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First Commercial Moon Mission Approved
dorantrist writes "A Discovery Channel article that The U.S. Government has just licensed the first commercial mission to the moon to TransOrbital, Inc.. Part of the mission is "to VERIFY Apollo and other landing sites" because there are still a few people out there who believe the Apollo program was a hoax. --Maybe they can also pickup the golf balls left by Alan Shepard?"
Who thinks that people silly enough to believe the first trip to the moon was a hoax will now believe that this trip is for real?
"...to VERIFY Apollo and other landing sites"
Great, they're going to send back fake pictures of the Apollo landing site...
I wanna know what right the US has to grant commercial missions to the moon. Like we are the only country that has rights to the moon as a resource.
The next big wars will be over space shipping lanes.
riley
Maybe they can also pickup the golf balls left by Alan Shepard?
dont have to..... take a look here or more specifically this animation.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I bet this company was started years ago by the military in secret and now after all this time, when the dust has settled and the heat has let up, is going back to the studio to fake another landing. :)
This time I bet ILM will put some really cool animals and critters on the moon. Maybe even some faces in the rocks and a giant underground mine with a real live arnold.
WOW.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
Why does this company need to get approval of the US Gov?
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
"Trailblazer is expected to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan within the next nine to 12 months. "
So, WTF does it have to do withthe US government?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
lander: we are now returning with alan sheperds balls.
base: what was that? (chuckle)
lander: i said were returning with alan shepards balls.
base: hehe, sweet. did you use the retractable cup tool to scoop them up?
lander: yes, we used the cup.
base: would you say that your... hehehehehe, cupping alan shepards balls?
lander: umm, yes, weve successfully cupped his balls.... do you guys hear laughing over the frequency cutting in?
base: oh no, no laughing here. would you say your excited to be cupping....
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Am I the only person disturbed by the idea that people will go to the moon and strip mine with abandon, and destroy its beauty from the perspective of people on Earth? I think something will never be the same about our little neighborhood of space when people look up and see lights all over the moon at night and they've dug up the man in the moon's face... ;)
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
This won't change their minds. These people are never going to believe we landed on the moon. They'll just convince themselves that TansOrbital is a puppet company. I'm not even sure if they'd believe the whole deal if they went up themselves, took off their helmets and died from exposure to the vacuum and cold.
Well, I'm still somewhat skeptical that they'll actually be able to do it ... I'll believe it when it happens. But if they do manage it, I think that it's a good step forward. As the government doesn't seem to have much interest in getting us to space, we're going to have to rely on commercial ventures to do it for us.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Eaxactly what I was wondering. WTF is up with that, you need permission to leave the planet? Well, I guees maybe you need permission to come back, but still...
Edith Keeler Must Die
Actually if you read the article they are launching from Kazakhstan.
Don't these guys know anything about marketing!?! What they should have mentioned is building the first Wi-Fi network and WarShuttling.
Shooting off another space mission to take pictures of the landing site from the first space mission isn't going to convince skeptics, who are convinced that all these space missions are big left wing conspiracies. What they need to do is go up there and dust the moon with some colored powder or something.
"Trlblzr wuz here! 02"
That'll convince them.
The angel in the oatmeal.
I believe you need permission to launch any satellite into orbit, and launching a large rocket into space without first letting everyone know what you are doing might not be a real good idea.
What?
So it's highly unlikely to travel through US airspace. No?
So WTF does it have to do with the US government?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Because they are incorporated in the US and therefore bound by its laws and regulatory agencies, I assume.
Yes, it's strange at first sight that you need a license, from the US government no less, to go to the moon. They don't even launch there, they launch from Kazakhstan, as the article says.
But that also means this is a US company launching space craft from abroad. I would think a few permits are involved there - like in exporting it there in the first place. I don't know exactly what sort of technology export restrictions there currently are, but I think spacecraft will be covered.
And of course they need a license from the guy who patented 'flying to the moon' as a business method...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
At least it wasn't an X-10 pop-up ....
from the article:
"Trailblazer is expected to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan within the next nine to 12 months. Trailblazer will also carry a time capsule containing messages and personal items that will remain on the moon where the craft crashes.
