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Nope, he performed the actual test. That shouldn't come as a surprise given his hands-on approach to building rockets. I wish I had a reference for you, but I'm sorry that I don't. It may have been in this book but I'm not totally sure about that.

Von Braun had nothing to do with the Apollo spacecraft (That was Max Faget and his merry band).

Faget didn't design the LEM either, so does that mean that Faget wasn't really a part of the Moon landing program either? The LEM was designed and built by Grumman. For what it's worth, I believe that Faget was by far the most influential member of the program and that we wouldn't be where we are at today without his talents. When I heard that he died a while back I was very sad.

... but you demonstrate clearly you haven't understood them.

I guess that different people are going to read stuff differently. What surprises me is that you don't have more respect for the Apollo program. Even NASA fills much of it's dead air time on NASA TV with footage from previous missions.

No, the mission rules allowed a brute force docking in lunar orbit when the LEM was returning - and the lives of the landing crew were on the line and potential damage to the docking system didn't matter.

You make this sound like it was cavalier. The astronauts wouldn't have allowed it if they thought they were in danger. The CDR had the last say in the matter, and it wouldn't have happened without his approval.

That aside, let's look at the danger involved. In the worst case scenario, they would not have been able to achieve hard dock again while in lunar orbit. A backup system was available and well tested (on Apollo 9) whereby the astronauts would have exited the LEM in space suits and come aboard the CSM through the main hatch. I guess you could argue that opening the CSM main hatch was an added danger, but they did it on each return flight to recover film canisters from the side of the SM.

You claim to have read them...

You don't prove your points by claiming that other people are liars. You do it with facts. If you want to throw around insults then take it to Washington, D.C.

BTW: I did find a reference to the landing radar problem on Apollo 14 that you spoke about. According to the article, it was at 30,000 feet that they discovered the problem and they fixed it at 22,000 feet. Mission rules called for a mandatory abort at 10,000 feet. Hardly a nail biter.

Most people aren't aware of this due to the illogical sex taboos in the US.

The reason I asked should be obvious. While the Columbia disaster may have provoked political and fiscal concerns, we should not forget that Columbia wasn't the first shuttle that 'Disentergrated' causing the loss of astronauts. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasa

Just looking at US history, we've engaged in nearly 3182 (approx. Source: http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/cape_launch es_000722.html ) launches. In all of that time, the entire launch process should have been perfected. The list of steps, including checking heat shields should have been done every single time.

Using your logic, 'how many times did you check you had your wallet with you before the time you left it at home?' is not really an accurate representation of the NASA space program since we should be learning from our mistakes. One would think that we improve on systems and procedures to prevent repititions of past mistakes.

Do you usually go down a pre-launch checklist before leaving your house to ensure you have everything? Do you usually have a debreifing each time you get home to identify what parts of the day you could improve upon? If you forget your wallet one day, would it be added to the checklist the next day? After nearly 30 years, do you think your checklist should "accidently" not include ensuring you have your keys?

Debris is not an unknown issue. Please do not assume that just because it was determined to be the cause of the Columbia distaster, that it was the only time that aspect of launching a rocket into space was ever considered.

SpaceflightNow's status page has nothing, Space.com's coverage has nothing, and NASA's official Return to Flight page has nothing, whether in coverage or in the videos. So I'm calling shens.

BTW, I just heard on talk radio that Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home today. Truly an American icon.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050724_sts114 _preflight.html

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050713_sts114 _scrubupdate.html No mention, from NASA themselves, about your magical VALVE theory? Did you make that up in your mom's basement while painting your model rockets? ITS A FUEL GAUGE not a valve, tard.

"The sensors are designed to monitor the fuel levels inside Discovery's external tank during launch in order to shut down the shuttle's main engines before propellant runs out. If one sensor fails, the shuttle could keep firing its engines on an empty tank, which is a hazardous situation, NASA officials said."

NOT USED IN SPACE MORON! WHO MODS THIS CRAP INSIGHTFUL?!?!?! THEY TELL THE ENGINES TO SHUT DOWN WHEN THE FULE IS GONE!!! NO MAGICAL VALVES AT ALL TARD BREATHE!!

