America spends more money on exploring space than we do exploring Earth. The deterioration of the ozone layer could very likely make Earth just like Mars in a generation. Ironically, Washington is gutting the whole NASA space program ~ guess what, to pay for manned expeditions to Mars. Next time you see images from Mars take a very good look because that is what Earth will look like to your children; or to you, if you are young right now. I guess they don’t call it the Red Planet for nothing ~ because the only way Earth can survive, the way the scientific community has painted us into a corner, is for Communism to reign supreme.
There is great controversy within different areas of NASA over using robots versus men to explore space. Politics has no place in NASA. Different agencies have their specific missions and they should cooperate in the achievement thereof. Pound for pound you can’t do better than a human astronaut on a complicated mission; whereas robots are ideal for certain kinds of missions as well. NASA should aggressively plan missions of both types, and all their resources should be available to both teams. So far this strife in the ranks has scored two wins for the robotics ~ the shuttle disaster and the Mars landings. Hooray for robots. More robots. R2D2.
It is becoming increasingly important for America to have a secure, dependable source of energy. In the last few years alone, California’s largest utility has gone bankrupt, Enron has folded – bringing trillions of American worker’s retirement savings with them. The escalating war on terrorism threatens to envelope major oil exporters in the region. We need a secure energy source if we are to conduct the war against terrorists without the possibility of retaliation against our energy supplies. A major incentive is needed to study collecting solar energy from space, and transforming it into power in our utility grids. What a novel idea – doing something practical in space with government funding. No. It’ll never happen.
Space can be made self-supporting, even profitable, by increasing government research into “power from space” incentives. One reasonable project is to build a collecting station on the moon and to transmit the energy to Earth. We have already put men and machines on the moon – it’s time to use that technology to put power plants on the moon so America can have a secure and dependable energy future. Naturally all the oil companies oppose that and since Bush is an old oil man, and Cheney too – two strikes and we’re out.
We need a new and improved shuttle fleet. The shuttle technology was a decade old when it was originally constructed twenty years ago. The shuttles are already far beyond their expected lifetime, and yet we are now making increasing demands upon them – to build and provision the International Space Station. They are fulfilling these escalating demands on lower budgets, less public support, and versus increasing problems in funding from Congress. Of course, they aren’t doing anything any more – but every thing looks so good on paper, why change it?
Given the importance of energy to the national defense, and NASA’s proven ability to make optimal use of limited funds, the Space Commands of all the military services should be put under the direction of NASA. This will give them the additional funding, manpower, and resources they need to ensure a timely and safe completion of their current objectives. We need to be sure the Hubble telescope crashes safely to Earth when its orbit degrades. We need to be sure the Chinese get all our manned moon mission technology – after all, the Chinese lobby in Washington has more money than any other, with the Chinese economy booming lately while ours stagnates. You know, my cast iron barbells are “Made in China” ~ there has got to be something bad wrong with a system that lets such a heavy, low tech item be sold in America at a profit. That something is Washington.
There was one glaring flaw in the investigation of the shuttle disaster last spring. Everybody placed the blame on the NASA Culture but nobody identified it. The culprit is the University of Texas at Austin, which has the virtually unknown Center for Space Research which – believe it or not – is 2nd only to JPL in the space echelon. In fact, at least 70% of the engineers at JPL are themselves UT graduates or employees, or otherwise tied to UT Austin. Nobody should be able to assert that much influence from complete anonymity. Well, other than special interests groups in Washington.
Long term, we need a new goal. We need an American goal, not an international one. The U.S. space program has given our technology and expertise generously to virtually every other space program in the world. This generosity has not been rewarded in kind. Consequently, we should be more circumspect in sharing with other nations – as they have always been, and continue to be, with We need our own dream; and that dream should be a manned mission to Mars. We want heritage not hate in space.
This should be a joint venture with American corporations (and not international multinationals, either). They need the excitement of participating in a high tech venture; their employees need the opportunity to take part in something different and exciting; challenging and intellectually stimulating. We all need a big, bright, exciting new adventure to pull together and show the world what America is all about. We need to put men on Mars; and to thereafter keep them there in a permanent and expanding presence. Just think how happy those six men will be at the climax of their trillion dollar mission, to think of the billions of starving children back on Earth.
Don’t tell any of the Mars fanatics that.
An enduring question in the early U.S. space program is why the Nixon Administration made NASA destroy all the design plans of the huge Apollo rockets used before the shuttle program was begun. Apparently they didn’t want to have any competition for the shuttle. Yet the fact remains that those rockets were capable of putting a large payload in orbit very efficiently – they are sorely needed now to build and provision the International Space Station. Incidentally, the scientific community has recently established that the usefulness of the ISS is over ~ and it’s not even complete yet. I suppose it’s only useful purpose for them was to transfer all our best technology to every nuclear weapon wannabe in the whole world.
Another compelling question is how the Russians were able to build a carbon copy (actually better than that – an upgrade version) of the U.S. space shuttle. Why aren’t the Russians using his vehicle to help with the ISS project? Is NASA so transparent to foreign snooping that every iota of technology it creates is immediately available to everybody in the world? Is that how the British are able to launch their Mars probe from a brand new space program? The learning curve of every other space program in the whole world is a steep upward spiral; ours is a steep downward spiral. Washington is at this very moment assembling legislation to make it so, permanently. NASA is already so ordered, by the President on the advice of his Council of Scientific Advisors.
Dozens of technical papers have been written exploring surveillance data of Mars for evidence of water. Yet the gravity of Mars is so low that water could never have existed in massive quantities on the surface, for very long. That is, when we settle Mars and create an artificial atmosphere, it will have to be constantly replenished because it constantly dissipates into space. If water ever existed on the surface it would quickly have evaporated and been lost to space. Just think of all those hundreds of elegant technical papers that are made obsolete by this simple fact; all the dissertations voided; all the tenured professors demoted. It’ll never happen, science must progress forward – not backward.
The test that NASA did to “confirm” that a fluff of foam blew a huge hole in the shuttle wing is absurd. A hole that size would have destroyed the wing from friction as the shuttle escaped the atmosphere; at a very minimum, it would have caused a WHOLE lot of steerage while piloting the shuttle out of the atmosphere. The simulation NASA did was wrong too – if your going 100 MPH and you throw a heap of foam out the window and it hits a car right behind you, it’s relative speed is not enough to cause much damage. NASA said the foam would be going much, much faster because they started the foam at REST when in fact it’s initial velocity is 100 MPH same as the vehicle it peeled off of. Don’t try this yourself, especially not at 100 MPH.
You’ve seen the photos of the little spacecraft parachuting down to the surface of Mars. There’s a problem with that. Mars has an very thin atmosphere, so thin that a hypothetical wind going hundreds of miles an hour would barely feel like a breeze. A parachute is useless in that kind of environment. It wouldn’t give any braking at all. (The rollover image shows this in context. Clearly the whole B-rated Mars movie is a facade ~ for causing every human female to be made barren… it’s happening, because fertility ends sooner and menopause later.)
There’s also a phenomena called aero-braking, by which a spacecraft uses the atmosphere to stabilize its orbit around Mars to a nice circular orbit. Mar’s gravity is so small it is able to hold an atmosphere that’s only fraction as thick as Earth’s. A spacecraft would have to practically graze the surface of the planet to get any braking, and the mountains on Mars are so high – Mt. Everest is a hill by comparison – it’s impossible to get that low.
NASA has just sent into orbit a $1 billion scientific project that’s been in the works for decades, to test Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. They have three super precise crystal balls in suspension and will measure how gravity affects them during an orbit. I suppose
those astrophysicists haven’t read any of the literature about the dozens of GPS satellites in geosynchronous orbit, with such a precise placement and accuracy of communication that folks in orbital mechanics have learned far more about Relativity than astrophysicists will ever learn from the new NASA satellite.
Evidently my own efforts to undermine Relativity have caused enough inquiring minds to question its veracity that this penultimate test is deemed necessary to settle the matter once and for all.
Fundamentally, deep space scares the hell out of people. They are little advanced beyond the small child who needs a light on at night to keep the bogey man away. Cities are lit brightly at night, country avenues and back yards too – not, as most people tell themselves, to protect against vandals ~ but to assuage their instinctive fear of the dark. There are so many terrifying creatures in the science fiction epics that it is unlikely any human will ever get much beyond a few day’s travel from Earth, and then only en route to a brightly lit moon. Likewise for deep sea exploration. Scientific education has such a shallow tap root that the intrepid explorer of the deep blue sea dashes for the almost as equally scary surface at a moment’s notice.
