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Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Sixth Man On the Moon, Dies At 85 (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: According to a story in the Palm Beach Post, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, has died at the age of 85. He flew as lunar module pilot on board Apollo 14, which flew to and from the moon between January 31, 1971 and February 9, 1971. His crewmates were Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa. Apollo 14 was the return to flight for the moon landing program after the near disaster of Apollo 13 in April 1970, and explored the Fra Mauro highlands on the lunar surface. NASA marks Mitchell's passing as well.
He had an interesting life; probably never dull and with few regrets.
Rest in peace, astronaut.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The really sad thing here is that it is likely that all of the original Apollo astronauts will be dead before anyone else goes to any non-Earth body.
relevant infographic
Just like any orgasm you think you might have witnessed.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The really sad thing here is that it is likely that all of the original Apollo astronauts will be dead before anyone else goes to any non-Earth body.
While I agree that this is sad in a philosophical sense, we should also consider that while we haven't sent people to a non-Earth body, we *have*:
1) Landed on a comet
2) Got up-close-and-personal images of Pluto
3) Also Charon
4) Discovered over 5000 exoplanets
5) Send a probe out of the solar system (*)
6) Maintained a manned space station for the last 18 years
7) Sent several robots wandering around mars and taking pictures
8) (And occasionally vaporizing the miniature martian town centers with its "heat ray")
And a bunch of other things, such as mapping the CMB, finding strong evidence for dark matter, imaged an exoplanet, gotten spectrometer readings of the atmosphere in an exoplanet, found an asteroid with rings, and many minor things.
I'm not sure what the utility of sending a human into space is at the present time. Unless there's an obvious use case, it *seems* like the extra effort of sending a human isn't worth the risk, except as a political statement.
Oh, and we're seriously considering mining asteroids. How cool is that?
(*) Depending on the definition of the boundary, and the current definition is "cloudy" at that point, so that the probe seems to be going into and out of the boundary that defines the solar system edge.
You might also remember that the 60s were generally a decade of prosperity, not just for the 1% on top but for pretty much any and all people in the US. It was a decade of economic growth, people could actually afford building new homes, two cars and still pay off their mortgage.
How much thereof was due to the moon program? Directly? Probably little. But indirectly the program had incredible impact on the US economy. Due to its secrecy and the "we" spirit, pretty much any and all work had to be done inside the US, creating jobs. New inventions, not only in technology but also in process management and management itself, boosted the economy further than anything before. The inertia of this all led the US well into the 80s.
If anything, we'd need something like this again. Something that means more domestic production jobs, innovation and new possibilities. Right now we do have corporate welfare as well. But in the worst kind. Where the people pay for corporations to take jobs abroad.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He said he had had an "epiphany" in space and later devoted his life to studying the mind and unexplained phenomena. He said he believed that aliens had visited Earth. ... Mitchell left the US space agency Nasa in 1972 and set up the Institute of Noetic Sciences which aimed to support "individual and collective transformation through consciousness research".
Source: BBC.
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Get a fucking telescope. Point at Moon. See Flag. See Rover.
That is only because the telescope manufacturers are in on the conspiracy. The telescopes have built in GPS modules that detect when you are pointing them at the moon, and then they project images of the flag and rover onto the lens. Duh.