Russia to build a mine on the moon

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Pssst, between you and me - it's cheese they're really after!

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Speaking of Rolls Royce and the Moon...

Rolls Royce made the Pegasus Turbofan which keeps the Harrier jump jet floating. Strangely enough they didn't perfect the hovering stability of the jump jet until the 80s...

So how did they manage to land an even more advanced 'lunar module' on the moon 10 years earlier - a surface 200,000 miles away, with a device that looked like a bunk-bed powered by compressed gas and then drive a jeep across the surface and plant the Stars & Stripes.

Hollywood? YEEHAW!

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Space flight maybe be simpler than flight on Earth but that lunar module still had to contend with lunar gravity, landing and launching trajectories and docking, varying landing and launching weights and filming for the camera left on the moon. I don't understand how they managed such a feat 30yrs ago on the processing power of a calculator.

My favourite idea for space propulsion is the large metallic sail that NASA proposed building to catch the solar particles. They used the idea in one of the last Star Wars films, it's kind of goofy!

I read about one idea for space propulsion that involved bending space around the nose of a spaceship to create a tiddlywinks effect. When you think that we are finding stars with Earth-like planets that are 20,000 light years away (and that's just to the centre of OUR galaxy) then we are going to have to work out how to travel faster than any particle in the magnetic spectrum.

As for these new Fusion reactors, the first of which is to be built in France soon, has anyone stopped to consider that when Fission was first invented the first use killed 300,000 people? That may have been a mis-use but what happens with Fusion if you get a Chernobyl?

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Back in 1950s America (when everyone sat around with their pipe, slippers and knitted tanktop) a radio show was broadcast. It was a dramatisation of War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells and it was so realistic that half the radio listening population thought that real aliens from the planet Mars were invading.

Back in 1970s America (when everyone sat around with their bongs, platforms and flower-power t-shirts) a TV program was broadcast. It claimed that Earth Men from the nation of 'America' had defeated the evil communists and driven a dune buggy on the moon whilst posing for photographs, falling arseways over moon dust, bouncing around and then blasting back off in their magical spaceship.

Tigger: Did YOU believe this 'Pooh'?

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Back you dogs, back I say!

*CRACK*

Tigger: It may have been Orson Welles's voice but H.G.Wells wrote it. Orson Welles also did the Transformers movie, quite a fall from grace - first he announces the world is going to end, then "Autobots Transform!".

1938/1950s - Okay I got the dates wrong, half the US population was gullible 12 years earlier than I stated.

27,000 couldn't be wrong about the moon landings? There are 2 million employees of the Pentagon - fat load of good that did the truth when it came to Iraq!



Cymric: I'm out on my history? It was a Soviet 100-Megaton bomb that topped the yield tables. The shockwave blew villagers off their bicycles 50 miles from the test site.
               
As for Fusion bomb - I concede my knowledge of weapons of mass destruction is out of date (A bit like the CIA's) but the device is still AKA Fission-Fusion-Fission.



mdma: I'd like to slap you for my linching... but you're buddhist.



Alas, I still don't believe man has landed on the moon. Troll away learne'd ones, I'm going to burn an effigy of Neil Armstrong.

:-)

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I'm not disputing we have placed things into orbit or sent probes around the solar system. I'm not disputing Hubble (even though the images are touched up with those colours) and maybe I am mixing anti-war with anti-science.

However there are a number of scientists that have made it vocal that the radiation levels on the moon would be too high, as would venturing too far from near Earth orbit. They say that for a week long journey back in '69 it would have killed the astronauts and THAT is why Russia never made it. What happened to Laika, and that monkey?

I've never been into conspiracy theories but I've read somewhere that the only solution to this problem of man(/woman) exploring deeper space is to somehow constantly regenerate the nerve tissue that is damaged by over-exposure to radiation (remember how instant this was in that film about Los Alamos?).

Interesting then that over the last few years medical science has 'put all it's eggs in one basket' with regards to embryonic stem cell research; cells that can be told to grow into anything you want them to - including damaged nerves.

If man did land on the moon then I'm sure we've been given a much glossier image of it than we should have. Such a feat would have incurred much higher casualties and would have taken a lot more time and money than a single economy could have coped with. And probably adding to the rose-tinted view of the landings is the fact we never went back... but now Bush has spent all his pocket money.

Anyway, I'm sceptical and not totally against the moon landings - but like the holocaust, which many are now questioning, information is kept far too secret, things are glossed over, spin and lies blur reality. Even truth can become tarnished.

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Oh God, it's Groundhog Day.

I'm going to wake up every morning at 8am and see my posts on this thread dismembered...

Okay guys I'm going to break with the tradition and admit you were right and I was wrong. My hypothesis was strewn with poor logic, erroneus data, irritability and envy for a superior space program. Oh, and a subscription to Sky TV's babbling cynics society.

I myself have gone through a civilian session of astronaut training at the ESA headquarters in Brussels as a wee man and it didn't leave me terribly convinced - it was just a Euro-fetish shop in my opinion. The only way to convince the general public will be Spaceship One.

Now I'm going to lick my wounds, leave me be you cretins.

Oh yeah, and blobrana is cute.

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hppacito: You're entering risky territory here...

:-D :-D :-D

I tried the moon conspiracy theory and was mauled to within an inch of my life!

On the subject of laser reflection however, I watched some guy in the supermarket scanning barcodes and wondered how exactly does the laser 'read'?

Is there a seperate diode in there with 'read' in mind, angled so as to receive the reflected beam out of the main laser... or does the laser pulse (send-receive-send-receive)?

:-)

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[X-Files theme tune]

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/moon.htm

[/X-Files theme tune]

Interesting the bit:
"In a television program about the hoax theory, Fox Entertainment Group listed the deaths of 10 astronauts and of two civilians related to the manned spaceflight program as having possibly been killings as part of a coverup."

Maybe what the engineers were working on was in fact the ICBMs...

:-D

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100 tonnes? That's pretty amazing...

I'm sure I read the Arianne 5 and those Boeing/Mcdonald Douglas rockets can go as far as 10 tonnes.

What do the modern Russian ones carry?

What I found interesting about the Space Shuttle was that when they test the engines there is so much hydrogen released that the test site generates it's own rainclouds!

:-D

Britain should never have scrapped it's Blue Lightning program in the 60s. I only discovered a few months back that we had launched 600 'Skylark' rockets filled with God knows what from a secret site in Denmark... better if we'd sent a man into space rather than given the clowns at MI6 a better looking glass.

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by PMC:
A good number of British scientists worked on both Saturn and Apollo too.

A bad number of Nazi scientists worked on them also. And I doubt they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts...

:-D

I must say that a great deal of the suspicion that falls on NASA is due to the generals who wield the whip. They 'contain' information on grounds of national security when it could be of vital interest to mankind.

NASA should be a public limited company in the spirit of Wall Street where people can buy shares in missions. Not some federal military quango who's better ideas get poached for weapons systems.

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Hrrm, agreed on all points...

... except I have this feeling in the back of my mind that NASA's budget comes from the USAF. Not sure.

I remember seeing a lot of NASA experiments that involved rockets hung under the B52, radio controlled passenger airliners, jumbo jets with huge laser generators and even talk of using the new generation of space shuttle to drop solid metal bombs from orbit (they wouldn't need explosives due to the velocity they'd be travelling at!).

Then there's this 'Jet Propulsion Laboratory' thing and the fact that shuttle pilots train in the airforce...

I wonder why the Russians never kept their cloned Shuttle going though and how many times it flew (if at all!).

I saw a TV documentary once where the Concorde designers decoyed the Russian espionage by substituting the formula for Concorde's tyres for the recipe for chewing gum.

They still managed to make 'Concordski' though...

;-)

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by Tigger:
No, NASA has its own budget.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nasa

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was established in 1958 [1], is the agency responsible for the public space program of the United States of America. It is also responsible for long-term civilian and military aerospace research."

So it has it's own budget yet "is also responsible for... military aerospace research"

Hmmm... a "civilian agency" conducting military research... isn't that was Cyberdyne Systems did before it let Skynet do the dirty work?

:-D

I bet most of the Pentagon spy satellites have been launched under the auspices of 'global warming research' or 'gathering information on solar activity'.

There seems to be underlying aggresion in government run space agencies. Only yesterday Israel launched a spy satellite (surprisingly from a Russian rocket) to spy on Iran. Japan launched a spy satellite to keep an eye on North Korea and the US sends spy satellites to watch everyone.

Britain just enjoys making more craters on Mars, France likes a good 'ol fireworks party...

Noone seems to be doing anything particularly interesting these days - and by that I mean MANNED!

Bring on private space exploration, the garage built orbiters!

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Turambar: That cat looks suspiciously like Maximillion from The Black Hole!



:-D