Thanks to UFO Updates for the link
By
James Oberg
The great age of exploration in the 1500s witnessed the creation of its own folklore: sea serpents, unicorns and unipeds, the Fountain of Youth and the Seven Cities of Cibola. Not surprisingly, the young Space Age has also witnessed a similar body of myth and legend, based on rumors, travellers’ tales, misinterpretations, wild imaginations, and self-serving fabrications.
This lecture elucidates the most popular of these stories and to trace them to their sources, not merely to refute them but to understand the processes which created them and helped them spread. Their popular appeal is analyzed. Related, authentic mysteries are discussed, along with guidelines for telling the difference. The tone is humorous and sympathetic, not negative.
In a culture of conspiracies, why not imagine a conspiracy to either “fake” the moon flights, or to conceal a vast array of moon bases — and new books, articles, WWW pages, and lectures have appeared on this theme. Meanwhile, many UFO stories around the world are based on honest public misperception of space and rocket activity. The most interesting case occurred in the Soviet Ukraine in the late 1960’s, when secret space weapons tests caused fireballs to appear frequently in the evening sky. The public reported these as “crescent-UFOs” and that’s the way they are recorded in the UFO literature. An official team from Moscow’s Academy of Sciences even published a formal study verifying that the phenomenon was unexplainable in earthly terms. But it was all a coverup of an illegal weapon which the USSR had signed a treaty promising not to deploy. Similar UFO cases from Russia, China, France, Argentina, and the US can be traced back to unusual space activities.
I would address this one comment from Oberg:
Perhaps because NASA has made spaceflight boring, it’s not surprising people seek excitement in alternate perceptions of the newest human frontier, outer space.
Or maybe the American public is just jaded. When a naked ape, the ancestor of a creature that spent its days hiding in trees, coming down to dig groundnuts at peril to life and limb “grows up” and learns to hurl gigantic fountains of fire at the heavens, bearing men and women, that’s the antithesis of boring.
Or maybe it is boring. Maybe blowing away virtual cops and innocent bystanders in “Grand Theft Auto, LA” is more exciting. Or that little gray men are stretching out our buttholes. Or that the government is hiding away secret technologies that will stop the planet from “burning up,” a la the prophecies of the Goreacle at Nashville.
American’s are far too fond of jacking off. We spank are brains daily on the internet, and ejaculate our bizarre beliefs all over the white void of cyberspace.
I make more typos when impassioned, it seems.
More precisely, NASA in its infinite f^$%ing wisdom has attempted to make spaceflight boring. Spaceflight is far from boring, It’s complicated, takes huge amounts of energy, the environment sucks, there’s no gravity, moving from place to place is HARD not to mention deadly if you do the math wrong. Space should be the most exciting, dangerous and fascinating adventure we have. It should blow away Survivor AND the places they go to are exotic and fascinating as well.
But what does NASA do? Make it boring? We should have people living on Mars today! Think of the mileage we could get in the geopolitical arena! “We went to Mars! Do you really think your petty tin-pot dictatorship is going to impress us? We went to Mars! All you know how to do is kill people.â€
But instead we invade countries without the slightest notion of what to do once we are done. We don’t even understand the cultures that we are disrupting. Urrr it makes me sick sometimes. I grew up during the moon landings, We did that freaking trip for about the cost of one godamn Spirit Bomber. We blew thirty years learning how to put wings on a space station and crash it.
Sorry, this got my hackles up for a moment.
I understand your point, and I agree with virtually everything you say. I was looking at it from the angle that with the glut of idle entertainment, ranging from the sacred to the profane, available to the populace now, space exploration is just one more idle entertainment, one more thing vying for their increasingly scattered and short attention spans.
I was there, just like you, glued to the TV screen during the Apollo program. I remember, during one of the landings, the principal of my grade school set up a television on the stage in the cafeteria, for anyone who wanted to sit and watch the mission. A friend told me years later that he and another kid had tried to get me to come out to the play-yard, but I was glued to the screen. I was the only kid up there, most of the time. And that was in the early 70s.
