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Apollo 12 at 35
neutron_p writes "Thirty-five years ago this week, the sedentary, fine-grained powder began to rise, billow and race off toward the horizon. Soon after - at 1:54:35 a.m. EST on Nov. 19, 1969 - the lunar module Intrepid landed, bringing two more humans to the surface of another world. Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad and lunar module pilot Alan Bean would be on the Moon for more than 31 hours, with crewmate Dick Gordon orbiting above in the command module Yankee Clipper."
Doesn't look a day over 30 to me.
Wayne Campbell: I mean, there are two Darren Stevens, right? Dick York and Dick Sargeant. Yeah, right, as if we wouldn't notice! Oh hold on: Dick York, Dick Sergeant, Sergeant York... Wow, thats weird!
Karma: Terrible
But you can't prove it!
I hate wasting K on redundant slashisms, but there it is.
sigs, as if you care.
and Apollo 12 of all things? Psh. At least pick a more exciting Apollo mission.
Its amazing that those guys had 256k of memory (I think, maybe that was the space shuttle), and they managed to write the flight control programs without any bugs. Programmers today have trouble with 256 megs of memory
"brxref
In Soviet Russia, the moon lands you!
...to be stuck in the command module, so close to the Moon yet to never set foot on it?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I think that the benefits of actual space exploration are extremely limited. But there are many positive externalities. Tang, goretex, materials advancement, programming advancement (fill me in on more, those are off the top of my head). I personally like F1, but see no great societal value in the actual racing. Many benefits have come however from the tech development required to make the cars go fast.
"brxref
Just think, this Apollo 12 in all its glory had less computing power than a Furby.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
I'm not 36 today, there I beat it.
I think the fact that something that has only happened a few times in the history of mankind is not considered "news worthy" IS the news.
This is exactly the attitude that ruined the moon program if you ask me.
I think the editor that posted this news story was trying to make this point.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
"Thirty-five years ago this week, the sedentary, fine-grained powder began to rise, billow and race off toward the horizon."
I always thought that cocaine had been around for more than 35 years.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
Top Five reasons why the space program should be among our top priorities as a nation:
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
2. Scientific Exploration: Learning more about the universe around us will teach us more about our own world, ourselves, and our origins.
1. To provide the sense of progress which yields human happiness. No one likes stagnation. I can think of nothing more repulsive than the idea that in 200 years we could still be Earth-bound.
This is depressing. It used to be we had both _technological_ AND _social_ progress. For the last ~30 years, the social progress has flattened out and we are now going backwards, turning into a paranoid fascist consumer/security state with a bunch of robber-barons at the helm. Their slash-and-burn profiteering has now caused the U.S. to lose it's manufacturing and technological lead, so we are also stalled in technological progress also. Their criminal mismanagement is blamed on outsourcing and globalization, instead of bad trade policy and stupidity. Our country is now dumbed-down and medicated on a steady diet of poor public education, glorification of stupidity, media whores, and mind-numbing propaganda. The recent thievery of the national election is a new low point in our descent. RIP American Democracy, we hardly knew ye.
Visit the best Liberal Blog: DU
Here's a more worthless fact: Did you know that in Soviet Russia, Owen Wilson beats you?
It's a pity that the NASA's reach into space was killed off so drastically through lack of political support. We should be actually living on the moon by now.
Every time I see a picture of Mars, it reminds me of Australia. The landscape speaks to me that we should go and live there, even more so than the moon.
We seem to have so many problems and distractions on Earth, that we forget that there are higher and more worthy goals than just watching tv and feeding ourselves. I really wish I could be a outerspace pioneer.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
you're new here, aren't you?
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
I'm not 36 today, there I beat it.
i beat myself 36 times today
There's no way that's true. Actually, reading over your post it seems that this post is either the product of a diseased mind or the most brilliant troll ever conceived. Either way, good work!
If I was new, I wouldn't be complaining. I've seen the ad before and their spam stories on here. I just think it's time there was a reaction to this.
Should Hustler advertise on here too? How about penthouse and Vivid video?
It's good to see success commemorated. These days, when talking about the past NASA Space Program, we only hear about failures (Challenger) or near failures (Apollo 13). Incredible achievements for the time... let's hope Bush's Trip to Mars is a serious endeavor, because I can't wait to see that!
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
5. No, populations level off after condom use is popular.
4. What total crap. I worked for NASA for 10 years and there's was nothing that help the US economy except that we spend money on stuff.
3. Where do you get this crap? That's totally wrong.
2. All the more reason for an unmanned space program. Way more efficient.
1. Too bad. That's the reality. We're not going anywhere.
From abc.net.au:
NASA explains it a little better, noting that the 74KB is actually 37KW, using 16-bit words:
Hardware
The guidance computer is a general-purpose digital machine with a basic word length, in parallel operations, of 15 bits with an added bit for parity checks. The instruction code includes subroutines for double and triple operations. Memory cycle time is 11.7 microseconds with a single addition time of 23.4 microseconds. The 'core rope', used for the fixed memory, has a capacity of about 36,864 words with an erasable memory (of ferrite core planes) of 2,048 words. The processor is formed from integrated circuits (ICs). The total computer weight is 29.5 kg. The fixed memory contains programmes, routines, constants, star and landmark co-ordinates and other pertinent data. The erasable memory acts as an intermediate store for results of computations, auxiliary programme information, and variable data supplied by the G&N and other systems of the spacecraft.
sigs, as if you care.
Those are all benefits, but why have the government pay for it. I seriously doubt a private corporation would still be using the space shittle, which is an incredible waste of money compared to other solutions. Let the private corps benefit from the innovations. Or have the government pay a private corp X number of dollars to carry out the same functions that Nasa currently does.
"brxref
This was the space program with NASA in peak form. Perhaps it wasn't their finest moment (maybe either 11 or 13 was), but the breadth and ambition is utterly above NASA today. This was only the second landing, yet NASA aimed for that 31 hour stay on the surface.
They were confident that their communications around the world would keep the uplink with the astronauts as Earth rotated, confident that the first landing wasn't a lucky fluke, and willing to commit to keeping the crew there long enough to do a little real science. If the focus on 11 was largely on the medical situation of the crew, by 12 we were increasingly confident that people could survive on the Moon long enough to do something useful, and the focus began to shift to building a permanent presence there and answering some of the more interesting questions of the Planetologists.
The near disasterous shortage of fuel and over-abundance of rocky ground in the final seconds of Apollo 11's landing could have made NASA rely more on cautious approaches and more intensive micro-management, but instead it led to an increased recognition of the role of the astronauts on site in making the final decisions. That in turn gave us six successes and one gloriously redeemed failure.
Who is John Cabal?
and space is alot sexier than researching cow farts
Power to the Penguin!
>all I have ever cared (heck, even known) to be remotely important was Apollo 11 and Apollo 13.
yap, the first one, and the one which failed. probably the only missions most people can think of, cos they were the more spectacular missions.
but the real missions were the later ones. like 16 & 17 with over 70h time on the lunar surface. they grew much more confident with what they can and cant do on the moon in the later missions.
flight summary of manned apollo missions
apollo lunar surface journals
You mean, the Americans were on the moon?!
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Not all of us can afford good memory, you insensitive Stop 0x0000000A or IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I really sorry for kids that have had to grow up not knowing the excitement of those days of the Apollo moon missions. I can remember in school, all the students gathering in the gym to watch the TVs. That's why for the survival of NASA, I wish they would set a new goal like a manned mission to Mars.
There are other perhaps greater reasons - in the name of Science. After all "Ex Luna, Scientia"
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
Wow, 700% returns! Wouldn't that be even more of an argument for expanding private space exploration? Governments may overlook profitable opportunities like this, but surely greedy capitalists wouldn't pass up a chance to octuple their money.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
""Thirty-five years ago this week, the sedentary, fine-grained powder began to rise from a secret soundstage in the Nevada Desert. Soon after - at 1:54:35 a.m. EST on Nov. 19, 1969 - the lunar module Intrepid was lowered by crain onto the manufactured lunar set. Apollo 12 actor Pete Conrad and his fellow actor Alan Bean would be filmed on the set for more than 31 hours, with director Dick Gordon filming the worlds most elaborate hoax from his studio nicknamed 'The Yankee Clipper.'"
And don't even get me started on the NASA Earthquake machine...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Isn't Nov 17 the time of the year when we pass through the Leonid meteor shower? They launched on the 14th and landed on the moon on the 19th, so that means they were out there in time to fly through the debris...
Wasn't that a bit dangerous?
I want to sniff some ASS-PANTIES!!!11
I'm not a native latin speaker, but I think you mean "heptuple" not "octuple". A 100% return yeilds nothing. You got exactly what you sponsored. A 200% return is double what you invested. You see where I'm going with this?
Learn something new.
for those who where not around here's some links to the AGC, DSKY and more:
*Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)
*slash article with source code listing
*Simulation of Apollo Guidance Computer
*DSKY
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
The episode for Apollo 12 with Dave Foley as Al Bean is easily my 2nd favorite after the Lunar Module episode. They really brought the characters to life, and I'll be damned if I didn't want to get to know all 3 of the Astronauts as friends after watching that.
I haven't watched it in years, but I just like Beano, I can remember to switch SCE to AUX.
Part of the reason they're so profitable is that technology produced for NASA is done on their dime. So companies save nearly all their R&D budget.
Also, NASA, and people working for NASA, don't have to pay for the license to use chemical process X, or spend millions on patent research to make sure their product doesn't infringe, or pay hordes of lawyers to stave off competitors who hold patents on something similar. So say you're doing research into growing modified plants for a Mars mission. Instead of paying Monsanto money for the right to play with a gene sequence, then paying a biotech firm money for the right to use a particular manipulation technique, then paying another company for the right to use a chemical test, and paying lawyers on top of it all to make sure what you're twiddling with isn't patented by anyone and that you don't infringe any licenses, you just do it. So of every dollar NASA spends, more of it is spent on, you know, actual research.
.sig: Now legally binding!
total bollocks
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I have mixed opinions with your reasons.
5.) No, population is geometric growth. Population will double faster after each time is doubles. Other factors such as disease, birth control, etc will modify it, but its still not linear. Plus we have tons of room still on Earth, its a big planet.
4.) Sorta true. It does have its benefits, but those are more longer term benefits, and I'm not sure its a 1:7 payoff.
