Lunar lander designed for human spaceflight
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- SF & more -Wir Kinder der Raketenbauer - „Wie die Erfahrung des Weltraums das menschliche Wahrnehmen, Denken und Handeln verändert“von Alexander Seibold(Hördauer 50 Minuten)Apollo 17 (7.12. – 19.12.1972) war der elfte bemannte und letzte Flug zum Mond. Insgesamt gab es sechs Mondlandungen im Rahmen des Apollo-Programms. Die Erde wird gelegentlich mit einem perfekten Raumschiff verglichen, auf dem die Menschheit durch das All reist. Der Astronaut James Lovell sagte einmal: „Was wir auf der Erde haben, erkennen wir erst dann, wenn wir sie verlassen.“ Der Fotograf dieser berühmten Fotografie ist leider unklar. Sicher ist nur, es war einer der Astronauten der Apollo 17-Crew: wohl Harrison Schmitt oder auch Ron Evans. (Foto: The prime crew for the Apollo 17 lunar landing mission are: Commander, Eugene A. Cernan (seated), Command Module pilot Ronald E. Evans (standing on right), and Lunar Module pilot, Harrison H. Schmitt. They are photographed with a Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) trainer. Cernan and Schmitt will use an LRV during their exploration of the Taurus-Littrow landing site. The Apollo 17 Saturn V Moon rocket is in the background. This picture was taken at Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida. NASA 10.10.1972, public domain, https://images.nasa.gov/details/S72-50438).Wenn Ihnen diese Sendung gefallen hat, hören Sie doch hier mal hinein. Realisation Uwe Kullnick
What happens when you put Captain Kirk, a NASA astronaut, and Neil deGrasse Tyson on a ship to Antarctica? Recorded on board with William Shatner and Scott Kelly, this episode explores the thrill of discovery — from rough seas to deep space — and what it means to boldly go.This episode of StarTalk, recorded live from Drake Passage during the Space2Sea Voyage of Legends to Antarctica, is presented in collaboration with FUTURE of SPACE.https://futureofspace.io/space2sea-antarctica/Follow or Subscribe to FUTURE of SPACEhttps://futureofspace.ioAbout FUTURE of SPACE:FoS is a media company that produces innovative content, programs, and experiential events that embrace new frontiers, celebrate the human experience, and elevate the conversation, engaging audiences in meaningful and transformative ways.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/risk-is-our-business-with-william-shatner-scott-kelly/Thanks to our Patrons John Shipe, Kenneth Kapptie, Dan Lee, Mark Randolph, Steven Green, David Pearson, Marius P, Sean Kershaw, Marc Bode, Jon Pulli, Sean Wins, Bessie Comer, alextravaganza, Matt in L.A., brian oakes, Tyler Carpenter, Stephan Spelde, Seymour buttz, Jeff Burton, Micheal Chinnici, stuart kim, Kathleen Ziegelgruber, Karl ryan, Fabio Later, Lorna Leigh, Abi Cats, Anthony Charlier, Zane White, Jonathan Plumb, Matthew Hinterlong, Danny K. , Muhammad Laiq Khan Rind, Khadeer Ahmed, Kathy Ziegelgruber, Bryan Smith, Shawn Nirdlinger, empty0vessel, Ruben Suarez, Jeffrey Roche, James Williams, Jules Victor, livingston ex, and Kora Celine for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.
After everything learned through Mercury and Gemini culminated in the seventeen Apollo missions. The first ten were all testing and rehearsals, but the whole program, and a whole era was characterised by Apollo 11, the first time humans set foot on the moon. Along with the triumph, there was tragedy and a very near miss, and one of the most underrated aspects of NASA's space program - the lunar roving vehicles that let the astronauts explore more than seven kilometres from the Lunar Module.This really was one of the most remarkable endeavours of science, engineering and teamwork. Let's dive in.Follow Cosmic Coffee Time on X for some special content X.com/CosmicCoffTimeEmail us!cosmiccoffeetime@gmail.comYou can request a topic for the show! Or even just say hi!We'd love to hear from you.
After circling the Moon ten times on Christmas Eve, it was time for Apollo 8 to come home.
On October 13, SpaceX and Elon Musk successfully launched their Starship rocket into low-Earth orbit. Then, in a milestone moment for space technology, they successfully captured the rocket's Super Heavy booster with “chopstick” arms on the launch tower upon reentry, marking the first time a booster was ever caught in mid-air.The achievement is a mind-blowing feat of human engineering — one that hasn't gotten nearly the recognition that it deserves. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with must-read space journalist Eric Berger about the role of SpaceX in the new, 21st-century Space Race, the significance of the company's achievements, and our potential to become a spacefaring, inter-planetary species.Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Techica, and is the author of both Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX and his most recent excellent book, Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age.In This Episode* Starship's big reentry (1:43)* Race (back) to the moon (8:54)* Why Starship? (11:48)* The Mars-shot (18:37)* Elon in the political area (22:10)* Understanding SpaceX (24:06)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationStarship's big reentry (1:43)James Pethokoukis: After the launch tower caught that booster stage of the rocket, I saw someone on Twitter a day later say, “Hey, do you guys remember over the weekend when SpaceX sent a Statue-of-Liberty-sized object to space and then caught it when it came back down? That was amazing!”So two things: First, as a space guy, what was your reaction? Two, beyond the sheer coolness of it, why was this an important thing to happen?It seemed inconceivable a few years ago, but now, all of a sudden, it's the future of rocketry, just like that.Eric Berger: Just from a space perspective, it's epic to see, to use your adjectives, the Statue of Liberty comparison. I mean, it's a small skyscraper, but they essentially launch that thing to space at thousands of miles per hour, then it slows down, it comes back right where it took off from, hovers, and it falls precisely into these two arms that are designed to catch it. The cool thing is that we'd never seen anything like that before. It seemed inconceivable a few years ago, but now, all of a sudden, it's the future of rocketry, just like that.the significance of this, of course, is SpaceX has shown that with the reusability of the Falcon 9 rocket, it can really change the economics of launch. This year they've launched 101 times. No country had ever done that many launches before in a year. They're going to launch 95 percent of all the mass into orbit this year with primarily the Falcon 9 Rocket, and all that's because the first stage is entirely reusable, they're flying them more than 20 times now, and so they're just taking that and scaling it.What was amazing about the tower catch this weekend was the fact that it really removes the need for landing legs. You may think, “Well, what's the big deal about that?” Well, there's a lot of mass involved with those landing legs: You need powerful actuators to drive them, you need hydraulic fluid, and that's a lot of dead mass in the vehicle. Also, it's not insignificant to transport the rocket from wherever it lands, either on a boat or on land, to the factory and to refurbish the rocket and launch again. Ideally, with this step, they're eliminating days from that process of reuse and ideally, in the future, they're literally going to be catching the rocket, setting it back on the launch mount and then potentially flying again.So it's not just the Starship, right? So for the other launches, is this is going to become the landing procedure?No, it will be just for Starship. They will continue to fly Falcon 9 as is. That's a mature product, everyone's pretty comfortable with that vehicle. But, look, other companies have tried different things. When Rocket Lab was trying to reuse its small Electron vehicle, its plan was to have the first stage come back under a parachute and then basically swoop in with a helicopter and catch it so that the rocket didn't fall into the ocean. That ended up not working.It seems very whimsical.Well, it made sense from an engineering standpoint, but it was a lot more difficult to snag the rocket than they ended up finding out. So, up until now, the only way to get a rocket back vertically was on a drone ship or landing straight up, and so this is a brand new thing, and it just creates more efficiencies in the launch system.What is the direction now, as far as launch costs and the continued decline of launch costs if this will be the new landing procedure for Starship?It's impossible to say that, of course. We can look to a Falcon 9 for an analog. SpaceX sales started out selling Falcon 9 for $60 million, it's upped that price to about $67 or $68 million — still the lowest-cost medium-lift launch vehicle in the world, but that's the price you or I or NASA would pay for a rocket. Internally, the estimate is that they're re-flying those vehicles for about $15 million. So, in effect, SpaceX has taken the cost of the lowest-price vehicle on the market and divided it by four, basically.Starship, of course, can lift much more payload to orbit than Falcon 9. By some measures, five to 10 times as much, eventually. And so if they can get the cost down, if they can make the first and second stage reusable, I think you're talking about them bringing the cost down potentially another order of magnitude, but they've got a lot of work to get there.I think the second most common comment I saw on social media — the first one being like, “This is amazing, I'm crying, this is so cool” — the second one is, “Why is NASA not using this Starship to get to the moon?” It seems like progress is being made quickly, and you mentioned the costs, I think people are just befuddled. It's a question you must get a lot.The reality is that if we want to go to the moon before 2030, we probably need to do it with a combination of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Starship. It's a complicated answer, but the reality is that NASA, in conjunction with Congress, has basically, over the last quarter of a century, pivoted away from reusable launch vehicles, and at one point in the early 2000s, they were actually funding three different reusable launch vehicles. The most famous of those, of course, was the Space Shuttle. It stopped funding the Space Shuttle in 2011 and it went back to developing this large, expendable rocket called the Space Launch System. That was the tried and true pathway, and no one really had faith in what SpaceX is doing. And so now here we are, almost 15 years later, and SpaceX has gone out and proved it with the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy, and now Starship.The reality is that if we want to go to the moon before 2030, we probably need to do it with a combination of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Starship. In 2021, NASA did select Starship as its lunar lander. So Starship is a critical part of the architecture. Probably the most challenging part, actually, is getting down to the lunar surface and then getting back up reliably. And so Starship plays a key role, and I just really think that it's inevitable that Starship and potentially Blue Origin's architecture will be how humans get to the moon and back, but we're kind of in an interim period right now.Is it just sort of too late to switch?Yeah, it is. It's too late to switch. You could conceive of scenarios in which humans launch in Crew Dragon, transfer over to a Starship, and then come back in Crew Dragon, but even then you've got some challenges. And the problem — problem is the wrong word, but one of the major issues with Starship is that it has no redundancy when you come back and land. It has got to nail the landing or people inside of it die. So you're going to want to see hundreds of Starship launches and many, many successful landings in a row before you put people on the vehicle. And to have the idea of launching humans from Earth to the moon at this point, we're pretty far from that. I would think a decade from now, at least, and by then China will be on the moon. And so it's really a matter of, do you want to sort of continue to delay the human return of the moon, or do you want to take the tools that you have now and make your best run for it?Race (back) to the moon (8:54)Since you brought it up, are we going to beat China to the moon with the SLS?Very much an open question. The SLS Rocket is basically ready. In its current form, it performed very well during Artemis I. It's obviously super expensive. You may have seen the Europa Clipper launch on Monday of this week, that launched on a Falcon Heavy. For almost a decade, Congress mandated NASA that it launched on the SLS rocket, and that would've cost 10 times as much. NASA paid about $200 million for the Clipper launch on Falcon Heavy, SLS would've been in excess of $2 billion, so it's a very expensive rocket, but it does work, it worked well during Artemis I. The best way we have right now, Jim, to get astronauts from Earth out to lunar orbit is SLS and the Orion deep spacecraft vehicle. That will change over time, but I think if we want to put humans on the moon this decade, that's probably the best way to do it.Is it going to be a close call? I don't want to overemphasize the competition aspect, but I guess I would like to see America do it first.It's going to be close. NASA's current date is 2026 for the Artemis III moon landing. There's no way that happens. I think 2028 is a realistic no-earlier-than date, and the reality is SpaceX has to make a lot of progress on Starship. What they did this past weekend was a great step. I think the key thing about the fact of this weekend's launch is that it was a success. There were no anomalies, there's going to be no investigation, so SpaceX is going to launch again. As long as they continue to have success, then they can start popping these off and get to some of the really key tests like the in-space propellant transfer tests, which they hope to do sometime next year.[W]hen you're on the moon, there's no launch tower, there's no launch crew, you've just got the astronauts inside Starship, and if that vehicle doesn't take off on the moon, the crew's going to die. So it's got to work.What Starship will do is it'll launch into low-earth orbit, and then it'll be refueled, and it'll go to the moon, and you need lots of launches to refuel it. And then really the key test, I think, is landing on the moon, because the South Pole is pretty craterous, you've got to have high confidence in where you land, and then the big challenge is getting back up to lunar orbit safely.Think about it: When you watch any rocket launch, you see this very detailed, very intricate launch tower with all these umbilicals, and all of these cables, and power, and telemetry, and stuff, and humans are looking at all this data, and if there's any problem, they abort, right? Well, when you're on the moon, there's no launch tower, there's no launch crew, you've just got the astronauts inside Starship, and if that vehicle doesn't take off on the moon, the crew's going to die. So it's got to work. And so that's really a big part of the challenge, as well, is getting all that to work. So I think 2028, for all that to come together, is a realistic no-earlier-than date, and China's pretty consistently said 2030, and they're starting to show off some hardware, they recently demonstrated that suggests they have a chance to make 2030.