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

One of the original TimePods, back in 2012 or so.

I get lots of fraudulent RFQs asking me to provide random items to slightly-misspelled government agencies or university departments. What does the Crown Prince of Nigeria need with 500 Fluke 87 DMMs, anyway? Do the scammers turn around and sell them on Craigslist? Inquiring minds want to know...

-- john, KE5FX

You can never have too many Fluke 87s. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Bounds on the age of the moon from isotope ratio geochronology. Strictly it measures the time since the igneous rock was last in a molten state.

But the problem there was that the management suits didn't want to disappoint the waiting nationwide TV audience despite the engineers misgivings about the overnight frost impacting the seal elasticity.

Werner von Braun was never a fan of putting astronauts on anything other than a liquid fuelled rocket where you at least have some control over burn rate. Once you light the oversized fireworks that are SRBs they go.

Were you not allowed to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing or something?

Those missions could also have gone wrong. Apollo 13 did go wrong but in a way that with a huge amount of inginuity that they were able to survive and live to tell the tale. The world was on tenterhooks as the drama unfolded in realtime until they made a safe return to Earth.

It acted as a spoiler to the viewing figures for movie Marooned which found itself looking behind the times with reality overtaking fiction.

Is that worth 10s of billions of dollars to know? Couldn't a robot scoop some dirt? Think of the thousands of great science studies that could have been done with that cash. The telescopes we could have built. Think of the lives we might have saved with more virus research. The kids we could have fed.

There was no reason to put a schoolteacher into space. It was all theatre, not science.

I'm always amused by ravings about sending out people to "explore space." They explore the insides of a smelly tin can. Space is a vacuum, not much to explore there.

It wasn't essential but it should have been good PR for science education had the launch been successful (and every other one was).

STEM subjects need all the help and good publicity they can get if we are not to be overrun by meedja studdis types, lawyers and accountants.

Professor Brian Cox former front man for D.Ream has gone a long way to making the hard sciences, astronomy and physics in particular sexy again in the UK. The last time there was such a buzz was the Apollo era.

I'm inclined to agree that there is little point to most of the "science" being done on the ISS platform. It is something of a boondoggle, but it is probably better than having Russian ex ICBM and warhead designers working for the highest bidding despotic states.