3.) Uh yeah. I'm sure that a super volcano will pop out of nowhere without warning surprising us all. I'm skeptical about this one.
2.) But does the public care? I want to find these things too, but does Johnny want to find out the quantum science to why is car breaks down every 100 miles?
1.) There's enough to keep the public mind occipied right now. Terrorism, global warming, personal lives. Space exploration rates in at a "Oh wow, robots. Gee whiz."
And to your final comment:
If you look at history, you notice how everything goes faster as time goes on. It took them hundreds of years to master the seas, but in only a hundred years we've pretty much covered flight. My history teacher said that by the time our great-grandchildren come along, we will be travelling through wormholes.
If that's hard to believe, 100 years ago, if I told you that you could travel into space, you'd think I'm crazy. It's all about how fast things change.
We all live in a #FFFF00 submarine...
Space exploration is cool. I support it. Please allow me to be a devil's advocate:
It seems to me that first world countries are having trouble keeping people procreating. The more advanced the society, the more rights the women, the better things the women have to do than sit at home and rear a half dozen to a dozen kids. Countries like Canada only grow because of immigration. Is it Taiwan that is trying to encourage procreation with subsidies?
NASA is, by every account, a grossly large organization with bureaucracy the likes of which no other entity in the world can hope to measure up to. They're too bureaucratic to save the Challenger. Why not invest incredible amounts of money in some targetted industries (A mach 10 aircraft has little real world application today) and in some "emerging" industries with higher financial risks / humanitarian rewards?
Most of the world ending scenarios seem to have other, potentially more beneficial solutions. Sure, leaving the world to go to the moon or someplace else may be a good way to spread the risk. It would be quite some time to set up the infrastructure to support a self sustaining populace that would not suffer from inbreeding. We may get to the point where this is possible, but NASA is not heading down a path to enable this. If there's a scenario that leads to a (nuclear or CO2) winter, why aren't we making subterrainian cities 10+ feet underground? I would expect one could even justify this by pointing out that such a city would be a prototype for an offworld city. Not that it should necessarily be a self contained monstrosity / joke, but something that starts to set up the infrastructure and maybe includes some geothermal carnot generators (what better way to take advantage of the perpetual winter outside than to make self-sustaining power by harnessing the power of the earth?
The inherant scientific value is irrefutable, but there is little real world application to this.
The dark ages were brought about because innovation stagnated. Everyone ran out of ideas and got so concerned with today that they stopped worrying about tomorrow. These days, we're perhaps on the brink of a newly perceived stagnation. We're masters of the air (airplanes), sea (gigantic boats and submarines) and land (earth destroying cranes, cars, trucks, trains, etc.). Microelectronics are banging against the Laws of Physics, with only nanotechnology seemingly a solution. In our daily lives, few people can think of a way to continue to innovate that makes a difference. Heck, most people don't want to upgrade their life centers (TVs) because the upgrades (HDTV) are too expensive despite how much better they are. Life changing innovation, the kinds of which impact "human happiness" are those leaps and bounds we've been hitting in the past century or two. You can't predict them, an
They also took a jeep with them. I'd want to stay 3 days too, if I could go bouncing around in a dune buggy in 20% Earth's gravity.
[quote]The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.[/quote] I'll take my chances with a civilization ending event, thank you kindly.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
Nice of you to have figured all this out for us dimwits. After all, the sky is falling. Well, OK, maybe not right away, but it will, eventually. Long after everyone's great, great grandkids are dead. Presumeably the pace of technology will slow to a crawl and the next generations will be drooling morons.
Am I correct in assuming that, to you, cool toys and the wow factor are the only things that make/keep you happy?
If so, you are a marketer's wet dream. There are enough shiny, worthless things already and excessive worrying about "the future of the human race" will prevent you from living a real life. Not that I have one myself of course.
I love the bit where the writer describes the recommendation by the software engineer to ignore the reported errors as "a gutsy call". There's these guys, in a tiny little spacecraft, about to land on the moon, with most of the world watching, and the prestige of the USA and indeed democracy and capitalism at stake. The computer's screaming error messages. If you call for an abort, the moon effort is a flop (at least temporarily). If you call proceed and the thing craters, you're going to be the guy whose screwup killed two American heroes. "Gutsy"...more like balls of titanium!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm frustrated with the direction our space program has taken over the past couple decades. I'm grateful to see things like the X Prize happening, but I wish that as a nation we would make space exploration a high priority. I mean perhaps all that's there is a big bunch of rocks, but there are so many benefits that come from the technology built to make space exploration posible.
Whatever happened to exploration for explorations sake? I think that a good measure of the health of a society is it's curiosity about what's around the next corner, and it's willingness to find out. This truly shows the measure of the people.
I know that at this point all of the social bleeding hearts usually chime in "but what about all the problems right here one Earth???". Unfortunately these people are focusing on the problems, not the solution. For these problems to be fixed society has to advance as a whole, not be drug down by social agendas. When a society advances, solutions to the previously mentioned problems will come. It's simply par for the course.
Exploration is fundamental to this advancement. There's an infinite universe of stuff out there that's waiting to be discovered, and we're content to just let it be? How is that healthy? How do we know that there isn't anything there until we look? Just because the few measly areas of the universe we've looked at "don't have anything" doesn't mean there's nothing out there. This would be like flipping open a random book, reading 10 words, and determining that it has no plot.