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were PromisedWhy Starship? (11:48)What is the commercial case for Starship, assuming that these next launches continue to go off well? What is it supposed to be doing here on Earth and in Earth orbit?The next big race is to deliver internet, not to a dish that you set up, but actually to your mobile phone. It's called direct-to-cell, and you need much bigger satellites for this. And so SpaceX needs the Starship to launch these satellites, so that will really be the commercial use case for Starship in the near term.Its primary function, and I think the most important function for SpaceX in the near term, is launching these much larger Starlink satellites. I think it's been pretty well proven that there's a large demand for broadband internet from low-earth orbit. Starlink has now up to four million customers and they're actually signing almost at an exponential rate. Then growth, the business is profitable. So that's been super impressive. The next big race is to deliver internet, not to a dish that you set up, but actually to your mobile phone. It's called direct-to-cell, and you need much bigger satellites for this. So SpaceX needs the Starship to launch these satellites, so that will really be the commercial use case for Starship in the near term.I think once the vehicle starts flying reliably, we're going to see where the commercial customers go because we've never really been in a launch environment where you're not really constrained by mass and, more importantly, by volume. You can just build bigger, less-efficient things. Instead of hyper-managing your satellite to be small, and light, and compact, you can kind of make trades where maybe you have a lower-cost vehicle that's bigger. The capability of Starship with its voluminous payload fairing and being able to lift a hundred or more tons to low-earth orbit for low cost — entirely new regime. And so I think it's a case of Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come,” and in the near term, Starship will be the business case, and longer-term we'll see some unique opportunities.You've been covering this for quite a while, documenting, books, including your most recent book. Really an amazing ride as a space journalist for you here.I've been covering space now for two decades, and really with a focus on commercial space over the last decade because I think that's where a lot of the excitement and innovation is coming from. But the reality is that you've got this whole ecosystem of companies, but the 800-pound gorilla is SpaceX. They're the company that has consistently had success. They are the only provider of crew transportation services for NASA, still, even five years after their initial success, and they're the only provider right now that's launching cargo missions to the space station. They've got huge Starlink satellites, constellation. As a journalist, you really want to understand the biggest, most dominating force in the industry, and that's clearly SpaceX, and so that's why I've chosen to dedicate a lot of time to really understand where they started out and how they got to where they are, which is at the top of the heap.The story that you lay out in your book, which came out last month — Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age — to me, it's still a story people mostly don't know, and one that I think a lot of non-space reporters don't understand. What are some common misunderstandings that you come across that make you feel like you need to tell this story?I think, until recently, one of the things that people might say about SpaceX is, “Well, what's the big deal? NASA's launched humans to orbit in the past, NASA's launched cargo, they had a reusable space vehicle in the Space Shuttle.” What's different is that SpaceX is doing this at scale, and they're building for a long-term plan that is sustainable.I'll give you an example: The Space Shuttle was reusable. Everything was reusable except the external tank. However, you needed a standing army of thousands of people to pour over the Space Shuttle after it came back from space to make sure that all of its tiles and every piece of equipment was safe. Now, when it was originally sold to Congress back in the 1970s, the program manager for the space shuttle, George Mueller said that the goal was to get the cost of payload-to-orbit for the Space Shuttle down to $25 a pound, which sounded great because then they were saying dozens of people could fly on the vehicle at a time. Well, of course, at the end of the day, it only ever flew at a maximum of seven people, and the cost of payload-to-orbit was $25,000. So yes, it was reusable, but it was the kind of thing that was super expensive and you couldn't fly very often. You could do limited things.It's really the first vehicle we ever developed to go to Mars. SpaceX is doing some of the same things that NASA did, but it's doing them better, faster, and a lot cheaper.SpaceX is proposing kind of an order-of-magnitude change. We went to the moon in the 1960s with the Lunar Module, and everyone remembers it carried two astronauts down to the lunar surface. And that whole thing launched on a giant stack, the Saturn V rocket. So if you were to take the Lunar Module and replace the astronauts and just use it to deliver cargo to the moon, it could take five tons down to the lunar surface. Starship, in a reusable mode, can take a hundred tons. If you send an expendable version of Starship, it's 200 tons. And oh, by the way, even if you're not bringing that Starship back, you're getting the whole first stage back anyway.And so that's really the promise here, is you're building a sustainable system in space where it doesn't cost you $6 billion to go to the moon, it costs you half a billion dollars or to go to the moon, and you can then go on and do other things, you can fill your Starship up with methane repellent and go further. It's really the first vehicle we ever developed to go to Mars. SpaceX is doing some of the same things that NASA did, but it's doing them better, faster, and a lot cheaper.That $25-a-pound number you gave for Space Shuttle, where are we with SpaceX? Where is SpaceX, or where are they and what's their goal in that context?They're getting down in a couple of thousand dollars a pound with a Falcon 9, and the idea is, potentially, with Starship, you get down to hundreds of dollars a pound or less. They have a big challenge too, right? They're using tiles on Starship as well. They showed some of them off during the webcast this weekend, and I think we have yet to have any kind of information on how reusable, or how rapidly reusable Starship will be, and we'll have to see.The Mars-shot (18:37)To the extent the public understands this company — this is my understanding — the point here is to build Starship, to further this satellite business, and then that satellite business will fund the eventual Mars mission and the Mars colonization. I think that's the public perception of what is happening with this business. How accurate is that? Is that how you look at it? I mean, that's how I look at it from my uninformed or less-informed view, but is that really what we're talking about here?Yeah, fundamentally, I think that is accurate. There is no business case right now to go to Mars. AT&T is not going to pay $5 billion to put an AT&T logo on a Starship and send a crew to Mars. There are no resources right now that we really can conceive of on Mars that would be profitable for humans to go get and bring back to Earth. So then the question is: How do you pay for it?Financially, the business case for Mars is not entirely clear, so you've got to figure out some way to pay for it. That was one reason why Elon Musk ultimately went with Starlink. That would pay for the Mars vision.Even when settlers went to the New World in the 1500s, 1600s, in United States, they were exporting tobacco and other products back to Europe, and there's no tobacco that we know of on Mars, right? Financially, the business case for Mars is not entirely clear, so you've got to figure out some way to pay for it. That was one reason why Elon Musk ultimately went with Starlink. That would pay for the Mars vision.I think that's still fundamentally the case. It's effectively going to be paying for the entire development of Starship, and then if it becomes highly profitable, SpaceX is not a public company, so they can take those revenues and do whatever they want with them, and Elon has said again and again that his vision is to settle Mars, and he's building the rockets to do it, and he's trying to find the funding through Starlink to accomplish it. That is the vision. We don't know how it's all going to play out, but I think you're fundamentally correct with that.I think when he mentions Mars, there are some people that just give it a roll of the eye. It just sounds too science fictional, despite the progress being made toward accomplishing that. It sounds like you do not roll your eyes at that.Well, it's interesting. He first really talked publicly about this in 2016, eight years ago, back when there was no Starship, back when they just were coming off their second Falcon 9 failure in about a year, and you kind of did roll your eyes at it then . . . And then they got the Falcon 9 flying and they started re-flying it and re-flying it. They did Falcon Heavy, and then they started building Starship hardware, and then they started launching Starship, and now they're starting to land Starship, and this is real hardware.And yes, to be clear, they have a long, long way to go and a lot of technical challenges to overcome, and you need more than just a rocket in a spaceship to get to Mars, you need a lot of other stuff, too: biological, regulatory, there's a lot of work to go, but they are putting down the railroad tracks that will eventually open that up to settlement.So I would not roll my eyes. This is certainly the only credible chance, I think, for humans to go to Mars in our lifetimes, and if those early missions are successful, you could envision settlements being built there.Elon in the political arena (22:10)Given SpaceX's accomplishments and their lead, is that company politics-proof? Obviously there's always going to be controversy about Elon, and Twitter, and who he gives money to, and things he says, but does any of that really matter for SpaceX?I think it does. We've already seen a couple examples of it, especially with Elon's very public entree into presidential politics over the last several months. I think that does matter. In his fight with Brazil over what he termed as free speech, they were confiscating Starlink, and so they were trying to shut Starlink down in their country, and that directly affects SpaceX. In California, over the last week we have seen a commission vote to try to limit the number of launches Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base, and they clearly did that because they were uncomfortable with Elon's behavior publicly. So yeah, this is going to bleed over.Now, in the near term, there will be limited impacts because the US Department of Defense clearly needs SpaceX rockets. They need SpaceX's Starlink, they use a branded version of it called Starshield for military communications. The launch and Starlink capabilities are essential for the military. NASA is even more reliant on SpaceX for the International Space Station and beyond; the entire moon program runs through Starship, so it's not going to change in the near term, but longer term you could see this having impacts, and it's not clear to me exactly what those would be — I don't think you could really nationalize SpaceX, and I think if you did try to nationalize SpaceX, you would sort of destroy its magic, but I do think there will ultimately be consequences for the Elon's political activity.Understanding SpaceX (24:06)About Reentry, is there a particular story in there that you think just really encapsulates, if you want to understand SpaceX, and what it's doing, and where it's come from, this story kind of gets at it?The point of the book was to tell the story behind the story. A lot of people knew, generally, what SpaceX has accomplished over the last decade, or the last 15 years, but this really takes you behind the scenes and tells the stories of the people who actually did it.It's a company that's moving so fast forward that, like I said, there are all these challenges they're facing and they're just tackling them one-by-one as they go along.I think one of the best stories of the book is just how they were making this up as they went along. The very first time they were going to try to land on the barge was in January of 2015, the drone ship landing, and the night before that barge was going to set out to sea, the guy who had developed the barge realized that, wait a minute, if we come back with a rocket this week, we have nowhere to put it in the port of Jacksonville, because they were staging out of Jacksonville at the time. And there had been this whole discussion at SpaceX about where to put these pedestals, but no one had actually done it. That night, he and another engineer stayed up all night drinking red wine and CADing out designs for the pedestals, and they met the concrete pores the next morning and just built these pedestals within 24 hours. It's a company that's moving so fast forward that, like I said, there are all these challenges they're facing and they're just tackling them one-by-one as they go along.Elon has spoken about there's sort of this window of opportunity open for space. In the United States, at least, it was open and then it kind of closed. We stopped leaving Earth orbit for a while, we couldn't even get our people into Earth orbit; we had to use another country's rockets.Is this window — whether for space commerce, space exploration — is it sort of permanently open? Are we beyond the point where things can close — because satellites are so important, and because of geopolitics, that window is open and it's staying open for us to go through.I think he's talking about the window for settlement of Mars and making humans a multi-planetary species. And when he talks about the window closing, I think he means a lot of different things: One, the era of cheaper money could end — and that clearly did happen, right? We've seen interest rates go way up and it's been much more difficult to raise money, although SpaceX has been able to still do that because of their success. I think he's thinking about his own mortality. I believe he's thinking about a major global war that would focus all of our technological efforts here on planet Earth trying to destroy one another. I think he's thinking about nuclear weapons — just all the things that could bring human progress to a screeching halt, and he's saying, “Look, the window may be 100 years or it may be 20 years.” So he's like, “We should seize the opportunity right now when we have it.”Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. 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In the last of our Footsteps on the Moon series, it's 55 years ago, 20th July 1969 and Apollo 11's Lunar Module, the Eagle, has landed on the moon. Six hours later the crew became the first people to make footsteps on its surface. Written by Jessica Riches, performed by Stephen Fry. Sound editor Will Jacob.
In the fourth of our Footsteps on the Moon series, it is 1969. Tension is high in Nasa's Mission Control room in Houston, USA, as Apollo 11's Lunar Module attempts to land on the moon.Written by Jessica Riches, performed by Stephen Fry. Sound editor Will Jacob.
At thirty-six, Haise was the youngest member of the crew of Apollo 13, and his black hair and angular features made him seem younger still. Homepage with Pictures.
When President John F. Kennedy set the objective of landing on the moon before the end of the 1960s, no one really knew what it entailed. The Apollo program involved many incredible feats of engineering, but perhaps the most impressive was the development of the Apollo Lunar Module. The Lunar Module was unlike any spacecraft before or since. It was the first spacecraft designed to fly only in the vacuum of space and the first to land on another celestial body. Learn more about the Apollo Lunar Module and the incredible design challenges it had to overcome on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15. Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts. Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast! https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today's episode will inspire you to keep going in the midst of difficulty. Two of our coaches and directors of our JimCockrumCoaching.com program tell it like it is in business and what to do to keep going. Listen to the Olson's behind the scenes back story! "Houston, we have a problem..." On April 13, 1970, Jack Swigert's famous words marked a pivotal moment in the Apollo 13 mission, where an explosion turned a moon landing into a desperate fight for survival. The astronauts, with the ingenuity and determination of their ground team, used the Lunar Module as an improvised lifeboat, overcoming critical issues with limited resources. This story mirrors Brian Olson's journey in the Amazon business world, where persistence and innovative problem-solving turned early failures into remarkable success. Inspired by his unwavering commitment, Brian emphasizes the importance of setting concrete goals and being ready to face challenges head-on. His journey underscores that, much like the Apollo 13 mission, achieving great success often requires tenacity, creative thinking, and an unyielding belief that failure is not an option. Special guest at the conclusion of today's show, Jeff Schick of JeffSchick.com answers the question: Why does my account health number drop sometimes even though I didn't get any issues on my account? Watch this video on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/vN-qLeEhqhk Show note LINKS: SilentSalesMachine.com - Text the word “free” to 507-800-0090 to get a free copy of Jim's latest book in audio about building multiple income streams online or visit https://silentjim.com/free11 JimCockrumCoaching.com - Get a free session with a business consultant on our team at 1-800-994-1792 / 1-801-693-1688 or TEXT US at 385-284-7701 (US & Canada only for Text) ALL of our coaches are running very successful businesses of their own based on the models we teach here! We've been setting the standard for excellence in e-commerce and Amazon seller coaching since 2002 with over 10,000 students served! Hundreds of our successful, happy students have been interviewed on our podcast! SilentJim.com/bookacall - Book a call here to discuss our offers including coaching, legends and ProvenAmazonCourse.com course My Silent Team Facebook group. 100% FREE! https://www.facebook.com/groups/mysilentteam - Join 75,000 + Facebook members from around the world who are using the internet creatively every day to launch and grow multiple income streams through our exciting PROVEN strategies! There's no support community like this one anywhere else in the world! https://ProvenAmazonCourse.com - The comprehensive course that contains ALL our Amazon training modules, recorded events and a steady stream of latest cutting edge training including of course the most popular starting point, the REPLENS selling model. The PAC is updated free for life! https://SilentJim.com/kickstart - if you want a shortcut to learning all you need to get started then get the Proven Amazon Course and go through Kickstart.
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After a total of 31.6 hours on the moon, the Lunar Module ascent stage fired for about 7 minutes placing Intrepid into an orbit of 10 miles by 54 miles. Homepage with pictures
Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1054, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Abolitionism 1: Between 1830 and 1860, this system transported many runaway slaves to southern Ontario. the Underground Railroad. 2: Before the Harpers Ferry attack, he and his men killed 5 proslavers in Pottawatomie, Kansas. John Brown. 3: This 1787 ordinance included a fugitive slave clause. the Northwest Ordinance. 4: The first issue of this William Lloyd Garrison abolitionist paper was published January 1, 1831. The Liberator. 5: By means of the Missouri Compromise, this New England state was admitted as a free state. Maine. Round 2. Category: Historical Transports 1: The V-8 Ford in which this criminal couple were gunned down in 1934 became an instant attraction. Bonnie and Clyde. 2: Good grief! The Command Module and Lunar Module for Apollo 10 were named for these 2 characters. Snoopy and Charlie Brown. 3: It made its final flight in April 1928 when Charles Lindbergh presented it to the Smithsonian. the Spirit of St. Louis. 4: James Lawrence was referring to his frigate the Chesapeake when he gave this famous command in 1813. "Don't give up the ship". 5: When this "Express" train crashed in 1900, Casey Jones died with his hand still on the brake lever. the Cannonball Express. Round 3. Category: Divinity 1: Born from a golden egg, this multifaced god of creation in Hinduism mediates between Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma. 2: Shinto deities are called kami; Inari is the kami of this grain. rice. 3: The Mahdi is an anticipated messianic spiritual figure who will restore this faith to its rightful purity. Islam (or Muslim). 4: 1 John 4 says "God is" this and "perfect" this "casteth out fear". love. 5: When Christian Science refers to the supreme being, it uses the term "divine" this 4-letter word. mind. Round 4. Category: Driving Alexis 1: In 1912 someone must have driven Alexis Carrel to give his Nobel lecture on suturing these, arteries and veins. blood vessels. 2: If you're driving company founder Alexis Ohanian to Reddit's offices, head for the Tenderloin area of this city. San Francisco. 3: If you're driving this actress, it may be to the set of "The Handmaid's Tale". Alexis Bledel. 4: You'd want to drive the czarevich Alexis (born 1904) very carefully as he suffered from this condition. hemophilia. 5: Driving this author of "Democracy in America" may have been rough as he complained, "Trail infernal, carriage without springs". (Alexis) de Tocqueville. Round 5. Category: Genius: Picasso 1: Living in Barcelona in 1899, Picasso befriended fellow artists and dodged police looking for these radicals against all government. anarchists. 2: Young Picasso was influenced by bullfighting and the pageantry of this southern region that includes Malaga. Andalusia. 3: Many of Picasso's motivations are dramatized, like how the horrors of the Spanish Civil War inspired this masterpiece. Guernica. 4: As a young man, Picasso lived in Catalonia with a friend, painting and avoiding service in this 1898 conflict. the Spanish-American War. 5: The suicide of a close friend in 1901 stimulated the emotional expressiveness of this period of Picasso's work. the Blue Period. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used
In this episode, the boys have another of their popular Dynamite Conspiracy episodes, where they discuss whether the recently exposed new evidence proves that the original Apollo moon landings were faked and mankind did not step forth on the moon. Or is this new evidence, not a smoking gun we first thought?Links discussed during the show:-https://rumble.com/v40hzld-reese-report-putin-told-moon-landing-photos-are-fake.html-https://www.quora.com/How-did-NASA-shield-the-film-cameras-on-Apollo-missions-from-cosmic-radiation-https://science.nasa.gov/biological-physical/stories/van-allen-belts/What are your thoughts on this topic? Is the evidence described enough to change whatever view you currently hold about this moon landing?Do you agree with Tony and Tayo on this? Or do you have other thoughts?Tune in and listen to the discussion - and please let us have your thoughts on these subjects.Although we much prefer effusive praise
This week we're replaying some of our favorite past episodes about Earth's number one satellite. In this episode from November 2019, we look at the Apollo 12 mission, the second time humans went to the moon and the first time we launched an artificial earthquake there. Plus: one of the two moonwalkers painted a picture that included their command module pilot on the lunar ground. Crash Site Of The Apollo 12 Ascent Module Possibly Found After Almost 50 Years (Bad Astronomy) Conrad, Gordon and Bean: The Fantasy (Art USA) Help launch the next great podcast episode when you back Cool Weird Awesome on Patreon --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coolweirdawesome/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coolweirdawesome/support
The NASA Apollo 13 recordings are a unique and valuable resource for understanding the Apollo 13 mission and the challenges faced by the crew. The recordings include everything from the astronauts' conversations with Mission Control to their descriptions of the explosion that damaged the spacecraft and their efforts to survive and return to Earth.The Apollo 13 recordings were recently digitized and restored, and they are now available online for the first time. This is a significant event, as it allows us to hear the events of the mission unfold firsthand from the perspective of the astronauts.The recordings are also a testament to the ingenuity and courage of the Apollo 13 crew. In the face of a crisis, they worked together with Mission Control to find a way to survive and return home safely. Their story is one of hope and resilience, and the recordings provide a powerful reminder of what can be achieved when people work together.Here are some of the most notable moments from the Apollo 13 recordings:"Houston, we've had a problem." - Jim Lovell, reporting the explosion that damaged the spacecraft."Power down everything but the essentials." - Gene Kranz, Flight Director in Mission Control, giving the order to conserve power."We're going to have to use the LM as a lifeboat." - Jim Lovell, deciding to use the Lunar Module to return to Earth."We're going to make it." - Jim Lovell, expressing confidence in the crew's ability to survive and return home."Splashdown confirmed! Apollo 13 is safe." - Mission Control, announcing the safe landing of the Apollo 13 spacecraft in the Pacific Ocean.The Apollo 13 recordings are a fascinating and inspiring record of a mission that could have ended in disaster, but instead became a story of triumph. They are a must-listen for anyone interested in the history of space exploration and the human spirit.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5995136/advertisement
Harrison Schmitt's father was a geologist but it wasn't until college thatSchmitt decided to follow in his dad's footsteps. By the mid-1960's, Schmitt had a Ph.D and was working at the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Center. Before long, NASA was looking for geologists to advise on the upcoming lunar missions. Schmitt then advised the Apollo 11 crew on what to look for and to bring home. And he also consulted with every subsequent mission. But before too long, NASA decided to send Scmitt himself to the moon and the rest is history - the only man to visit the moon who was not a military aviator.In this edition of "Veterans Chronicles," Schmitt describes training in the T-38 and helicopters with the U.S. Air Force at Chandler AFB and why that training was so critical to his mission. He also tells us what it was like to blast off, walk on the moon, and take one of the most famous photos in history. He also tells us what he considers to be the most important geological discoveries from the Apollo missions.
Did you know that the white material on the outside of space shuttles was not metal or glass but actually fabric? Specialized quilts, two inches thick, covered the space shuttles and protected the astronauts from deadly heat and radiation. Jean Wright was one of the eighteen “Sew Sisters” who crafted these thermal blankets, mostly by hand, with incredible precision and skill. From sending letters to Johnson Space Center as a child with crayon-drawn patch ideas, Jean had always aimed to work for NASA, patiently applying and eagerly awaiting for the job she was meant to have, one that would help secure – in a literal sense- the materials that would protect the vehicles carrying the astronauts to space, and secure her place in NASA history… this is the conversation that you must not miss. On this very special 200th EPISODE of the Casual Space Podcast, Beth enjoys speaking with Jean Wright, sharing her inspiring stories from her time at NASA as a “Sew Sister.” Together, Beth and Jean discuss stories from Jean's newly-released book, Sew Sister: The Untold Story of Jean Wright and NASA's Seamstresses. The book, just like this conversation, unveils both the grandeur of space flight and the intimacy of a needle and thread, and the story of Jean's childhood passion for space and sewing, and her fascinating work for NASA's shuttle program. Listen as Beth learns the definition of what schnibbles* are. Note: It's a variant of schnibbles, a far more common term for “scraps,” or “small pieces,” which is heard in parts of the United States that were settled largely by German immigrants. The term comes from German Schnippel, meaning “scraps.” Imagine having the task of cutting the fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer that went to the Moon with Neil Armstrong, and several shuttle flight- so it could be displayed at the University of Cincinnati . And guess what kind of fabric the Wright Brother's used for the first flight? A kind of high-end, expensive fabric women would use for their undergarments! “I'm all about fabric!” – Jean Wright, Casual Space Podcast Jean Wright is a former NASA Aerospace Composite Technician- a NASA seamstress. Jean worked with the United Space Alliance at the Thermal Protection System Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. One of 18 seamstresses in this critical role, Jean and her co-workers dubbed their group, “The Sew Sisters”, using machines and hand stitching to build, create and repair thermal protection flight hardware and parachutes. Wright worked on the Endeavor, Atlantis and Discovery space shuttle missions. She also worked on test parachutes and aft-skirt blankets for the Orion spacecraft. When she's not sewing, Jean is a photographer for SpaceUpClose; www.spaceupclose.com Beth's Note: I especially loved “Big Mo,” “Sweet Sue”, and “Lurch” - the names of the sewing machines used by Jean and her team at NASA (some from 1914)! More about Jean: Jean says she's retired, but she's ever the most incredible NASA advocate, photographer, speaker and representative. Jean remains involved with NASA as a Docent for the Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center. She is a member of NASA's Speakers Bureau, representing the organization at civic, professional, educational and public events. She has been a keynote speaker at the MQX Quilt Festival in 2018, Women's History Month at KSCVC in 2018, Family Day at the Udvar-Hazy National Air & Space Museum in 2016, the International Quilt Festival with Astronaut Karen Nyberg and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. One of her life's biggest thrills was being asked by Mark Armstrong to cut and prepare for auction, pieces of historic muslin fabric from the Wright Brothers 1903 Flyer that his father, Neil Armstrong, carried to the moon aboard the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. Pre-order Jean's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Sew-Sister-Untold-Wright-Seamstresses/dp/0884489825/ref=sr_1_1?crid=35842DQC0D3T2&keywords=sew+sister+the+untold+story+of+jean+wright&qid=1693428497&sprefix=sew+sister%2Caps%2C103&sr=8-1 Apply for a NASA Moon tree here: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-forest-service-to-share-moon-tree-seedlings-promote-stem And don't forget to send your story to space at www.storiesofspace.com
Zoe Saldaña has appeared in the top three grossing movies of all time – Avatar, Avatar: Way of Water and Avengers: Endgame. You may know her as Uhura in the Star Trek reboot films, Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy, or as Neytiri in Avatar. Now Zoe is taking a break from sci-fi and fantasy to star in a new, Earth-based TV series called Special Ops: Lioness. It's a spy thriller about a covert programme that trains and dispatches women around the world as undercover operatives. Zoe joined Nuala to record an interview last week, before the US actors' strike was called. The Metropolitan Police has started using counter-terrorism tactics to hunt down the 100 worst male sexual predators targeting women. Nuala gets the reaction of former Inspector of Constabulary Zoe Billingham, who led the 2021 review of the policing response to violence against women and girls, calling for it to be treated with the same priority as terrorism. 15 countries in the Middle East and North Africa still apply laws that require women to either 'obey' their husbands or seek their permission to leave the marital home, work, or travel. That's according to a new report from Human Rights Watch, which compares the state of male guardianship laws across the region. The report finds that, although women's rights activists have been successful in winning some freedoms, new restrictions are still being implemented – particularly in areas of conflict such as Yemen and Syria. Rothna Begum, Senior Women's Rights Researcher, joins Nuala to explain the findings. Yomi Adegoke is the co-author of the bestselling guide, Slay in Your Lane: A Black Girl's Bible. Now she's stepping into the world of fiction with her debut novel, The List. Journalist Ola and her fiancé Michael are getting married in a month, but their excitement is shattered when a database of men in the world of media, and allegations of sexual harassment against them, is anonymously posted online. And Michael is on it. How will the couple navigate the fall out? Yomi joins Nuala to talk about why she wanted to write this story. For the first time in fifty years, humans will soon be returning to the moon. Sara Pastor is the project manager and Chief Engineer of the International Habitation module – the place where astronauts will live and study scientific findings in space as part of the Artemis Mission, set to happen in the next few years. Sara joins Nuala to talk about why this is such an important project for human exploration, and how women are at the centre of it.
After completing a four-year tour of duty, he attended the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland. He trained under the direction of Pete Conrad, who would later become Commander of the Apollo 12 moon flight, and who would be instrumental in getting Bean assigned to that mission. Homepage with pictures.
Here is an interview which I conducted with speechwriter / author , James C. Humes, who wrote the words on the plaque on the Apollo 11 Lunar Module! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Medverkande i detta avsnitt är Martin, Patrik, Danijel och Linda Karlström. Gillar ni det vi producerar får ni gärna skicka in ett bidrag till bankkonto SEB 5708 35 378 011) Intro, TV inslag från 1992 när Robert Faurisson var på besök i Sverige https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR2wKFK6Fbk2) Tingsrättsdomen i Linda Karlströms stämning mot den svenska staten föll den 15:e mars 2023 och Linda vann målet och tilldöms ett skadestånd på 100000kr men det unika i detta fall är i stället för som brukligt att den förlorande parten får stå för båda parters rättegångskostnader så dömer Stockholms Tingsrätt att båda parter ska stå för sina egna rättegångskostnader. I Linda Karlströms fall uppgår dessa kring 1 miljon kr. I domen motiverar Tingsrätten detta beslut enligt följande:”Såvitt avser de grunder som Linda Karlström åberopat till stöd för sin talan har hon inte fått gehör för sitt påstående att staten svarat för SVT:s handlande. Parterna har haft en omfattande argumentation i denna fråga. Linda Karlström har vidare åberopat en stor mängd bevisning för att styrka att nyttan med vaccin inte är vetenskapligt belagd, att New World Order inte är en konspirationsteori, att Förintelsen inte är en av de mest väldokumenterade händelserna i mänsklighetens historia och att SVT inte är sakligt och opartiskt. Tingsrätten har avvisat denna bevisning och anser att Linda Karlströms processföring i denna del i onödan tyngt målet. Med beaktande av dessa omständigheter anser tingsrätten att vardera part ska stå sin rättegångskostnad i målet.” I detta avsnitt reflekterar vi kring den bevisning som Linda Karlström inte tilläts lägga fram i sin rättegång och som sedermera användes som motivering av Tingsrätten för att låta henne stå för sina egna rättegångskostnader som ligger kring 1 miljon kr.3) Outro Kungens man av Björn Afzelius https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai2KH_qtalw4) Länkar till avsnittet: https://www.righteousjews.org/article37.html http://www.talmudunmasked.com/ https://archive.org/details/ErnstZundelSettingTheRecordStraightFullHistoryChannelDocumentary https://archive.org/details/ErnstZundelOffYourKneesGermany19832003 David Cole in Auschwitz (Finns även många böcker i ämnet att ladda ner på denna sida) https://www.holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=1004&play=94#watch Martin undersöker gaskammare i Auschwitz https://archive.org/details/martin-undersoker-gaskammare-i-auschwitz https://archive.org/details/QuestioningTheHolocaustWhyWeBelievedPart1Of2YouTube720pWhy the Lunar Module "looked fake" https://youtu.be/kD49-n3jZaw Böckerhttps://archive.org/details/en-tom-sack-kan-inte-sta https://archive.org/details/KaufmanTheodoreGermanyMustPerishEN194135P.
54 years ago this week, Apollo 9 was in orbit around the Earth testing out the Lunar Module on it's maiden flight, and today we talk to the Lunar Module pilot Rusty Schweickart about that flight and so many other things.Rusty Schweickart:https://www.rustyschweickart.com/ Emily's Articles:Space in the Seventies: Rusty Schweickart in the Seventieshttps://medium.com/the-making-of-an-ex-nuke/space-in-the-seventies-rusty-schweickart-in-the-seventies-18f62ef15801Full show notes: https://spaceandthingspodcast.com/Show notes include links to all articles mentioned and full details of our guests and links to what caught our eye this week.Image Credits: NASASpace and Things:Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/spaceandthings1Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spaceandthingspodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/spaceandthingspodcast/Merch and Info: https://www.spaceandthingspodcast.comPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/SpaceandthingsBusiness Enquiries: info@andthingsproductions.comSpace and Things is brought to you And Things Productions https://www.andthingsproductions.comSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/spaceandthings. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
ALIENS BUILT OUR MOON - HOLLOW MOON DOCUMENTARY The Hollow Moon hypothesis and the closely related Spaceship Moon hypothesis propose that Earth's Moon is either wholly hollow or otherwise contains a substantial interior space. No scientific evidence exists to support the idea; seismic observations and other data collected since spacecraft began to orbit or land on the Moon indicate that it has a thin crust, extensive mantle and small, dense core, although overall it is much less dense than Earth.The first publication to mention a hollow Moon was H. G. Wells' 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon. In 1970, two Soviet authors published a short piece in the popular press speculating that the Moon might be "the Creation of Alien Intelligence". Since the late 1970s, the hypothesis has been endorsed by conspiracy theorists like Jim Marrs and David Icke.he Hollow Moon hypothesis is the suggestion that the Moon is hollow, usually as a product of an alien civilization.[1][2] It is often called the Spaceship Moon hypothesis[1][2] and often corresponds with beliefs in UFOs or ancient astronauts.[2][3]The suggestion of a hollow moon first appeared in science fiction, when H. G. Wells wrote about a hollow moon in his 1901 book The First Men in the Moon.[1][4] The concept of hollow planets was not new; The first discussion of a Hollow Earth was by scientist Edmond Halley in 1692.[5][6] Wells borrowed from earlier fictional works that described a hollow Earth, such as the 1741 novel Niels Klim's Underground Travels by Ludvig Holberg.[7]In 1920, fringe author Marshall B. Gardner cited Wells's speculation of a Hollow Moon as support of the Hollow Earth theory.[8]Both Hollow Moon and Hollow Earth are now considered to be a fringe theories or conspiracy theories.[9][1][10][11] The concept of the Moon as a spaceship is often mentioned as one of David Icke's beliefs.[10][12][13]Claims and rebuttalsDensityThe fact that the Moon is less dense than the Earth is advanced as support for it to be hollow. The moon's mean density is 3.3 g/cm3, whereas the Earth's is 5.5 g/cm3.[14] One explanation of this discrepancy is that the moon may have been formed by a giant impact which ejected some of the early Earth's upper crust into its orbit.[4][15] The Earth's upper mantle and crust are less dense than its core.[16]The Moon rang like a bellBetween 1969 and 1977, seismometers installed on the Moon by the Apollo missions recorded moonquakes. The Moon was described as "ringing like a bell" during some of those quakes, specifically the shallow ones.[17] This phrase was brought to popular attention in March 1970[1] in an article in Popular Science.[18]On November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 deliberately crashed the Ascent Stage of its Lunar Module onto the Moon's surface; NASA reported that the Moon rang 'like a bell' for almost an hour, leading to arguments that it must be hollow like a bell.[1] Lunar seismology experiments since then have shown that the lunar body has shallow moonquakes that act differently from quakes on Earth, due to differences in texture, type and density of the planetary strata, but there is no evidence of any large empty space inside the body.[17]Vasin-Shcherbakov "spaceship" conjectureSpeculative cutaway model of a Spaceship MoonIn 1970, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, advanced a hypothesis that the Moon is a spaceship created by unknown beings.[2] The article was entitled "Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence?" and was published in Sputnik,[10] the Soviet equivalent of Reader's Digest.[1][19] The Vasin-Shcerbakov hypothesis was reported in the West that same year.[20]Their hypothesis relies heavily on the suggestion that large lunar craters, generally assumed to be formed from meteor impact, are generally too shallow and have flat or even convex bottoms. They hypothesized that small meteors are making a cup-shaped depression in the rocky surface of the moon while the larger meteors are drilling through a rocky layer and hitting an armoured hull underneath.[14]The authors reference earlier speculation by astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky, who suggested that the Martian moon Phobos was an artificial satellite and hollow; this has since been shown not to be the case. Sceptical author Jason Colavito points out that all of their evidence is circumstantial, and that, in the 1960s, the atheistic Soviet Union promoted the ancient astronaut concept in an attempt to undermine the West's faith in religion.[2]"Perfect" solar eclipsesIn 1965, author Isaac Asimov observed: "What makes a total eclipse so remarkable is the sheer astronomical accident that the Moon fits so snugly over the Sun. The Moon is just large enough to cover the Sun completely (at times) so that a temporary night falls and the stars spring out. [...] The Sun's greater distance makes up for its greater size and the result is that the Moon and the Sun appear to be equal in size. [...] There is no astronomical reason why Moon and Sun should fit so well. It is the sheerest of coincidence, and only the Earth among all the planets is blessed in this fashion."[21]Since the 1970s, conspiracy theorists have cited Asimov's observations on solar eclipses as evidence of the Moon's artificiality.[22][23] Mainstream astronomers reject this interpretation. They note that the angular diameters of Sun and Moon vary by several percent over time and do not actually "perfectly" match during eclipses.[24] Nor is Earth the only planet with such a satellite: Saturn's moon Prometheus has roughly the same angular diameter as the Sun when viewed from Saturn.[24]Modernly, some scholars have claimed that "the conditions required for perfect solar eclipses are the same conditions generally acknowledged to be necessary for intelligent life to emerge"; If so, the Moon's size and orbit might be best explained by the weak anthropic principle.[24][25][26]
Darkest Mysteries Online - The Strange and Unusual Podcast 2023
ALIENS BUILT OUR MOON - HOLLOW MOON DOCUMENTARY The Hollow Moon hypothesis and the closely related Spaceship Moon hypothesis propose that Earth's Moon is either wholly hollow or otherwise contains a substantial interior space. No scientific evidence exists to support the idea; seismic observations and other data collected since spacecraft began to orbit or land on the Moon indicate that it has a thin crust, extensive mantle and small, dense core, although overall it is much less dense than Earth.The first publication to mention a hollow Moon was H. G. Wells' 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon. In 1970, two Soviet authors published a short piece in the popular press speculating that the Moon might be "the Creation of Alien Intelligence". Since the late 1970s, the hypothesis has been endorsed by conspiracy theorists like Jim Marrs and David Icke.he Hollow Moon hypothesis is the suggestion that the Moon is hollow, usually as a product of an alien civilization.[1][2] It is often called the Spaceship Moon hypothesis[1][2] and often corresponds with beliefs in UFOs or ancient astronauts.[2][3]The suggestion of a hollow moon first appeared in science fiction, when H. G. Wells wrote about a hollow moon in his 1901 book The First Men in the Moon.[1][4] The concept of hollow planets was not new; The first discussion of a Hollow Earth was by scientist Edmond Halley in 1692.[5][6] Wells borrowed from earlier fictional works that described a hollow Earth, such as the 1741 novel Niels Klim's Underground Travels by Ludvig Holberg.[7]In 1920, fringe author Marshall B. Gardner cited Wells's speculation of a Hollow Moon as support of the Hollow Earth theory.[8]Both Hollow Moon and Hollow Earth are now considered to be a fringe theories or conspiracy theories.[9][1][10][11] The concept of the Moon as a spaceship is often mentioned as one of David Icke's beliefs.[10][12][13]Claims and rebuttalsDensityThe fact that the Moon is less dense than the Earth is advanced as support for it to be hollow. The moon's mean density is 3.3 g/cm3, whereas the Earth's is 5.5 g/cm3.[14] One explanation of this discrepancy is that the moon may have been formed by a giant impact which ejected some of the early Earth's upper crust into its orbit.[4][15] The Earth's upper mantle and crust are less dense than its core.[16]The Moon rang like a bellBetween 1969 and 1977, seismometers installed on the Moon by the Apollo missions recorded moonquakes. The Moon was described as "ringing like a bell" during some of those quakes, specifically the shallow ones.[17] This phrase was brought to popular attention in March 1970[1] in an article in Popular Science.[18]On November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 deliberately crashed the Ascent Stage of its Lunar Module onto the Moon's surface; NASA reported that the Moon rang 'like a bell' for almost an hour, leading to arguments that it must be hollow like a bell.[1] Lunar seismology experiments since then have shown that the lunar body has shallow moonquakes that act differently from quakes on Earth, due to differences in texture, type and density of the planetary strata, but there is no evidence of any large empty space inside the body.[17]Vasin-Shcherbakov "spaceship" conjectureSpeculative cutaway model of a Spaceship MoonIn 1970, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, advanced a hypothesis that the Moon is a spaceship created by unknown beings.[2] The article was entitled "Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence?" and was published in Sputnik,[10] the Soviet equivalent of Reader's Digest.[1][19] The Vasin-Shcerbakov hypothesis was reported in the West that same year.[20]Their hypothesis relies heavily on the suggestion that large lunar craters, generally assumed to be formed from meteor impact, are generally too shallow and have flat or even convex bottoms. They hypothesized that small meteors are making a cup-shaped depression in the rocky surface of the moon while the larger meteors are drilling through a rocky layer and hitting an armoured hull underneath.[14]The authors reference earlier speculation by astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky, who suggested that the Martian moon Phobos was an artificial satellite and hollow; this has since been shown not to be the case. Sceptical author Jason Colavito points out that all of their evidence is circumstantial, and that, in the 1960s, the atheistic Soviet Union promoted the ancient astronaut concept in an attempt to undermine the West's faith in religion.[2]"Perfect" solar eclipsesIn 1965, author Isaac Asimov observed: "What makes a total eclipse so remarkable is the sheer astronomical accident that the Moon fits so snugly over the Sun. The Moon is just large enough to cover the Sun completely (at times) so that a temporary night falls and the stars spring out. [...] The Sun's greater distance makes up for its greater size and the result is that the Moon and the Sun appear to be equal in size. [...] There is no astronomical reason why Moon and Sun should fit so well. It is the sheerest of coincidence, and only the Earth among all the planets is blessed in this fashion."[21]Since the 1970s, conspiracy theorists have cited Asimov's observations on solar eclipses as evidence of the Moon's artificiality.[22][23] Mainstream astronomers reject this interpretation. They note that the angular diameters of Sun and Moon vary by several percent over time and do not actually "perfectly" match during eclipses.[24] Nor is Earth the only planet with such a satellite: Saturn's moon Prometheus has roughly the same angular diameter as the Sun when viewed from Saturn.[24]Modernly, some scholars have claimed that "the conditions required for perfect solar eclipses are the same conditions generally acknowledged to be necessary for intelligent life to emerge"; If so, the Moon's size and orbit might be best explained by the weak anthropic principle.[24][25][26]
Day 144 Today's Reading: 1 Corinthians 11 The generation you are from will determine which historical tragedy you will remember as an American. On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Japanese war planes bombed Pearl Harbor. Eighteen battleships were sunk or destroyed. Two hundred airplanes were put out of commission. And the servicemen who were either killed or wounded numbered 3,581. America's war cry as she entered World War II was, “Remember Pearl Harbor.” I grew up when that changed to “Remember 9/11.” That was the day—September 11, 2001, when the towers fell. The world does not need so much as to be informed as it needs to be reminded. The Bible tells us again and again to “remember.” That is what Communion is. And that is what Paul is challenging us to do in 1 Corinthians 11. Some churches participate in Communion every week, some do it once a month, and some churches a few times a year. Communion is a mini drama of salvation, using the props of bread and wine. Here's what Paul says about Communion in verse 26: “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are retelling the story, proclaiming our Lord's death until he comes” (TPT). Here's how it reads in The Message translation: “What you must solemnly realize is that every time you eat this bread and every time you drink this cup, you reenact in your words and actions the death of the Master. You will be drawn back to this meal again and again until the Master returns. You must never let familiarity breed contempt.” Communion is one way we can express our love for Jesus, because it is a way we can say to Him, “We remember what you did for us.” Whenever we participate at the Lord's table, we too have a battle cry: “Remember Jesus Christ.” Remember the cross. And to help us remember, we get the bread and wine props. Props are important reminders. When we get married, an important prop is part of the wedding ceremony. When we get the prop, we say, “With this ring I thee wed.” When we say those words, we don't mean that the ring or putting the ring on the finger is what makes us married. It's a prop to remind us, and to show everyone around us, the commitment we have made. That's what the sacraments of the church are. Props to remind us. To make it anything more than a symbol is dangerous. It's like loving our wedding band, when we need to love our spouse. To cling to a symbol is what many try to do and they miss what God was trying to show us. What was God reminding us of with the bread and the cup? The bread means God came. We say the bread is His body—that's God in person. In his first epistle, John says that this Jesus came in bodily form: we touched Him, we saw Him, we heard Him. He did not write a message in the sky for us. He did not shout it audibly. He came to tell us that God loves us. God came in person for us. The cup reminds us that God cares. The blood means God cares. The cup of juice reminds us that it should have been us paying for our sins, but God cares so much for you and me that He took our place. He cares and He died for you and me on the cross. The juice means God cares and took our place. Did you know that some astronauts had Communion on the moon? On July 20, 1969, two human beings changed history by walking on the surface of the moon. But what happened before Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Neil Armstrong exited the Lunar Module is perhaps even more amazing. We know that Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon, but Buzz Aldrin took Communion on the surface of the moon. Some months after his return, he wrote about it in Guideposts. Aldrin knew he would soon be doing something unprecedented in human history and he felt he should mark the occasion somehow, so he took Communion elements with him out of the earth's orbit a
Geoffrey Notkin joins us to talk about meteorites... what they are, how you can find one, how to buy one if you don't want to tramp around a desolate wilderness for weeks, and the upcoming auction of his impressive collection. Stay with us! Image credit: Leigh Anne DelRay © Aerolite Meteorites www.aerolite.org Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Geoffrey Notkin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Geoffrey Notkin joins us to talk about meteorites... what they are, how you can find one, how to buy one if you don't want to tramp around a desolate wilderness for weeks, and the upcoming auction of his impressive collection. Stay with us! Image credit: Leigh Anne DelRay © Aerolite Meteorites www.aerolite.org Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Geoffrey Notkin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Andrew Aldrin — yes, son of *that* Aldrin—is a newspace professional who has survived years in that rough-and-tumble industry and emerged as the Cosmic Curmudgeon. His primary question: where's the beef? Where is this promised newspace revolution, and will we even recognize it when it occurs? How do we measure it, and what's the tipping point? Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Andrew Aldrin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
Andrew Aldrin — yes, son of *that* Aldrin—is a newspace professional who has survived years in that rough-and-tumble industry and emerged as the Cosmic Curmudgeon. His primary question: where's the beef? Where is this promised newspace revolution, and will we even recognize it when it occurs? How do we measure it, and what's the tipping point? Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Andrew Aldrin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit
The Artemis lunar landing program is moving ahead. While the SLS works toward its test flight, SpaceX makes progress on its Lunar Starship, and after a lawsuit-riddled two years, Blue Origin and partners will bid on a secondary landing system. Also, the Mars helicopter gets quiet, and nukes in space are back! Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: itpro.tv/twit promo code TWIT30 Blueland.com/SPACE
The Artemis lunar landing program is moving ahead. While the SLS works toward its test flight, SpaceX makes progress on its Lunar Starship, and after a lawsuit-riddled two years, Blue Origin and partners will bid on a secondary landing system. Also, the Mars helicopter gets quiet, and nukes in space are back! Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: itpro.tv/twit promo code TWIT30 Blueland.com/SPACE
Unfortunately Aldrin's life became difficult shortly after he emerged from quarantine and began months of public appearances. Homepage
After Buzz graduated from Montclair High School in 1946, he turned down a full scholarship offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and went to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Episode with pics.