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050724_sts114 _preflight.html

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050713_sts114 _scrubupdate.html No mention, from NASA themselves, about your magical VALVE theory? Did you make that up in your mom's basement while painting your model rockets? ITS A FUEL GAUGE not a valve, tard.

"The sensors are designed to monitor the fuel levels inside Discovery's external tank during launch in order to shut down the shuttle's main engines before propellant runs out. If one sensor fails, the shuttle could keep firing its engines on an empty tank, which is a hazardous situation, NASA officials said."

NOT USED IN SPACE MORON! WHO MODS THIS CRAP INSIGHTFUL?!?!?! THEY TELL THE ENGINES TO SHUT DOWN WHEN THE FULE IS GONE!!! NO MAGICAL VALVES AT ALL TARD BREATHE!!

Hardly. Consider the following, slightly unrelated tale. It demonstrates how LITTLE can happen in 13 billion years. English prose uses 26 lower-case letters and 26 upper case letters. Throw in 10 digits, and the following 18 common pucntuation marks: .!?,;:'"$#%&()/-+* and we get roughly 80 characters ( 26+26+10+18=80 ) that are used in common english prose. This is conservative considering that most modern keyboards have 100+ keys. For our purposes, we will say that one monkey pressing one key will therefore have a chance of 1 in 80 of typing any particular letter, say T. One monkey pressing two keys will have a chance of 1/80 times 1/80 of typing any two particular letters, say Th. That is, a monkey has a chance of 1 in 6400 of randomly typing "Th". To type the word "The", the chances are 1 in 512000 (1/3^80). In general, for N characters, the probability would be 1/N^80. Now let's examine a longer sentence: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back." This sentence has 52 characters. So the probability of monkey typing this in randomly is 1/52^80. Or, 1 chance in: 19066346913841944036898935159067571914007532772132 2538326368101913940\ 54066195372127089220252400916515660459655214049797 8921601884724658176 That looks like a pretty big number. That's 138 digits. Or in scientific notation, about 2 x 10^137. Let's say our monkey could type one character per second (he's very coordinated and very disciplined). How long would it take to type 19066346913841944036898935159067571914007532772132 2538326368101913940\ 54066195372127089220252400916515660459655214049797 8921601884724658176 characters? Well, there are 60 seconds per minute, so this would be: 31777244856403240061498225265112619856679221286887 089721061350318990\ 09011032562021181536708733486085943409942535674966 315360031412077636 minutes. Or, with 60 minutes per hour: 52962074760672066769163708775187699761132035478145 149535102250531650\ 15018387603368635894514555810143239016570892791610 5256000523534627 hours. Or, with 24 hours per day: 22067531150280027820484878656328208233805014782560 478972959271054854\ 22924328168070264956047731587559682923571205329837 719000021813942 days. Ok, there are 365.25 days per year, so that's: 60417607529856339002011988107674765869418247180179 271657657141833960\ 92879748577878891050096458829732191440304463599829 483915186348 years. Now, the universe is about 13.7 billon years old ( http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/map_discover y_030211.html ). That's 13,700,000,000 years. So how many ages of the universe would it take that monkey to enter that many characters? Oh, only: 44100443452449882483220429275675011583516968744656 402669822731265664\ 91153101151736416824887926153089190832339024525422 98 AGES OF THE UNIVERSE. That's a long time for one monkey to be working on that one problem. So let's put more than one monkey to work. Hmm, how about one monkey per atom in the universe (these are very small monkeys). For our purposes, we can estimate the number of ATOMS IN THE UNIVERSE to be 4 x 10^78 ( http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/sunspot/pr/answerbook/ universe.html#q70 ). So, using 4 x 10^78 monkeys, how long would it take all of them? Ok, this is getting better. Only: 110251108631124706208051073189187528958792 AGES OF THE UNIVERSE. That's still a big number, about 10^41. Well, maybe the monkeys could work faster than one character per second. Maybe a monkey could work as fast (or faster than) today's modern desktop CPU. Let's be generous and say 10 GHz (10,000,000,000 operations per second,

What finacial information, exactly, was requested?

How much impact, exactly, does increased solar output have on Global Warming?

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_0 30320.html

Welcome to the 21st century. And from the company itself.

Wow.

Here it is:
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/movies/uranus_ experiment_000516.html

"Whether it wins the Nebula on Saturday or not, the series will retain a unique place in cinematic history thanks to the first installment, which boasts the first explicit sex scene shot in zero gravity conditions.

The scene was filmed by flying an airplane to an altitude of 11,000 feet. The plane, containing performers Sylvia Saint and Nick Lang, then went into a steep dive, creating the momentary illusion of weightlessness.

Insiders described the filming process as particularly messy from a technical and logistical standpoint.

Budgeting constraints allowed Saint and Lang, who portray astronauts, only one shot at a perfect zero-G take, leaving the actors with only a narrow 20-second window of time in which to launch themselves toward one another and complete the scene. "

What I, however, would most like to see, is a collaborative effort between NASA and the fledgeling private sector space initiatives.

It's called the Centennial Challenges Program:

http://exploration.nasa.gov/centennialchallenge/cc _index.html

Basically, NASA's been partnering up with private organizations to offer cash prizes for space-related achievements. Congress has unfortunately put a limit on how much of their budget they're allowed to devote to competitive prizes, but they've still been able to offer prizes for space tethers, beam power, and extracting oxygen from lunar regolith.

A while back I also tried submitting an article about NASA and its plans for commercial delivery of cargo and passengers to the ISS, but the story was rejected. Here's the text of it:

At a recent talk, Michael Griffin outlined NASA's plans for helping to generate a robust and competitive commercial market in orbital spaceflight. The speech and Q&A transcripts from the talk are available. In a move reminiscent of the US government kickstarting the early airline industry by purchasing airmail services, NASA plans on supplementing government-derived transport by purchasing cargo delivery services to the International Space Station from commercial providers, followed by crew transportation after the systems have proven themselves. Unlike traditional government contracts, sellers wouldn't see a profit before the services are delivered and the emphasis will be on actual performance instead of process and specifications. Aviation Week has some commentary on the announcement.

There is one planned for 2008 which should be able to do this.

You can also vaguely see the Apollo 15 landing site from the Clementine photos.

unfortunately, current telescopes don't have the resolution to view the landers. Newer crops of space born telescopes should be able to view them.

This link seems to provide some information on a probe that the ESA launched. Unfortunately, the images from the flybys have not been released. From linked article of why hubble cannot view the landers - "Anything left on the Moon cannot be resolved in any Hubble image," According to the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble for NASA. "It would just appear as a dot."

I'm sure I've read about newer telescopes that will be able to resolve the landers. Can't find the articles now though.

I dunno, frogbert, if units of measure intimidate you, maybe you should try this new thing we put together a few years back. It's called a calculator ...

No you can't!

And, Lord knows, this was a slashdot-specific story, and you certainly couldn't have gotten details anywhere else before you opened your mouth.

Resurrect the Moose !

http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/moose_00092 3.html

A few weeks ago I tried submitting the following story to slashdot, but it kept on getting rejected (same with these stories). As seems to be becoming tradition, I thought it would be relevant to the current topic, so I've pasted the text here. And no, it's not Karma-whoring if my Karma's already been maxed out for years. :)

At a recent talk, Michael Griffin outlined NASA's plans for helping to generate a robust and competitive commercial market in orbital spaceflight. The speech and Q&A transcripts from the talk are available. In a move reminiscent of the US government kickstarting the early airline industry by purchasing airmail services, NASA plans on supplementing government-derived transport by purchasing cargo delivery services to the International Space Station from commercial providers, followed by crew transportation after the systems have proven themselves. Unlike traditional government contracts, sellers wouldn't see a profit before the services are delivered and the emphasis will be on actual performance instead of process and specifications. Aviation Week has some commentary on the announcement.

I also think I remember seeing something before about NASA selling one of the launch complexes at Kennedy Space Center to SpaceX, but can't find more info. Does anybody have a link to more on that?

