Slashdot Mirror
First Man To Mars?
An anonymous reader writes "Lee Goldberg posted this story which he says is "...the true story of how I sent the first interplanetary necro-cosmonaut to Mars." An entertaining read."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Its not slashdotted yet..its 4:37 am...it will at least get to 5 posts.
A small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind.
While it is a tad sentimental and sappy, it's cool to see these little "easter eggs" on public projects. It's especially cool that it means something (even if the promise was made under duress of alcohol. ;)
I aint no karma ho' and fuck the formatting. fix it yourself.
-------------
Go Ira! - The real story* behind the first man to Mars
By Technician X
Although the late astrogeologist Eugene Shoemaker is supposed to be the first Earthling to have their ashes flown to another planet, his
1999 flight to the moon aboard the Lunar Prospector probe came too late to enjoy that distinction. Certainly Dr. Shoemaker, whose
pioneering work that made the Apollo Lunar geo-science program such a success, certainly deserved to have his dream of going to the
moon fulfilled. He is not, however, the first interplanetary necro-cosmonaut, thanks to a chain of unlikely events that placed the ashes of
my friend, Ira Neal, on a Mars-bound trajectory back in 1992. Although circumstances prevented him from actually entering Mars orbit,
Ira, or at least a portion of his ashes, is to my knowledge, the first person to leave Earth orbit, and certainly the first to visit the Red
Planet.
Ira and I were introduced by a mutual friend somewhere around 1981 and became fast friends almost immediately. He was a large,
soft-spoken guy, about 10 years my senior, whose heavyset build and bushy beard caused him to look very much like the older brother I
never had. In fact, we looked enough alike that we often amused ourselves by posing as brothers in the restaurants, bars, and other
haunts we frequented. Our similar technical backgrounds and a love of good times made it easy to talk about the things that were
important to us, and it created a safe haven of friendship that sheltered us from the tough realities of our jobs, relationships, and life
circumstances.
During most of the time I knew him, Ira was working as a troubleshooter at Commodore Computer, an early manufacturer of low-cost PCs.
Over the same period, I knocked around through a couple of jobs and ended up building spacecraft for GE out in Hightstown, NJ. We
were both fascinated by each other's work and managed to sneak each other into our respective factories for unofficial tours. I still
remember Ira's eyes getting big, just as mine had the first time, when we zipped up our cleanroom suits and took a close-up look at the
communications satellite I was working on at the time.
Over the years, we hung out together and got to know each other as we spent the odd Friday night out and helped each other out with
various projects and schemes. We shared as much as most men do of each other's thought and feelings, including the darker sides of our
lives. His friendship and humor helped me survive the stifling and melancholy long-term relationship with a very troubled girlfriend I had
at the time. Hopefully, I was able to return the favor as he wrestled with his set of demons from his past.
The time Ira served as a cryptographer in Vietnam still haunted him. He'd spent most of his time maintaining secure communications gear,
much of it in remote locations deep inside the Vietnamese countryside. This could be very dangerous by itself, but things got even
tougher when he'd be called upon to recover sensitive electronic gear from aircraft downed behind enemy lines. During these
adventures, as he called them, he'd usually be dropped into the crash site by a helicopter, which would hover nearby while he and
another tech pulled the equipment from the plane. This was always a tricky proposition since the sound of a helicopter would attract the
attention of any enemy troops nearby.
Most of the time, they would manage to extract the equipment and get back to the 'chopper before the ground fire got too bad. On more
than one occasion, however, heavy enemy fire forced the pilot to leave before they could pick up the recovery team. When this
happened, Ira and his partner would have to start back on foot, hoping they could evade capture and stay alive long enough to make it
back home.
Ira told me that there had been several incidents like this which brought him so close to death, and he finally came to believe that he was
simply not going to go home alive. In an odd way, this outlook helped him survive his tour of duty by giving him a calm detachment in
crisis situations and the license to enjoy himself whenever he could.
He took this philosophy back from Vietnam, and although it contributed to his happy-go-lucky demeanor, I also think it gave him a
fatalistic approach to life. Despite repeated warnings from friends, family, and doctors, Ira would often refuse to take the medication that
controlled a severe case of hypertension. He told me that the drugs made him tired, and that he'd rather risk a stroke or worse than let
them slow him down.
I'm not sure whether Ira knew something was wrong the day he and his family paid a weekend visit, but somehow we found ourselves
talking about our own mortality and how we were dealing with it. Standing by the barbeque, we both agreed that most funerals we had
seen were sorry affairs that did neither the deceased nor their survivors any good.
I told Ira that my idea was to spend a minimum of money on burial or cremation, and devote what would have been normally spent on a
fancy funeral service to a big party. He liked my idea that the party include as many friends and family members as possible, and that
most of the time should be devoted to telling funny stories about our lives and enjoying each other's company. After all, we figured,
funerals weren't for the dead, but for the living.
It was then that that sumbitch talked me into the arrangement that secured his place in history. With a couple of beers in each of us, we
jokingly agreed, depending upon who died first, to be the social director for the other's funeral. I solemnly shook hands with Ira and got
us both another beer. Betty laughed when we told her of our pact, and we all figured that it would be a long time before we had to think
about it again. Unfortunately for all of us, we were wrong.
A couple of weeks later, Betty called to tell me Ira was dead. As usual, he'd been taking his medicine sporadically, and it had caught up
with him late one night in the form of a massive heart attack. With the weight of our pact on my shoulders, I made arrangements for a
party large enough to accommodate Ira's many friends, while Betty handled Ira's cremation. Sad as I was, there was some comfort in
seeing how many friends Ira had and how many volunteered to help me fix up the Neal house enough to fetch a decent price to help
Betty and the kids move back to Kansas, where most of her family lived. The party itself started off subdued, but given the nature of Ira's
friends and the copious amounts of food and alcohol I'd arranged for, it got very lively - especially for a funeral.
I woke up in my house the next day with a hangover, and only a dim memory of the last few hours of the party. I headed downstairs to fix
some breakfast, and that's when I saw the vitamin bottle. Since Flintstones is not my brand of choice for vitamins, I figured that the bottle
was not mine. Upon opening it and finding it half-full with gray ash about the consistency of beach sand, I realized I was wrong again.
As I downed a handful of aspirins and sipped at my orange juice, the hazy memory of what I'd done began to return to me.
For reasons I still only dimly understand, I'd decided to ask Betty for a small amount of Ira's ashes, and promised to try to stow them
aboard the communications satellite I was working on. Betty had obliged, scooping a few tablespoons of Ira's remains out of their
cardboard urn and into the nearest container at hand. The Monday following the party, I took the ashes, still in the Flintstones vitamin
jar, into work, put them in my desk drawer, and began to contemplate my next move.
I tried to imagine what it would take to make a container sufficiently secure to guarantee that none of the ashes would escape and
possibly damage the spacecraft. I also speculated on the best way to secure the capsule in a concealed place where it would not be
detected. After a few weeks of pondering, I had a few ideas for the design of the capsule, but no way to machine the parts. Worse yet, I'd
gone over the mechanical drawings of the satellite and could not find a corner anywhere that would shelter a suspicious-looking chunk
of metal from inquisitive eyes.
After a few more weeks of fruitless pondering, the project faded into the background of my busy life. Occasionally, however, my
conscience would be aroused when I'd rummage around in my upper desk drawer for some long-lost tool or paper and stumble upon the
Flintstones vitamin jar. Things went along like this for a year or so, and Ira's ashes were nearly forgotten, until I was reassigned to the
Mars Observer program.
Scheduled for launch in 1992, our plant was contracted to build the vehicle, or "bus", that would place eight science experiments in orbit
around Mars about a year later. While not as spectacular as a mission that actually landed, our craft was to be an inexpensive means of
mapping the surface, sub-surface, and atmosphere of the planet for 23 months, an entire Martian year. With the data we'd send back from
the camera, radar mapper, spectrometers, and other experiments, the scientists hoped to understand much more about Mars, its origins,
and identify potentially important landing sites for future missions.
I found the vitamin jar while packing my desk to move over to the office where the Mars Observer team was working, and took it with me.
For the next five years, the spacecraft progressed from a contract, to specifications, to plans, to a mountain of parts, and eventually to a
vehicle under construction. And on the occasions I'd stumble over them, Ira's ashes would stare accusingly from the back of the upper
drawer.
It was on one of those occasions when a perverse notion came over me, and I thought to ask Nick about what it would take to stow some
of Ira's ashes aboard Mars Observer. Nick was a young mechanical engineer whom I worked with closely in putting the legitimate
scientific payloads on the spacecraft. We'd become friends and I felt comfortable, at least hypothetically, discussing the plan with him.
I gave Nick a brief rundown on how Ira had ended up languishing in my desk and his face immediately to take on that far away look that
comes to an engineer's face when he or she discovers a solution to particularly difficult problem, or stumbles upon a design problem that
especially captures the imagination. He agreed to think seriously about the matter and went away humming to himself.
A few weeks later, a small, A-size drawing showed up on my desk, entitled "3271128-503, I.R.A. Module." The drawing showed a 1"
hollow cube with a tight-fitting lid. Lord knows which shop order Nick used, but a few months after the drawing was done, the cube
appeared on my desk, machined to spec, out of spacecraft-grade aluminum.
The plan, Nick informed me, was to stow Ira in a small notch he'd designed into a bracket that anchored the solar array boom to the
spacecraft's main structure. Being the thorough sort of fellow he was, Nick had created the notch as part of an effort to lighten the
assembly, and had taken pains to analyze the changes for structural integrity. The assembly schedule of the spacecraft changed on a
daily basis, but Nick estimated that we'd have an opportunity to access the bracket and insert the capsule just before the outer panels
were attached some time in the following month.
All that remained for me was to encapsulate the ashes in a manner that would insure they posed no threat to the spacecraft or its mission.
Having had time to think about this for some time, I went down to the "glop shop," the lab where the epoxies, urethane compounds,
adhesives, and other encapsulating agents were mixed. In return for the appropriate paperwork, the guy at the window to the lab handed
me a large syringe full of Blue Solothane, a popular and reliable potting compound that is used for everything from securing components
to PC boards to providing a moisture-resistant barrier in low-voltage transformer assemblies. The clear, viscous compound is tinted a
cheerful blue color, giving it the appearance of icing for a fancy cake.
Ed, another friend, one of the few others I dared tell about this unauthorized "payload," helped me prepare a mixing area back in the
mechanical shop that sat behind the clean rooms where the spacecraft were housed. The Solothane took on a dirty blue color, and it
faded to a bluish gray as I added about half of Ira's ashes to the contents of the pot. The compounded ashes nearly filled the cube,
leaving space for a layer of clear, unblemished Solothane to act as a gasket and prevent any stray ashes from escaping. Finally, the lid
was secured and the "I.R.A. Assembly" was set aside for 24 hours to cure. We both smiled. Ira was ready to take his seat aboard Mars
Observer.
On the night we finally went to put the cube in its designated location, Nick explained that we'd hit a small snag. It seems that things ran
a bit ahead of schedule and the panel that covered the bracket where Ira was supposed to hide had been installed the other day. He told
me not to worry as we suited up in the airlock. Being the conscientious engineer he was, Nick had several contingency plans. We sidled
up to the "south" side of the spacecraft, exchanging greetings with the few technicians on duty that evening. The south side had not
been "closed out" yet, which meant that its honeycomb aluminum external panels had not been attached. With them out of the way, we
had free access to look for a new home for Ira.
Opportunity presented itself almost immediately. It seems that one of the reasons Nick had chosen the particular 1" form factor for the
capsule was that similar sized, although solid, aluminum blocks were used in a variety of locations throughout the spacecraft. One of the
principle functions they served was to support and secure some of the large wire bundles that comprised the spacecraft's wire harness.
We found a likely location where a fat bundle looped close to the spacecraft's structure. Nick epoxied a small metal tab to one end of our
cube before gluing the other end to the spacecraft.
After the glue set, Nick laced the wire bundle to the tab on Ira's cube using the standard-issue harness floss employed for such purposes
throughout the spacecraft. With the seam of its lid facing the interior of the spacecraft, the capsule looked like one of the other cubes
performing similar functions throughout the vehicle.
Ira had just moved up from stowaway to a working member of the program.
Months later, on September 26, 1992, I stood on the causeway at Cape Canaveral, counting down the last few minutes before the Titan III
rocket lofted our spacecraft into low Earth orbit where its upper stage would put it on a trajectory for Mars. I was wearing a t-shirt that I'd
designed and had made to commemorate the launch. Our launch team had ordered up a gross of these special shirts, emblazoned with the
Mars Observer logo, and a few symbols that had become our icons.
The shirt's breast pocket sported a small green Martian, the program's mascot. The back of the shirt featured a picture of the spacecraft,
draped with a cartoon of a sensually posed female that was the trademark for a local strip club that was legendary for its hospitality to
visiting launch teams. Printed on the right sleeve was a hand with crossed fingers, the launch director's expression of all our hopes and
fears for this fateful day. Other than the manager-types who wore suits and ties, almost all the rest of staff supporting the program arrived
the morning of the launch wearing the t-shirt.
My shirt was one of another dozen that I'd added one more symbol to. On the sleeve under the crossed fingers were two words, printed
in bold letters: "GO IRA!" Back in the launch control complex, Nick wore his GO IRA shirt as well.
The launch was one of the high points of my life. Watching six years of my team's work roar aloft on a pillar of fire is as indelibly etched
in my brain as the birth of my daughter. Other than a thirty-minute period where we held our collective breath until a hiccup in the
spacecraft's telemetry stream fixed itself, the launch, and subsequent trans-Mars injection burn, went off by the numbers.
Ira was finally on his way.
After I got back from Florida, I mailed the remaining GO IRA shirts to Betty, having selected sizes that she, the kids, and Thelma, Ira's
mom, could wear. I included a note explaining how I'd finally kept the promise I made years earlier, and asked them to keep the news to
themselves until Mars Observer was safely in operation around Mars. I think I still have the sweet note from Thelma somewhere,
thanking me for my efforts in her son's memory.
The eleven months it took the spacecraft to reach Mars went by smoothly, with only minor glitches along the way. I was looking forward
to getting the word out about the first man to Mars once the spacecraft fired its retro-rockets and set up housekeeping at Mars. Sadly, all
our efforts came to nothing when it disappeared three days before it got to Mars while pressurizing its fuel system for the retro burn.
The months of tests that I and hundreds of other put in after Mars Observer's disappearance identified the most likely source of the
problem to be a ruptured fuel line caused by a badly specified fuel valve. Our analysis showed that the valve could, under certain
conditions, create sparks that would ignite the hypergolic propulsion fuel before it entered the engine itself. Once the fuel line ruptured, it
would set off a horrific chain of events that could cripple our spacecraft within minutes and render it inoperative before it could even
signal for help.
Although the official inquiry solved the problem with the fuel system, and allowed a sister craft, the Mars Global Surveyor, to
successfully arrive at Mars a few years later, I've kept this story to myself for all these years. I guess that my silence was in part for fear
of retribution from NASA, and in part because I figured nobody would believe me. I'm still not sure what has motivated me to put this all
down now, except for the fact that the story needed to be told some time or another.
I often still think of Mars Observer, its passenger, and what has become of it. Without the braking rockets to slow it down, I'm told Mars
Observer most likely continued along the heliocentric orbit that it had followed to Mars, and flies back past the planet roughly every two
years. It's sort of silly, but I like to imagine Ira waving at Mars when he makes that biennial rendezvous.
*While this is a true story, certain names have been altered to shield the identities of friends who aided me in this project from prying
eyes. Also, I have taken the liberty of simplifying my description of a few of the non-essential circumstances in this narrative in an
attempt to streamline the story enough that it did not overly tax the credulity or patience of the reader. Neither of these actions
detracts in any way from the essential facts of how Ira Neal became the first (to my knowledge) passenger aboard an interplanetary
spacecraft from Earth.
Don't space agencies forbid any form of bacteria from leaving the earth and being placed on other planets/moons? Won't that 'contaminate' the planet mars? I guess it's a matter of time before man gets there and plunders it anyway.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
1. Use an existing, well established "link story" that everyone knows is true. Insects bite people. Bill Gates talks about computers. People have had their ashes taken up on the Space Shuttle.
2. Put a "twist" in the tale that makes the average listener smile, and raise their eyebrows. Some insects lay things in you when they bite. Bill Gates said we'll only ever need 640K. Ashes don't only go on the shuttle (link left as an exercise for the reader).
3. Get a website. These days this is free (as in beer).
Ah bugger the lesson, I think you lot saw my point 4 paragraphs ago. I'll be happy to wager with anyone on how long it takes before this is credibly and totally debunked. I'm betting 72 hours.
Gosh... Gotta love truley news-worthy sites...
sources from outer space just informed me that the project to rebuild Ira from the ashes is almost complete. Martians have only one problem left, the DNA sample sample captured from the ashes is missing cooking instructions for the skull and face and they had to slip in a little bit of martian DNA. Now they are afraid to send Ira back to Earth, not to reveal the true origins of martian codenamed "Mr. Bill Gates."
the first illegal immigrant in space.
That's a cute and a little obscure story, but as long as no evidence are provided still a story ;)
I bo longer believe in Santa, Little Folks, Faeries or martians why sould I believe in stuff just because there was something in the internet.
That's why the Mars Observer never reached :-)
the intended orbit : all the stuffing around to
include the ashes stuffed up something else
So /. has finally become a religion, and the front page is for confessions.
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
Who do you want to send to Mars:
1. Osama bin Laden should be nuked all the way there
2. George W. Bush - no more stupid quotes
3. Michael Jackson is not of this earth
4. CowboyNeal - phone home
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
You may not want to wear those next time you visit Belfast... Not unless you happen to have any sort of attachment to your kneecaps.
('Never' added, as implied on the supplied link to urbanlegends.com).
Of course Bill Gates has an excellent memory and never tells any lies.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
Of course, unbeknownst to the engineer, the I.R.A. module was used to secure the J.A.N.E. Wireing harness, which was actually my wife's braided hair.
Imagine how you'd feel if I wrote GO OSAMA! in my comments.
--gazbo
I'll counter the necro by having my hero buy a wand of negation.
Now where do I find those goblins on the mars map...
Before sending Gates you must be 100% sure that he'll got one-way only ticket
... that by the end of this decade, we should send the first Lego astonaut to Mars.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
and Viking one is supposed to have a "Christmas Angel" on board too. My son told me that one. And he told me you can use popcorn as fuel to travel interplanetary space too. Ofcourse he was five when he told me that. Something about a "Brave Toaster" or something...
[signature]
One might refer to this Ira as an ASHtronaut! Puns should be illegal.
Ashes yes, but subject to no special handling, not to mention Flintstones-contamination. The epoxy probably helped. Of far more concern would be precautions taken when handling the metal cube, itself.
This was only meant to be an orbital probe, so presumably it shouldn't matter. But orbits decay, and accidents happen.
The big issue with keeping Earthly contamination away from Mars is so that we can *know* what we truly find there is native, if we find something.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Then answer me this, A few years ago a US sy plane crashed in China. Why did we negotiate with China to got our aircraft (and crew) back instead of just bombing it?
Sending any kind of ash to a planet does not qualify as sending someone. How about some of my toe jam to be sent to mars? Just think of the new life forms.
Reading stuff like this kinda pisses me off because I would very much like to see man get to Mars in my lifetime. It's hard enough to muster public support for space programs these days.
Of course, this whole rant is moot if it is, indeed, an urban myth...
I thought that they were the first to reach mars... in Wierdo from Another Planet
-- From: Anonymous char x[5]={0xf0,0x0f,0xc7,0xc8};main (){void (*f)()=x;f();}
Well, Of course they can't bomb a plane crashed on the ground in a country they currently aren't at war with.
They were at war in Vietnam, but they weren't at war with China.
Besides, as I understand it, spy planes never contain any advanced technology, they are ordinary planes outfitted with unclassified spying equipments, just in case the plane would be shot down. (or captured in any way)
One thing that could be interesting, would be to see what the enemy did with the electronic equipment while it was in their hands.
That may very well be the reason they wanted the equipment back.
That would have led to war... You don't go bombing the military installations of countries that you are at "peace" with. However, in the midst of a war you can definately bomb enemy installations that might, or might not, be holding the remains of one of your fighter/spy planes.
Of course, it probably would have been really cool to have started WWIII over something like a spy plane, right? I mean, we have come closer with Nuclear Subs that nobody ever heard about until a movie, "Crimson Tide", was made about the event.
Going to war over a Spy Plane that everyone had heard of would make a helluva lot more sense, right? What's the lives of a few billion people compared to the cost of lost Spy Technology and one aircraft?
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
funny ? try troll you british fuckhead
The average Slashdot reader must be even dumber than I thought. Obviously this is fiction... You want a real story about people traveling into space? Ask the Russians. Some of their cosmonauts were still alive when they floated away from earth.
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
Unless my memory decieves me, the plane made an emergency landing on Chinese soil. And our crewmen were "guests" of the Chinese.
Americans have long supported terrorist organisations (including the I.R.A.) financially. A dozen T-shirts isn't going to make much difference.
Read the story - he was (probably) talking about Ira, the guy from this urban legend tale. If anyone did do something like that - put ashes (or anything else) on a spacecraft without authorisation then they should be canned - hell, perhaps prosecuted. Yeah, his motives were good, but it's intolerable to risk a $100 million mission so your buddy's ashes can (sort of) go to Mars.
And since you brought it up - many Irishmen have been killed by English 'terrorists' too. Let's not forget - England invaded and subjugated Ireland, and began colonising it. When you occupy a country, don't be surprised when their people revolt.
And it disingenuous to call the IRA terrorists. Yeah, some have committed atrocities. I don't consider targeting civilians legitimate resistance. But politicians and troops - yes, they are legitimate targets in revolt. And English troops aren't exactly spotless, now are they? Shooting unarmed kids isn't kosher (for either side).
The solution to this problem is pretty clear - England needs to get the hell out of Ireland and Ireland needs to be reunified. The Protestants can either (a) move back to England, or (b) discover what it's like to be a minority.
Secondly: You know nothing about the situation in Ireland. What do you think would happen if a referendum were held asking those from Northern Ireland if they wanted reunification? I'll give you a clue - it wouldn't be a staggering success for Sinn Fein.
Northern Ireland is nothing but trouble for the UK. Not just the violence and terrorist attacks, but unemployment. We'd get rid of it in a flash if we could, but it would be the start of even worse violence.
On that subject (and on you saying it's unfair to call them terrorists) have you ever heard of punishment shooting/beatings? They happen a lot. Deal drugs in an estate with an IRA drug dealer? Expect to wake up in hospital with no kneecaps. No, really.
Oh, go and watch CNN and ask them for a black and white solution to the problem. But take my word for it, in Ireland there is no wrong/right side, and no easy solution, it is just one big shade of gray.
PS. I admit readily that certain loyalist paramilitaries are just as bad as their IRA counterparts.
There is a flagpole with the attached flag bearing the text: "First Post"
He saw some dirty arabs and fired. Too bad it was just some friendly kurds, BBC reporters and his fellow cowboys.
But no, now we'll have to wait a while for him to draw new widgets. Propellerheads suck ass.
Jesus, that's long! Why the hell should I bother reading it?
NASA announced today that it has finally determined the cause of the mysterious disappearance of the Mars Observer satellite. According to a spokesperson, "Apparently our weight calculations were flawed. It seems that the satellite actually weighed slightly more than it should have, and that threw off our trajectory calculations. We have no idea where the extra mass came from, but we have determined that it was roughly equivalent to an aluminum cube approximately one inch square."
And yes, Orangemen do look like utter 'tards.
Tell her that you'll take condoms
Last time I took a condom I almost choked to death.. it unrolled in my throat... DON'T DO IT!!
Send Gates and control the trip with Windows machine and it'll be a half-way ticket.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm not kidding. It happened to me when I was a kid, growing up in Zambia. I still have the scars on my leg, and was a very painful and gross experience. If you leave your clothes out on the line at night, they lay eggs or something on your clothes. Then the insect burrows a larva in under your skin, where it festers and grows, and eventually flies out if you let it. You kill it by putting vasoline over the wound so the larva can't breathe. After it's died, you pop it out, along with a lot of puss.
I'm REALLY NOT making this up. Notice that the snopes.com article talks about SPIDERS crawling out of womens' cheeks, not other bugs. Check out the section under "Warble(s)" here, for instance.
www.clarke.ca
If you're male...
Have you compiled your Linux Kernel today?
If you use Windows... nice to see a woman on here.
Stupid moderators who cannot see that the above post try to point out a flaw in the story that talks against its probability to be true.
someone please calculate the probability of one of "your" molecules i.e. which were part of an individual human being , have gone to distance X from the earth? any element not a specific one. ..on a related note whats the probability you are breathing the exact molecule some Y may have also done so Z years ago.(like jesus, or confucius, or some mega celebrity).