"
If you want to establish imperial right to the moon, just establish the precedent of demanding control over such activities. Companies such as Transorbital are not rich; they cave quickly. But now precedent is established: the U.S. claims the right to regulate U.S. companies' activities on the moon, even if launched from another country.
Editorially I add that the precedents established in cases such as Noriega and various internet sites overseas has given the U.S. expanded *expected* control of activies in other countries. We're essentially claiming, bit-by-bit, hegemony over the planet by any means necessary. It's not a vile conspiracy, merely the Logic of Empire.
It's not so much a matter of getting permission, but to inform people of what's going on. MOST launches are at least announced, since especially in this day and age, you don't want to launch off rockets without informing anyone. Jittery governments who are in the dark might think its the start of a nuclear attack. This HAS happened in the past. We don't care that you launch rockets, we just want to make sure they're going into space and not somewhere else.
Its also important that if something goes wrong with the spacecraft and all contact is lost, the craft (or debris from it) can be tracked by those who are most concerned about such things. A single screw in low earth orbit can cause major havoc if it impacts a spacecraft. You want to know where it is.
The other issue is to insure compliance with any international treaties with regards to propulsion systems or use of celestial bodies for which someone at one point in time might have signed a treaty for. True, they could launch the rocket anyway, and probably nobody could do much about it. But there's no sense pissing anyone off if a yes answer is overwhelmingly probable anyway.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
There's no trademark infringement if the products or services involved are in unrelated fields. That's how you can end up with a modem, a truck, and a spacecraft that have the same name.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
And it has fuck all to do with permission to go to the moon.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Okay, so let's see. We have the technology to digitally edit people out of video scenes in REALTIME. We have the technology to digitally add in elements to a video scene (I would assume in realtime). We have the technology to do damn near anything we want digitally, given enough time and servers, short of making fully-believable humans. And some pictures supposedly sent back from a satellite is going to convince someone who thinks they managed to fake the moon landings 30+ years ago that they were wrong? Riiiiight.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
nonono... you've got it backwards: We've got a privately held company disguised as a government!
No government owns the moon. There is an international treaty/pact/something which states that no country may place a claim on any celestial body (scroll down to article 2). This has, however, not stopped private enterprise from placing such claims.
so thy got a shitty web page. That tells me they're not spending money on web design. Maybe tha banner ad was a quickie made by one of the engineers on some spare time? Maybe you should't blast a company by it's public outlook and give them a chance to actually get to the moon. Then when the money is rolling in from tourists, mining, whatever, you can bitch because the web page isn't up to your petty standards.
>
Maybe so that the US doesn't think that it's some sort of warhead being launched ...
... the US government has granted permission to an undisclosed public company to verify that stories posted on /. are real.
As an added bonus, this mission will weed out all duplicate submissions, spelling, grammars, etc. of the stories.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
You will always have skeptics, just liek you will always have people who believe in UFO's. I've seen articles about how the mission was a hoax and they are quite convincing. If your going to teb moon bring a drilling rig, set up some experiments. Mount a teliscope, a big reflector dish anything. but dont go just to find some stupid golf balls.
You don't own it until you "improve" it. That is have permanent residents living there without significant outside assistance. This rule of international law has applied to everything from continents (e.g. Australia) to homesteads (e.g. some company wanted land in the US west, or rather the oil under it, and sued for the government to take it away from the homesteader since he hadn't built a good enough cabin and hadn't cleared land for a garden -- they only lost because of a statute of limitations issue).
The next step is bulldozing everything in sight -- so when you look up at night and notice that all the peaks have been flattened and all the craters have been filled in, then you'll know that somebody really owns it!
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
whats worse is a life where you patrol slashdot for grammar heirs.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Here's a link:
link
Ping time'll be a real bitch, though (somewhere around 2600 ms)...and people thought satellite Internet service was bad. I'd also think it would be too easy for the Media Mafia to throw some jamming satellites into low-earth orbit that would interfere with "Havenco, Lunar Division."
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
but he'd have to learn to spell kazakhstan
Actually they had to cancel that lesson when he failed all attempts at learning to pronounce it.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, not the U.S.