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/shut tleworth_nasa_010726.html

He Got $500m from selling Thawte to Verisign and I've read somewhere he pledged to redistribute half of it. Nice :)

Now there's a concept with some intresting consequences... if more than one body shares the same orbit, that too is "unstable to anything"

Nope. They probably won't collide. Consider a body starting in the L3 point of the Earth and the Sun, and perturbed slightly. If it's perturbed outwards, it will orbit slightly slower, inward, slightly faster, and so it will rotate around the Sun, toward the Earth. But in doing so, it may pass through L4 and L5, which are both stable Lagrange points, and will tend to reverse the path of the asteroid (in the rotating frame). There's a semi-large asteroid called Cruithne which is in such an orbit. You can see a drawing of its orbit in the corotating frame here. As you can see, when it approaches L4 and L5, the potential turns them around, so Cruithne is well protected against colliding with Earth.

It's a little hard to understand such an orbit, but the gist of it is this. It's important to remember that when you move inward towards the Sun, you speed up, and so end up moving counterclockwise in the corotating frame. When you move outward, you slow down, so you end up moving clockwise in the corotating frame. So if you push an object towards the Sun from L3, it'll go faster, moving counterclockwise, towards L5. As you approach L5, though, you're getting closer to the planet (Earth). It pulls you outward (since you're inward from it), which slows you down, which moves you back clockwise, and away from the planet. Repeat for L4.

L4 and L5 tend to "sweep up" all the material in the orbit between them (i.e. on the other side of the planet). There's a nice discussion on the behavior of objects near the Lagrange points here. It even mentions the timescale over which the Lagrange points are unstable. L1 and L2 are unstable on periods of ~23 days. L3 is unstable on periods of ~150 years, which means you could conceivably have a manmade body there with relatively little effort. Not much reason for anything there, though, as it is constantly out of touch with Earth, being on the opposite side of the Sun and all.

Ahem, Paul Allen invested 20-30 million of his own money to win the 10 million Ansari X-Prize.

He also funds all sorts of other laudable projects.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/SS1_ALLEN_040 620.html

I really don't think it was schmoozing that cause him to invest.
All the same, it's often useful to get to know the people you are investing in, don't you think?

The closing speed between the comet and the Deep Impact probe was about 10 km/sec. Soft landing the probe on the comet would have required an equal amount of delta-V from a rocket engine to match the comet's velocity. 10 km/sec is roughly earth escape velocity, so we're talking about a landing rocket roughly equal in size to the one that launched it from earth!

Sounds like you need to learn about "orbital mechanics" too, actually. When leaving Earth, you need big rockets to achieve 10km/s *to escape from the bottom of a big gravity well*. Once in orbit, the probe can use the slingshot effect and gain additional speed while leaving Earth orbit. Then, once en route, no more gravity well to escape, the probe can use a small motor to accelerate slowly to match the comet's velocity. Such a small drive has been used before.

Please go back to school before opening your piehole...

I figured someone would do something like this with the destructive nature of the project. What if we had nuked the moon?. The lawyer bill alone would have bankrupted the US government.

>> This is quite likely the finest result Nasa has had for a long time.

> Ignoring a couple of rovers on Mars...

Apparently NASA reused, in this impactor, software they had for the Polar Lander.

har har.

(And, as a repentant soul, congratulations NASA on this great bull's eye).

This reminds me of this issue:

From Hubble Space Telescope pictures to the vocabulary used to describe the stars, astronomers and the media are coloring our universe, and they've been doing it for decades. While not intended to deceive, the efforts can range from the overly subjective to the absurd.

Slate explains that the raw images from space telescopes are colored with Photoshop before they are released to the public. The 'Pillars of Creation' shows the difference that color makes. You can download the free Photoshop plug-in to color your own images.

Witness above where you assign 'human carrying capacity' to an unmanned spacecraft!

Hmm... seems you're right. What am I thinking of then? /Me starts digging

Ah, the Soyuz capsule of which the Progress is a derivative of. My bad. :-)

Actually, it's probably considerably *more* than four flights - since your quoted capacity to LEO is based on the 28 degree orbit of Skylab rather than the 56 degree orbit of ISS.

