China's great leap forward: Space

Orlando Sentinel ^ | December 9, 2001 | Michael Cabbage | Sentinel Space Editor

[Cincinatus]

What resources on the moon are you talking about? What's the cost-benefit equation look like for mining and transporting those resources back to Earth? I don't think we have found gold or uranium up there.

Actually, we have all the uranium we could ever possibly need (it's easily recyclable from existing stocks) and gold is an inert metal, useful as an electrical conductor, but not all that rare on Earth, at least for any useful purpose (I omit its role as a monetary standard, essentially an obsolete usage since early in the last century).

The fallacy in your argument is your assumption that for something to be valuable, we have to import it back to Earth. The key value of lunar resources is their location; they are already in Earth orbit -- on the Moon. As it costs thousands of dollars to launch materials into space from Earth's surface, something already in Earth orbit has intrinsic value merely by virtue of its already being in orbit.

Specifically, what's really valuable on the Moon is the recently discovered water ice deposits in the shadowed areas near the poles of the Moon. Water is much more valuable than its obvious role as something to drink; it is (literally) rocket propellant -- you break down the water molecule into its component hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis, freeze both into their liquid form, and use it to fuel the rocket engines of an Earth-Moon space transportation infrastructure. If you can routinely operate between Earth and Moon, you can also access any orbit in between, including the economically important geosynchronous orbits and the strategically important high-apogee orbits used by our national security apparatus to electronically eavesdrop on our enemies and potential enemies. The ability to easily and routinely move throughout Earth-Moon space is a technical capability worth billions of dollars both to our economy and to our national security.

Right now, no one owns this lunar resource. The USA discovered it, but the first one to get there and start processing it, "owns" it. It ought to be us, not the Chinese.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Loral and Clinton sold our edge, our tax-paid-for R&D and along with it our national security.
They gave (sold) the Chinese the ability to achieve this "great leap forward: Space."

[Cincinatus' Wife]

IMHO this is very good news. Going to Mars before we even establish an infrastructure in cis-Lunar space is putting the cart before the horse.

Yes the search for life isn't a mission, it's a prescription for being cut off at the knees.
The Chinese may be giving us the kick in the butt that we need
Cis-Lunar must be the next step. Maybe the Sagan fog is finally lifting.

[JoeSchem]

Not to downplay all the technical challenges, but the key milestones on the road to manned spaceflight are the lift capacity and reliability of the launch vehicle. The Long March Rocket is more than adequate to the task of putting a Mercury-class space capsule into orbit.

All they need now is a pressurized metal ball with maneuvering jets, an ablative shell, and a parachute. If they're spending $3 billion a year, it won't take long to get there.

[mrsmith]

"The key value of lunar resources is their location; they are already in Earth orbit "
Yep:
The present cost of putting aything in LEO is about $10k per kilo ( or pound- I've seen both figures used).
The cost of gold is about $10k per kilo.
Anything wanted in LEO is worth it's weight in gold.

Another under-acknowledged benefit of the moon is that a radiation safe environment can be created by covering a hole or digging a cave.
That's much cheaper than constructing an entire space habitat- which has to be abandoned during periods of high solar activity anyway.

Moon production of oxygen, simple aluminum products, glass, and food are early lo-tech possibilities.
Lack of hydrogen is the moon's killer drawback- it's value for fuel is so high it would be worth mining for, or even producing it by nuclear processes.

And if moon-supplied raw materials prices are lower by a factor of ten (a hundred even?) or more than Earth materials, space-based manufacturing will be no longer a fantastically expensive niche industry but would have mass-production possibilities.

Heck, the control of lunar-supplied materials would make a moon base so valuable, it's biggest expense could be militarily defending it against competitors!

[jhofmann]

You broker no argument from me regarding military control of our space agencies. We already have Space command and after the USAF gives up its TACAIR mission to robots, I suppose they will be looking for something else to do.

[jhofmann]

A small mass driver that can hurl payloads to earth. I'll trade one ICBM for a "small mass driver". Please keep my tax dollars out of your schemes of glory.

[jhofmann]

What a very rude and arrogant reply. Your post, presented as fact, is merely supposition. A venture to the moon such as you describe would be fraught with risk and be a huge investment of tax dollars. You take this propaganda from the Chinese who appear to be positioning themselves for war in space (that is he who shoots out the satellites first, wins the first salvo). I'd rather spend my money taking out their capabilities than risk it all on some moon folly.

