New NASA moon project logo unoficially unveiled.

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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

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Don't care or want to hear the "money is better spent xxxx" argument.

Nothing like shutting down debate right away.

Red is the best colour ever. NO OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS!

Bren R.

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.

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Don't care or want to hear the "money is better spent xxxx" argument.

Nothing like shutting down debate right away.

Red is the best colour ever. NO OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS!

Bren R.

Uh huhh. The Agitator(tm) strikes again. I guess you could say I'm as "Red" as any lifelong left-coast Democrat Bubba-lovin' dude whose name here was originally "BlueStater." Or to make a point of it, I could just insinuate that you are an American. Feels good, no? I take it you don't have any subjects about which you've heard all the pros and cons and have made up you mind and just don't want to hear it anymore? My wife already gives me an earful everytime the shuttle goes up.

EDIT: Pssst! Here's a hint: I said I didn't want to hear it. Didn't say you couldn't say it anyway.

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.

Well and fine. But sometimes you've heard all the arguments over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and you just want to state your opinion and be done with it and not have to hear the same old freaking thing again. As far as the moon landing "hoax," well, there are still people who believe the world is round. Secondly, there has to be a point to faking it. No one ever really states a point. Just try to prove it didn't happen (prove a negative, divide by zero). The closest I've seen is that "they" realized very early on that it would be impossible therefore they started with the whole fake thing. And, by the way, somehow got the Russians to say "uh, yeah, they did it. We tracked them the whole way. Yeah, that's the ticket, we are sure they did it..." To which another tinfoil hat type says "well the Tri-lateral Commission and the Masons along with the Illuminati blah blah blah funded by Dupont and General Dynamics..." AAAAHHHHH!!!!! please....... make the lambs stop screaming.

Put me down as one of the round earth people

I don't generally put much stock in conspiracy theories. It takes too many people to make them work, and as Mark pointed out, they need to be motivated. Furthermore, I don't really care. Sometimes, the power of a story to heal and inspire doesn't require it to be proven to everyone's satisfaction. You know, I don't want to put the moon landing up there with religion (or even talk about the latter, thank you very much) but it is enough to me that *I* choose to believe.

I think faking a moon landing and have almost everyone on earth buying it for more than 36 years is by far a more difficult feast than actually landing on the moon

, So congratulations to NASA either way.

Good point. Who could keep such a secret? Besides the populace of Roswell, NM, that is...

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But sometimes you've heard all the arguments over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and you just want to state your opinion and be done with it and not have to hear the same old freaking thing again.

Everyone's heard all the sides. But as soon as you make a statement, there will be dissenting opinions. Stick a Jesus or Darwin fish on your car, someone will say something.

The only place you're going to not have a debate about any concrete statement is when you're in a place surrounded by like-minded people. Learned that last summer when I walked to my car with the "Union and Proud of It" banner across the back window after a wedding social for some friends of Lisa's that met at a Young Liberals convention. A young pair of grits getting it their car behind yelled out "Hey look, the NDP are here"... bit of jawing back and forth... I got into the car pretty pissed off that they'd felt the need to find offense in it, I didn't spend the whole night pointing out the drawbacks and foibles of all the Lib senators and MPs that were there.

One of the other people in my group put it into perspective, "Bren... at least you know they've evolved and are capable of speech these days"... then seriously she added "you know how hard it is to get two people to agree on dinner, never mind politics?"

Now if someone takes issue with my vehicular statement, I'll engage in debate, and leave their mother's promiscuity with barnyard animals out of the discussion.

Bren R.

The secret thing is pretty funny if you think about it. I mean, the NSA thing leaked, the Blue Dress Stain leaked, Watergate, etc, etc. I guess the thing with the moon landings is that the people they trot out as "witnesses" lack any credibility I can detect. They "knew someone who knew a guy" or say "I can't reveal my sources but whoa nelly if you knew who they were your head would explode" or "yeah I was a was a second-tier engineer for Grumman and I got fired because I knew the LM wouldn't work and they said they let me go because I sucked at being an engineer which of course couldn't be the truth."

My favorite is the former Lockheed engineer (dang, what's his name) who never studied astrophysics or particle physics but has "guaranteed" that no one could survive even near-earth orbit much less flying through the Van Allen belt to the moon. He uses as the basis of his blather about the spaceflight hoax the fact that astronauts always say they can't see start most of the time when in near-earth orbit, completely ignoring the effects of atmosphere as a light filter, the lack of such a filter in space, the tremendous glare of the sun and moon and the earth itself which is several orders of magnitude brighter than any other celestial object etc.

Exactly! Can you imagine the logistics nightmare for NASA/Gov. if in fact the LM was a carefully orchestrated hoax? You can only ‘hush’ so many people, right? IMO, most conspiracy theorists overestimates the US government. The US government is just not that capable and clever... the private sector, maybe, but not the government.

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Good point. Who could keep such a secret? Besides the populace of Roswell, NM, that is...

And I'm going to keep right on believing in the Rosswell story until the Govt. finally gives in and shows us the photos to prove to us that it didn't happen.

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The US government is just not that capable and clever... the private sector, maybe, but not the government.

Well, we're not talking about recent governments, either. This was back in the LBJ days before Presidents got sidelined by knotted bread and spent second terms negotiating arms deals with jars of jelly beans.

Bren R.

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The US government is just not that capable and clever... the private sector, maybe, but not the government.

And with that all the conspiracy theorists add to their theory that the moon landing hoax was contracted out to the private sector. Perhaps lockheed martin.

Oh, come on. LM is practically the fourth branch of government.

With the F/A-22 Raptor contract they might as well be

The "L" part can sometimes be considered as "smart" as the average govt. types.

We had a very sensative contract with them and they had to remain anonymous even to the rest of the emplyees in our company. Nobody was to know "who" they were. Including me!

I found myself inducted into the program when I mentioned to the security chief of the program; a good friend of mine; who "they" were, cause nearly half of them were wearing company tie tacks!

One thing that the conspiracy theorists never address is the fact that the moon landing happened during the peak of the cold war- so the USSR was VERY interested in the U.S.'s progress, and they monitored it all the way there and all the way back. If there had been any funny business at all they would have known about it. Not only would they have loved to have discredited and embarrassed the capitalist pigs, but up to this point there had been a "space race" and the Soviets sure didn't want to lose!

All the conspiracy guys come up with is "OMG the shadows are going at different angles!" and other such nonesense that is very easily explainable to those with half a brain.

I like the people who thought that the Mars pictures recently were a hoax.

It said false color, people...