Considerably more? Doubtful. Four flights is 472,000 kg to LEO. The final weight of the ISS is supposed to be 419,000 kg. That leaves us with 53,000 kg to spare.

Now the Shuttle drops about 8,000 kg of cargo capacity to reach the 51 degree orbit. (If you've got a good calculation for the Delta-V required to get there, now's a good time to jump in. Otherwise I'm going for the educated guess.) 8,000 kg is about 28% of the 28,000 kg to LEO. Using the decrease of 28%, we get a S-V rating of ~84,960 kg per flight. Which works out to about 5 flights with some room to spare. Just to be on the safe side, we'll call it six flights. That's still far less than the 21 you're suggesting. It's true that the shuttle also carries people up, but I'll get to that in a moment.

It's less of a savings than you might think. The marginal cost of a single Shuttle mission is around 50-80 million dollars US. OTOH - a single Saturn V costs around 500 million dollars US. (Shuttle flight costs are sensitive to flight rate, whereas Saturn V flights are virtually non sensitive to flight rate.)

The Space Shuttle currently flies for about 500 million per flight. This article suggests that the average cost of a shuttle flight is 1.3 billion! (backed up here)

For each shuttle flight vs. S-V flight you get less cargo, and more costs! And using the 1.3 billion figure per flight, you could launch TWO Saturn V's per shuttle flight! One with Space Station parts, the other with a dozen or so humans in a capsule.

Which is hardly surprising - as it's role isn't as a lunar support base. Even if it were in a more friendly orbit, it's hideously unsuited to being a lunar support base. (More millions to convert it - less saving than you suppose above.)

Except that one of the original roles of Space Station Freedom was as a lunar staging point.

NASA's budget wasn't significantly cut during the Clinton years - it was virtually level.

The funding cuts to the Space Station Freedom program, not the cuts to NASA as a whole. Budgeted funding for the program was cut time and time again until the plan was finally cancelled and the ISS given the go-ahead in its place.

try this: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_amos_0 30411.html

Here it is at http://www.space.com/deepimpact/

Well, I've been trying to submit a story to slashdot over the past few days about a "parallel path" to government-built shuttle-derived that NASA recently announced, but I haven't had any luck. I've already had four or five variations on it rejected. Anybody have ideas on what might be wrong with the following submission?

At a recent talk, Michael Griffin outlined NASA's plans for helping to generate a robust and competitive commercial market in orbital spaceflight. The speech and Q&A transcripts from the talk are available. In a move reminiscent of the US government kickstarting the early airline industry by purchasing airmail services, NASA plans on supplementing government-derived transport by purchasing cargo delivery services to the International Space Station from commercial providers, followed by crew transportation after the systems have proven themselves. Unlike traditional government contracts, sellers wouldn't see a profit before the services are delivered and the emphasis will be on actual performance instead of process and specifications. Aviation Week has some commentary on the announcement.

(The following is from a slashdot story I've tried submitting variations on a few times over the past few days, which has gotten rejected repeatedly for whatever reason. Since it's relevant to the topic of what NASA's planning on doing once the shuttle is retired, I'm posting it here)

At a recent talk, Michael Griffin outlined NASA's plans for helping to generate a robust and competitive commercial market in orbital spaceflight. The speech and Q&A transcripts from the talk are available. In a move reminiscent of the US government kickstarting the early airline industry by purchasing airmail services, NASA plans on purchasing cargo delivery services to the International Space Station from commercial providers, followed by crew transportation after the systems have proven themselves. Unlike traditional government contracts, sellers wouldn't see a profit before the services are delivered and the emphasis will be on actual performance instead of process and specifications. Non-traditional space companies such as SpaceX and t/Space have found Griffin's remarks encouraging, and Aviation Week has some commentary.

Now they can launch, but the ISS won't complete itself, ant that is why i wonder what the hell happened thet made them shut down all the projects they ever stared with to replace the shuttle.

They could at least have shut the projects down BEFORE dropping sacs of money down the drain(if that is what they thougt they were doing - i didn't think so)
The dead X33 and X34 projects :
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/x33_ cancel_010301.html

Keep in mind that the whole impactor crash plus spacecraft flyby will only require a small fraction of a second.

Quoting Rick Grammier, a mission project manager from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena: "If I ran this clip at the speed of the actual encounter, you wouldn't have seen anything. It would have been all over in the blink of an eye."

Oh, great, another time consuming argument with a Zubrin fanboy.

You haven't read his book

Outright wrong. Unlike you, I wouldn't be caught dead debating material I haven't read about.

Really? Please site.

The word is "cite". A "site" is a location. Here is your "cite": Goal #4 of the Apollo program was to "develop man's capability to work in the lunar environment.". Here's a Lunar Colony from 1969. Complete with a smelter. The concept of extracting resources from the moon continued with numerous R&D processes in the late 60s and early 70s; ton-quantities of regolith simulant were produced for the experiments. There was renewed interest in the 1980s with Reagan's call for lunar colonies by 2005.

Mining under most proposals was to be done simply on regolith, using a three drum slasher. Cutler and Krag proposed and investigated a carbothermal oxygen production plant that processed ilmenite desposits. Another 1985 study investigating an entire proposed colony ("Selenopolis"), was to produce 500,000 tons of oxygen per year.

And automatic mining equipment really isn't that complex.

That's bloody hilarious. *Manned* mining equipment produced where weight is no object (here on earth) is quite complex. Have you ever seen the work that goes into setting up, for example, a tunnel boring system? Mining equipment costs millions of dollars per piece, and it's not for no good reason. Add to that the ridiculous weight, the oxygen-requiring temperature-sensitive engines, etc, and you're stuck paying brand new R&D costs without the benefit of bulk sales and having to use things like lithium-aluminum to cut mass.

Also, Zubrin et al created a scale model of some of the oxygen mining gear. Worked great, needs to be tested.

We don't even know specifically where water ice is, yet! (we have some ideas). By the way, have you seen how well electryolysis devices as such perform in hostile environments, even with extensive testing and two decades of development? The US has nothing like it qualified for long term missions - Elektron is the best thing out there (we have some heavy short-term devices).

Loss of a critical component, and that's the end on Mars. No "repairs" being sent up on "the next flight", no massive backups to "tide you over" (this refers not only to oxygen, but to everything critical for life).

Apples to oranges comparison. And 100% WRONG. I honestly can't think of ONE of the missions which it could be claimed with any certainty would NOT have been saved without a human around to check things out.

That's because you've never read about the subject. I hate having to replace a textbook for people like you.

Mars 1960A: Failed to reach earth orbit due to catastrophic vehicle launch failure. Nothing humans could have done.

Mars 1960B: Same

Mars 1962A: Broke into pieces after being launched; pieces remained in Earth orbit for a few days. The equivalent of having more dead humans.

Mars 1: Communication lost in transit for unknown reasons. Depending on the cause, humans may or may not have been able to salvage it.

Mars 1962B: Made it to earth orbit. Rocket fire for transfer orbit destroyed the craft. Humans would have perished.

Mariner 3: Protective shield from earth launch failed to detach. The extra weight prevented it from reaching Mars. As most manned Mars missions don't allow for EVA due to the difficulty and extra mass, at the

Hear, hear.

I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.

You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.

Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.

Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.

Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings ;)

It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.

Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already :)

By the way, speaking of aether... ;)

I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.

If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?

Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.

The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.

Everybody's MMV :)

-- Ritchie

If countries were as serious about robotics as the Japanese are, the whole idea of a Moon dominated by Japanese robots would just be a dream. But Tachikawa is just stating the obvious. The sadly, Japanese are the only ones qualified to provide useful robots.

Considering that the moon has minerals very rich in Titanium on the surface (So much so that it's significant...) and that the industrial byproduct of the extraction of the Titanium from said minerals is Oxygen, I'd say that there's metals up there- usable ones. http://www.permanent.com/l-minera.htm

Also worth noting is that there's enough He3 up there trapped in the regolith that can be easily and controllably fused into other isotopes and elements to be bothered with mining it out of the surface as well. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html

Not everything is QUITE as the detractors of the space program would have you to believe it to be.