[Brett66]

I was talking about China owning the mass driver and your ICBM could be intercepted by a missile defense system. However, a mass hurtling in from space at much higher velocity than an ICBM could not be intercepted by a missile defense system that isn't designed to handle such targets.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

#18 I meant to ask you what do you think that means, "leap-ahead technology pursuits."???

I believe O'Keefe was talking about major breakthroughs, things that aren't out-dated before they fly. (I want to see that!) And he said he didn't want (my wording here) good money going after bad just because it was budgeted. He said that NASA needs to recognize and admit when something is a bad idea or program, then cut their loses and move on to a more productive one.

I think he is going to be a breath of fresh air.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Let's roll, (blast off)!

[medved]

The most astonishing findings of our space programs are presently being covered up and denied for ideological reasons; if NASA keeps its head in the sand for another five years, there is a real possibility that the Japanese or Chinese might get to Cydonia before we do.

The Viking probe of 1976 sent back images of a region of Mars called Cydonia, which included the familiar "Face on Mars" as well as images of pyramids and other seemingly artificial structures, all megalithic in nature and apparently intended to be seen from off-planet.

These images also included a gigantic and seemingly five-sided pyramid:

Images returned from the global surveilance device in orbit around Mars the last several years have included an image of the main pyramid in the ring of pyramids to the left of the face which should have immediately ended all controversy over the question of artificiality:

To me at least, the pyramid is four sided and the four triangular sides are clear enough, and I've marked them with green lines. The other part of the image which I believe I'm seeing amounts to some sort of an enclosed corridor or causeway leading out from one corner of the pyramid, and then two funny and nearly rectangular features at the end of that causeway or whatever it is, which may be doors or some sort of adjunct buildings or something. There also seems to be a line going from the Eastern corner of the pyramid to the two doors or whatever, which I've marked with a blue line, but I suspect that's just an edge of sand being blown up into a sort of an apron abutting the pyramid, and that the hollow between the pyramid and the corridor would naturally trap sand. In particular, if you didn't look at the whole thing closely enough, the line (blue) from the Eastern corner to the two doors might cause you to think that the whole structure was irregular enough to be a natural formation but, again, a closer look seems to me to forbid that.

Nonetheless, there was little or no mention whatsoever in the press of this new pyramid image, and this was largely because press coverage centered around the new image of the face which NASA released:

This image was said to prove the entire controversy regarding Cydonia to be a bunch of buncombe, and to prove that the structures at Cydonia all to be natural geological formations.

More recently, Dr. Tom Van Flandern, a former director of celestial mechanics at the Naval Abservatory, and others have noted that the image which NASA and JPL released, aside from being a worst possible case in terms of viewing angle and lighting, had actually been "cleaned up" or something like that via the use of a high-pass filter which is a standard image processing device for removing detail. Van Flandern notes that the basic help function for Adobe's Photo Shop product notes:

High Pass Filter: Retains edge details where sharp color transitions occur and suppresses the rest of the image. The filter removes low-frequency detail in an image. Useful for extracting line-art and large black-and-white areas from scanned images.

Van Flandern notes that, as to JPL's motives in using such a filter device on this particular image and then handing it to the public, "we are left with an unhappy choice between dishonesty and incompetence."

When we consider that the raw image looks like:

and that the same image with minimal computer enhancement, which does not add any information looks like:

All of that is bad enough, i.e. it might convince people that NASA and JPL told a big, stupid lie to the American people and to the world. But it's getting worse; consider the new and more direct overhead image of the face which NASA released during May of 2001.

Click Image Above for Full Size NASA Images

Several things are clear. First and most obvious is that anybody still trying to claim that this thing is a mesa or any other kind of natural formation is dillusional. I notice several things, which I have indicated in the marked-up image below

First is that there is only one possible way to build such a thing, i.e. to pile up stones into the rough shape you need, large stones on the bottom and then progressively smaller ones, and then put some sort of a hard facing over the entire thing. You can see how this has been done in the image. On the left side from which wind and sand come, the facing is almost entirely eroded and, even where the underlying stone shows, everything has been worn smooth. On the right side, we can see that part of the facing remains, much of it having fallen off to the side in heaps. We can see the cutout in the facing for the left eye which I have noted, and we can see where the facing fell and broke away from the nose, which is what you would expect. We can also see the rough stones of the nose area, which have not all been worn smooth.

