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Moon Rocks Still In Demand After Almost 40 Years
During NASA's Apollo missions to the moon, roughly 842 pounds of rocks were collected from the lunar surface. Scientific demand for the rocks has always been high, and a review board tracks and sends out hundreds of samples each year, even now, decades after the rocks were brought to Earth. They've provided researchers with a wealth of information about the entire solar system. From the NYTimes:
"The samples have confirmed that asteroid and meteor impacts, not volcanism, created the vast majority of craters that define the Moon's topography, while a constant barrage of meteorites, micrometeorites and radiation melted and pureed the bedrock to create the blanket of fine-grained soil and dust -- known as regolith -- that now cloaks the lunar surface. And knowing the ages of Moon rocks, which can be computed to within 20 million years, has enabled scientists to establish a baseline that allows them to date geologic features throughout the solar system. The surface of the Earth, one of the solar system's youngest topographies, is constantly changing, as it is faulted, folded, shaped and reshaped by eruptions, earthquakes and erosion. By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets."
This is always my big objection to major conspiracy theories that involve the faking of an event observed by millions.
Even if only a few dozen or hundred people would have to be involved in faking something like the lunar landing or 9-11, the population of experts closely observing the events in question is enormous. Many of them could secure protection from governments or organizations opposed to the US or whatever power is in question. When you begin to total the number of people who would have to keep quiet on something like this, it gets absurd fast. Do we really believe that some shadow government is quietly faking thousands of papers on moon rocks carefully enough to avoid major contradictions over decades of publishing?
Not that the public isn't deceived all the time. But it happens in ways that are simultaneously more subtle and more blatantly obvious. Inducing apathy with a flood of partially true information works a lot better than engineering specific falsehoods.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
In short, the conspiracy would be more complicated than the actual event.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I dunno. Most of the science that we can do and should do, do not currently require manned expeditions to mars. Those include developing a sustainable living environment (which we have trouble doing here on earth) and faster modes of transportation (otherwise your asking for people to spend up to 10 years in space with minimal human contact). Like all good science, before we start performing experiments involving humans, we should perform our initial studies using lesser organisms or no organisms if at all possible. This will end up yielding similar results with less risk to the humans or financial stability of the program. I'm sure the "No manned space program!" supporters are only saying that because it will lead to more practical and attainable advances without leaving the space program subject to shifts in the political landscape.
Also, as an armchair activist, that kind of belief depresses me. There really are groups of evil powerful people manipulating the world toward their own ends. But when you start to believe that they're a cartoonish parody of villainy capable of controlling virtually every corner of society like it was an army, the response is just resignation. Real abuse of power is far more mundane, and as such, is something we can actually do something about. It's a GOOD thing that there is no Illuminati to contend with.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
"... knowing the ages of Moon rocks, which can be computed to within 20 million years"
If there's a 20-million-year margin of error, then they certainly do not 'know the ages of moon rocks'. It really is pathetic what society tolerates/accepts when it comes to "science".
That ain't the same. Those rocks first of all were subject to a heavy inpact collision, then traveled for years or millenia and finally had a fiery entrance into our atmosphere, only to survive another hard impact.
That's a bit like saying you saw an original Tin Lizzy when you just saw one that spent the last century on a scrapyard after it had a crash totalling it.
Yay for car analogies!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hubble cost about $2.5 billion to build and launch.
The Shuttle costs $1.3 billion per launch at the rate of ~7 launches a year.
If there were no manned space program, NASA could've easily afforded to build and put a dozen HSTs in orbit.
The question isn't what can do the job better, the question is what can do the job most efficiently: i.e. effectiveness / cost. An unmanned Mars mission designed to return samples would probably also need to return a hundred kg in support equipment. A manned Mars mission would probably need to return several tons of equipment, people, and active life support equipment. Fuel requirements scale proportionately to payload weight so you've just increased the mission cost by one if not two orders of magnitude. Sure a person could do the job better, but is it really worth paying 10x-100x more for something a little better?
At this point in time, putting people in space is mostly a symbolic gesture, meant to inspire the population (or at least give them a sense of superiority over other nations). As much as we want the romantic notion of people traveling to the other planets, the technology just isn't there yet. Should we continue pouring most of our money into inflated mission costs just so we can say we have people up there? Or should we concentrate our money on cost-effectively experimenting and improving technology which could eventually be used to get people out to the planets and stars?
Nobody wants to kill off manned space travel. The goal of even an unmanned space program is to pave the way for people eventually going out there. What the anti-manned program people want is an increased emphasis on cost-effective research and experimental technology, and less on symbolic gestures. IMHO there is substantial PR value in having some sort of manned space program. A lot of people working in astronautics and the space program today wouldn't be there if there hadn't been a manned program that inspired them as a kid. But the NASA budget currently 3:1 in favor of manned space travel needs to swing the other way if we're really serious about developing space travel technology.
Sure it will be cheaper and easier to do manned space travel in 100 years time but i will be long dead by then.
I think that sort of thinking is why people want to see it now, rather than leaving it for our grandchildren's children.