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Personalized Moon Crash
Ich Bin Zu writes "Do you want to create your own crater on the moon? CNN has an article about a company putting a personalized moon crash for sale on ebay. The bid opens with $6 million which will enable the highest bidder to stuff up to 10kg worth of stuff on a space craft and lob it to the moon. The condition of the cargo is not guaranteed as it crashes on the moon at 4000 mph."
I think we can safely guarantee the condition of just about any cargo which hits the moon at that speed...
I want to send my mother in law to the moon...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Boy, how redneck can you get?
.00001 grams or so that is capable of withstanding an impact of that speed. Marketing gone awry.
"Hey Bubba, I know what let's do! Lets go throw sh*t at the moon and see if we can make craters. Yeah, that's cool Zeek. heh, heh, heh."
Seriously though, where is the science in this? They claim to want to take pictures, but they are pictures of the near side of the moon, of which we have plenty. And, unless you wanted to bury your cremains on the surface of the moon, this is the same kind of thing you find when you go hiking in the desert or mountains and find cans and things that people have shot at and left to rust or names carved into trees or rocks saying "Steve was here".
I am usually a strong supporter of science related work and space exploration, but this seems.....well?......What's the point?
Condition of the cargo cannot be guaranteed after the 4,000 mph impact, Orbital Development explains, although the cargo is contained within a special burst-resistant canister.
P.S., what is the point of using a "burst resistant container" if you are going to be aiming your "object" for a 4000 MPH impact with the moon? I am currently unaware of any container system weighing more than
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
That ought to be enough to annoy all the scientists measuring micro traces for life.
until the moon people launch a full-scale retaliatory strike.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
how high a 10kg super bouncy ball would bounce going 4000mph in low gravity. Think it would bounce hard enough to hit the space station?
So if it lands on the property I bought from the Lunar Embassey (http://www.moonshop.com/) can I sue them for littering, or even trespassing. I am serious, I have the paperwork and everything. Don't tread on me!
They're pointing out that some people are simply useless. Bored rich guys are typically the most useless people we have on this planet. Along with those bimbos who walk down catwalks.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
We have lots of garbage and pollution on Earth, lots of space-junk in orbit around the Earth that is widely predicted to become a hazard, and plenty of junk left on the Moon's surface from the manned and unmanned expeditions.
The place isn't even accessible to tourists yet and someone has come up with a way to pre-pollute it.
Do we really want to turn the Moon into an interplanetary garbage dump?
Keep your litter and junk to yourself.
The company is Orbital Development.
Gregory Nemitz is an interesting character. I am a little skeptical about the deal since you are purchasing a "project" and not an actual mission. So there are very few guarantees attached, and you have limited authority of the project.
I think Nemitz's more interesting project is the most credible attempt to assert ownership over an extraterrestrial body. Specifically, he is asserting his claim over the near earth asteroid Eros.
On his website you can see legal correspondence between him and NASA as he gives them an invoice for a parking fee for their NEAR spacecraft that crash landed on the asteroid. Also available is his explanation of what he is doing and why he is doing. A very interesting read, and it gives some in-depth analysis of the nature of property ownership.
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wildmage
Memoirs of a Mad Scientist
I think we can safely guarantee the condition of just about any cargo which hits the moon at that speed.
Implying that it will be destroyed, right?
Not necessarily.
This is just an extreme case of the "egg drop" problem used by the UofMich ingineering school ion their packaging class one year (and no doubt other engineering schools from time to time).
Problem: Package a raw egg with less than (x) grams of packing material so that it can be dropped from the roof of the four-floor engineering building to the concrete below and arrive intact.
A number of solutions were tried. Some I remember hearing about:
- Suspended inside a ball by rubber bands.
- bubble wrap variants
- foam peanut variants
- Stuffed into the top of a stack of styrofoam cups with kleenex, fins added to last cup to insure bottom cup arrives end-on. (Energy absorbed by friction of cup stack cracking and collapsing).
(That last one was a winner and led directly to the nested-sheetmetal protectors you sometimes see on freeways in front of overpass support piers.)
Then we have NASA's recent "airbag" landing on Mars.
4K MPH is a bit extreme. But you've got a LOT of space to, for instance, blow up a LARGE airbag/bubblewrap analog, and plenty of time to do it.
Encapsulated electronics, and even moving parts if packed correctly, can handle thousands of Gs easily. (Think about MOOG's final test for his synthesizer components: Three feet to a cement floor, must stll be fully operational and still correctly tuned afterward.) 4000 MPH = 5867 fps. Bullets are routinely accellerated to that velocity in a few feet without distortion from the g forces involved (though that is a bit extreme), and bullets with moving parts (such as spin-armed explosive rounds) to maybe a couple thousand FPS ditto.
So figure inflating maybe a 50 foot radius cluster of 'way thin kevlar balloons or bubble-wrap with aerojell just before impact, and taking maybe 20kg at the peak of decelleration, and it should be survivable.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What is polluting what, here? A very small bit of metal is "polluting" a huge, cold rock whirling around a nuclear fireball, which will some day swell and swallow up that rock. I'm sorry, but this is not immoral. Polution *can be* immoral because of the negative ways it affects LIFE--and I'm pretty sure that there is no life on the moon. You're taking a slightly bizzare (though understandable) aethetic to keep the moon "unspoiled" and turning it into a moral issue, but it's NOT. It's aethetics, and nothing more. It doesn't matter at all if a bit of metal was mined on earth, processed, then blasted off to some other bit of rock. It just doesn't. You can't even argue that it's unsightly, because there's no one there to see it. I'm not saying that this isn't a stupid thing to do (it is), but immoral? Hah...
This reminds me of an old joke:
American astronauts arrive to the moon. Their communication with Earth: