Monthly Archives: February 2010

Astronauts with Personality — Please!! …Following the Mars Society Convention 2010: STURGISSSSS!!

Immediately after the Mars Society Convention we’re going to Sturgis to party, drink hell and shoot machine guns — depending upon how much money we have left after whiskey. If you don’t have a bike — no problem. You can rent from a Harley dealer in Ohio or on the way. We’re camping along the side of the road. Basically, this is a balls reenforcement project for Men who are WORKING HARD to see humans on Mars in their lifetime. If you want to go incognito that can be arranged (for example, if you are James Cameron)…no women invited. They will meet us in Sturgis.

Rebels only.

It’s not personal, #ItsNotYouItsDefinitelyUs. If you’re tired of marriage to or dating a passive characterless ass-kissing academic limp-dicked system-worm give him a few days riding under the stars to Sturgis. We’re ramping testosterone among advocates of Humans to Mars. It’s become a requirement of our passionless world. This is an unsanctioned event without supervision very intentionally fatal to betas. Have bail ready.

Update: get a motorcycle license now from your local Harley dealer following a two day lesson for less than $200.
Since artists interested in promoting ‘humans to Mars’ are of any gender, it is encouraged that women either form a girls-trip to Sturgis or meet us there. In theory it would be possible to meet periodically along the way, but, that would be unlikely. Impossible, in fact. If you look like Angelina Jolie you could try, but it still won’t help. There’ll be enough women along the way.

Google Search:
“Masculate” 14,900 results.
“Emasculate” 309,000.  This is part of the problem.

(If you show up with anything other than a Harley or KTM 950 Adventure you’ll be disinvited. No exceptions. That includes you and your bullshit Triumph Angelina.)

Oh God I love this blog

James Cameron…Lone Voice in the Wilderness

James Cameron, the writer and director of “Avatar” and “Titanic,” served on the NASA Advisory Council from 2003 to 2005, and has led 6 deep ocean expeditions.  He is currently a co-investigator on the Mars Science Laboratory Mastcam team and a lifetime member of the Mars Society.  (This commentary also appeared in the February 5 edition of the Washington Post.)

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Rockets Run on Dreams

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What do rockets burn for fuel? Money. Money that is contributed by working families who have mortgages and children who need braces. And why do the American people support our efforts in space? Because they still believe, to some extent or another, in that shining dream of exploring other worlds. So it could be said that rockets really run on dreams.

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The exploration of space is the grandest adventure challenging the human race. As a filmmaker I have celebrated this greatest of dreams in my movies and documentaries, and I remain as passionate about the discoveries ahead as I was when I was a kid. So it was with some trepidation that I waited for the NASA budget to be unveiled this week. I was concerned that amid the nation’s fiscal crises, space exploration would fall off the priority to-do list. But the new NASA budget reveals a pathway to a bright future of exploration in the coming years. It simply reflects the deep changes and hard decisions necessary to accomplish that goal.

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Last year President Obama instructed the Augustine commission to report on the likely prognosis for NASA’s exploration activities. After months of study, the conclusions the panel released last October were gloomy. The Constellation program, implemented in XXX and designed to put humans back on the moon by 2020, could not possibly succeed within that timeframe or for the budgeted amount, it reported.

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In response, the president and NASA have crafted a bold plan that truly makes possible this nation’s dreams for space. Their plan calls for the full embrace of commercial solutions for transporting astronauts to low Earth orbit after the space shuttle is retired next year. This frees NASA to do what it does best: deep space exploration, both robotic and human. By selecting commercial solutions for transportation to the International Space Station, NASA is empowering American free enterprise to do what it does best: to develop technology quickly and efficiently in a competitive environment.

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As Peter Diamandis, chairman of the nonprofit X-Prize foundation, said in a recent blog, “The U.S. government doesn’t build your computers, nor do you fly aboard a U.S. Government-owned and -operated airline. Private industry routinely takes technologies pioneered by the government and turns them into cheap, reliable and robust industries.” When the shuttle is finally retired after more than three decades of service, the United States will be dependent on the Russian Soyuz to get our astronauts to the International Space Station, at a cost of $50 million per person. But under the new NASA plan, private industry will take over this capability within a few years, much more quickly than Constellation would have, and at a competitive price.

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The money saved will be plowed into research and development of robotic explorers that will act as precursors and technology demonstrators, paving the way for human exploration of the moon, asteroids and Mars. Additional funding has been committed to the development of advanced propulsion technology, which can bring down the cost of spaceflight. And the space station’s lifespan will be extended several years, which in turn will increase the science yield and satisfy our international partners. This international cooperative effort is important as a model for how future large-scale missions will be organized and funded. In addition, money is being made available to both Earth and planetary science, which can help us understand climate change on our own world and the alien processes at work on some of the other worlds in our solar system.

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Over the past 15 years, I have gotten to know a lot of people at NASA while working on projects to advance space and ocean exploration. I’ve found that many, if not most, started as starry-eyed childhood dreamers. Maybe they loved science-fiction stories, with their promise of alien worlds, or maybe they were geeks like me, peering through a telescope in the back yard until their moms yelled again for them to come inside, “it’s a school night!” They grew up to become engineers, brilliant planetary scientists and steely-eyed missile men, who collectively have pushed our human presence out to the moon and our robotic presence not just to Mars but to the outer reaches of the solar system. I applaud President Obama’s bold decision for NASA to focus on building a space exploration program that can drive innovation and provide inspiration for the world. This is the path that can make our dreams in space a reality.

What the Hell Happened to Our Space Program?? Can you imagine the Right Stuff generating these fucking headlines??

ONN: NASA Scientists Plan to Approach Girl by 2018
“Our backup plan: using the Hubble Space Telescope to take high-resolution photos of her and
then masturbating furiously while hating ourselves for it.”

NASA Launches David Bowie Concept Mission
“These new suits are veneered with a protective silver lamé to complement the multicolored lightning bolts emblazoned across the helmets’ sun visors. They’ve also been updated with several improved components to ensure the team is completely safe when it’s time to leave the capsule—if they dare.”
NASA Is An Industrial Subsidy In Disguise
I grew up with the romantic notion that NASA is not merely a government agency, but an organization dedicated to bravely propelling the human race forward into a glorious future of scientific advancement and discovery […but…] NASA exists largely to provide an economic boost to the American aerospace industry, particularly Boeing. NASA gets away with this thinly veiled pork-barrel politicking, the piece contended, by distracting the public with “bread-and-circus” space missions that emphasize thrills over genuinely useful scientific discovery.>
Consider the hoopla surrounding John Glenn’s return flight to space. He got a ticker-tape parade and front-page coverage, but what did science actually gain? …it’s time we started making NASA accountable for its wasteful, PR-driven expenditures.
NASA Baffled by Failure of Straw Shuttle
$68 billion straw space shuttle [… ] “It was nice and crisp and dry,” Toshikima said. “Which is the best condition for straw headed away from the earth’s gravitational pull.” The Explorer 2, like its predecessor, was headed for the sun, where it was to be the first spacecraft to land on a star. “We’d hoped to bring back and study sun rock,” Toshikima said.”
NASA Announces Plan to Bring Wi-Fi to Its Headquarters by 2017
An ambitious mission to make Houston’s Johnson Space Center wireless-Internet capable within one decade. We are not content to rest on our laurels. It may seem like an impossible task, but if we commit all of our focus, technology, and resources, we can get Wi-Fi into NASA’s offices and research labs within our generation.”  Griffin was confident that NASA’s estimated $655 million plan to install a wireless broadband router by 2017 could reap huge benefits for the entire space agency.
NASA has suffered from a public credibility crisis in recent years due to perceived incompetence, a failed mission to Mars, the damaged and dormant Hubble telescope, and its inability to procure a long enough USB cable to reach all the way over to engineer William Chen’s cubicle. But NASA officials argue that a secure high-speed line could prevent disasters such as a 2005 incident in which an employee attempting to download the movie trailer forCheaper by the Dozen 2  crashed the Mission Control Center mainframe computer for two weeks.
NASA Embarks on Epic Delay
The unprecedented delay has reportedly brought together the nation’s foremost aerospace engineers, whose combined efforts have already added 18 months of rescheduled meetings to the daring mission. “Delays of this magnitude were once the stuff of science fiction,” Scolese told reporters during a noon press conference Monday that actually started around 3:15 p.m. “But now, thanks to a number of long-overdue technological advances, this historic delay will stretch the very limits of what humankind can push back indefinitely.”
“Never before has man dared to fall behind on such a sweeping scale,” said Brenda Win, head administrator of the newly established delay-management team, which is expected to be named sometime next month or maybe the month after. “A postponement like this only happens once in a lifetime. This will be the series of setbacks you’ll tell your grandchildren about.”

“When we have finally finished here, the universe will see there is no end to what man can entangle in red tape,” Scolese wrote in the stirring statement. “Even as we speak, our top people are dragging their feet on what will become the longest and most profound delay in the planet’s history.”

 

“Mark my words: In our lifetime, NASA will delay putting a man on Mars,” Scolese continued. “Well, maybe not in my lifetime. I’m almost 50.”
Vows to Put Man on Moon Before It Disappears At End of Month
The president went on to propose the construction of a lunar capsule that could land on a concave surface.
NASA Delays Shuttle Launch Out of Sheer Habit
NASA To Send Earth Into Space

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/35905

People Living On The Moon
“Golden throne so tourists can have their pictures taken as the Moon King.”
Scientists Ask Congress To Fund $50 Billion Science Thing
I have always said that science is more important than it is unimportant,” Committee chairman Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN) said. “And it’s essential we stay ahead of China, Japan, and Germany in science. We are ahead in space, with the NASA rockets going to other planets, so we should be ahead in science too.”
“Now, I’m no science major, but if I’m being told by a group of people that the protons, neutrons, and electrons need unifying, then I think we owe it to the American people to go in and unify them,” Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) said. “After all, isn’t a message of unity what we want to send to our children?”
Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked
According to Armstrong, he was forced to reconsider every single detail of the monumental journey after watching a few persuasive YouTube videos, and reading several blog posts on conspiracy theorist Ralph Coleman’s website, OmissionControl.org.  “This is all just common sense, people,” he added. “It’s the moon. You can’t land on the moon.”
NASA Announces Plan To Launch $700 Million Into Space
fficials at the Kennedy Space Center announced Tuesday that they have set Aug. 6 as the date for launching $700 million from the Denarius IVspacecraft, the largest and most expensive mission to date in NASA’s unmanned monetary-ejection program. “This is an exciting opportunity to study the effect of a hard-vacuum, zero-gravity environment on $50 and $100 bills,” said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who noted that prior Project Denarius missions only studied space’s effect on fives and singles.

