Re: OT: First astronauts by a private company, at 3:22PM ET *USA*

You've been trolled, Martin. ;)

No doubt a good half of the denizens of SED idolized the Mercury Seven as boys, and no amount of argument is going to overcome that.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Gitmo bay prison uniforms didn't help there either.

They remind me of the ones that ISTR Mattel astronaut toys of the 70's.

Only really needed to keep the astronauts from suffocating if the atmosphere in the capsule escapes. They are not much good for EVA.

I'm going to try to get Elon Musk interested in my idea for the future of high-speed surface-to-surface travel via space. You put the passengers in lightweight pressure suits like that, and sit them in a chair with a small heat shield attached to the bottom. Attach the chairs to a gantry with chains like the swing-ride at the carnival, and put it under an aerodynamic faring.

Once in space the faring pops off and the gantry is spun up and the chairs swing outwards from centrifugal force. at the right moment the chair with heat shield is released and flung outwards on the correct tangential ballistic trajectory; after re-entry the heat shield is discarded and you float comfortably down on your parachute and land in your back yard.

People have already spent as much time on the ISS as it would take to go to Mars. Twice that duration should be doable, especially if you don't feel like you're just wasting time going around in circles.

There's more radiation once you leave LEO, of course. But they'd be carrying a big tank of water, which makes a good shield.

Some things, you do because they're hard.

(I do wish that taxpayers who aren't in favor of this type of activity could opt out of paying for it, though. That would imply that *I* could opt out of paying for things that waste even more money.)

-- john, KE5FX

Eh, I'm more of a Wernher von Braun fan. They let him cut a hole in his office ceiling at NASA to make room for his Saturn V model (

And he even had his own personal Eidophor, or whatever that screen behind him is. That's clout.

-- john, KE5FX

Martin Brown wrote in news:rb2f74$1r7j$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org:

Major Matt Mason Started in 1966 based on Movie Sci Fi space suit appearances, because apollo was not yet 'public' per se.

I wish I still had all of my childhood toys. Though not mainstream, like Hot Wheels and such, though I had some of those too. I had a lot of GI Joe stuff. The Gemini Capsule and John Glenn's 45 rpm recording of his flight on Orange vinyl. That has some value now too.

bitrex wrote in news:5T3BG.429422$ snipped-for-privacy@fx46.iad:

Nope... There will NOT be any skeet shoot type human / space insertion machines.

There MAY be at some point an EM accellerated ramp up a mountainside that ends with an SRB boost, all sub 9G acell.

A damped railgun thing.

Your thing might be a good way to pre-boost a hard payload to space, but no flesh.

Up the side of a mountain to reduce the size requisite of the SRB (s) is a good idea because it uses up less combustibles.

I think we should put a few trillion tons of polar ice on the Moon.

"John Miles, KE5FX" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Nice shot. Thanks.

I have the 50th Aniv proof dollar coin and the 5 ounce version. Neither are being minted any longer.

The dollar was $34 when I bought it last year and is already worth $79.

The 5 ounce is even more rare and is over $100 more than I paid already. I also was going to buy the Gold, but they had already sold out of it.

I wish I still had my Saturn 5 Apollo 11 mission rocket model. Cool stuff. I was only 9 then.

I saw some interview with one of the guys one that mission, during re-entry he kept his finger on the radio button so that if he saw the autopilot correcting indicating that the wing was breaking up he could give ground control his opinion on their damage assessment, no doubt with lots of swear words

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The thermal tiles were seriously impressive as a piece of technology.

The thing wrong with the shuttle was more that it was just too ambitious and cutting edge with far too many possible single points of failure. Much of the vulnerabilities came from military requirements for its use and in particular landing with a large payload.

Cars no longer dribble their vital fluids on the drive like they used to in the good old days of packed glands. Mechanical seals were essential to the operation of space vehicles (and submarines) where it is critical that you do not suffer any kind of routine leak with normal usage wear.

Robotic probes today can do an impressive amount of stuff. That wasn't true back in the Apollo days when men on the moon were the most reliable way of getting some decent geological samples back. NASA Apollo landings got us about 380kg of moon rock back with some geologically choice specimens whereas the three successful Russian Luna robotic probes only managed a grand total of 0.3kg random rocks all up. Some specimens have been sold for eye watering prices (and some "moon" rocks in museums have been swapped for similar looking terrestrial rocks to feed the market).

Until you do detailed isotope ratio analysis or rare earth signatures on them the substitutions are not obvious even to a trained geologist.

Seriously stupid, and deadly. Replaceable ablative heat shields would have been cheaper and safer, but there was that fantasy of launching a shuttle flight every week, like a commuter bus.

That, and being useless.

Did shuttle scientists invent the o-ring? If their seals were so good, why did Christa McAuliffe die? Why was she even on Challenger?

Right. The shuttle took massive funding away from robotics, just to kill some astronauts.

That wasn't

What use is moon dirt? It's not very interesting, and could have been returned by a dozen robotic scoops for the cost of one manned moon mission.

NASA Apollo landings

What was learned from that 380 kg? Where is it now?

The moon shots were theatre, and the rocks are useful as museum pieces.

The tiles were fine. The issue with Columbia was the reinforced carbon/carbon composite on the leading edges of the wings. They got bashed in by a supersonic Nerf ball.

Besides the expense of the shuttle program, it required all its payloads to be man-rated, which made them much more expensive too.

They inspired a whole generation of young scientists and engineers, including yours truly, and brought back national confidence seriously dented by Sputnik and Gagarin.

It's mostly a cultural activity, like high energy physics and gravitational-wave astronomy, but that doesn't mean it's valueless.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'm thinking of the millions of kids that gathered to watch live TV in their schoolrooms, to see Challenger explode and kill a schoolteacher.

NASA invented reality-TV :-).

On Tuesday, June 2, 2020 at 8:49:14 AM UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com

No question there, a lot of kids saw that and were permanently turned off. But a few others saw it and reacted differently. They might not have been sitting up front near the TV. Maybe they weren't even paying attention until things went wrong and people started freaking out. Next semester, maybe they signed up for some extra math and physics classes. To assess the benefits of manned spaceflight, you would need to measure the consequences of that sort of thing. Good luck with that.

But hey, maybe if we give NIF another $5E9, they'll get that whole fusion thing working. They're a good customer of yours, aren't they? I haven't done any business with them (and probably won't, now), but SpaceX once bought one of my boxes, so that's probably why I'm a fan of what *they* do. :)

-- john, KE5FX

I see zero benefits to manned spaceflight, except to demonstrate over and over that space is extremely hostile to life.

They were once, when they were building the thing. Long time ago. We did the master timing system and the beam modulators. We did get a nice award for the lobby.

What did they buy?

We get all sorts of small, weird orders. Like, for instance, a little laser driver from Apple, or a 12-volt wall wart from Univ. of Vienna.

I liked most of my teachers, but I could think of a couple where that would have been pure wish fulfillment. ;) (Not a spiritually healthy attitude, for sure.)

In any case, a great many have been inspired by stories that didn't have happy endings: The Morte D'Arthur, Le Chanson de Roland, the Elder Edda, and many more. I'm not sure that teaching school lessons from space quite rises to the level of the battles of Mt. Badon, Roncesvalles, pr Ragnarok, of course.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Well, we all die sometime. How we die, and for what purpose, is a first-order question. Where we do it is a second-order question.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs