Conpsiracy Buffs Start You Engines! Moon video!

[Jim O'Bryan]

NASA Loses Moon Footage, Hollywood Restores It.

WASHINGTON – NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.

In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.

But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.

The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.

Read the rest here.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090716/ap_on_sc/us_sci_moon_video

[Jim DeVito]

That is pretty silly that they wrote over the tape. But it opens the door to a larger question.

Where are we really going from here?

Back to the moon? Why? Whats so cool about the moon? How are we going to get too and from the space station once re retire the shuttle fleet?

The so called space elevator?



How about Mars. The russians are locking people in capsules to see how they would react to the isolation it would take to get to Mars.

Russia locks up six for Mars experiment

I think they just got out of the capsule. I think next year they are going to lock people up for the full 512 days it would take to get there.

And who owns space? The first person with the biggest gun up there?

It is going to be one hell of an interesting future!

[Jim O'Bryan]

Where are we really going from here?

Moon

Why?

H3

Next stop, rocket with enough lead to get through Van Alen Belt.


.

[David Lay]

Next stop, rocket with enough lead to get through Van Alen Belt.

There is too much radiation in outer space for manned space travel.

This general charge is usually made by people who don't understand very much at all about radiation. After witnessing the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the tragedy of Chernobyl it is not surprising that the idea of radiation should elicit an intuitively fearful reaction. But when you understand the different types of radiation and what can be done about them, it becomes a manageable problem to avoid radiation exposure.

The Van Allen belts are full of deadly radiation, and anyone passing through them would be fried.

Needless to say this is a very simplistic statement. Yes, there is deadly radiation in the Van Allen belts, but the nature of that radiation was known to the Apollo engineers and they were able to make suitable preparations. The principle danger of the Van Allen belts is high-energy protons, which are not that difficult to shield against. And the Apollo navigators plotted a course through the thinnest parts of the belts and arranged for the spacecraft to pass through them quickly, limiting the exposure.

The Van Allen belts span only about forty degrees of earth's latitude -- twenty degrees above and below the magnetic equator. The diagrams of Apollo's translunar trajectory printed in various press releases are not entirely accurate. They tend to show only a two-dimensional version of the actual trajectory. The actual trajectory was three-dimensional. The highly technical reports of Apollo, accessible to but not generally understood by the public, give the three-dimensional details of the translunar trajectory.

Each mission flew a slightly different trajectory in order to access its landing site, but the orbital inclination of the translunar coast trajectory was always in the neighborhood of 30°. Stated another way, the geometric plane containing the translunar trajectory was inclined to the earth's equator by about 30°. A spacecraft following that trajectory would bypass all but the edges of the Van Allen belts.

This is not to dispute that passage through the Van Allen belts would be dangerous. But NASA conducted a series of experiments designed to investigate the nature of the Van Allen belts, culminating in the repeated traversal of the Southern Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly (an intense, low-hanging patch of Van Allen belt) by the Gemini 10 astronauts.

http://www.xmission.com/~jwindley/envrad.html

[J Hrlec]

We need to blow up the moon....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj7vMKy4EI

[Donald Farris]

Hi,
In another thread I mentioned graphene. That material will enable us to do amazing things to the hulls of spaceships (not just usable for my Superman suit).

The elevator you show was used in the Mars trilogy ("Red Mars", "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars") by Kim Stanley Robinson. What material would be strong enough to serve as the cable? Why graphene, of course.

[Phil Florian]

Whatever we do, we can't put a penal colony on the moon like in Heinlein's awesome THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS. They started chucking rocks at Earth when they wanted to go solo. Sweet.