Second is that the megalith is heavily damaged, and has suffered more than one kind of damage. My guess is that the entire rock plate on which the megalith sits was picked up and slammed down, and that the megalith was deformed in the process. You can see the places where the hard casement has been pulled apart on the right side. The megalith has been compressed along the axis from lower left to upper right which I have marked with the blue line, and stretched along the other axis from lower right to upper left. The angle A between the line of the headdress on the left side and the line along the top is thus less than the original 90 degrees. The line through the center of the face has been deformed from the original straight line to the curved line which I have drawn. The basic shape of the mouth is still there, albeit moved to the left as I have noted. You can see where the outer casing has broken away from part of the outline of the mouth on the right.

You can see the ridge along the eyebrows as I have noted, you can see the indentation for the right eye and the outline of the left eye cut into the facing and still in reasonably good shape. You can see the rise for the nose as well as the area where the casing broke away from the nose on the right, and part of the remains of nostrils, and you can see the basic lines of the mouth.

Unless of course you're STUPID like the feebs at NASA who're still working triple shifts trying to convince the world this thing is a mesa. In that kind of case, no amount of technology will help. There has never been a cure for stupidity, and there will never be one.

A short while ago, Dr. Van Flandern and other associates gave a presentation at the National Press Club which may be viewed at Metaresearch.

Information has been coming in for two or three years now from the device presently over Mars. Massive evidence of Mars having been inhabited fairly recently has been accumulating. As Metaresearch and other www sites dealing with the subject note, this includes evidence of settlements:

Click on image for full NASA image. Note the terracing, and the rows of structures which are heavily weathered to the upper right of the image but which retain their rectangular corners on the lower left (leeward) side.

Other human faces have been found carved in the surface, e.g.:

Numerous other things intended to be viewed from off-planet have been documented at Metaresearch, Cydonia Files, and other sites.

What then drives the basic instinct of NASA and JPL to bury this story? One possible motive which has been suggested involves the division of funding between manned and unmanned space missions at NASA and JPL. But, more realistically, the major problem which the Cydonia findings presents to the people in these agencies is one of basic scientific paradigms. Nobody could build all of this stuff on this kind of a megalithic scale with space-suits on; the planet has to be habitable for Cydonia to get built. This is a huge problem, in that it would require a totally different basic theory of the history of our solar system from the one which the scientists have. There is simply no way, given the standard paradigm, in which Mars could have ever been habitable. It would always have been too cold, and it would never have had the gravity necessary to hold a livable atmosphere, assuming that gravity is the only thing which ever holds atmosphere to planets.

The standard scientific axiomatic scheme including the basic doctrine of uniformitarianism, evolution etc. etc. does not allow for solar-system-wide catastrophes within the age of man, nonetheless, that is precisely what we have here. Those newer face images are definitely modern people and not early hominids. Nothing involving modern people here, on Mars, or anywhere else figures to be millions of years gone by, and nothing capable of destroying the planet next to us and making a dead world of it would have gone unnoticed by our ancestors.

What we have here is another case of junk science, i.e. the theory of evolution and the doctrine of uniformity, destroying research and logical thinking amongst scientists. The science pages of our journals are filled by descriptions of NASA projects to search for microbes on Mars while studiously ignoring major evidence that they have found a city there, as if germs were important, and cities were not.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Good grief!! You believe this crack-pot stuff?

[Cincinatus]

Can a spacecraft leave the planet (much less do what you've mentioned) without scientific ambition behind it? To study and master science requires a lot of work. Are "America's" (actually they're the government's) schools fostering the skills needed?

I don't disagree with your distainful analysis of the American educational system, but it's irrelevant. We didn't go to the Moon in the 60's because all Americans turned into engineers and scientists -- we had a small, carefully nurtured, jazzed-up group of dedicated, smart-as-hell diehards who worked 20 hour days, 7 days a week for years to make it happen. There were just as many nitwits and lunkheads 40 years ago as there are today. They didn't stop us before and they won't stop us now.

[Cincinatus]

Lack of hydrogen is the moon's killer drawback

The Moon has hydrogen. It just happens to occur only in a very specialized environment: the permanently dark areas near the poles. The Clementine and Lunar Prospector data indicate at least ~ 10 billion metric tons of water ice, at both poles. That's an equivalent amount of rocket fuel for roughly four million Shuttle launches, or, one Shuttle launch per minute for over seven and one-half years!!

Oh, by the way, a Shuttle launch is way too much power for a lunar liftoff -- I just gave those numbers for comparative purposes. The point is there's plenty of hydrogen on the Moon. You just have to go get it where it is, just like petroleum on Earth.