Slashdot Mirror
Israel To Launch First Privately Funded Moon Mission (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A team of Israeli scientists is to launch what will be the first privately funded mission to land on the moon this week, sending a spacecraft to collect data from the lunar surface. Named Beresheet, the Hebrew word for Genesis, the 585kg (1,290lb) robotic lander will blast off from Florida at 01.45 GMT on Friday, propelled by one of Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. Once it touches down, in several weeks, it will measure the magnetic field of the moon to help understand how it formed. Beresheet will also deposit a "time capsule" of digital files the size of coins containing the Bible, children's drawings, Israel's national anthem and blue and white flag, as well as memories of a Holocaust survivor. While it is not a government-led initiative, the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) corporation joined as a partner. If the mission is successful, Israel will become the fourth country, after Russia, the U.S. and China, to reach the moon. "This is the lowest-budget spacecraft to ever undertake such a mission," an IAI statement said of the $100 million project. "The superpowers who managed to land a spacecraft on the moon have spent hundreds of millions." It added that although it was a private venture, Beresheet was a "national and historic achievement."
"containing the Bible, children's drawings, Israel's national anthem and blue and white flag, as well as memories of a Holocaust survivor" - What, no tiny bagels?
Yes, 50 years ago, and having to develop the entire thing from scratch instead of opening a bunch of catalogs and buying the parts.
So the Iz are going to put a thing atop an American rocket and claim they "reached the moon"?
https://www.dailymotion.com/vi...
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Iron Sky! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Beresheet will also deposit a "time capsule" of digital files the size of coins containing the Bible, children's drawings, Israel's national anthem and blue and white flag, as well as memories of a Holocaust survivor.
Wrong. What you have are transistors, and the hope that someone will be able to read their on-off state at some indeterminate point in the future.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
There is no such thing as "from scratch" in engineering. They have stood on the shoulders of giants in case your nazi ass missed it
Actually, in the case of rocketry, most of the world stood on the shoulders of Nazis, in case your giant ass missed it.
the shiningest star among this group is Korea, which began cutting up boys' penises after the Americans occupied their country.
Tiger penises too hard to come by, I guess...
So far, the posts in response to this article are all sarcastic and cynical, mocking the claim of "reaching the moon" when they are just hitching a ride on SpaceX, not to mention riding the coattails of big nation states that have spent billions over half a century to develop the foundational technologies and do it all in grander style. But think about the historical significance of this. It may be small potatoes in a sense, but it is indeed the first time that a non-governmental low budget endeavor gets there (if it succeeds). The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. You cannot do something the 2nd and 3rd time without doing it the first time. Making inexpensive or commercially feasible trips to the moon with some regularity will depend on projects of this magnitude and expense, and at some point, somebody does it first, and this is it.
True, they are not running the whole show themselves. The launch comes from a an established carrier. But therein is another wondrous thing. A government rocket is not lifting them, a private enterprise is. And don't forget that with complex technologies, businesses are highly interconnected and dependent on each other - no one company can do it all themselves - even NASA needed thousands of subcontractors to get Apollo there and back. Furthermore, all they are doing with SpaceX is getting off the ground, and nowadays, that's easy. Not so easy is dropping out of orbit and landing, without overshooting or crashing, and the Israeli craft will do that on its own. And, a small potatoes budget forces you to be clever, and how they are going to get from low orbit to the moon on minimum weight and fuel is itself inspiring, lessons to be learned for all the moon trekkers who hope to follow.
If nothing else, this kind of event can inspire other pioneers and entrepreneurs that it can be done. Something hasn't been done until the moment it is done, and whoever did it, they were the first. Their pride is understandable. You would be too if you were the first, and we would equally applaud and be inspired by you. This opens the gates, and more will follow. Who knows, next could be the Jamaican bob-rocket team. (And instead of Tang, rum and mauby.)
If you look at the history of mathematics, Arabs and Greeks optimistically ended their math education in the third year of high school. The really interesting things were discovered after 1700, perhaps with the exception of calculus, which was discovered after 1600.
Ezekiel 23:20
For some reason there's no option to report this post, so I'll have to settle for telling this a/c to take a long walk off a short cliff. Fuck off, troll.
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
Higher level math still depends on lower level foundations being discovered first. Who asked you what you thought was more interesting? That wasn't the question.
One might successfully argue that it's the other way round, as evidenced, e.g., by partially-historically-inverse presentation of linear algebra in universities, where you start with the low-level foundations discovered last and then you follow up with some of the specific results discovered way earlier (before you exhaust them and follow on with specific results obtained in the 20th century).
By the way, your random assertion that "it's easier to land on Mars than in Melbourne, Australia" that you fought so hard to try to convince everybody wasn't totally a crock of shit? Yeah. That's what I remember as your greatest contribution, your most "interesting" nugget of bullshit opine. To be honest, your take on mathematics doesn't come close.
My take on mathematics doesn't come close to a claim I never made? Wow, something I said is different from something I *never* said? How surprising and insightful! :-p
Ezekiel 23:20
If you look at the history of mathematics, Arabs and Greeks optimistically ended their math education in the third year of high school. The really interesting things were discovered after 1700, perhaps with the exception of calculus, which was discovered after 1600.
Really? It is fascinating to see that somebody managed to cram so much arrogance and ignorance combined into a single statement. Algebra is an invention with roots in ancient Babylonia and with contributions from the Greeks but that in it's modern form largely came from the Islamic world. It is considered to be a critical invention because it is the gate keeper to all higher mathematics. As for Geometry, where the Greeks made a a huge contribution, it is kind of descriptive of it's importance that one of the two times Isaac Newton was heard to laugh is when somebody asked what the point of Euclid's Elements element's was. Newton once said: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants", he had a point. None of this stuff that you consider uninteresting was trivial or obvious at the time it was discovered and your 'interesting stuff' would not be possible without it.
Algebra is an invention with roots in ancient Babylonia and with contributions from the Greeks but that in it's modern form largely came from the Islamic world.
Invention? You mean discovery? And by "modern form", you mean the discoveries of al-Galois? Oh wait, that was Evariste Galois and it was the 1800s already!
one of the two times Isaac Newton was heard to laugh
A cool story, but all it illustrates is mostly our shoddy history record. Note that I didn't say a word about Elements or Euclid, so I'm not sure what was your point there. Purely geometric methods never got to the point that you needed for a large portion of rocket engineering problems the solution of which made Von Braun and his projects successful.
Also, none of the things you wrote contradict what I wrote, which is what I'm pretty sure is basically a statement from Keith Devlin that I read some years ago. So don't complain to me about that.
Ezekiel 23:20
You have to understand, no Jewish woman would ever take anything that's not 10% off.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Said by you.
Actually, it's said by you. YOU wrote it right there. I can't edit your comments.
Ezekiel 23:20
That's a hypothetical considering that you can't post such a link. But yes.
Ezekiel 23:20
yet without them you wouldn't get beyond that
History shows us that various methods were discovered multiple times independently by multiple people using different approaches, so I don't see how this statement is provable.
Ezekiel 23:20
17.6%, the rest, are mainly from backwards 3rd-world "cultures"
So much like most of the rest then.
People need to stop mutilating children.
The Greeks invented ballistic missiles? I guess that's why both the Americans and Soviets grabbed all the Greek rocket scientists after WWII to start their own ballistic missile programs.
For the record: The 'Holocaust' is not a lie.
Educate yourself instead of sharing your idiocy on the internet.
Funniest circumcision joke I've ever read. Would read again. A++
Bin Laden wasn't in a cave. That was just made up because nobody knew where he was. You're basic your accusation against Silverstein on circustancial evidence. However the actual hijackers were caught on camera, witnesses saw them in flight schools, calls were made from the planes and of course the airlines and airport security had data about who was on the flights. The whole thing is a little bit too complicated to be a mere insurance fraud. Most insurance scammers just burn their buildings down, they don't have planes flown into them. And if it was an insurance scam, why bother hitting the Pentagon and whatever flight 93 was aiming for? I supposed you'll say that was just a detraction... Your whole theory is based on imagination rather than solid facts.
I guess if they can afford this type of thing, they'll need no future foreign aid from the U.S.
...
Why would you need to invoke gods? For what reason? And how is it not a discovery if every individual comes independently to the same conclusion? Languages of the world are interesting in the ways in which they differ, mathematics is interesting in how it is exactly the same for everyone. It's not like, for example, the density of primes is inverse logarithmic for Europeans and constant for Polynesians. That's not "an abstraction", that's a fact of nature.
Ezekiel 23:20
... equivalent to a gold rush.
For those simple bastards who want to go to Mars, here's your alpha and beta site.
Experiments on the far side (see Gary Larson) will be shielded from instrument noise generated by Earth. That's good science.
Imagine launching payloads from the Moon to reach either the Earth or Mars or targets of opportunity.
If China would only mention, "nuclear weapons," we could get this show on the road.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I want to point out that the cost comparison was skewed in currency conversion. The article quotes a cost of £77m, followed by the statement “The superpowers who managed to land a spacecraft on the moon have spent hundreds of millions.” which is still referring to pounds. Just wanted to point out why the comparison in the summary didn't make much sense.
Better known as 318230.
The first clause is a tautology, but not a very useful one, which makes the second clause nonsensical.
Ezekiel 23:20
Why is it a Platonic fallacy? It's for example an "invention" that zeros and ones and additive and multiplicative inverses exist in fields? Or a matter of logical necessity? These are absolutely discoveries. These things were not made up arbitrarily based on how good someone's sleep was; they could not have been formulated in any other way.
Ezekiel 23:20