To start with, I'm posting a related space.com URL (note the date this article was posted... /. behind the times):

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050608_mars_ aurora.html

The magnetic field of Mars is more like what it will be like on the Earth when the pole reversal occurs: There are several north and south poles scattered all over the surface of Mars, including some near the equator. A "North Pole" and "South Pole" may only be a hundred miles apart in some cases.

The overall effect of this is that the general magnetic field for the planet as a whole is weak, and instead of having ionized material streaming into just two poles on Mars, solar storms will stream into dozens or hundreds of magnetic poles all across the entire planet.

The terms of Aurora Borealis and Australis would still be correct terms in the sense that there still are north and south "poles" to stream material toward, but it would be scattered over almost the entire planet. Unless you happen to have a "compass" on you when a solar storm hit Mars, you wouldn't really be be able to tell the difference.

I do feel like the original researcher who has pushed this "press release" out did a disservice by only mentioning the Aurora Borealis, probably because he has lived his entire life in the Northern hemisphere and is really only familiar with that term, even if he is an astrophysicist and should know both auroral terms. Coming up with a new term is just silly.

The P.I. for the "Deep Field Infrared Observatory Near the Lunar Pole" is... Roger Angel. No, not the baseball writer, the two-ell angel, but the astronomer and telescope designer from the U of A who pioneered using spun-molten-glass as a means of making huge, thin mirrors.

Here's a story from Universe Today and one from space.com.

1.8 million is peanuts compared to the NASA aeronautics research budget of US$850 million per year. However, NASA's aeronautics programs (non-space) are taking a beating in the funding competition with Moon/Mars programs. I know there's a lot of interest and public support for the flashy and expensive space hardware, but it's the core aeronautics research that has a great impact on our mobility around the planet, reducing energy consumption, and reducing environmental impacts of atmospheric flight. I would like to see an Apollo-like program in aeronautics coupled with a continued space presence.

Saturn 5 Blueprints Safely in Storage

A popular, untrue (http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_fiv e_000313.html) urban legend, started in 1996, states that NASA has lost or destroyed the blueprints or other plans for the Saturn V. In fact, the plans still exist on microfilm at the Marshall Space Flight Center, though it seems unlikely that future engineers will find that the plans will come in handy after the subsequent 40-plus years of advances in rocket science.

A poster below mentioned the great quantities of Helium 3 in the moon as a possible rocket fuel

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html

Baldrson writes "Peter Diamandis, originator of the Ansari X-Prize is now claiming private companies may beat NASA back to the Moon: "In the next five to eight years we will have the first private orbital flights occurring. When you're in orbit you are two-thirds of the way to anywhere. I predict that within about three years of private human orbital flights...you'll have the first private teams of people stockpiling fuel on orbit and making a bee-line for the Moon." If Diamandis's math is correct and Bigelow's $50M America's Space Prize is sufficient for orbit, NASA could set up an "Apollo Prize" for a lot less money than they'd spend themselves to return to the moon. Indeed, someone like Paul Allen could afford to endow such a prize if NASA gets too bogged down with funding cycle politics again."

Baldrson writes "Peter Diamandis, originator of the Ansari X-Prize is now claiming private companies may beat NASA back to the Moon: "In the next five to eight years we will have the first private orbital flights occurring. When you're in orbit you are two-thirds of the way to anywhere. I predict that within about three years of private human orbital flights...you'll have the first private teams of people stockpiling fuel on orbit and making a bee-line for the Moon." If Diamandis's math is correct and Bigelow's $50M America's Space Prize is sufficient for orbit, NASA could set up an "Apollo Prize" for a lot less money than they'd spend themselves to return to the moon. Indeed, someone like Paul Allen could afford to endow such a prize if NASA gets too bogged down with funding cycle politics again."