Which still raises the question, why do they need permission? Courtesy to NASA, or did the U.S. demand the company request permission? If the second, I think a immensely bad precedent has been set.
that was brought up in the fox documentary about the moon landing?
For the most part, any first year physics student could counter the arguments in the documentary, which is why there were no real physicists on the show. The one that they had merely said something to the effect of "Yeah, there are a lot of crackpots out there".
For example:
1. The astronaut is climing down the lander, and is in shadow, yet his space suit is brightly lit, suggesting a studio lighting scenario.
Answer: You may have noticed that the moon reflects light. This is why it allows us to see at night.
2. The pictures are exceptionally clear, yet the astronauts were not trained photographers.
Answer: any photograph taken in a vacuum will look more clear, due to less distortion from the atmosphere.
3. There is a picture of the lander, and some rocks around it, then a picture of the "same scene" with no lander.
Answer: Due to the lack of atmosphere on the moon, large boulders and even mountains may appear to look like close-up rocks when photographed.
4. The lander just appears to "take off", with no acceleration.
Answer: That's because it was a "catapult", you idiot, not a rocket. Escape velocity on the moon is tiny compared to earth, so a large enough explosion will do the trick.
5. The flag appears to be "waving in the wind".
Answer: only when the astronaut is touching it, you retard. When he lets go, it just sits there. I can make a flag wave too. Even with no wind. Imagine that.
There were other, equally stupid pieces of "evidence", but there was ONE thing I could not explain.
In some of the photos, the camera's crosshair is *partially behind* the scene. How is that possible unless the photos were airbrushed?
WWJD? JWRTFA!
An an unrelated topic, who else would like to see them send Lance Bass into space, and NOT BRING HIM BACK?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Helpful link, but does this mean that if Russia wanted to launch a similar mission to the Moon they would have to seek U.S. approval? I guess this may only apply to U.S. companies. Still seems odd.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Consider that there are literally thousands of satellites presently in low-earth orbit, some functional, some merely centimeter-sized pieces of debris. Much of this is being tracked by US Air Defense, and orbital elements for spy sats are not generally made public, for obvious reasons.
So, it is likely that these folks submitted a mission plan and trajectory to the US, which then returned it to them and said "that should work fine, have fun". They were not "getting permission to leave the planet", they were getting a go-ahead to help keep their moon shuttle from an accidental collision with either an unregistered spysat or the odd bit of space junk as they pass through LEO. This has been common practice for many years now.
Cheers,
Mouser
...many Europeans still don't believe people have actually landed on the North American continent!
;)
Many believe that life on other continents is just to absurd an idea to take seriously. Or, if life is there, the ocean is just too big a distance to cross, so we will never know.
In fact there is an European internet project called SATI@home, or Search for American Territories Intelligence, that is listening for intelligent life in North America. This project may fail though. If there is life in North America, it is likely that Europeans would never be able to decode the meaning of any of the messages or culture.
Many Europeans think its all just political mumbo jumbo anyway.
"The concept most foreign in all religions is that of a universe existing forever. Beginnings and endings are a fools dream."
-Anonymous
Personally, I'd like to see the Apollo landing site declared an International Historical Site. As the man said, it was a giant leap for all of mankind, and I'd like to see it preserved as-is.
Yes, I know this mission is just going to take pictures, but sooner or later someone (Chinese? Bill Gates?) is going to once again land on the moon, and could casually destroy a significant part of mankind's history.
This is a lot like a father giving his permission for a daughter to marry someone. Is it needed, no, but it's nice to have a show of support. This also probably opens the door for a better relationship between Transorbital and NASA
Aside from that, being an american company, it falls under US jurisdiction as far as environmental and public safety concearns (even tho the launch is in russia) as well as possible exporting of technology concearns.
Why not just use two small curved mirrors 100 meters apart? You don't get the light-gathering ability, but you don't really need it because the moon is so bright. You should be able to get the effective resolution of a 100-meter scope right? It seems to me like the biggest challenge is building a big frame that won't wobble too much, and coping with the differences in atmospheric "seeing" between the two mirrors. However, it probably isn't too much more difficult than running the MMT, which has 6 large synchronized mirrors. Maybe I'm missing something...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It was called "Salvage 1".