I for one support space exploration. If the human race is going to grow we need to renew the spirit of exploration. After all, where would we be if nobody questioned the fact that the world is flat and the sun revolves around it?
IIRC, there were two unique things to Apollo 12. First, they landed amazingly close to an unmanned Surveyer probe that landed a couple of years before. They did this in part to test precision-guided landing techniques for later missions and to bring back samples of the old probe to see how it weathered on the moon.
They actually found viable bacteria spores on parts of the returned probe that lasted the entire flight from Earth and survived for two or so years on the Moon. They learned they had to improve the sterilization process for later probes to Mars and beyond to reduce the risk of contamination from the smallest Earthlings.
Another notable is that they accidently ruined the only TV camera they had by pointing it too long at a reflection of the sun off of a peice of equipment. It used new compact color technology and was fragile. Thus, there were no live TV pictures.
They perhaps should have brought along a lighter black-and-white one as a backup. However, weight was a premium, especially in the earlier missions. In fact, Apollo 11 (the first landing) almost skipped having a TV camera altogether because of load constraints. But mission planners were talked into carrying one.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, the world population is not going to double ever again. Studies have predicted that the population will reach about 8 - 10 billion and then start shrinking.
I can. In 200 years we could still be fighting between ourselves.
The photo's in the article link look somewhat fake. What's with the crosshairs... and the scenery that repeats itself. :-D
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Basically, it had to be right because it was important and because there was no room for screw-ups, literally!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
and lunar module pilot Alan Bean would be on the Moon for more than 31 hours, with crewmate Dick Gordon orbiting above in the command module Yankee Clipper."
Those were the days. They orbited the moon with Yankee Clipper. Today we Yank with Clippy.
You too? Yeah, I remember... and the old thrill is still there.
C|N>K
You missed a few.
6. The more money invested in space exploration, the less money that goes to war.
7. Space exploration is one of the few things that many countries are working on together. This helps bring peace.
8. If all good scientists worked for NASA, or a privately funded space program, then there'd be no scientists researching weapons.
9. Australia started off as a penal colony. Perhaps this would be a good use for Mars
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Maybe getting a little offtopic here, but that's an interesting point you've made there. Anyone know just how large an initial colony would have to be for it to have a gene pool diluted enough to eliminate inbreeding risks (not to mention the gross factor)? A couple of hundred? A couple of thousand? More?
With an annual growth rate of 1.1 percent right now, for us to expand across other planets to relieve population here would require us to offload more than 65 million people a year
Apparently Burts rocketship can fit three people at a squeeze. So thats a lot of trips.
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This happened about a year before I was born. I remember growing up in the 70s, and reading so many books and Popular Science articles about all the fantastic bases that would be on the moon and beyond within my lifetime.
Now, I think I'll be lucky if there's even a a single small moon outpost before I'm dead in another 30-40 years.
It makes me sad to think of all the space exploration that could have been bought and paid for with just the billions that we've spent on the Iraq war. Not to mention the billions (trillions?) that was spent on the arms race with the old USSR. What a tragic waste.
Population is NOT a good reason to colonize space.
Think about it. Billions of people. We will not be able to move that many people off world, it's just logistically obsurd. If north america were complete empty, think about how difficult it would be to thin out china by moving them to America. It'd be almost impossible, and that's just an ocean.
It'd be useful for the survival of the human race to not all be on one planet, but to think we're going to move a significant part of the population to colonies is crazy.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Congratulations to the ESA. This landing shows that we're a world leader in the exploration of space, and highlights the prestige and technologic prowess of our space agency. I think every nation on Earth can recognise the bravery of our astronauts and the epic accomplishment they have achieved. Feats such as this prove that with ambition, determination, and the world's most brilliant scientists, we can achieve great things. This is truly a wonderful day for Europe, the ESA and the human race as a whole.
Edit: I've just been informed that this is old news, from the USA, back in 1969. This was nothing more than a publicity stunt and highlights the USA's careless expenditure of money at the expense of the rest of the world. I think every nation on Earth can recognise the reckless abandon in which NASA acted, with no regard for their astronaut's lives. Stunts such as this prove that the USA has ambitions to control the Moon, and that its space program employs typical idiotic gung-ho Americans. This was truly a sad day for the USA, NASA, and the human race as a whole.
Space colonies aren't going to solve the population crunch any time soon, if ever. Assuming your claim of population doubling every 40 years is accurate, and a start value of 6 billion, you'd have to send 10 million people off into space EVERY YEAR to keep the population constant. This doesn't even consider the fact that by the time we have technology to colonize, the population isn't going to be 6 billion...
That's not to say the project isn't worthwhile (I agree that it is), but you can't use population control to justify it. It just won't accomplish much of anything there.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
8. If all good scientists worked for NASA, or a privately funded space program, then there'd be no scientists researching weapons. [emphasis mine]
What about the evil/mad scientists? If there's one thing I've learned from movies, it's that there is always a number of evil/mad scientists who want to kill humanity.
I was eight at the time. Grand high (vicarious) adventure for kids, yessir. I discovered an Estes catalog the next summer and haven't stopped since.
.
Captain Kangaroo did a live-at-a-simulator show to accompany Apollo 12. He gadded about a moonscape set in a helmetless moonsuit, showing how the astronauts would descend from the LEM.
I recall having to explain to my excited toddler brother than NO, the Captain was NOT on the moon, if he really were he'd DIE!
I don't remember much of 12's news coverage, although I recall the bit about the Surveyor, and the mention here of the fried camera stirs vague memories.
The real memorable flight was the next one . .
Stefan
Heh, yes, well the supposed fight against the spread of communism was the driving factor for most of the explosion of tech. As were the world wars. We fought two 'wars' to stop communism. We fought two wars to fight facism. Hopefully this -ism of terror doesn't make us break that pattern.
;)
We still have innovation. Except that after the wall fell, our newfound enemies were/are far smaller than the USSR. Our innovations were built on the assumption we were one team against another, similarly sized team. It's no longer Team Reds vs. Team USA; it's the Uncle Sam vs. a ton of angry killer bees.
Because we needed things like spy satellites, big navies and fast fighters (all money) to beat team red, we developed our techs like crazy. We spent like hell, we developed like hell. Now, we don't need to so much. We need stealth. We need nimbleness. And we need drugs to soothe our shell shocked loved ones.
Now, what do we have: invisible robot-controlled planes, GPS guided munitions, golf clubs that seemingly defy the first law, and Rogaine.
The current -ism doesn't really make us build wholly new techs. Until we have Minority Report technology (read minds/motives), I don't think terror will be stopped. There's always going to be small countries/groups that have far less people than the US that hate us (or one of the countries we support); they have little choice other than to channel and foment their anger into terror. And because America is getting that feeling that we're not liked everywhere (yeah, it's mainly toward the prez, but it just seems that way,) we'll circle our wagons, and this circle of hate will continue.
In the meantime, I think that we are in a good time for progress of conveinience tech. (as for social progress, well, the US just becoming lazy and a little insular, that's all). Better mpg (SUVs notwithstatnding), faster internet, stronger, um, Viagra products. (Sort of reminds me of that BASF commercial) Yes, we aren't building wonderful Saturn Vs nowadays (The only way we'd ever go to the moon now would be if we heard BL had himself a terror training base buried underneath the Sea of Tranquility,) but I would rather live in an age of relative peace with my Roomba versus flying to the moon with the constant threat of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Just wait till India's or China's (more likely China at this point) GDP matches or surpasses the US. Someone will get pissed off at someone again and then the tech push will happen again. I wonder if the US would win then.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
Space exploration (and eventualy, sooner-better-than-later colonization) will of course be helpful for the near and mid future, but for the far future you can't argue with math: Population growth is an exponential function, and will eventually overtake the cubic function of physical growth and expansion, even if it's in all three dimensions at the speed of light. Population control will happen eventually, whether it's natural or human-directed.
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
Sounds good, I want to believe it, please provide a reference or two.
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
This is a simple, but good strong argument that we should colonize space so we don't continue to have all our eggs (and sperm and other things) in one basket.
1. To provide the sense of progress which yields human happiness.
Megadildoes...
Tag lost or not installed.
Most things in the astronaut corps came through experience. You were backup crew on a mission and 3 missions later you were usally prime crew, for example. Being the command module pilot put you in good stead to be the mission commander on a later flight. Jim Lovell was CM pilot on Apollo 8 and commander on Apollo 13 (Frank Borman was commander of Apollo 8 and probably would have been commander of Apollo 11 if he'd not quit being an astronaut). Dave Scott was CM pilot of Apollo 9 and commander of Apollo 15. John Young was CM pilot of Apollo 10 and commander of Apollo 16.
As for the others, Apollo 7's crew was blacklisted because of their "grumpiness" in flight, Mike Collins quit being an astronaut after Apollo 11, Dick Gordon did the same after Apollo 12 and so did Jack Swigert after Apollo 13 (can't say I blame him). Stu Roosa was Apollo 14's CM pilot but his shot at commanding Apollo 17 was overtaken by Gene Cernan who had been LM pilot on Apollo 10. Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled and that was that.
Graham
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
I would point out that since the doubling of population growth is exponential and a sphere centered on earth expands only geometrically, to avoid population control we not only have to expand outwards, but outwards at an ever-accelerating pace.
Eventually even a shockwave of humanity expanding outwards filling space at the speed of light will not be able to keep up with a doubling population. Thus, the density colonized space will have to increase, also at an accelerating rate until eventually we attain critical mass and collapse the universe into a black hole from the weight of our existence.
You can't outrun population control, only delay it a little.
Nope. No air on the Moon, the dust did not billow, and did not race farther away than a few meters.
The parent, lucifer 666 is posting some very bigoted and racist material regarding an African-American organization, I hope you take his vile hate speech into consideration before rewarding him with postitive moderation.
Too many words.
3. Don't keep all our eggs in this one blue basket at the bottom of a gravity well.
2. Scientific Exploration: Learning more about the universe around us will teach us more about our own world, ourselves, and our origins.
The inherant scientific value is irrefutable, but there is little real world application to this.
That's right, and the inherent scientific value was irrefutable of the subjects studied by Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Einstein, Bohr, Feynmann, etc etc, and at the time there was little real world application to any of their studies either.
You seem to propose studying the technology of today instead of investing anything for the pure sciences, which would yield the technology of tomorrow. If people with your mindset had their way for the past few centuries, then as an example we'd have highly-optimized wooden cartwheels and metal bearings for our horse chariots, but would know nothing of combustion engines, much less automobiles and aircraft.
It's ironic because later in your post you strongly advocate technological innovation. But you fail to realize that by inhibiting the studies of the pure sciences in favor of applied technological advancements, you will hamper future technological opportunities.
make world, not war
Just make people read /. - seems to me no one who reads /. ever gets laid. Problem solved.
Generation ship
"In order to assure genetic diversity during a centuries-long trip, any generation starship would require on the order of thousands of inhabitants..."
To reduce the population, it only has to fly up 10 meters before offloading the passengers.
That's a lot of short trips.
If you're technologically advanced enough to be reading this, it is also likely that you are not having enough children.
(insert jokes here)
"Today about half the world lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility. ... East Asia ... Russia ... Europe ... Iran, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey, and Lebanon ... Canada, Australia, and New Zealand ... United States is just barely below replacement with about 2.0 births per woman. All four of these nations still have growing populations due to high rates of immigration."
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
As somebody else pointed out, it would be too expensive to move that many people. Better to spend the same money on healthcare, food, or free condoms, for example.
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
I keep hearing different stories on this. Many of the inventions credited to space exploration are the kinds of things that probably would have been invented eventually anyhow, and none of them revolutionary. Direct R&D spending would probably have been a better way to get inventions and new ideas.
The other numbered items I tend to agree with more or less.
Table-ized A.I.
"I think this thing needs a little more all-weather testing!"
Seriously, if you haven't seen FTETTM, run right out and do so. Especially the Apollo 12 episode and 'Spider'.
Back in September, NASA selected 11 companies to conduct preliminary concept studies for human lunar exploration and the development of the NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle. Many of these are your typical aerospace dinosaurs, but a notable exception is t/Space, a new company which includes people like Burt Rutan (of Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne), Elon Musk (of SpaceX), Red Whittaker (of the Red Team, which constructed an autonomous vehicle which competed in DARPA's Grand Challenge), and several of the new companies in the budding private space industry.
According to their page: Our core mission requirement is to enable prompt, affordable, safe and sustainable lunar exploration and development by the largest possible number of Americans, both in person and via telepresence.
Under our approach, government incentives focus exclusively on top-level goals, with technology and operational choices left to the private sector. The government incentives will be matched to specific top-level needs, but the "invisible hand" of market forces will shape choices as they flow down multiple supplier chains. Incentives will be structured so that several companies in each major area have an opportunity to win this support. With this competitive industrial base, two major processes become possible:
* Market forces will continually launch new products that replace established goods and services (the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter [Austrian economist 1883-1950] identified as the key element of capitalism). Poorly performing systems will be killed off quickly via competition rather than via burdensome NASA reviews or Congressional intervention.
* Capability gap analyses will be performed by dozens and ultimately hundreds of companies on a continuous basis. As happens now in all competitive industries, the successful companies will be those who listen closely to their customers and accurately predict their future needs - in other words, capability gap analysis by multiple independent profit-seekers.
Commercial firms will create and own infrastructure that offers services that overlap in many cases. The overlaps found in a competitive private space economy will provide the resiliency now lacking in single-string solutions such as the Space Shuttle and Space Station, for which there are no ready alternatives. While functional overlaps are viewed as inefficiencies in centrally-planned systems, in a market-based system they drive costs lower (by reducing monopoly power and spurring innovation) and accelerate schedules (by eliminating single-point bottlenecks among suppliers and spurring competition).
If I understand correctly, tSpace's plan is to design an overall space architecture, and have companies compete for different components, whether they be launch vehicles, space station life support modules, or lunar landers. Many of these components will also be available commercially, keeping the price down and the reliability high. I suspect it's going to be difficult to keep from being eaten alive by the huge aerospace companies (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.), but I have a hope that they'll somehow end up getting the contract and end up completely reforming our approach to space.
I highly recommend reading through their presentation. The things they discuss are quite insightful, and they have some incredible ideas. Here's a few of their points:
Safety results from design choices, not oversight
* Attempting to produce safety by inspection, quality control,
Sperm and eggs can be frozen and surrogate mothers used to diversify the gene pool. It is done with livestock all the time.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Well... actually, the Dark Ages were brought about because hordes of barbarians invaded Western civilization, killed a great many people, burned the cities, and completely destroyed the economy. People didn't "run out of ideas" - concepts like "using horses to pull plows" and the water wheel became popular during this period.
This "everybody was inexplicably stupid until about 1400" idea is a modern fantasy.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
I'm not sure where you got this, but it sounds off.
Apollo 12 lunar surface journal.
Actually, they have all of them and some are pretty good reads.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
In 1979 we still worked with those old FCUs (Flight-certified CPUs.) They all had 4k ram, and were 4-bit bit-slice. We looked UP to the Commodore64 and even the TI-99-4(A). We begged to use the 8085-A2 like the mil guys. And that was already obsolete. But the space environment dictated what was usable: if it had not been tested proven, forget using it on board a spacecraft. Ok, we learned/knew this. Apollo used transistor logic because what was already available was not yet proven killable (within accepted parameters) by space radiation. NOTHING else could be used until after LDEF came down, and that was delayed by Challenger by 4 years. It's all about radiation. In space, we need wide circuit paths to make up for cosmic bombardment, until we all go to photons, and prove it unkillable. I'd bet a dime that's what Putin is suggesting his new rocket/orbit-vehicle uses as control circuit, and is much-less-killable. Think nuclear exclusion principle.
One of the reasons that WWIII hasn't started is because the scientists reasearched nuclear weapons. They finally created a weapon too terrible to use. Scientists in WWI thought they had it when they made chemical weapons. It appears that the WWII scientists suceeded. This is of course one of the main reasons that they immediately wrote a letter telling officials never to use their invention. It wasn't because they thought they made a mistake creating it. The letter was just the final step of their part in the development.
It should be noted that no world power has fought directly against another world power for almost 60 years. Name another period in recent history where world powers haven't fought for so long.
Apollo 12 was unforunately sandwiched between two much more famous missions: 11 and 13. I will never remember the names of those on 12, but names like Armstrong, Aldrin, and Hanks I will never forget.
Kuuumm-by-yaaaaa, my lord, kuuum-by-yaaaaa
now let's all hold hands in a global circle of love!
Moron. The funny thing is, that if it wasn't for pacifists, we could acheive peace.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
First off, I support space exploration. I was playing devil's advocate with my parent poster.
Secondly, I'll continue in that role to respond to you. You are implying that, merely because I stated space exploration may not be the right way to spend our resources that I am against all progress. Yet, you paraphrase me: "Why not invest incredible amounts of money in some targetted industries and in some "emerging" industries with higher financial risks / humanitarian rewards?". Just because I don't think making a space station whose sole purpose is to support astronauts that will babysit it full time is a good idea does not make me against progress. Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Einstein, Bohr, Feymann, Curie, Watson, Franklin -- sure science is good. Man has come so far in understanding his world. Understanding the universe is a good idea too, but the US is not in a position to undertake a leadership role while provoking the rest of the planet. We understand so much, yet we act on so little. We should concentrate on industries that will generate near term benfits, AND spend some money on the "long shot" "emerging" technologies. The problem with using space vehicles as the tool for "emerging" technologies is the enormous cost associated with just sustaining the project before you can launch your first telescope that will explain weak forces.
I support space exploration; comparing the fantastic knowledge we're gaining from space these days to any number of prestigous predescessors on whose shoulders we now stand is a bit of a far fetch. The knowledge is great. It may some day have a practical application. Today, however, I believe we have geopolitical battles to fight and cannot responsibly continue with a space program for purely scientific reasons. Reconcile my support for a space program with my claim that it is irresponsible to undertake space exploration for scientific reasons in whatever political way you see fit.
Better yet use the moon as a penal colony, much closer than mars. as long some computer tech doesn't find the colony's main computer has gone self aware and get involved in a revolution where they start tossing tons of grain back at us with a mass driver it should work out just fine.
Mycroft (if above don't ring any bells hopefully my pseudonym helps)
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Is it just me, or does the Toy Story 2 poster look like Al Bean's painting?
_ two.htmls y-new.html
Notice the bunny fingers:
http://www.impawards.com/1999/toy_story
http://www.alanbeangallery.com/CGBFanta
Ecce potestas casei!
nice wheels grandpa
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Not unless it was a hollywood moon set. lunar dust does not billow or race off anywhere - in a vacuum it falls straight down again once the driving force- the engine exhaust in this case- is removed, despite the low gravity; dust, feathers and hammers all fall at the same rate.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Space exploration is one of the few things that many countries are working on together. This helps bring peace.
Bullshit, you are mixing cause and effect. Peace enables cooperation. It only takes one party to make a war. Your choices then are to lie down and be exterminated or fight back.
This naive cluelessness is something Communism exploits directly through its support of 'peace' organizations. This is the same tactic that spawned the famous Lenin quote about 'useful idiots'.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
Wrong. Human population growth has not been linear throughout human history. Starting around 1946, the human population grew explosively *way* more than doubling within 40 years. Before that, human population was much more stable. Anyway, traveling to the moon is one helluva long way from inhabiting another planet.
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
This may have been true in the 1950s, I very much doubt it's true today. I would love to see some evidence to support that assertion.
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
All six billion of us suddenly escape? That would be a neat trick.
2. Scientific Exploration: Learning more about the universe around us will teach us more about our own world, ourselves, and our origins.
But manned space travel is inefficent way to do that.
1. To provide the sense of progress which yields human happiness. No one likes stagnation. I can think of nothing more repulsive than the idea that in 200 years we could still be Earth-bound.
There are better ways to provide a sense of progress - how about a cure for cancer?
And you ignore that this is the 35th Anniversary when 'Green Acres' and 'The Beverly Hillbillies' (among other landmark shows) were pre-empted because of a boring moon landing?
Where are your priorities?!?
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
to say that dust "billows" on the moon. Without air to form currents and eddies, anything tossed up just follows a ballistic path until it hits the ground again.
