 8.

...

Previously, he's said he thinks we'll have people visiting the Red Planet in 10 years. He's even told Steven Colbert his reasoning behind the plan. First, he said, if humans become "a multi-planet species, humanity as we know it is likely to propagate into the future much further than if we are a single-planet species."

Earlier this year, he told Henry Blodget that his plan involves taking a large number of people and a lot of cargo to Mars. He then wants to work on terraforming the planet to make it more habitable, to make it more like earth over time.

It's "a serious fixer upper, but it's possible" Musk said in an interview last year at Ignition. Greenhouse gasses would warm things up, the atmosphere would get dense, the water would melt and form liquid oceans, he said.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Wants-To-Build-A-City-On-Mars-4979634.php

I think I read before that the Falcon Heavy could get payloads to Mars.

Here's some other news, Russia's going to lower Proton launch costs to compete with Elon Musk. They still can't beat his prices but they'll be close and just "a little bit higher:"

Proton Launches May Compete on Price With US Falcons: Russian Space Corporation

“If Space X enters the market with the prices and features it is talking about, if it can launch the Falcon 9 to a geostationary transfer orbit for $55.5 million, then it aims for the below 4.5-ton satellite segment, which is a quite large segment. We can reach this cost price, not exactly this one, a little bit higher,” Pavel Popov told journalists.

He added that should the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle with its $81 million price tag be successful, then a different price format would prevail on the market but the Russian corporation would still be able to compete.
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20140911/192850092/Proton-Launches-May-Compete-on-Price-With-US-Falcons-Russian.html

(being objective: Russians make good engines, we're just in a pickle now that the US can't get anymore of them and is totally reliant on them -- while Elon Musk is not. The US Air Force will have no way to launch spy satellites or nothin', if Putin cuts the supply off. It will take 6 years minimum to develop an American engine and new launch vehicle for the Air Force.

I wonder why they can't just use SpaceX, perhaps Musk can't ramp up fast enough / congresscritters insist on giving these contracts to Boeing and Lockheed -- and they were the ones using Russian engines, now they'll get the contract to make a new engine, and the US taxpayer will pay through the nose for it.

I say: throw the money at SpaceX, ramp up their production. They already make engines.)

[timmac]

But Why, don't we have enough problems here to be fixed..

[Sixstrings]

But Why, don't we have enough problems here to be fixed..

Because he just wants to.

It's a private company, his money, he can do what he wants.

(his line of thinking is the same as Stephen Hawking, that we must become an interplanetary species or we will certainly become extinct, one way or another, just staying on this planet)

[timmac]

(his line of thinking is the same as Stephen Hawking, that we must become an interplanetary species or we will certainly become extinct, one way or another, just staying on this planet)

So by sending humans to a planet that no one can live outside a enclosed tube like building feed with air is suppose to insure mankind will not go extinct.

We humans were made for planet earth, we multiply here and have done very well for the last 7000 years or so..

[dinopello]

Build it and they will come

[Sixstrings]

So by sending humans to a planet that no one can live outside a enclosed tube like building feed with air is suppose to insure mankind will not go extinct.

Musk is talking about terraforming. But of course that's very long term and science fictiony, but hey, what's a thousand years matter?

We do have to get off the planet. There is no choice about that. If nothing else another asteroid will wipe us out, just as it did the dinosaurs which gave the planet to we mammals. And the dinosaurs were only dominant because an asteroid had wiped the place out before them. These asteroids come in pretty regular intervals.

Mammals will get wiped out by a meteor impact, you can count on that.

Barring that, we may nuke ourselves or any number of things, or climate change.

If we survive all that, then eventually the earth gets swallowed up by the sun as it goes red giant. So no matter what, we have to get off the planet and begin to branch out into the solar system and beyond. If that takes thousands of years then we may as well get started on it now.

Columbus was one man with a couple ships, in 1492. Small crew. He could have said screw it, and it would have been another hundred years before the first step.

It actually took centuries to get colonization really going in the Americas, after 1492. It takes a long time. You got to make a start though. That start is one little base on Mars, and the moon. And build from there, over centuries and millenia.

It's not impossible, by the way, to get something self-sustaining just using what can be found on the moon, or Mars. Asteroids have a lot of materiel. There's all kinds of stuff out in the asteroid belt, too, maybe even amino acids or primitive life on some exotic asteroid. (saw that on nat geo, there's a hell of a lot of asteroids out there, then also let's not forget all of Saturn and Jupiter's moons. Several have water oceans under the ice.)