First it was a rather cool TV movie. Andy Griffith played the junkyard owner/D.D. Harriman type who wanted to go to the moon in a ship he would build.
The ship was mostly a cement mixer with welded and bolted on gear. The "fuel" was extremely volatile high explosive with a specific impulse much higher than H/O2 rockets, so it didn't require much in the way of tank space.
Griffith's character clamed that the equipment left behind on the moon was claimable as salvage (hence the name). He wanted to land on the moon, claim and retrieve choice bits, and return to Earth to sell the stuff to finance the whole deal.
The network ordered up an ongoing TV series based on the movie, but without the moon involved there was really nothing for the ship/enormous bomb to do.
Thanks -- makes much more sense.
So Transorbital has gotten permission (whyever) for sending up a single probe that will a) take detailed pictures, b) drop a "time capsule" on the moon and c) collect lots of telemetry useful to space scientists. The first probably has a market--a detailed lunar atlas would be pretty neat and the other pictures would sell. The second pays for the trip itself but doesn't produce anything of value so it's just a sink for my disposable income. :-) And the third I'm assuming exists but there probably isn't much reason to talk about it--it isn't sexy enough.
Future plans involve dropping navigation beacons? Okay--so they've got a map and beacons. They could sell those to anyone who wants the information. They have a few other one-way craft planned, too.
But commercial uses have to make money. The first commercial use would have to be mining. But that only works if it is cheaper to shove equipment up the gravity well and catch it on the way down than digging somewhere on Earth. Anything else is way too expensive today. Maybe that's changing and Transorbital is betting that it is.
--- "It annoyed me, so I fixed it." -- Tom's First Principle of Engineering
I think other posters have already explained that very well, so I won't repeat that here.
But talking about the satellite and orbits issue, it may be interesting but bear in mind that orbital elements or ephemeredes are only valid for a certain amount of time after they are issued (up to a few weeks); this is due to the effects of things like atmospheric drag, orbital corrections and the alike. This is particularly true for low-orbit satellites like ISS and the Space Shuttle (when in orbit, off course)
Specially interesting, see here a chart of the orbital height of the International Space Station over time. Quite interesting chart.
and Kevin Bacon be on this flight, too? Tom was so heroic last time he went. I hope he has better luck this time..'
Anything you say will be held against you.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Who thinks that people silly enough to believe the first trip to the moon was a hoax will now believe that this trip is for real?
That was my first thought too.
But then I realized that the solution is obvious: We just need to round up all the people who think that the moon landing was a hoax, take them to the moon, and -- this is the important bit -- leave them there.
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
Re:Verify?
The sharpest image ever taken of the moon from the Earth's surface "is 0.07 arcsec, or about 130 metres on the lunar surface (in the N-S direction). Elevation differences of a few tens of metres only are therefore visible by the shadows they cast. The VLT image represents what an astronaut (with normal eye acuity of 1 arcmin) would see from 400 km above the surface." (European Southern Observatory press release, August 9, 2002).
I mean if I believed in the flat earth it's all a conspiracy of the gubmint, the masons, the illuminati-bilberg group-zog theories then I would have to assume that this is a hoax too!! It stands to reason you can't reason your way over paranoia.
Will Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon be on this flight, too?
;-)
No, But I'm betting on Trish Stewart and Joel Higgins will be riding in a moonship that Andy Griffith made out of an old cement mixer truck...
Oops, that's already been done
The surviving family of Jackie Gleason is suing for patent infringement.
/.'d into slag.
They claim that Jackie Gleason held the intellectual property for going to the moon some 15 years prior to the 1969 lunar landing. "To the moon, Alice!" is the phrase being used as proof that the business model was originally Gleason's.
TransOrbital could not be reached for comment due to a massive Slashdot effect, but expects that their poor webservers will be replaced sometime next week after being
"Our ancestor, The Great One, would have wanted us to protect his intellectual property," one of the relatives was quoted as saying.
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
Actualy, the US and russia have signed treaties banning 'ownership' of space. It belongs to all humankind (they did this to save money).
We do however, have restrictions on setting off huge balistic missles in our airspace..
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Who can forget the urban legend about Mr. Gorsky?
When Apollo Mission Astronaut Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon, he not only gave his famous "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" statement but followed it by several remarks, usual com traffic between him, the other astronauts and Mission Control. Just before he re-entered the lander, however, he made the enigmatic remark "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky."
Many people at NASA thought it was a casual remark concerning some rival Soviet Cosmonaut. However, upon checking, there was no Gorsky in either the Russian or American space programs. Over the years many people questioned Armstrong as to what the "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" statement meant, but Armstrong always just smiled.
On July 5, 1995 (in Tampa Bay, FL) while answering questions following a speech, a reporter brought up the 26 year old question to Armstrong. This time he finally responded. Mr. Gorsky had finally died and so Neil Armstrong felt he could answer the question.
When he was a kid, he was playing baseball with a friend in the backyard. His friend hit a fly ball which landed in the front of his neighbor's bedroom windows. His neighbors were Mr. & Mrs. Gorsky.
As he leaned down to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky, "Oral sex! You want oral sex?! You'll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!"
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
What they really need to do to convince the skeptics is to leave something behind that *IS* visible from the earth. Like a big Nike swoosh. I bet Nike would pay $10 to $20 billion for it. If they wouldn't, Pepsi would. That oughta cover R&D on some kind of lightweight reflective (or non-reflective...?) deployable device big enough to be visible with binoculars. Or, a space-based solar-powered laser that could project an image on the dark parts of the moon during new moon phases-- but that would mean going to a lagrange point instead of the moon itself maybe. I dunno. Anyway, it would be hella cool.
Not the mission - I think that it's great. I'm talking about the moon landing hoax people.
Part of this mission is to verify the Apollo landing sites. The only reason this is necessary is because of stupidity.
In the other story about gravity wave speed I wrote that whatever the speed, gravity will always be slower than the speed of stupid. I was marked as a troll (are unfunny jokes trolls?) but this just goes to prove my point.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Salvage 1 carried my first exposure to the
concept of connecting to a computer remotely,
and that had a dramatic effect on my perceptions, and directly contributed to my bbs-a-holic nature!
The crew needs a "computer" but can't afford one,
not laying around in the junkyard of course, so they "steal" a computer. Dammit, even then, the idea of connecting remotely to a university computer center was automatically regarded as a crime.
They couldn't have had one of the characters be a teacher or grad student and just have access to computers without resorting to clandestine means, NOooooo. Had to be a criminal act, since everbody knows that computers are only for the government, or banks, or whatever. !@#$%.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
There was no reasoning with him. He believed that the moon landing was a hoax because we did not have the technology to reach the moon at that time.
He also believed that we got the early solid state transistors from the aliens via the Roswell crash.
I never was able to figure out how these to beleifs could coincide.... Boggles the mind....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mrgorsky.htm
This legend, seemingly an obvious joke, began circulating on the Internet in mid-1995 and was picked up by the media a few months later. The inclusion of specific details (e.g., the name of Armstrong's neighbor, the date of the press conference on which he revealed the meaning of his remark) apparently led some to believe the farcical story might have some truth to it.
At its most basic level, this tale is a humorous anecdote that plays on the stereotypical portrayal of Jewish wives as reluctant to engage in recreational sex (and especially oral sex). In variant forms of this legend the last name of Neil Armstrong's neighbor is different, but the name used is always a "Jewish-sounding" one, such as Gorsky, Seligman, Schultz, or Klein; the unusual word order employed by the wife in her refusal ("Oral sex you want?") is also a stereotypical speech pattern attributed to Jews. On another level, this legend can be seen as an attempt to humanize a cultural hero by associating him with a story that is both humorous and racy: Neil Armstrong, the world-famous astronaut, is made to seem like a "regular" guy.
Any doubts about the veracity of this legend are laid to rest by the official NASA transcripts of the Apollo 11 mission, which record no such statement having been made by Armstrong. Armstrong himself said in late 1995 that he first heard the anecdote delivered as a joke by comedian Buddy Hackett in California.
I am not a geologist, but I have long understood that the crusts of planets are generally composed of minerals rich in light elements (e.g. magnesium, aluminum, silicon), and that only tectonic activity and volcanism bring the heavier elements up from deeper in the planet. The Moon is a very small body and not tectonically active (although there are some volcanic craters and features on her surface.) I would guess that the Moon's surface rocks are mostly silicates of the light metals, not much different from the most common rocks on Earth. We've already got magnesium, aluminum, and silicon in enormous abundance.
hyacinthus.
... if you do a frame by frame shot
of this sequence you can very plainly see a rock APPEAR
and then disappear.
If anything debunks the moon shot. This is it.
Um, how is this definitive proof that it was staged? Why, if they made the footage on earth and doctored it, would they insert a rock for a single frame? Why would they need to insert rocks anyway, we've got plenty on earth.
More likely (to me) is a defect in the film or in the transmission. They didn't have digital video cameras and mpeg-4 video back then, so I wouldn't expect it to be perfect. Especially if it were shot on the moon.
Calm down. It's because it's a US corporation, and according to international law, the US is responsible for policing anything from it's borders that goes up there. If they were a French company, they'd need to satisfy the French government's requirements. Scroll back on up this forum - someone cited the exact law, agreed to by the united nations.
Sheesh.
--
Evan (no reference)
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Why does the US government have to license trips to the moon? The satellite is taking off from Russia, and neither space nor the moon are US territories. The article didn't clear this up, can anyone else?
for final proof of the moon landings, visit http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/Apoll oLaser.html.
Apollo 11 left a mirror up there so that we could use a laser rangefinder to calculate the distance to the moon.
It's still there - and it still is working. You can remove your tin foil hat now...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Have all you fools forgotten about the guy they left behind? As I live and breath, we have to get him back so he can collect his social security and find who Garfield is!
The Lonely Astronaut
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I found the tape of the *real* landing from the web.
It goes:
"That's one small.....Oh Shit! I accidently tore my suit on on uhhh oh, Daisy Dai...Da.uh.... [static]"
Table-ized A.I.
If you are actually trying to claim it's a hoax - I'm not sure - then think about the *difficulty* of pulling this off... what follows is quoted from another /. thread long ago. It covers most of the difficulties rather nicely I think.
#
For the interest of Slashdot readers, national governments, and any other interested organization, I am posting instructions on how to fake a moon landing and not get caught for 30 years.
Before the Landing
Put out a request for tenders for a contract to build the lunar hardware to major aerospace companies. It would be pretty obvious after the fact that no one had built your launchers and landers.
In the contracts, give a specification that would lead the 10,000 engineers who work on the project to reasonably believe that the equipment could be used to land on the moon. Engineers are smart people; they could easily spot holes in your assumptions if you make the requirements less stringent than they have to be. If it were obvious that the hardware couldn't land on the moon, you would be caught.
Have the hardward manufactured and delivered. Again easy to spot if this wasn't done, especially for a Saturn V-class rocket and related assemblies.
In summary: You would actually have to build stuff that would probably be able to land a man on the moon, with all the associated expenses.
During the missions:
You will actually have to launch the thing you contracted to build. You could launch something else -- but why bother? We've already established that you have to build a moon rocket, and you'd have to pay off everyone who was involved in its destruction and substitution. Besides, it would be big news, so news organizations would want to film the launch of the big rocket.
So, the capsule could be suborbital, or stay in orbit, and the rest of the mission could be faked, right? Wrong. Antennas around the world will be tracking the radio signals from the capsule, including the continuous telemetry feeds. Something would have to go to the moon, on a realistic lunar trajectory, or this would be immediately spotted by legions of radio astronomers and HAM radio amateurs around the world, many of whom have advanced signal processing available to them (like Doppler analysis, etc.). They would also be able to tell the difference between a lunar trajectory and a different orbit, like a geosynchronous orbit, because of the moon's particular position in the sky.
So, the capsule has to go to the moon. Does it have to orbit? Yes. The capsule must stay in the vicinity of the moon for several days (again checked by those with large radio antennas). The only foolproof way to do that is to orbit.
So, the capsule has to orbit. Does it have to land? Yes. While in orbit, the capsule can't communicate with Earth from the far side of the moon. Yet a lander must be able to send continuous telemetry to the Earth. It would be pretty obvious fakery to have the "lander"'s telemetry fade out at the same time as the capsule's.