The abort system had two basic control modes, “attitude hold” and “automatic.” In automatic, the computer would take over the guidance and start looking for the command module, which was certainly not what the crew intended to do at that moment. While correcting for a minor yaw-rate-gyro disturbance, the astronauts accidentally switched the spacecraft to the automatic mode, resulting in frantic gyrations.
When Stafford and Cernan were ready for undocking they discovered the Lunar Module had slipped three and a half degrees out of line with the command module at the latching point, possibly due to loose mylar collecting on the docking ring…
Infopolitik: A Military Withdrawal in the Information Age— Pranay KotasthaneA month-and-half ago, I had tweeted this:I had further written that:“in the Industrial Age, such suppression could be covered up; that’s no longer the case in radically networked communities. The difference between the Afghanistan of 2001 and 2021 is mobile phones plus internet. Given these factors, the use of force against non-combatants is almost certain to receive instant condemnation from other countries. We can expect some backlash in US domestic politics as well. Such conflicts are global by default in the Information Age. The strength of these reactions might not be enough to change the overall decision (of the US). But it will be interesting to keep a watch from this angle.”Little did I know that this assessment will play itself out within a matter of three weeks. Over the last ten days or so, the humanitarian crisis at the Kabul airport — more than the Taliban’s atrocities — has made it to phone screens across the globe. At the margin, this has had a positive effect of pushing national governments to allow more Afghan refugees in their countries. At the same time, the negative perception of the 2015 Syrian refugee influx has meant that the increase in refugee intake, at least in Europe, is unlikely to be significantly higher.The Afghan situation is a subset of how a conflict will play out in the Information Age. Putnam’s classic two-level game framework describes the general case of conflict quite well. He argued that the politics of many international negotiations can be imagined as a two-level game.At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favorable policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among those groups. At the international level, national governments seek to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign developments. Neither of the two games can be ignored by central decision-makers, so long as their countries remain interdependent, yet sovereign.Here’s my illustration to describe this setup.The politics of this setup operates as follows:Each national political leader appears at both game boards. Across the international table sit his foreign counterparts, and at his elbows sit diplomats and other international advisors. Around the domestic table behind him sit party and parliamentary figures, spokespersons for domestic agencies, representatives of key interest groups, and the leader's own political advisors. The unusual complexity of this two-level game is that moves that are rational for a player at one board (such as raising energy prices, conceding territory, or limiting auto imports) may be impolitic for that same player at the other board. Nevertheless, there are powerful incentives for consistency between the two games. Players (and kibitzers) will tolerate some differences in rhetoric between the two games, but in the end either energy prices rise or they don't.The key insight is this:The political complexities for the players in this two-level game are staggering. Any key player at the international table who is dissatisfied with the outcome may upset the game board, and conversely, any leader who fails to satisfy his fellow players at the domestic table risks being evicted from his seat. On occasion, however, clever players will spot a move on one board that will trigger realignments on other boards, enabling them to achieve otherwise unattainable objectives.In the Information Age, there’s a Level 3 game as well — the radically networked communities of the two negotiating parties can directly interact with each other. Given that groups can talk to each other directly, such interactions often affect what Level 1 and Level 2 negotiations can achieve. In the current refugee crisis, the level 3 connections are forcing a re-evaluation of hardened stances against migration at Level 2, at least in a few western countries. As the situation at the Kabul airport improves, the focus will shift to the Level 3 interactions focusing on the Taliban’s repression. To what extent these interactions will affect the Level 1 & 2 games, I’m not sure. Nevertheless, this model provides a useful frame to parse the events that will unfold in Afghanistan in the coming months. If the content in this newsletter interests you, consider taking up the Takshashila GCPP in Technology Policy. It is designed for technologists who want to explore public policy. By the end of this course, you will be able to use a #ResponsibleTech framework to systematically understand the ethical dimensions of technology advancements. Here’s a Twitter thread explaining the motivation behind the course.Intake for the 30th cohort ends on 28th August. To know more, click here.Cyberpolitik: The Taliban Question for Platforms — Sapni GKThe Taliban's takeover of Kabul last week left many commentators and experts surprised. The quick capture of the elected Afghan government has caused great worry to social media platforms and their users in Afghanistan, wary about the digital footprints and the online lives of millions. When the Taliban was in power two decades ago, they had banned the internet in the country. However, today's landscape is different with an internet penetration of over 20% and four million social media users. In bigger cities like Kabul, people have been using the internet for the myriad conveniences it provides, including the use of social media platforms to voice opinions and concerns. For companies, content moderation, data handling practices, and a host of other digital rights are a cause of concern. For individual users under Taliban rule, these digital traces may be matters of life and death. The uncertainty around the future government has left social media platforms in a fix. Currently, Facebook Inc. and YouTube ban Taliban content on their platforms. However, Twitter and LinkedIn continue to allow the use of their platforms, provided the content policies are not violated. Additionally, many of these platforms have limited the visibility of the networks of users in Afghanistan.The Taliban has learnt the art of managing social media platforms. These platforms are an ideal tool in their arsenal to create noise and build narratives that drown dissident voices from within the country. They have also used technologies such as biometric identification to target members of the armed forces, which now stokes the fear of misuse of the World Bank-supported national digital identity card system, Tazkira. Internet access opened up social and economic opportunities in Afghanistan, including the development of a nascent startup ecosystem in Kabul. These benefits now stand to be obliterated as the structure of most of these platforms is dependent on data collection. At the design level, they are structured to keep users continuously interacting and glued to the platform. The process of reclaiming the data held by these platforms, and removing one’s personal information is tedious, even in the presence of enabling legislation. This difficulty in erasing digital traces may aid the Taliban in identification and targeting. The organisation is reported to have used Facebook to identify targets in the past. At times like these, an easier exit out of the digital ecosystem of these platforms - a kill-switch - seems a legitimate ask. These companies have a lot of important decisions to make. Currently, the account of the President of Afghanistan remains suspended and inactive on Twitter, with no clarity on what happens if and when the Taliban is recognized as a legitimate government. Bigger questions arise in the absence of the 2006 constitution and a new regime based on a rigid interpretation of Sha'aria Law. Law enforcement, which may or may not follow the international norms of liberal interpretation of rights, would be a challenge for these platforms. To operate legitimately in the state, they might have to hand over incriminating evidence for acts previously not designated as crimes, contributing to the violation of otherwise accepted human rights such as free speech. It is a slippery slope for platforms on counts of privacy, data protection, content moderation, and free speech. Much depends on the stance taken by the international community and ensuring that these companies are not pushed to take calls denting the fabric of international political order. Antriksh Matters #1: GSLV, Do Not Go Gently into the Night— Aditya PareekThe cryogenic upper stage of a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) failed barely five minutes into its ascent. According to media reports, the failed mission also took out an expensive and essential advanced Earth Observation Satellite, EOS-03/GISAT-1 along with it. ISRO expected the mission to be a success and even published detailed specs of the mission on its website. The loss comes after the launch of EOS-3 was delayed for nearly a year and a half following the pandemic. It’s a blow to India’s Earth-imaging capabilities, at least in the short term. According to this New Indian Express editorial:GISAT-1 was planned to be the first of two such identical satellites to be put into space to relay back crucial data. The two satellites were planned to image in the multispectral and hyper-spectral bands to provide near real-time pictures of large areas of the country—selected field images every five minutes and entire Indian landmass images every 30 minutes at 42-metre spatial resolution.As this piece in The Print by Sandhya Ramesh explains, when compared to the failure rate of missions undertaken by space programmes and agencies of other nations, ISRO still fares very well.Although ISRO has attributed the failure to a technical anomaly, more details if they are ever revealed, will only come out after an investigation. It may be too early to judge if the latest failure of the GSLV platform will result in delays and further setbacks for big-ticket India space programme missions like Chandrayaan II or Gaganyaan.Antriksh Matters #2: Artemis and India’s Moonshot— Aditya RamanathanIn late July, the government of the Isle of Man, a self-governing British Crown Dependency with a population of less than 100,000, announced that it had agreed in principle to join the Artemis Accords. The Accords are a series of bilateral agreements between the United States and other countries. First announced in October 2020, the Accords lay down norms for lunar exploration. They are a prerequisite for joining NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration programme.At present, 11 other states have signed the Accords with the US. The Isle of Man sought to become a hub for the global commercial space industry. If it signs the Accords with the US, it will join the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the UAE, Canada, Ukraine, Italy, and Luxembourg. The Artemis Accords pose a dilemma for India: signing them and joining the Artemis programme will greatly aid India’s own lunar ambitions. However, the Accords also potentially open up the moon and other celestial bodies to unregulated mining, and de facto assertions of ownership of the celestial real estate.Despite these risks, it makes sense for India to sign up to the Accords while maintaining its flexibility by pursuing other options, including space cooperation with Russia, and pushing for a new set of multilaterally accepted rules for space activity. The Promise and Peril of ArtemisThe Artemis Accords list 10 principles that seek to lay down norms for operating on the Moon. These are: the use of space for peaceful purposes, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, registration of space objects, release of scientific data, protecting heritage in space, allowing the extraction and use of resources in space, deconflicting activities, and managing orbital debris and ensuring the safe disposal of spacecraft.Most of these principles are innocuous and in line with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), to which all spacefaring states adhere. The provision for protecting heritage in space is