Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler New NASA moon project logo unoficially unveiled.

Big space buff. Geekgeekgeek. Project "Orion." The Apollo logo had the 3 main stars of Orion crossing the A. Link here.'
Don't care or want to hear the "money is better spent xxxx" argument. Current NASA budget is $15Bln us, opposed to $430Bl US for our already "equal to the next 20 military budgets combined" "Defense" figure. In my eyes (and you'll never convince me otherwise) it's a bargain at 4x the price.
BTW, the F-22 and F-35 are beautiful aircraft to be sure, but why are we spending $150Bln plus on fighters/fighter-bombers that no one will even bother matching? By the time they even get around to trying the US will be fully deployed with non-piloted UCAVs.

LJ

Hey I am with you that the money used for the space program is money well spent, in my eyes anyway. I have several friends that are employed by NASA.

If only I could pick where my tax dollars went.... I'd gladly divert my defense dollars to space dollars. Much of the technology from space programs does end up in defense programs, of course, but it does result in wider benefits, like Tang and freeze-dried ice cream!

/snark

I'm a space nut, too, and I welcome a return or non-Earth orbital missions.

Yup; I'd prefer the space budget be expanded as well! As far as non-piloted vehicles are concerned, google F107 and F112 just for fun.
Rich.

I don't think Bren meant anything by red in this case, LJ. Sometimes a color is just a color.

Red was just a colour. I should have maybe mentioned something about zebras instead.

While we're talking about space, how about this tidbit... what's next, the dog ate my Zapruder Film?

Bren R.

Yah, that's been going on for a couple of weeks. Apparently someone interviewed a former staffer at the Parkes Observatory in Australia in which the staffer mentioned the tapes and how they sat around for a while then were shipped to JSC or Marshall or somewhere never to be seen again. It's been bandied about on blogs and sites like digg and /. and Space.com since then and just started popping up in the corporate media the last couple of days.

The genesis of the problem was that the EVA was originally scheduled to take place while the Earth was oriented so Goldstone was doing the tracking. When Armstrong requested moving the schedule up a couple of hours (as documented in "A Man on the Moon" by Andrew Chaikin, among others) the tracking schedule was thrown off, so the best that could be gotten live was the Slow-scan video we all know so well, due to the data relay limitations of the day. Slow-scan is incompatible with the NTSC TV signal so what you saw was a monitor shot by a TV camera with the resultant lovely "grainy ghost" picture. So Parkes recorded the NTSC-quality video and stored them and blah blah blah.

Or, of course, that the moon landing didn't actually take place (you know, the whole "distract the public from that pesky Vietnam war", "we're not spending your money on guns and kickbacks... we're going to the MOOOOON", "Hey, Ruskies... we did it first!" propaganda... you know...)

Depends on your point of reference... if you believe what you saw (and well, can never see again - oops!), or if you think that "hey... this is the best we could FAKE outer space at the time... how did we actually GET there in 1969?"... opinions vary.

Oddly enough.. only 6% (about 18 million people) of the US population now regards the lunar landing as a hoax, down from 30% in the early 70s.

Don't think I live to bust your b*lls or anything. Just have to fire up the Devil's Advocate engine when I read "My opinion. Don't discuss."... that and I got to use an image of Uhura, Chekov and a tribble.

Bren R.