Does it have to come back? Yes; for the same trajectory reason. The return trajectory could be tracked.
Does the capsule/lander have to be manned? Not necessarily, but there would be many complications if it weren't. You would have to be able to carry on ground/capsule communications in a realistic manner even though the communications from the capsule would have to be recorded and beamed back (because your radio is being monitored). The "astronauts" would be unable to perform any diagnostic tasks aboard the spacecraft (because they're not aboard it), so the entire flight control team would have to be in on the hoax (dozens, even hundreds, of people to pay off).
In summary: You would have to actually send something to the moon, which may as well be manned.
After the Landing
Bring back tons of "moon rocks" and other materials for analysis by independent scientists around the world. These rocks could not be obviously of terrestrial origin, implying some exotic materials science (or creative geology). Either that or pay off anyone who comes in contact with the "lunar samples".
And if you're NASA - do this seven times, with one of the seven attempts turning into a remarkably realistic failure.
The upshot: It's equally easy and expensive to actually land a man on the moon than fake it convincingly. Furthermore, the evidence for fakery would not be found in trivial forms of evidence, like photographs, but in more obvious places, like contracts, accounting, radio monitoring, and the lunar samples themselves.
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
www..--..net - for incisive, w
Well, #1, the purpose of mining would not be for use on Earth, but for use in space, and for that every mineral on the Moon is useful, being many km/sec closer to anywhere in space than minerals on Earth.
Second, the Moon had a (very ancient) volcanically active past - the Mare basins on the near side are volcanic basalts, there are several mountainous regions that appear to be volcanic rather than caused by impacts, and numerous "rille" formations thought to be collapsed lava tubes, etc. One of the mineral deposits associated with some of this is the 'KREEP' that includes some concentrations of heavy metals, including thorium and uranium.
Third, the Moon's surface is exposed directly to the solar wind and apparently has quite high and useful (if we had fusion power plants) concentrations of Helium-3. That is probably the only mining target that would actually be worth transporting back down to Earth.
Energy: time to change the picture.
That's Paul Blase, CTO of TransOrbital - he knows what he's talking about :-)
Energy: time to change the picture.
You clearly have not spent much time in the American desert.
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They did, they said the US would be held responsible for all US corporations. (Or close enough for government work =)
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Other challenges are combining the light from each mirror in phase to within about a tenth of a wavelength (50 nm say for light). Then you would have a telescope that could _only_ see details 1 milli arc second across. You'd get no signal from details 2 milli arc second across. To make an image you have to scan the distance between the mirrors, and you have to scan the whole system in 2-d to build a 2-d image. You get let the earth's rotation do one of those things for you if you wish. The computer reconstruction time to build the image would probably stop any of the hoax nutters believing you. COAST does this
The reason that's not an easy story to believe is that if someone was making a FAKE lunar rover film, they'd have to put in extra effort to make a rock appear in just one frame. What in the world would be the motivation behind putting in such extra effort to make the film LESS credible? It's not going to happen by "accident" and it's not something someone involved would WANT to do on purpose.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
...and their hilarious "Mars Propaganda Project" in preparation of upcoming Mars missions:
The purpose of the Mars Project is to create and deploy fossils and/or ruins suggesting the prior existence of life and/or civilisation on the surface of Mars. Possibilities include artefacts which connect to various aspects of the Bible or other Earth mythology. It is intended that this is accomplished before NASA or some other agency sends amanned mission to Mars.
Link to archived site since original page is down.
(Their faq is still a classic of internet humour...)
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You may like my a cappella music
Sure it moves without atmosphere, in fact it would move a lot faster. It would drop to the ground as fast as a ten pound lead weight, so there would be no lingering dust cloud to see.
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I'd be happier if Carmack and Co could check for us.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I wonder if a sufficiently powerful telescope could make out the landing sites on the moon. You could even charge people to look through it.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
1. Send commercial expedition to the moon.
2. Verify Apollo landings.
3. Profit!
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
What they have done and spoken publicly about is go through the full approval process: state dept, FCC, NOAA, etc. And I find that quite impressive. Somebody once said a spacecraft can't launch until the paperwork exceeds is bigger than the ship - looks like they're most of the way through the hard part here!
Energy: time to change the picture.
