Note: my Climate Science resources can now be found here
In 1905, the world was awed by Albert Einstein's Annus Mirabilis (Miracle Year) in which he published five seminal physics papers which changed the way humans view the world. The topics of the papers were as follows:
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Terrence Dickinson - 2005-11
A
special independent
panel recommended to the White House that "NASA should scrap its grand plans
to return astronauts to the Moon and instead explore asteroids or the moons
of Mars". In part, the recommendation is based upon NASA's underfunded budget
(the same constraint which led to trade offs during the design of the space shuttle)
Using history as a guide, Europeans sailed for centuries in the Mediterranean
before they ventured around Africa to India and China. Likewise, we've got
to develop our space-legs by paddling for decade or two between the Earth
and the Moon. On a related note, the Moon is only 3-days away so rescue
missions are always possible. A 9-month trip to Mars makes a rescue mission
almost impossible. Now I think it would be really bad for one country to
attempt this alone. Going back to the moon should only be attempted by a
consortium of space-faring nations. This would be one way to divert money
away from destructive wars (the US has already spent $1 trillion on the
Iraq-Afghanistan conflict) to something constructive like space exploration.
p.s. In the 1990s, president Bill Clinton went to America's partners to ask for help in building the ISS. Wouldn't it be neat if President Barack Obama did the same thing for Altar/Orion/Ares?Now if you really want to feel what it would be like to live on the moon, go back and read Arthur C. Clarke's 6-page short story from 1951 titled "The Sentinel" (this story about lunar geologists was the basis for "2001: A Space Odyssey")
To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year's space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year--a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority--even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.
NASA managers should have learned a lesson (listen
to the engineers) from the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster,
but they didn't. Five years after that the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed
in 2003, we now learn that NASA managers once again did not listen to the engineers. I'm a fan of the manned space program
but NASA has morphed from an organization of "Scientists and Engineers"
to an organization of "Politicians and Bureaucrats" with Dilbert's
boss as their
mascot.
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/columbia/
You can watch the whole program online. Check out the part in 1993 where
NASA decides to save money by outsourcing shuttle refurbishment to the private
sector. (30,000 workers are downsized to 15,000)
In Canada, engineers
wear an Iron Ring on
the pinkie finger of their right hand as a reminder of how human folly can
lead to the loss of human life through poor design or inaction. Maybe people
who manage engineers need to do the same thing.
Click
Eagle Lander 3D to download
a really cool Apollo Lunar Lander simulation for Windows.
The "Apollo 11 short mission" is free but $25 will get you additional missions
and much more functionality. Features: authentic LM cockpit
with 9 functional panel switches; FDAI (8-ball) display; real LM landing
computer displays; mission-specific surface details and radio chatter; support
for both keyboard and joy-stick operation.Links:
Watch John F. Kennedy:
Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort
Hear
John F.
Kennedy: Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs
Spaceflight
Simulators
Space Telescopes
Ground Telescopes (in Southern Ontario)
Hobby Telescopes
Astronomy Software
Other Really Neat Stuff
Radio (including Satellite Radio)
Canada
World
Richard
P Feynman (1918-1988)
Jean
Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)
My Book Recommendations (one guaranteed way for me to tweak humanity's path by affecting internet search engines like Google). While on the topic of books here's an interesting excerpt:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species (1859)
NSR Comment: Here Darwin speaks about "the Creator" but religious fundamentalists would have us believe that he was an atheist while he was certainly a deist. Their oversimplification of most topics serves no one but themselves.
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