We humans were made for planet earth, we multiply here and have done very well for the last 7000 years or so..

Homo sapiens has been around for 200,000 years or more, not 7,000.

[Strummer]

We do have to get off the planet. There is no choice about that. If nothing else another asteroid will wipe us out, just as it did the dinosaurs which gave the planet to we mammals. And the dinosaurs were only dominant because an asteroid had wiped the place out before them. These asteroids come in pretty regular intervals.

It would be a billion times cheaper and simpler to develop an anti-asteroid shield than these fantasies about terraforming Mars.

[Strummer]

Columbus was one man with a couple ships, in 1492. Small crew. He could have said screw it, and it would have been another hundred years before the first step.

It actually took centuries to get colonization really going in the Americas, after 1492. It takes a long time. You got to make a start though. That start is one little base on Mars, and the moon. And build from there, over centuries and millenia.

The only reason why anyone even remembers Columbus was that he discovered a continent full of unimaginable riches and resources to plunder for centuries to come. Wanna colonize Mars? Why not colonize the Sahara or Gobi deserts instead? Makes about as much sense.

[dissident]

Columbus was one man with a couple ships, in 1492. Small crew. He could have said screw it, and it would have been another hundred years before the first step.

It actually took centuries to get colonization really going in the Americas, after 1492. It takes a long time. You got to make a start though. That start is one little base on Mars, and the moon. And build from there, over centuries and millenia.

The only reason why anyone even remembers Columbus was that he discovered a continent full of unimaginable riches and resources to plunder for centuries to come. Wanna colonize Mars? Why not colonize the Sahara or Gobi deserts instead? Makes about as much sense.

Indeed. Mars is a glorified moon with 12% the volume of the Earth. The surface pressure on mars is 0.7 hPa. On Earth this pressure occurs around 40 km above the surface. Even with a 95% CO2 atmosphere Mars is extremely cold, enough to freeze CO2 at the poles into dry ice.

We have had too many Hollywood and TV movies and dramas making Mars seem like another Earth with some fixable issues. This has instilled a distorted perspective much like the public view of nuclear power based on nonsensical movies such as the China Syndrome.

Humanity isn't going to solve its overpopulation, pollution and resource problems by running away to some other planet.

[KrellEnergySource]

It would be a billion times cheaper and simpler to develop an anti-asteroid shield than these fantasies about terraforming Mars.

But who would pay for it? How do we get consensus among 6+ billion people in order to prioritize the "must do's"? So far, we don't.

Brian

[Sixstrings]

But who would pay for it?

Well mostly, the American taxpayer.

This is the JPL program that's tracking asteroids:

Near Earth Object Program
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/

There's a mission planned to land a man on an asteroid. If I recall, I think some satellite just became the first to intercept an asteroid and orbit it (I think that was a European satellite).

This all sounds very far fetched and science fictiony but it really is a real threat. And it always seems like Siberia that gets hit with these things, remember couple years back that huge meteor that hit a Russian town and shattered windows and caused serious damage? And they had that massive one back in the 1900s, again, Siberia.

[AMAZING] Russian Meteor Explosion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrU90Ub4Uw

One day that's going to be a an extinction event sized meteor. And then poof, mammals are gone from the earth and some other group of critters get the run of the place and will evolve and branch out. Just as the dinosaurs, just as mammals did.

So anyhow, NASA is thinking about missions that could redirect an asteroid should it ever become necessary.

Is this something you should really worry about? No -- that next extinction impact could be a thousand years from now, or ten thousand, or fifty thousand. We are *overdue* for one though.

But it could also be ten years from now, or JPL could find a monster asteroid on an impact course tomorrow. So it has to be planned for and tech developed. Would be a shame to have all these rockets and not be able to save the earth's species because we didn't want to fund NASA and be prepared.

[Sixstrings]

Saturn Five already placed a bunch of guys in space; they found little to profit from. Nothing has changed. These 'rockets' still run on kerosene, are still glorified firecrackers.

Most late-epoch consumer-computer product marketers are carnival barkers, shills for their own psychopathy.

And THIS is like the "who is John Galt" prevailing attitude in Atlas Shrugged. Meanwhile, there is Elon Musk developing a reusable rocket that will revolutionize getting into space. He keeps at it even though everyone says it can't be done.