I want to preface this by saying I do think NASA went to the moon... but I do think its funny to read the conspiracy theories... there's always a few. http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/moon_hoaxes _010215.html

If the moon was developed as a jumping off point for Earth, exploration of the system would be much much cheaper than it is today (especially for the outer planets). That is because the Moon could build all of the space hardware and refine the fuel so we would not have to lift that mass out of the Earth's gravitational well. Plus, the Moon would be a much better location to train astronauts (lower gravity and easier access to no grav conditions). And, it would be a much cheaper source of some very expensive stuff on Earth, such as helium 3.

It is a shame that we've waited this long to even consider it.

You're wrong on every front.

No. Just the manned launches

Manned launches: 37 Soyuz, 14 Soyuz-T, 23 Soyuz-TM. Total = 74. There may be a couple other types of craft not included there, because I've seen the manned launches as high as around a hundred. Two manned Soyuz failures in 74 is a worse failure rate than two in 113. As mentioned before, the only reason why it has a lower casualty rate is because it carries a lot less people than the shuttle (it carried one and three, respectively, on its accidents. The shuttle carried seven on each).

And, by the way, if you think killing 50 technicians on the ground before one launch alone is irrelevant because it's not the cosmonauts who were killed, I hope for your sake that you never tell that to a technician's face. Same with the deaths of soldiers. That's rather sickening, to be honest.

but it is somewhat safer for the cosmonauts

Not on a per-person-per-trip-to-space basis. The shuttle has launched many more into space. I mean, we could say that the Spruce Goose is tied for the record of "World's Safest Aircraft", but that would be unfair, now wouldn't it, as it only flew a minimal crew one time.

That was a Progress launch

No, it was not. It was a Soyuz-U.

A similar failure of the Shuttle could kill hundreds

No, it could not. The light from the SRBs is visible from 450 miles around. The closest viewing area is outside the designated "blast zone", at 3.5 miles from the twin pads, and that's usually not allowed without a NASA pass. The primary shuttle viewing area is about ten miles away at Space View Park in Titusville, to the west. The shuttle moves east after liftoff.

The high safety of Soyuz ... as evidenced by probably around a hundred total casualties under its belt (including ground crews killed on unmanned launches) and a higher failure rate than the shuttle?

it has safety issues they still haven't solved

And a Soyuz just blew up there years ago. Your point?

Sol (our sun) is a 3rd generation star, in what is considered one of the original galaxies in the 13.7 billion year old universe ( http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_age_04 0817.html ) Sol about 5 billion years old and located 2/3 of the way out on the Orion arm which extends some 42,000 light years from the stellar nursury at the center. ( http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/MilkyWay_ SizeandShapeoftheMilkyWay.asp ) IIRC, centripital acceleration slowly pushes stars out from the center towards the edge. The Milky Way is approximately 10,000 lightyears thick at the edge and 30,000 light years think in the centre.

If we assume that intelligence and time since your sun was born have a positive correlation, this means the smarter aliens would be further from the galactic core, and this space covers approximately 11 billion cubic lightyears of a total 169 billion cubic lightyears, about 6.5% of the space. If we assume that the galaxy's 200 billion stars are evenly distributed over this volume (they aren't, the galaxy is denser towards the center), that gives us 13 billion stars with the possibility of intelligent life smarter than us. If we assume that 1% of them actually do harbor intelligent life (and that figure is probably way too high), that leaves us with 130 million stars, spread out over 11 billion cubic lightyears. Since we have an even distribution of stars, that means intelligent life will happen once every 85 million light years.

So the nearest intelligent life with an advanced society is 85 million light years away. Unless the alien race has discovered a means to FTL travel, if they left 85 million years ago, they would be arriving right now. Serious SETI research isn't aimed at meeting ET, or having a conversation, but confirming that extraterrestrial intelligence exists.

• form spores; i.e. are drought tolerant
• use the martian soil as a nutrient source
• perform a modified form of photosynthesis

The bigger problem is that the gravity on mars (which is only 38% of the gravity on earth) may not be strong enough to keep an atmosphere we can use on the planet; i.e. the mass of mars may be too small to allow it to be effectively terraformed.