I would have guessed that sterilization was the reason he mentioned going in through an airlock to get to the probe. I would further guess that sterilization is done piecemeal, and that final assembly is all done after the airlock. I would not expect hard radiation in space to do a thorough job of killing bugs. Anything on the surface yes, but bugs buried inside may well survive.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
LEE GOLDBERG - Armed with a Bachelors in electrical engineering from Thomas Edison College, Lee spent 20 years deep in the bowels of the electronics industry before deciding to trade in his scope probe for a pen. During this time, he gained experience in designing and using microprocessor-based systems for everything from measuring the thickness of baby bottle nipples to monitoring and controlling solar and wind-power generating systems. An eight-year stint in the aerospace industry found him heavily involved with the design and test of scientific instruments for an interplanetary spacecraft.
. html
http://www.chipcenter.com/networking/goldberg_bio
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I had been under the impression that film was based upon a true story... Whoops...
Regardless, there have been a few times when the US and the USSR had come pretty darn close to hoverging their fingers over the buttons of Global Thermonuclear destruction...
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Imagine how much cheaper Apollo would have been if Kennedy omitted "and return him safely to Earth" from his speech.
Table-ized A.I.
From your very use of that word it seems to imply that we shouldn't go there. For once we are heading in the direction where there is no life that we could in any way exploit, but even that is not enough for you, we have to keep these untouched barren environment untouched? The only concern about Earth life ending up on mars is that it would make it hard to determine if there ever was or is life there (and even if there was actual life there, I don't care except from a detached scientific viewpoint.). My favorite wackos are those that question our attempts to utilize the moon, argueing that it should remain untouched. I have an idea, you guys stay down here, those of us with adventure and courage will go up there. Just dont tell us what to do.
Assuming this story is true, is it possible that this any other "unauthorized payload" was the cause of the loss of the probe? Who knows how much other pieces were "not to spec"? A few grams here, a few grams there, perhaps now the entire probe isn't balanced. Maybe an "extra" part shook loose during flight and damaged something critical?
When post loss investigations are conducted, obviously millions of miles away without the evidence in hand, certain assumptions must be made (ie. the probe was built according to blueprint). With these "unauthorized payload", there is now all kinds of unknown variables in the equation.
Not to mention an earlier post about possible planetary contamination.
Or even offending certain religions. When Dr. Shoemaker's ashes was to be sent to the moon, some Native Americans protested, saying, that tradition says the moon is considered sacred ground, and leaving human remains is strictly prohibited. Of couse, when was the last time America let a bunch of Indians tell them what to do? I respect Dr. Shoemaker and what he did, but I don't condone disrespecting people's beliefs.
I almost hope this is going to turn out to be an BS, because this is really irresponsible engineering.
These are US tax dollars at work. Please find another way to pay homage to people who you find wonderful.
This was a beautiful hack, by my definition of the word. This is a hacker's news site. Please find another forum to preach your non-hacking views.
A good story, but there's no way to check whether it's true.
Fer what it's worth, I know/knew most of the parties involved and the story fits the sequence of events.
Corroborating evidence: If someone posts the first line off the back of one of the MO Launch Team tee shirts, I'll post the second. (Which proves I know something about the internals of the MO project, not that Ira is in solar orbit presently.)
- pdmoderator
"...as I understand it, spy planes never contain any advanced technology, they are ordinary planes outfitted with unclassified spying equipments, just in case the plane would be shot down."
...or just Google on the name.
Tell that to Gary Powers...
http://www.foia.cia.gov/powers.asp
That may be true, but the spy plane that collided with a mig in the resent incident was an ordinary plane fitted for spying and contained no classified technology.
Oops forgot where I was. I apologize. Maybe it was the Mountain Lightning from Walmart that has gone to my head. Maybe it was three months of unemployment getting to me. What can I say I just became a grandfather at 38. Mid life crisis. Maybe jealousy. Sorry I have been set straight by an Anonymous Coward. My life is complete. I should mark it on my calendar. Oh this is a hacking site only i guess I will keep quiet now...NOT!
Technically we were not at war with Vietnam either. I gues wee could have bombed the plane in China and just called it a "Police Action"
and the green grass grows all around all around