When he started spacex, everyone said you can't make any money in this business. He's not only making money but he's undercutting the whole world on satellite launch cost. A mere $55 million. Really, that's nothing. The resuable grasshopper launch system would cut that cost to 1/3. Just fuel cost.

Grasshopper rocket stages will land themselves back on earth without a parachute, how cool is that:

I mean really? Paypal? On-line banking is nothing new. And his Tesla? Chevrolet built a perfectly capable moern EV back in 1996. (By the way, it's not to late to short Apple. It has a long way to drop when Iwatch fails to find an audience. Or when the Genius-Worshippers realize they already have an Iputz-5 stuffed in their pocket.)

Actually, paypal was an innovation. Don't you remember? Before Paypal, the only people that could take a credit card payment were businesses that signed up as a merchant with Visa and MC.

Then paypal and voila, anyone in the world can take a credit card payment. Which was very much needed in the early ebay days.

But yeah I don't give a flip about this internet tech crap -- this other stuff is exciting. It's 21st century industrialism. Rockets and hyperloops, and he does it cheaper than anyone else that's the amazing part -- he wants to be the "walmart of space." THAT is thinking like a Rockefeller or one of those old railroad tycoons.

Anyone other than Musk would have just sold paypal and done some other bullsh*t internet crap. Like a farmville or some nonsense that adds no value to society.

Steve Jobs? Pffft. All he did was pick out colors for plastic phones and little design tweaks.

Doesn't compare to hyperloops and revolutionizing space travel. And i don't really care about teslas, but you have to respect those batteries he designed. Pstarr, do you really want to be in a Boeing dreamliner at 30,000 feet and its crappy batteries cascade explode? They ought to get over it and use Elon's batteries.

Just admit it folks -- the man is pretty cool. Patriotic. Believes in America. He's anti-Putin:

Elon Musk: Being At Putin’s Mercy Not A Good Thing
http://spacecoastdaily.com/2014/02/elon-musk-being-at-putins-mercy-not-a-good-thing/

Elon Musk cites Ukraine conflict in Pentagon contract fight
http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/05/elon-musk-cites-ukraine-conflict-in-pentagon-contract-fight/

(frickin' Boeing and Lockheed just want to keep using Russian engines, they even accused Musk of inflaming the Russians, but all Boeing and Lockheed care about are the outsourced Russian engines.

They have a 2 year stockpile. If Putin really cuts that off then the US military is in big trouble. Musk deserves credit as the only one smart enough to design and build his own rocket engines and they work and he beats the Russians on launch cost.)

Visionary. Who doesn't like a dreamer that succedes? He started SpaceX not to make money, but because he wants to see people get to Mars and government isn't getting it done.

Musk is an infrastructure *industrialist*, enough of this internet farmville crap, and our other rich elite that just play forex candlesticks and hedge fund high frequency scamming. Musk is doing real things, brick and mortar and rockets and EVs and solar panels across the US -- it's doing a lot for society, the environment, and humanity. (the aerospace innovation is a big deal, bigger than the green tech)

[Keith_McClary]

It's a private company, his money, he can do what he wants.

He has a lot of gubmint contracts. Since it's a private company they don't have to publish financials, so we don't know how much is "his money", or if they are actually making a profit.

[Sixstrings]

He has a lot of gubmint contracts. Since it's a private company they don't have to publish financials, so we don't know how much is "his money", or if they are actually making a profit.

He deserves those contracts, federal gov should throw money at this guy's companies. He's been shaking up the good ole boy aerospace industry and has had to fight tooth and nail on that.

There was even a bigwig in the USAF that apparently gave Boeing-Lockheed a massive contract and then he retires and gets a vp job with them or something. (I posted that months ago, was an article)

There is nothing wrong with throwing government money at success, versus failure.

Keith: SpaceX is a big win for the taxpayer. And foreign taxpayers too, around the world, with SpaceX's prices being so low. So what's the problem with that? He beats the Europeans, he beats the Russians, he beats the Chinese.

Why does everyone hate on him, I don't get it. It really reminds me of Atlas Shrugged.

Regarding where SpaceX gets its money -- gov contracts, and there's a group of venture capitalists, and they have a years-long backlog of worldwide satellite launch clients. He could take it public and get a gazillion bucks on an IPO. You're right about reasons for not wanting an IPO, but those aren't necessarily nefarious. It actually can ruin a good company. They do the IPO and cash out and the politics start and the rot sets in.