So, the emphasis now is to send robots to do our exploring. A whole generation of youngsters is a high skill level with video games, and virtual games that confront the user with every manner of danger or trap or means of swift demise. These individuals are in great demand with NASA to send signals to their Mars rovers, with the Army to control their remote reconnaissance drones, and the Army to pilot their iRobot mine detectors. Human exploration has too many problems – food, waste, exercise, entertainment, and lethal psychosis only a few days after leaving low earth orbit. NASA claims to be looking expectantly forward to putting a team of people on Mars but the reality is that nobody has figured out how they will keep from going stark raving mad after just a week in their year long transit to Mars. Nobody is even studying the problem, and NASA has only one full time psychologist on its manned exploration staff.
The higher the complexity and danger of conditions on Earth, the less distance a manned mission will get from Earth before succumbing to madness. Going into the deep dark unknown where no man has ever gone before is scary enough. Going there with the knowledge that your billion dollar mission is considered a total waste of money by millions of starving people in the world, is another matter. Space exploration so far has always been done with the conviction that many benefits to all humanity accrued – high strength metals for aircraft, computing machinery, new high temperature ceramics, aircraft flight safety controls, and countless other benefits have happened because of the space program. Little such benefits happened because of the International Space Station, other than technology transfer to other nations from the space superpowers.
Space missions henceforth will need some added incentives. A mission to the moon will have to be to study the possibility of collecting solar energy and transmitting it back to Earth. A Mars mission will have to pay for itself with the collection of precious metals – plutonium or titanium or rare gems used in lasers. We shouldn’t be looking for water on Mars, but for something to make future trips worth the trouble. Sadly the space community is run by scientists and not by engineers. Scientists want only knowledge, and give no intrinsic importance to knowledge that is useful. Engineers seek to make things that work and are useful, that will keep working and keep being useful; scientists have no such genes.
The problem is that space exploration on the academic level – and by extension on the industry level – is orchestrated by people who are called engineers, but who are actually scientists by every other conceivable measure. Engineers are trained to create things, not needing to know exactly why and how they work – but just simply haven proven analytically and experimentally that they do work, and content to go with that to the marketplace. Scientists have no such courage – the products they create must have rock solid, fundamental scientific laws that prove everything. As long as engineers trained as scientists are in control of our space effort there will be no further progress in the U.S., or any other space program.
NASA’s solution, as prescribed by the Blue Ribbon commission that investigated the Challenger crash is that the “NASA culture” is to blame ~ employees afraid to tell supervisors about the concerns for safety or ideas for improvement; supervisors who don’t listen, who won’t listen, and who won’t risk their own skin by passing any good ideas up the chain of command. NASA is having one on one interviews with a psychologist of all upper and middle level management, vowing that if they can’t “change the people, we’ll have to change the people” – meaning replace them. That change will last a few years at best, unless it is made a formal part of the institution ~ which it isn’t. That being the case – and it is obvious to everybody – the moral is that people who do not or cannot conform are to be cast out and permanently purged from the work place.
The need for institutionalizing psych reviews of all middle and upper management – and for rigorously ensuring the interviews are conducted by conscientious and skilled individuals – is obvious: humans have an instinctive fear of the unknown, and deep space is the ultimate unknown. New independent thinking people will be brought into NASA, but the pressure will be upon them immediately, to themselves conform. The end result of this NASA scheme will be to target, then indoctrinate all scientific free thinkers. The media will report progress of the program as it proceeds and Fortune 500 companies around the world will be able to benefit from the program, by creating similar schemes within their own ranks.
Big Brother is watching. The Borg matrix has a sophisticated security mechanism. Occasionally false results are published by NASA in order to see if anybody in the space community has the courage to speak out. Typically they would do so in the Google Newsgroups; or informally to colleagues or students. Such individuals are immediately labeled as security risks, having broken the constraints of the security apparatus which is intended to render them incapable of questioning authority in this manner. Similar schemes are being implemented in other areas, using NASA as the guinea pig – and as a public means of informing the Borg community of progress under way.
Technology has reached its limit in providing quality images of deep space, and data for a wide range of astronomical theories.
Such research is 100% funded by the public, and now that there’s not much else to spark the imagination, the funding will drop off sharply. Likewise for space hardware. The only thing that will keep public interest alive is a manned mission to Mars or a return to the moon to construct permanent, useful structures there such as to collect energy for transmittal to Earth. The latter will not happen because energy is too cheap, and the technology does not exist.