I’ve never read anything by “Vox Day” before, but one of my commenters cited him in a previous post. But having read this, it makes it pretty hard to take anything he (or she) has to say seriously:
I tend to support the faked Moon landing theory myself, not because of any particular detail, but simply based on the theory that if the Official Story is that we landed there, then we probably didn’t.
Note, that’s the only reason stated for disbelief–pure contrarianism. Never mind that it would have been much more difficult to fake it than to actually do it, and that all of the supposed “anomalies” or “proofs” that we didn’t go are readily explained by simple references to actual physics and facts.
I should also add that the Fox Network (which is not the same thing as Fox News) should be eternally ashamed of itself for broadcasting that travesty of a crockumentary on the subject a few years ago, and feeding the loons who believe this stuff.
Jon Goff has some interesting thoughts. I agree, for the most part. If Florida wants to continue to play in the game (at least for commercial vehicles), it has to realize that it no longer has the intrinsic geographical advantage that it’s thought it did for years. This is an issue that is going to take a lot of work with AST to sell, though, particularly for orbital flights.
Apparently, the last Shuttle flight had more foam damage than they thought. It was actually about average. They should keep flying, though. Or shut it down. Stop wasting money and time trying to fix the foam problem.
James Van Allen, discoverer of the magnetic belts surrounding the earth that bear his name, has died. He was one of the most (perhaps the most) notable long-time opponents of the manned space program. He never understood that civil space is about much more than science.
Condolences to his family. It is a loss to science, if not informed space policy debate.
Grant Bonin discusses the papers put out by the Space Frontier Foundation and the GAO on problems with NASA’s exploration plans in todays issue of The Space Review.
It’s worth the read, but being busy working on same plans, I would comment only on this bit:
Human-rating either the Atlas 5 or Delta 4 is likely to be an expensive proposition regardless of the fact that both boosters have already been developed (especially since no one really knows what it means to