New York Times Favors MARS FIRST!! $&%# the $*&@ Moon!

In its lead editorial February 9, the New York Times called on the Obama administration to make human missions to Mars the goal of the American human spaceflight program. A complete discussion of the current political situation and potential initiatives for dealing with it will be held at the 13th international Mars society convention, August 5-8, 2010, Dayton Mariott, Dayton, Ohio. Registration for the conference is now open at www.marssociety.org.

Commenting on the administration’s new space policy released February 2, the Times said:

A New Space Program

February 8, 2010

President Obama has called for scrapping NASA’s once-ambitious program to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020 as a first step toward reaching Mars. That effort, begun by former President George W. Bush, is behind schedule and its technology increasingly outdated.

Mr. Obama is instead calling on NASA to develop “game-changing” technologies to make long-distance space travel cheaper and faster, a prerequisite for reaching beyond the Moon to nearby asteroids or Mars. To save money and free the agency for more ambitious journeys, the plan also calls for transferring NASA’s more routine operations — carrying astronauts to the International Space Station — to private businesses.

If done right, the president’s strategy could pay off handsomely. If not, it could be the start of a long, slow decline from the nation’s pre-eminent position as a space-faring power. We are particularly concerned that the White House has not identified a clear goal — Mars is our choice — or set even a notional deadline for getting there. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Congress need to keep the effort focused and adequately financed.

The most controversial element of the president’s plan is his proposal to scrap NASA’s mostly Moon-related technology programs that have been working to develop two new rockets, a new space capsule, a lunar landing capsule and systems for living on the lunar surface. Those efforts have been slowed by budgetary and technical problems. And at the current rate, the Moon landing would likely not occur until well after 2030. The technologies that looked reasonable when NASA first started in 2005 have already begun to look dated.

A lunar expedition would be of some value in learning how to live on the Martian surface but would not help us learn how to descend through Mars’ very different atmosphere or use that planet’s atmospheric resources effectively. Nor would it yield a rich trove of new scientific information or find new solutions for the difficulties of traveling deeper into space.

The president’s proposal calls for developing new technologies to make long-distance space travel possible: orbiting depots that could refuel rockets in space, lessening the weight they would have to carry from the ground; life-support systems that could operate indefinitely without resupply from Earth; new engines, propellants and materials for heavy-lift rockets; and advanced propulsion systems that could enable astronauts to reach Mars in a matter of weeks instead of roughly a year using chemical rockets.

Leaping to new generations of technology is inherently hard and NASA’s efforts may not bear fruit in any useful time period. To increase the odds of success, Congress may want to hold the agency’s feet to the fire and require that a specified percentage of its budget be devoted to technology development.

The idea of hiring private companies to ferry astronauts and cargo to the space station is also risky and based on little more than faith that the commercial sector may be able to move faster and more cheaply than NASA. The fledgling companies have yet to prove their expertise, and the bigger companies often deliver late and overbudget.

If they fail or fall behind schedule, NASA would have to rely on Russia or other foreign countries to take its astronauts and cargoes aloft. That is a risk worth taking. It has relied on the Russians before when NASA’s shuttle fleet was grounded for extensive repairs. It would seem too expensive for NASA to compete with a new rocket designed to reach low-Earth orbit — far better to accelerate development of a heavier-lift rocket needed for voyages beyond, as NASA now intends.

The new plan for long-distance space travel also needs clear goals and at least aspirational deadlines that can help drive technology development and make it clear to the world that the United States is not retiring from space exploration but rather is pushing toward the hardest goal within plausible reach.

We believe the target should be Mars — the planet most like Earth and of greatest scientific interest.

Many experts prefer a flexible path that would have astronauts first travel to intermediate destinations: a circle around the Moon to show the world that we can still do it; a trip to distant points where huge telescopes will be deployed and may need servicing; a visit to an asteroid, the kind of object we may some day need to deflect lest it collide with Earth. That makes sense to us so long as the goal of reaching Mars remains at the forefront.

At this point, the administration’s plans to reorient NASA are only a proposal that requires Congressional approval to proceed. Already many legislators from states that profit from the current NASA program are voicing opposition. Less self-interested colleagues ought to embrace the notion of a truly ambitious space program with clear goals that stir all Americans’ imaginations and challenge this country’s scientists to think far beyond the Moon.

http://nyti.ms/cNdUmQ