(Interesting to note the use of a global view when referring to the moon.. Kinda like in Scifi movies when people who've never been to Earth talk about "the whole world".)
Anyway, because of the conditions on the moon, it'd be pretty hard to screw things up anymore than they are already. Nothing's better at containing biological weapons than a pure vacuum and constant unfiltered irradiation from the sun. Nuclear weapons tests would be almost unnoticable. There's no atmosphere in which to spread radioactive dust, no water supply to contaminate with deadly bacteria.
Well, of course. I don't mean to suggest that they gave the mission profile a green light, and then forgot about it. The anticipated trajectory will be tracked until the launch, presumably, and if a satellite should approach the exit corridor too closely, I'm sure they'll make the phone call. But they need to register a flight plan with a US agency so that this can be done.
Many thanks for the ISS orbital height plot. It is interesting to see the dramatic changes during boost, though even these seem to develop over a couple of days (I didn't realise the burns lasted that long).
Cheers,
Mouser
Uh, data is "information", it's not a physical object. GPS signals are data, satellite broadcasts are data, people out in the remotest part of Nebraska use "data" they get from space all day long. It's very easy to retrieve, once you have a physical facility in place to store and forward (for secure stuff you'd want to be sure it was exceedingly well encrypted). The Moon is the ultimate off-site storage location!
Energy: time to change the picture.
I remember that plot point now: didn't they tap into the Kennedy Space Center mainframes to get enough processing power to navigate? (it WAS the 70's..)
I seem to recall NASA twigged onto the linkup, but did not terminate the dialup because they were rooting for Salvage 1 to make it... as any real space engineer would.
There was no reason to "stop and start filming". Doing the sequence as stop-motion animation (as you seem to be implying was done) would have been more effort than making it smooth, and would have looked more obiviously a fake.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Guy comes to Ronald Reagan:
-"Mr. President, Mr. President, the Russians went up to the Moon and painted it red!"
R. Reagan: "No Problem. Send an Apollo Mission to paint 'Coka Cola' across it."
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Dead Body - Dig it up. Lots of useful raw materials up there - lack of oxygen might be a downer in terms of refining in situ (thereby reducing pollution down here, reducing mass to be transported etc...) but probably not insurmountable.
Find some water! Start digging. Then start launching metal bars at Earth to be caught in a big orbiting basket!
It is interesting to see the dramatic changes during boost, though even these seem to develop over a couple of days (I didn't realise the burns lasted that long)
Of course they don't, the burns are very short. They only need to supply apply a little more force than the atmospheric drag is excersing on the station. Maybe a quick review of your old physics text book would be in order ;) There's this fairly well known phrase that says:
An object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force
Maybe a quick review of your old physics text book would be in order ;)
:-) I was specifically referring to the burns that take place in October, December, March and April, that have a noticeable time-to-rise that is easily visible on the chart. Whether this is due to a slow, elongated burn, or multiple short bursts that can't be clearly made out at the plot's resolution, I can't say. Perhaps I should have been clearer and said that I didn't realise the series of burns took so long to commence.
Hardly, but many thanks for the patronisation.
An object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force
Yes, but the orbit-averaged height doesn't bloody well increase unless acted upon by an external force, now does it? Turn off the engine, and your orbit is fixed (sans atmospheric intereference).
Cheers,
Mouser
You said it was "a clip of the
the lunar rover moving around the surface of the moon." If you were faking it, I would think you could just shoot some footage of people driving around a rocky area on earth in a lunar rover in a sound stage. I don't see the need for any stop-motion or multi-shot trickery which would introduce the chance for a 'blooper' when someone forgot a rock in one shot.
And even so, even if there were multiple shots and they were spliced together to accomplish some effect, you'd expect the rock to be missing from multiple frames. Why would they splice in only 1 frame from an alternate shot? It doesn't make sense.
To me, if you suppose it is doctored, having an item missing in a single frame suggests that it was either added in the other frames frame-by-frame or removed from this one frame. That is what my earlier argument was based on - if you were going to the painstaking effort of editted frame-by-frame, why would you do it just to add (or substract) a plain old rock? If you wanted the rock in the picture, you'd have put it there in the first place.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.