primarily meant to protect areas of historical significance like the site of the 1969 Apollo 11 Lunar Module landing in the Sea of Tranquility. The provision that raises the greatest concern is the one allowing the extraction and use of resources. While the OST bars states from asserting sovereignty on celestial bodies, it leaves open a loophole wide enough to allow two things: for states and private entities to claim ownership over resources extracted from celestial bodies, and for private entities to claim ownership or stewardship of celestial real estate (without an associated claim of state sovereignty). Indeed, the innocuous provision for deconfliction could allow states or private entities to declare ‘exclusion zones’ with no time limit, making possession nine-tenths of the law.The Artemis Accords appear to be well designed to take advantage of this loophole. It is not surprising that the US would seek such provisions. It dominates the commercial space industry and stands to accrue the greatest benefits. In 2015, the US Congress passed a bill that allowed private entities and citizens to use the resources of celestial bodies. Later, in April 2020, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the Secretary of State to pursue diplomatic agreements that enable “commercial recovery and use of space resources”.India’s Imperfect OptionsWhy should India care? Unregulated mining and claims of ownership, whether de facto or otherwise, could lead to negative externalities and deny smaller spacefarers opportunities. The greatest potential negative externalities from mining would be the spread of lunar dust, which would be propagated quickly across the Moon’s low gravity, zero-atmosphere environment. This extremely fine dust can hamper and endanger lunar operations. These externalities will become even more evident when the principles of the Accords are extended to the Asteroid Belt, where mining could create debris fields and even dangerously modify the orbits of smaller asteroids. Finally, the finders-keepers model of lunar governance could allow larger spacefarers to monopolise the Moon’s resources, leaving smaller spacefarers like India at their mercy. India has three options: one, it can sign the Artemis Accords (and thus join the Artemis programme), two, it can join rival programmes such as the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) programme led by Russia and China, and three, it can pursue multilateral agreements through the UN or other bodies. As a medium-rung spacepower, India cannot fulfil its lunar ambitions on its own. It can only do so in cooperation with others. That means eschewing both the Artemis and ILRS programmes is not a viable option for India. While India must continue to pursue bilateral space cooperation with Russia, its prospects with the ILRS programme may be limited because of the presence of a hostile China. The Artemis programme, which includes the other three members of the Quad, as well as other friendly spacefarers, offers better prospects in the short term. India would benefit from signing up for it.However, over the longer term, India must seek to maintain its flexibility and leverage by seeking to participate in all multilateral lunar exploration programmes, whether they be Artemis, ILRS, or other future projects. Simultaneously, India must also nudge spacefaring states towards multilateral norms regulating activities on celestial bodies, whether through UN-based mechanisms or independently. The best outcome for India isn’t to pick one option, it is to pursue all of them. Check out Takshashila’s paper on India and the Artemis Accords here.Antriksh Matters #3: Satellites for Climate Change Research-Ruturaj GowaikarTwo recent events highlighted the importance of satellite-based sensors in climate change research. The first being an announcement about BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation and data sharing. And the second being the publication of the 6th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). BRICS agreement on Remote Sensing satellitesThis agreement was signed at a meeting chaired by India on 17 August and saw the presence of the respective chiefs of the space agencies of BRICS states. The chairman of ISRO and Secretary in the Department of Space, K. Sivan, was the signatory on behalf of India.This agreement paves a way to form a virtual constellation of six satellites already in orbit, and their respective ground stations at Cuiaba of Brazil, Moscow Region of Russia, Shadnagar–Hyderabad of India, Sanya of China, and Hartebeesthoek of South Africa. The satellites are CBERS-4 (jointly by Brazil and China), Kanopus-V type (of Russia), Resourcesat-2 and -2A (of India) and GF-6 and ZY-3/02 (of China).The CBERS-4 is a second-generation satellite of the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite Series. It is equipped with a MUXCam (Multispectral Camera), PanMUX (Panchromatic and Multispectral Camera), IRS (Infrared System) or IRMSS-2 (Infrared Multispectral Scanner-2), and WFI (Wide-Field Imager). All these sensors make it ideal to carry out its mission objectives of monitoring forest and water resources. The Russian Kanopus-V is a minisatellite launched with an aim to monitor the Earth's surface, the atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere and study the probability of strong earthquake occurrence. Sensors on it are PSS (Panchromatic Imaging System), MSS (Multispectral Imaging System), MSU-200 (Multispectral Scanner Unit). These sensors enable it to monitor land surfaces, sea surfaces, and ice sheets as well.Indian satellites Resourcesat-2 and -2A have a mission objective to provide remote sensing data for integrated land and water resources management at the micro-level. On-board sensors allow them to acquire images in four spectral bands ranging from Visible and Near-Infrared (VNIR) to Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) wavelengths. These sensors are Advanced Wide-Field Sensor (AWiFS), Linear Imaging Self-Scanning Sensor-3 (LISS-3), and Linear Imaging Self-Scanning Sensor-4 (LISS-4).The Chinese GF-6 (Gaofen-6) is an optical satellite developed under China’s High-definition Earth Observation System (CHEOS). It is the first precision agriculture observation satellite of China, with capabilities of ultra-wide imaging. It can capture images in the NIR spectra. The second Chinese satellite is of the ZiYuan series. The ZY-03 is a civilian satellite with high resolution and stereoscopic mapping capabilities. Stereoscopic imaging is possible due to the offset of 22º between its three in-line telescoping cameras. ZY-03 can also capture images in NIR. Reports indicate that the idea for a BRICS constellation had its origin in a 2016 meeting under the auspices of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. The successful signing of this agreement between India and China is an important milestone for the two countries with little history of formal cooperation in the space sector.IPCC report of 2021The 1st part of the 6th IPCC report has data and analysis on recent improvements in the field of climate science. This includes data on heatwaves, the effect of clouds on climate systems, and data on extreme events like droughts and precipitation at a local level. Such studies were possible as climate models have become accurate due to the incorporation of data obtained from satellite-based sensors. The contribution of data from satellite sensors in IPCC reports is steadily increasing after the 4th report in 2007.Satellite-based sensors have advantages over land-based sensors to monitor essential climate variables (ECVs). They can provide high-quality, continuous data of a region, and the instruments aren’t affected by local weather conditions. Moreover, certain ECVs like gravitational effects of continental ice sheets can only be monitored by satellite-based sensors. The Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) currently specifies 54 ECVs, of which about 60 per cent can be addressed by satellite data.Another factor in the improvement of climate models is the standardization of data processing, sharing, and reporting parameters between space agencies, governments, and scientists of various countries. Organisations and agreements like the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) of the World Research Climate Programme and the Office for Outer Space Affairs of the United Nations promote cooperation in this area. Thus, satellites will continue to provide an ideal platform for climate monitoring and international cooperation. Our Reading Menu1) [Paper] The use of remote sensing to support the application of multilateralenvironmental agreements by Nicolas Peter2) [Paper] Reimagining Social Media Governance: Harm, Accountability, and Repair by Sarita Schoenebeck and Lindsay Blackwell3) [Paper] Escaping the 'Impossibility of Fairness': From Formal to Substantive Algorithmic Fairness by Ben Green4) [Infographics and Article] How satellites are used to monitor climate change This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com
Harrison Schmitt played a key role in training Apollo crews to be geologic observers when they were in lunar orbit and competent geologic field workers when they were on the lunar surface. After each of the landing missions, he participated … Continue reading →
Harrison Schmitt played a key role in training Apollo crews to be geologic observers when they were in lunar orbit and competent geologic field workers when they were on the lunar surface. After each of the landing missions, he participated … Continue reading →
Harrison Schmitt played a key role in training Apollo crews to be geologic observers when they were in lunar orbit and competent geologic field workers when they were on the lunar surface. After each of the landing missions, he participated … Continue reading → The post Space Rocket History #370 – Apollo 17 – Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt first appeared on Space Rocket History Podcast.
The story of Ken Johnston's archive of historic NASA photos and his decision to go public with evidence of the manipulation of those images from the Apollo moon missions is the stuff of legend in the alternative history community. The basic story is that Ken discovered a disturbing situation in the secret halls of our hallowed space agency. At the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, Ken was the Director of the Data and Photo Control Department, responsible for all the photographs and data generated by the contributing scientists from around the world. He also produced and edited the NASA Lunar Sample Information Catalog for each of the Lunar landing missions.One day, Ken enters the room where he sees strange activity. Given that he feels a sense of responsibility for the integrity of the NASA collection, he inquires as to what is going on. He spoke with several people who called themselves “strippers” because they were stripping out details in lunar images that might be hard to explain. That day, they were at the task of painting out the stars in particular lunar images. The unusually lame excuse given was that the stars in the lunar sky would “confuse people.” This was alarming for Ken to discover. He found out also that “smudging out” anomalies on images was commonplace.Ken's story could be counted as a minority report in NASA's branded panorama of American heroics. The US Government and the American people had allocated significant financial and other resources toward the goal of reaching the moon at the behest of our young President Kennedy. The idea was to see what was there, to share that information to the world, and elevate the knowledge of mankind. To discover that the artifacts of that effort might have been manipulated was highly disappointing. It is this scenario being asserted by Ken Johnston, the very human being, who at one time, had watch over the chain of evidence.Dr. Johnston learned to fly in the US Marine Corps and in the 1960's and was one of the five test pilots assigned to work with the astronauts during the Apollo Moon Program at NASA in Houston. His job was to help train the astronauts to fly the Lunar Module. He was one of the Test Conductors and became the Test Director of the TM-5 Lunar Module Training Vehicle that was used to train all the Lunar Mission Astronauts. In 1969, Mr. Johnston was responsible for controlling all the Data and Photographic information generated from the Lunar Missions. He has three BS degrees in Aviation and Aerospace Engineering, a Masters in Theology and his PhD. in Meta Physics. Now retired at the age of 60, Dr. Johnston raises miniature horses in New Mexico.
