It's time to get beyond low earth orbit

I’d be all about a manned mission to Mars if the orange obscenity is the captain of that one way trip.

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Whatever it takes to escape Planet Trump!

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It’s a little known fact* that the original broadcast was supposed to be in 4k UHD and 7.1, but the CBS execs refused to sign off on the specs, leaving us with a legacy of blurryvision for years.

For the Trumpian definition of fact. The real* story is that the live broadcast was edited to remove the screams, which is why they had to route it through Parkes. Just ask at the RSL there and you’ll find people who will confirm this.

** Post-truth.

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I like the optimism, but didn’t the idea bipartisan government space programs go out the window with the privatization of the space movement?

it’s true there has been a lot of pressure from the red to gut NASA. I think in the past we were able to bridge the isle for reaching space but that was an exception not the current state of things.

this. :clap: thinking anything else is pure fantasy. we’ve evolved for our planet and nowhere else, even earth like planets would likely provide huge challenges.

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He’s thinking of Moore Ahnz’s Law! :joy:

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That’s not evidence. Do you know what evidence is? Not that.

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He’s in on it!

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I’ve oft wondered if that was possible on the amateur hobbyist level, what a cool story. Quite impressed. Cool friend. :+1:

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Too bad Ocean of Storms is an Amazon-only book. I would love to read it, but it’s not available in epub format, and I refuse as a matter of principle to buy Kindle ebooks.

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According to some conspiracy theorists the observable artifacts left behind on the moon were planted there afterward by secret remote-controlled missions. So another example of fakery that would be harder to pull off (at least with late-1960s tech) than just doing it for real.

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The shuttle was a dead end. The US could have gone to the asteroids with the highly modular Apollo architecture, especially if you include Skylab into the mix. It would have made a great cruise stage.

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HOW ELSE could solar energy possibly reach the ground :rolling_eyes:

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They’re in on it. THEY"RE ALL IN ON IT!1!!

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just like sandy hook. no one died. it’s all a lie.

sigh

i actually know someone who can’t stop talking about flat earth, van allen radiation belts, pizza gate, hillary’s body doubles, or whatever the conspiracy flavor of the month is.

i’m pretty sure he believes it all - at least enough to repeat it - i really don’t get why. but it all makes sense to him somehow.

( my favorite conspiracy theory is that all conspiracy theories are started by a joint effort between the cia and the kgb. no one seems to want to believe me tho… )

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He understates the case against falsification of the lunar video. To falsify a 30 fps video of John Young walking at 10km/h on the moon, you would have to shoot at 180 fps, and Young would have to run at 60 km/h in Earth gravity.

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Sometimes it’s best to just ignore the ignorant/troll. This is one of these times.

As for US space exploration… The crippling problem here is politics. To lawmakers it’s mostly a jobs program to help them get reelected. That’s why one of the main priorities is building a flawed, ridiculously expensive system (SLS also called the Senate launch system) based on shuttle technology. It has nowhere to go, no real missions. What counts is that the factories stay open and the hardware gets built.

The repubs favor the idea manned spaceflight more, because it allows them to take money from the budgets for Earth sciences and to an extent the very successful commercial spaceflight programs and force NASA to spend it on said hardware to nowhere. Lamar “SOPA” Smith is the chairman of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology and his anti-scientific priorities have nothing to do with what we would recognize as common sense.

An article about crewed spaceflight that talks about a new space race but that doesn’t consider these facts is not grounded in reality and basically worthless, sorry.

Meanwhile SpaceX is delivering and returning cargo to and from the ISS at a fraction of the cost of what was historically accepted. They are slated to begin crewed ferry flights in 2018 (could slip to 2019) but calling it “years from now” is misleading.

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Without looking up the exact values:
Assume things fall at 32 ft / sec / sec on Earth. Assume things fall at 326 ft / sec / sec on the moon.
Drop an object from five feet off the ground on Earth:
It takes about 0.56 seconds to hit the ground.
Drop an object from five feet off the ground on the moon:
It takes about 1.37 seconds to hit the ground.

To fake a moon video, we have to overcrank the camera by a factor of √6, or about 2½. We have to shoot 75 fps, and the fake astronauts have to hop at 25 km/h in Earth’s gravity.

(Which still seems pretty unlikely.)

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is much like a fart in an elevator.

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