Re: did man walk on the moon...and creationism.

On Aug 4, 4:08 am, Ye Old One <use...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 3 Aug 2009 09:38:07 -0700 (PDT), Andre Lieven
<andrelie...@xxxxxxxx> enriched this group when s/he wrote:

On Aug 2, 3:33 pm, Ye Old One <use...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 2 Aug 2009 07:53:41 -0700 (PDT), Andre Lieven
<andrelie...@xxxxxxxx> enriched this group when s/he wrote:

On Aug 2, 7:24 am, Ye Old One <use...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 2 Aug 2009 01:23:01 -0700 (PDT), Suzanne
<leila...@xxxxxxxxxxx> enriched this group when s/he wrote:

On Jul 31, 12:24 am, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 30, 11:32 pm, Suzanne <avoids-all-fa...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> further
LIED:
On Jul 30, 2:12 am, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:> On Jul
30, 2:32 am, Suzanne <lying...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> looned:
On Jul 29, 7:37 pm, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 29, 7:49 pm, Suzanne <liar-for-jee...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> lies and
lies and lies:
On Jul 28, 5:19 am, Burkhard <b.scha...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Gregory A Greenman wrote:
On Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:16:10 -0700 (PDT), Andre Lieven wrote:
On Jul 27, 11:54=A0pm, Suzanne <lying-lo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx cowshat

I have been a big fan of space history for over 40
YEARS now.
The notion that you will be able to tell me ANYTHING
that I don't know, and have not read, is AbZero.

People at NASA have been too, and so have I.

You show AbZero sign of it; real space buffs KNOW
something of the topic.

Real space buffs? Is this akin to the claim "Real men
don't eat quiche?"

No it is not, he is talking about people like myself who lived through
the events, followed them in incredible detail, kept books and
newspapers from the time (I still have all the newspapers from the
Apollo 11 flight.

Indeed. I still have files of newspaper clippings of every Apollo
flight from Apollo 8 to Apollo 17. My dad, at the time, worked at
the CBC in Montreal, and he was able to bring home out of town
newspapers, so my clippings go beyond just the then two local
city papers.

In the case of Apollo 11 I kept, intact, every paper and magazine I
could lay my hands on. Apollo 11 was a real milestone, but the value
of my collection is that there is also all the other news, comments
and adverts during a two-three week period.

That makes for a good time capsule of the whole period.

Yes, it is a prized collection which will in time be passed to the
grand kids.

Excellent. Make sure that they understand the importance of both
the collection, and of the events that they report on.

Add the DVD set of From The Earth To The Moon to that collection...

He is talking about people like myself who still blame
the US government for not getting us to Mars long before now.

I'm not sure that I'd use the word "blame", though I would use
"hold responsible".

I do use the word "blame". They could have done it by 1980, the fact
that they even stopped going to the moon was nothing short of
negligent.

This is a topic that has been, over the years, discussed a plenty
on sci.space.history. While I agree that ending deep space manned
flight was a Bad Thing, I have to also consider the old saying of:

"No bucks ? No Buck Rogers."

Yes, true :(

Just imagine what could have been done with, say, a mere 5% of
the price of the War in Iraq...

So, when the voters lost interest, and there wasn't an existing
political constituency to continue funding at early Apollo levels
(Consider also, that NASA budgets started going *down* in FY
1967, even before the first manned Apollo Earth orbit mission
flew.), so cuts were inevitable.

Yes, it was totally a political thing and it is the political leaders
I blame - they had the power to keep the population excited but
blew it.

Well... It can be a bit more difficult than that. Consider what else
was going on at the time: Racial unrest, and riots, the murders of
a President, a candidate for President from the same family and a
civil rights leader who preached non violence, coupled with a war
that was becoming more and more unsupportable and unpopular.

Given all that, I would be hard pressed to find just how to sell a
robust space program in that climate. And, the energy crisis and
stagflation of the early 70s didn't help, coupled with the near
Constitutional crisis in the US at about the same time.

In politics, if you want to get billions out of politicians, you have
to
show them why that money would be as politically useful as many
other means to placate the voters more widely with the same cash.

The problem is that space hasn't had much of a long term public
popular constituency.

On the plus side, the advances in unmanned spaceflight after Apollo
was amazing, such that we now have a fleet of craft working on and
around Mars, and even a Saturn orbiter.

Very true. However, we could have had men on Mars by the mid 80s.

Hmmm... I would suggest that you give a read of the SF novel "Voyage",
by Stephen Baxter. He postulates a US program where the focus does
stay on a manned flight to Mars. But, no Shuttle, no robust unmanned
program, and a few other things go away, to pay for it.

And, unlike you, people can tell me something.

<Laughs> Lie. You have yet to acknowledge the truth that f> you
 have been told and offered evidence for, that countered
your
willfully ignorant LIES.

No body listens to a bully, Andre.

Nobody listens to a lying, harpic harridan like you.

Understatement of the Year Award.

Accept, with pride :)

<bg>

YOUR bad. Again.

But I haven't seen that you can.

<Massive Loon Projection>

This must be....your signature?

It should be yours.

She's *earned* it...

Many times over.

And, she keeps earning it more and more...

Every day.

She's on a mission...

[snip lots more I agreed with.]

One comment I will add.

There is no doubt in my mind that WvB contributed greatly to getting
man to the Moon. However, there is also no doubt in my mind that
without WvB the USA would still have put a man to the Moon. It may
have taken a few years more, but it would have happened. What is more,
the method that would have been used would, I believe, have been more
cost effective and more sustainable.

This area is one of the grand "what ifs" of spaceflight. The space
race of the 60s was by no means inevitable. Had, say, VB's last 1956
Jupiter C been used to orbit a small Explorer 1 class satellite, then
the USSR putting up Sputnik a year later isn't the shock to the nation
that in our timeline it was.

Absent that, and the superpower space race may not happen at all.

So, without that impetus, what might we have gotten ? Perhaps a
gradual program that doesn't see any human orbital flight until the late
60s (Based on advances from the X-15 program, to develop manned
spacecraft that are a bit more than "spam in a can" capsules.), and a
Moon flight might have to wait until the 70s or even later.

In such a timeline, we might have gotten something closer to what VB
wrote about in his 50s Colliers articles and on the Disney shows on
the topic from that same time period.

The possible advantage of taking that non-race slower route is that it
builds up a sustainable infrastructure for spaceflight, both manned
and not. With such an infrastructure, it makes abandoning it somewhat
less likely or even short term sensible.

But, we got what we got, and at least we can say that it gave us some
exciting history. Perhaps it will end up like the races to the Poles
at the start of the 20th Century, where the first "landing" predated
sustained operations in those places by about 40-50 years, but the
sustained operations did come, once the infrastructure caught up.

It think that, like the colonization of the globe, it will be down to
business to really master space.

Andre

.

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