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How do you manage a situation where your company uses a particular set of tools that cannot be accessed outside of the office? That's the question I am answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 2021 Course Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook More about the Time Sector System The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 175 Hello and welcome to episode 175 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. A common question I am asked is how to manage a situation where the tools you prefer using are different from the tools your company uses. Another variation on this is where your company does not allow you to access the company tools outside of your company or your company's devices. It's a dilemma I know many face. So, that is what I will be answering today. Now before we get to that question, I want to give you a heads up that my Email Mastery programme has just been updated and is now available. This course will teach you the concept of Inbox Zero 2.0 and is designed to help you to get your email under control so you are not being constantly distracted by it and any actionable email is dealt with quickly and effectively. The methods and workflows taught in this course will change your whole relationship with email. It will remove the overwhelm, the thousands of emails sitting in your inbox and will give you a system that requires little effort to maintain. This system works. It has helped thousands of people get back in control of their mail and given them time back to work on more important things. And if you join the course this week, you will be able to buy it for just $39.99 as part of the early bird discount. Full details of the course are in the show notes. If you want to take the stress and strain of managing hundreds of emails every day, this course is for you. Okay, it's time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Stian and Steve. The question is: Do you have any tips and tricks for managing tasks and calendars when you have to use the software your company tells you to use and that cannot be used on personal devices. This makes managing to-dos and calendars very difficult as there are at least two of each. Thank you, Stian and Steven for your questions. Hopefully, we've summarised your questions accurately. This question is about being in a situation where your company has very high standards of security on company materials, software and devices, and this is understandable given news like the recent hack on Microsoft Exchange servers. Now before we start, the first thing I would not advise is to fight the system. The tools and devices a company uses are chosen for a specific reason. A lot of research has generally gone into this by IT departments and while there often is some bias towards the IT department's favoured operating systems, on the whole, they get it right. If your company uses Microsoft's suite of tools, then those are the tools you will need to use. Sure, that can be frustrating if you prefer third-party tools, but that is the way things are and unless you can demonstrate to your IT department that your solution is better than the existing arrangement, you are going to be fighting a losing battle. So, instead of fighting the system, take a step back and look at what tools you are permitted to use. Think of it like the scene in the film Apollo 13 where the engineers have to build a CO2 filter using only the materials on board the Lunar Module. Essentially fitting a square peg into a round hole. I have always said the tools you use to work your system are less important than the system itself. A great system should work with a pen and notebook. If the system you are using to manage your work cannot work with pen and paper, then your system is too complex and the problem is there, not with your tools. All you really need is a place to collect your inputs—your tasks, project notes and other important information. A way to organise those inputs so that what needs doing comes up when you need to see it and you need to be getting on with your work. For collecting, organising and doing you do not need anything elaborate. Now, if your company insists you use their Microsoft suite of tools you have an amazing set of tools that are getting better and better. It might be nice to be able to choose a task manager such as Todoist, Things 3 or OmniFocus, but those options are not on the table here. The only option you have is Microsoft ToDo or Planner. Now, I am old enough to remember a time when to read and respond to my company's email I had to be in the office at my work station. I could not access my company's calendar or email system outside of office hours and that was fantastic! It gave me a natural barrier between work time and personal time. Today, most people no longer have that luxury now they have access to their email and calendars 24/7 and that means work emails arriving at 11 pm on a Saturday night—because there's always someone who thinks sending emails at 11 pm on a Saturday night is a good idea. If you have read the original Getting Things Done book, published in 2001, that was written at a time when most people had to be in their office to be able to see what their projects were and the tasks they had to do. You could not do that from home on a Sunday evening. To do a weekly review, the book advised you to do it on a Friday afternoon before going home. That made sense. All your work-related projects and tasks were there. It was also a nice way to finish the week. So, if you do have to use your company's software, take a step back and review what tools you have. Apply the Apollo 13 mindset. For most people that would be a Microsoft Outlook account that gives you email and a calendar. You will also likely have access to OneNote for note-taking—which is one of the best note-taking apps out there today anyway, and Outlook Mail is excellent—even on a Mac now. Think about it. Many salespeople are given a company car that enables them to visit clients and prospective clients. Most company car drivers do not have much choice about which car they can have. It's usually a medium-range Ford, Hyundai or Toyota. I'm pretty sure if we could choose any company car we'd all be choosing Porsches, Range Rovers or Bentleys. That's not the way the world works… Sadly. The same goes for the tools our companies use. IT would be a nightmare for companies if every employee used different tools to get their work done. We saw this being played out a year ago when there were concerns about the security of Zoom. In the end, IT departments standardised which video conferencing tools employees were allowed to use. Some went with Zoom after they beefed up their security. Others went with Microsoft Teams. So, if we can't change the tools we have to use at work, what can we do to mitigate this? The first thing I would do is to find out all the various inboxes I have where work is coming in. There will be your email inbox, possibly your Slack or Microsoft Teams inbox, plus maybe a SaleForce inbox. Knowing where your work is coming from is the number one priority. Next, create a start of day checklist that includes checking all these inboxes and task lists for new work coming in. Then copy and paste your tasks for the day into one list. Now that might be a third party task manager if you are allowed to do that, or just a simple list in your company approved notes app. This list will form part of your daily task list. All you need is a simple list of tasks you need to complete that day. Another thing worth investigating is whether you can subscribe to your work calendar. I don't usually advise people to put their personal events on their work calendar—who knows who has access to that. But you may find it is possible to subscribe to your work calendar and have that coming into your preferred calendar of choice be that a Google or Apple calendar. In my experience, having two different calendar apps causes conflicts with your time. You will likely double book yourself one day. If you can't subscribe to your work calendar, then try it the other way round and subscribe to your personal calendar—just make sure nobody else can see it. The reality is there are no magic bullets that will miraculously allow your work and personal systems to converge. When you find yourself in a situation where your company essentially locks down their information, the only way you will find a solution is within your work permitted tools. Should you run two systems? Well, it's not impossible but it's not ideal either. But maybe that is the only solution you have. However, no matter how security sensitive your company is, they are not going to stop you from writing down things like “call Charles Grey about the proposal” or “work on Project X presentation” into a third party application. No nefarious corporate spy is likely to figure out what those simple tasks mean. You can use your phone to collect these tasks into your preferred app. But that said, the simplest way to manage this is to just use the company-approved apps. You may not likely them, but if they show you a list of tasks you need to complete each day and you have a notes app where you can keep your notes and project support materials for your projects then you have a system. Maybe a system not using your preferred tools, but at least you have a system. SO, the best advice I can give you if you are in a situation where your company is running multiple tools is to not fight your IT department. By all means, reach out to them to see if you can use your own apps, but you get a firm no, then look at what is available and set up your system within those tools. Make it a routine start of day task to collect all your work tasks from the various inputs your company has into one consolidated list and work from that list each day. One final tip I may suggest that has worked for some people in the past is to use a task manager that will email you a list of your tasks each morning. Todoist does this, for example, and you can set it so it emails you at 5 am in the morning. Then when you get to work, all you need do is print off that list, and use it as not only your task list for the day but also as a collection system. You can write down new tasks onto that paper and when you get home at the end of the enter the new tasks and check off the tasks you did. You can do that as part of your daily planning session. I hope that has answered your question, Stian and Steve, Thank you for the question. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
On Cernan’s second space flight, he was lunar module pilot of Apollo 10, May 18-26, 1969. Apollo 10 was the first comprehensive lunar-orbital qualification and verification flight test of an Apollo lunar module. Cernan was accompanied on the 248,000 nautical sojourn to the moon by Thomas P. Stafford (spacecraft commander) and John W. Young (command module pilot).
It looked like they had a leak from one of the propellant tanks on the Lunar Module. If so, that meant abort! The post Space Rocket History #357 – Apollo 16 – TLI, Transposition & the LM Fuel Leak? first appeared on Space Rocket History Podcast.
On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, striking a responsive chord with the American people. The Apollo program was created to meet this goal, and on July 20, 1969, astronauts of the Apollo 11 Mission became the first humans to land and set foot on the Moon. Apollo 11 Mission image – Astronaut Edwin Aldrin walks near the Lunar Module. National Archives Identifier 16685140 The Moon landing was a stunning achievement that commanded world attention, and thanks to newly discovered film holdings at the National Archives and a digitization partnership with filmmakers, an enriched perspective of the Apollo 11 mission is shown in the recently released documentary, Apollo 11. The documentary features previously unseen large format film footage and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings from the National Archives, allowing viewers to experience the perspectives of the astronauts, the Mission Control team, and the millions of spectators on the ground. The film showcases the days and hours in 1969 when American astronauts took “a giant leap for mankind” into the future. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thehistoryexpress/support
The Digression Podcast Guys were 6 and 2 when Neil Armstrong stepped down from the ladder of the Lunar Module, "Eagle", onto the surface of the moon. In fact, it's very likely, they were asleep at the very moment the United States won the space race. In retrospect, that really sucks, but what the hell, no one can experience every major event that occurs within their lifetimes. Hell, we often understand the significance of a historical event only in retrospect (like the Battle of Coral Sea, for example). Still, it's great to be alive now to remember the day when the underdog United States came from behind to kick some Russian ass 240,000 miles from the planet Earth:July 20, 1969, the Eagle landed! Suck it, Ivan! It's probably safe to say that just about everybody knows something about the Apollo 11 moon landing. Of course, we may be going out on a limb with that assertion. So, for this podcast, we discuss some items that either 1) we didn't really know about before or 2) we just thought were really, really interesting. So, you'll hear about the landing in some detail; where NASA got the flag that was placed on the moon; how Neil Armstrong may have been misquoted; the newscaster who was rendered speechless; what the Wright Brothers had to do with the Apollo mission; the ongoing 50-year experiment; a broken circuit breaker and waiting for swimmers in the Pacific; fuse; astronaut quarantine and a travel voucher for the trip of a lifetime; a dinosaur guidance computer and how the computer coder's sense of humor has changed little in 50-years; and finally, our Dad's contributions to the Apollo missions.
From the Earth to the Moon: A Retrospective Podcast on The Apollo Program
Shows the Apollo program from the point of view of the nine wives of NASA's second group of astronauts, from 1962 beyond the end of the program. The burdens placed on them include maintaining a home while presenting a positive image to the news media, shielding their husbands from any family concerns which could affect their position in the flight rotation or ability to return to Earth safely, and comforting each other in the face of tragedy as Elliot See and Ed White are killed. The episode is anchored by the Apollo 16 mission, during which recently married Ken Mattingly loses his wedding ring in the Command Module, and Lunar Module pilot Charles Duke finds it while Mattingly is performing a walk in deep space. Episode 11 links: Long article about Jan Armstrong Telegraph article about Astronaut Wives Club Interesting blog post about astronaut wives Life Magazine article about Marilyn Lovell Pat White obituary from The New York Times (Sept 8, 1983)
From the Earth to the Moon: A Retrospective Podcast on The Apollo Program
A dramatization of the Apollo 11 first Moon landing in Mare Tranquillitatis ("Sea of Tranquility") is interspersed with flashback sequences of Emmett Seaborn's television interview with the crew of Neil Armstrong, Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin, and Command Module pilot Michael Collins. Episode 6 links: Apollo 11 Pre-Flight Press Conference Apollo 11 Launch Apollo 11 PDI to Touchdown from Apollo Flight Journal FTETTM Apollo 11 Landing Scene FTETTM Buzz Aldrin Communion on the moon scene Apollo 11 EVA Apollo 11 16mm Film Footage
Returns to 1961, and NASA engineer John Houbolt's lonely fight to convince management that the easiest way to land men on the Moon will be to use a separate landing craft employing lunar orbit rendezvous. It then traces the design and development of the Lunar Module by a team led by Grumman engineer Tom Kelly. Covers the selection and training of the first crew to fly it, James McDivitt and Rusty Schweickart (along with Command Module pilot David Scott), and culminates with their first flight of Spider in Earth orbit on Apollo 9. The Apollo 10 lunar "dress rehearsal" is briefly mentioned. Episode 5 links: Overview of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous Excellent Video on John Houbolt and Lunar Orbit Rendezvous Grumman Documentary on Lunar Module Development Interview with Engineer Tom Kelly about the Lunar Module Apollo 9 Launch Apollo 9 EVA Apollo 9 LM Spider in Flight FTETTM Spider in flight scene Bonus: Apollo 10 Onboard Film Footage