I'll mitigate the annoying inanity of my nit-picking by adding that I learned this from BadAstronomy, where the fact was used to counter "evidence" used by moon-hoax loonies.
Evil is the money of root.
Microsoft is fighting for the right to innovate. Think of all the wonderful things they have created, developed, or patented from a stable, multi-user disk operating system, state of the art GUIs, the mouse, networking (especially TCP/IP which they have patent rights), the word processor (they even called it word), spread sheets, disk compression software, crypto software, databases, languages (C# is the best there is), and presentation software.
>happen to be a NASA flight controller - and when you are in Mission Control, you are "it". Sometimes, you must make a decision that is time critical,
I did some satellite control for space telescopes, and even when it's an unmanned mission, it's tough. We had ops stationed 24/7, with mostly routine work, but they earned their pay whenever trouble hit.
Weird thing is, with it being unmanned, the usual procedure for trouble is 'go into safehold, then we'll diagnose on the ground'. But then you have to decide when you have enough information to make a decision.
You can go with the basic readings, and catch it on the next orbit pass and try a solution. Time lost= 90 minutes.
Or you can wait until the principal investigator gets into the office (maybe 4 hours later), let her do diagnostics, maybe check with the instrument team in California... you'll get a more robust solution, but it'll take 1-2 days.
And if it's really weird, you'll have to run sims before deciding on a solution.
So it's the opposite of joysticking-- it's figuring out when you have enough information to make a good call. No lives to worry about, just dollars. I think that makes it easier than manned ops, by far.
Mind you, since telescope time amortizes out to maybe $250/minute, a skilled person able to do in half a day what a sclub would do in 2 days, can justify their salary in one incident.
You hear about WalMart working to improve efficiencies by, like, 0.01% and reaping billions. Well, at NASA, we do stuff to improve things by 1% here and there to save tens of thousands.
A.
There were maximum height and mass requirements.
Best Slashdot Co
Living in Yosemite National Park and walking among the giant sequoias...
OR
Living in a trailer-home where you can never open the door?
In other words, would you rather keep our destruction of earth in check (really, not that hard to do) and enjoy this planet for which we were perfectly designed OR would you rather jet off into space and other worlds?
The Alan Bean Online Gallery, displaying the works of the artist-astronaut, has been updated and reformatted to provide a more 'art gallery'-like experience for visitors, just in time for the 35th anniversary of the lunar landing of Apollo 12.
Enjoy a virtual stroll through the gallery at:
http://www.alanbeangallery.com
Would static electricity cause it to billow at all?
Control: "Flight, try SCE to Aux."
Bean: "I know that one!"
Carthago delenda est!
3. We must expand from Earth to escape {...}
All six billion of us suddenly escape? That would be a neat trick.
If you'd like, you can stay behind to save the cat.
Any benefits from the space program will reach us in years, possibly decades. By then, millions would have died from causes easily preventable by spending that money on them.
I'm not saying I'm for or against space stuff, but that's a fact. Just trying to be objective here :)
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years.
As oppossed to the Floridesque, warm, cozy environments found in most other planets...
So in light of other 'geopolitical battles', how do you feel about the US gubbmint funding NSF, and the many of the projects it contributes to (FermiLab for example)?
make world, not war
Cow farts are the number 3 contributor of Methane gas to the atmosphere (Oil & Gas production is #1; rice cultivation is #2).
Methane is nearly as significant in the greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide.
Not sexy, but important. Senator Proxmire be damned.
Three of those 27 went twice, so there were only 24. Lovel, Cernan, and Young, I believe.
Note that an access time of 11.7 microseconds is the same thing as saying that the memory runs at 85 kHz. Which is 0.08 MHz. Modern desktop computers have memory buses that run at up to 800 Mhz. This is a factor of ten thousand.
In what other area of human endeavor have we seen a ten-thousand-fold improvement over 40 years?
-Graham
Dick Gordon did not quit but was in line to command Apollo 18. When Apollo 18 was cancelled, there was a fight to have the 18 crew fly 17, since geologist Jack Schmitt was part of the 18 crew and there was a lot of pressure to send at least one scientist. The solution was to move Schmitt to 17 and bump Joe Engle, who had been training as part of the 17 crew.
Stu Roosa would not have been in line to command Apollo 17. He might have served as backup commander and then been in line to command Apollo 20 if that mission hadn't been cancelled. As it was, he served as backup command module pilot for 17.
Actually, the dust will retain whatever momentum was given it. If it's given a push outwards, it will continue to move outwards until it falls down to the ground, since there is no air to slow it down.
I think it would be far worse to be in the position of Lovell, Swaggert and Haise. While Collins can take satisfaction in doing what he went there to do and being a part of history, the Apollo 13 crew got screwed by a guy named Murhpy. They were there. They flew around it. They saw the spot they were supposed to land on from only about 60 miles up after travelling 150000. This was Lovell's 2nd time orbiting the moon (Apollo 8), but he didn't get the satisfaction of luna firma under his feet. I hate to think what must have gone through their minds as it slipped through their fingers.
Actually, we'd be better off not spending it on healthcare. Improved healthcare, especially in third-world nations, will make the population problem worse, as people live longer.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
http://www.voltnet.com/humor/furby/index.shtml
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