Posted on 08/31/2007 3:09:55 PM PDT by blam
I remember the 'shock' well.
This kind of thing has been going on for decades. Must be dozens, not counting Antarctic camps.
Wrong guess, try again.
July 20, 1969.
The same goes for moon missions.
Having grown up reading Heinlein, I was always sort of embarassed that we did nothing after the Moon Shot. I have always wondered why.
Most of these manned NASA Missions accomplish little, scientifically speaking with their laughable "Science Fair" type experiments. They are expensive rides to nowhere in particular.
Now if we had a lunar base ......
Gonna be a lot of dead Russkis on the moon. If they even get there. There might be some there already, and I’m pretty sure there are quite a few in earth orbit, if they haven’t burned up. Late 50’s-early 60’s was a bad time to be a cosmonaut.
Just the other day I read an article here at FR about one of the original “lightsaber” props from Star Wars being sent up on the next shuttle.
I’m OK with space tourists who are trained and paying but a movie prop is taking it too far.
Finder’s keeper’s
The problem right now is that neither side has the political or national will to actually go through with this program. If we’re not careful we’re going to end up with another ISS albatross. What we need to do is be wary of the Chinese coming up the middle to take the checkered flag.
And yet private space travel is catching on through men like Robert Bigelow and Sir Richard Branson.
NASA is on life support with its 40 year old space bus. If other nations feel the need to fleece their taxpayers for flights that can be done by private industry cheaper and more efficiently, let them. But the government of these US should not follow suit
Journalists are so damn lazy these days... I remember this date, because it was very close to my birthday. I was a little boy sitting with my dad, watching the thing..
The owners of the universe are not at all concerned that these hobbyists will siphon off a detectable portion of the global taxable income. True space development will follow withdrawal from the Treaty, which isn't happening.
I don't know. If you had told me when I was watching Neal Armstrong step on to the lunar surface that we send missions there until 1973 and after that by 2007 we would not have returned even once, I'd have asked what you were smoking.
We live in a nation whose media scorns heroes. When is the last time you saw a national story on the valor of one of our soldiers? The same media looks for phantom evils in the actions of our government and industry. The focus of today's media, news and entertainment are the so called victims. Not of crime or terror, but of their own gov't and business.
A new mission to Space will require a clarion call to rally America behind the heroes who wll plan, build, and carrry out the mission. If JFK had one skill it was to push the right rhetorical button and catch the people's imagination to do something great. Who will do that now?
we first orbited men around the Moon in 1968
In 1959 the US Army completed a plan for a manned military outpost on the moon. The Horizon lunar outpost was said to be necessary to protect United States interests on the moon; to conduct moon-based surveillance of the earth and space, to act as a communications relay, and to serve as a base for exploration of the moon. The permanent outpost would cost $6 billion and become operational in December 1966 with 12 soldiers.
In designing the base, Wernher von Braun appointed Heinz Koelle to head the project team at Redstone Arsenal. Spacecraft components would be lofted in 147 Saturn C-I and C-II booster launches, and then assembled in low earth orbit at an austere spent-tank space station. A Lunar landing and return vehicle would shuttle up to sixteen astronauts at a time to the base and back. Construction would begin in April 1965 and the base was to become operational by December 1966 at Sinus Aestuum or Mare Imbrium. The base would be defended against Russian overland attack by man-fired weapons - unguided Davy Crockett rockets with low-yield nuclear warheads, and conventional claymore mines modified to puncture pressure suits.
The US Air Force Lunex project was begun in 1958. The final lunar expedition plan of 1961 was for a 21-airman underground Air Force base on the moon by 1968 at a total cost of $ 7.5 billion.
In May 1961, just as Kennedy had decided that NASA should put an American on the moon, the US Air Force released a secret report, summarizing the result of years of planning to place a military base on the moon by 1968. However this schedule was extremely over-optimistic. First lunar landing was by the end of 1967, but the booster and lunar landing vehicles planned were considerably more advanced than those used for Apollo, which only achieved the same goal by 1969 a three times the estimated cost of Lunex. In hindsight it is apparent that increasing Air Force preoccupation with the Viet Nam War in the same period would have resulted in the program being stretched and perhaps eventually cancelled (as with all other Air Force manned space projects).
Many of the techniques for Project Lunex reappear in Korolev's early L3 lunar expedition plans. These include the selection of base sites by automated probes; the planting of homing transponders on the lunar surface for precision landing of manned landers and cargo craft; and methods of direct lunar landing. The Air Force admitted that their intelligence indicated that the Soviet Union had no plans to go to the moon - so Lunex was not a race against the Russians, but rather a plan to achieve the 'strategic high ground'.
The N1 draft project of 1962 spoke of 'establishment of a lunar base and regular traffic between the earth and the moon'. Korolev raised the matter informally at tea with Chief Designer of rocket complexes Vladimir Pavlovich Barmin, head of GSKB SpetsMash (State Union Design Bureau of Special Machine-Building). Barmin was interested in pursuing the subject, but how could such a base be placed on the moon. 'You just design the base', Korolev assured him, 'and I'll figure out how to get it there'. The project ran 12 years and was known to SpetsMash as the 'Long-term Lunar Base' (DLB) and referred to jokingly by detractors as 'Barminograd'. It would have put a semi-permanent nine-man base on the moon by 1975.
Consideration was given to using the same elements in expeditions to other planets. Under the DLB studies SpetsMash defined purposes of the base, the principles of its construction, phases of its deployment and composition of its scientific and support equipment. The enthusiasts that worked on the project were naturally known as 'lunatics'.
Beginning in 2000, Chinese scientists began discussing preliminary work on a Chinese manned lunar base. Although not funded, it remains a long-term objective of the Chinese space program for the second quarter of the 21st Century.
Beyond the initial Project 921 programs for development of a manned earth orbit capability, Chinese scientists began talking during the course of 2000 of more ambitious plans for a lunar base. At Expo 2000 at Hanover the centre piece of the Chinese pavilion was a display of two Chinese astronauts planting the flag of the People's Republic on the lunar surface. On October 4, 2000 Associated Press reported that Zhuang Fenggan, vice chairman of the China Association of Sciences, declared that one day the Chinese would create a permanent lunar base with the intent of mining the lunar soil for Helium-3 (to fuel nuclear fusion plants on Earth). On October 13, 2000, Xinhua News Agency reported a more definite timetable. These seemed to be the dreams of academics rather than a definite funded program, but at least indicated the expected course of development during the 21st ('Chinese') Century:
The problem is to identify the modern heroes. Professional sports furnished heroes for a while, but their image is failing lately. Dot.com industry furnished heroes for a while, but they didn't hold up long. The heroes appear to be politicians, some politicians. Yet, what have these heroes done? Hillary!08? Obama? Diana? Bono?
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