Yet, the world did watch in the moon landings. However, if they had continued, people would have become jaded to that, too. Now, when/if we return to the moon, the whole world will watch, and everyone will be impressed, and then it will become “business as normal,” and Britney Spears And as public interest wanes, budgets will wane, another war will start, and money will be apportioned to build more bombers that might have went to NASA before.
NASA went in the wrong direction, but I honestly find myself less able to fault NASA than I fault our fucking dumbed-down, bullshit news media, and idiot Congressional committees. I wrote a paper on this subject at University: “Space on Shoestring Budget: The Political Responsibility for Challenger” (Political Science hypothesis paper) which required me to go to the Congressional Record and take an in-depth look at the political motivations behind much of the space program, and how those motivations were reflected in NASA budgets. It was really an eye-opener for me.
Since Apollo, the dumbing down of the American populace has stayed in high gear, even as millions have been riding into the future on the backs of a crew of scientists and engineers out of academia that probably couldn’t fill up Candlestick park
If you haven’t read it already, read this article by Seth Shostak at Space.com entitled “When did Science Become the Enemy?”
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_shostak_science_070215.html
The salient quote from that piece I would like to quote here:
“The overwhelming majority of the citizenry has other interests, and looming large among them are the peccadilloes and personal intrigues of the rich and famous. Consider the contrast: in the past week the Space Telescope Science Institute released a startlingly detailed photo of a distant cluster of galaxies, a picture that gives even the non-expert a good idea of the structure of these, the largest entities in the universe. The photo of cluster Abell S0740-an image that would have bedazed every previous generation of humans-probably didn’t even make it to the front section of your local newspaper.”
“However, what did garner front-page ink last week, not to mention huge dollops of chatter on talk radio, was the unexpected death of Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy Playmate and reality TV star.”
That the space program has become a parody of sorts can be laid, imho, at the feet of Congress, the mass-media, and the American educational system, which has failed to inspire and educate millions. The increasing popularity of pseudo-science has been a factor, too, but that can be partly attributed to a failing primary educational system.
NASA itself is made up of a few good men and women, who have been puppets on a string to the Executive Office, to Congress, and to the OMB, AND to a society that has become increasingly jaded from excesses, of all manner and variety. There was also a substantial “brain drain” in the wake of Challenger. They weren’t just leaving out of the “shame of failure.” They were leaving because they knew NASA was offtrack.
Now that there seems to be a renewed interest in returning to the moon, have you noticed what the vehicle looks like?
It IS APOLLO! Granted, a command module beefed up with modern computers and vehicles that will benefit from advances in materials science (no more radar ranging with computers with the capacity of a digital watch, and no more Lunar modules with walls the thickness of tinfoil), but for all intents and purposes, the will be TAKING UP WHERE THEY LEFT OFF.
This was the conclusion I reached in my Challenger paper. The entire shuttle program was a side-trip, a diversion off into a Buck Rogers la-la land. It didn’t make any sense at all, in the context of where the Apollo program had been going. Yet, if Congress had appropriated enough funds for NASA to go with Dornberger’s original plan (two liquid fueled vehicles with auxiliary air-breathing jet engines, pggyback config., a booster and an orbiter), it would have worked. But after Apollo-Soyuz (an afterthought political mission), in the peak of the shuttle development years, we see Congressional appropriations for NASA hitting an all-time low. I actually found a blurb where one Senator in committee praised NASA for “staying on budget and within the timeline.” Of course, staying on budget meant taking shortcuts, and the biggest one was scrapping the Dornberger configuration in exchange for big skyrockets (SRBs), which had never before been used in a man-rated launch facility (save for the escape towers in Mercury/Gemini/Apollo). The second was deciding to skip the air-breathing jet engines, making the shuttle a “lifting body” with the glide ratio of a rock. Voila, we had a vehicle where the only egress after the SRBs lit was an intact landing – and you would get only one chance at that – no go-arounds. The third was necessitated by the SRBs, but it was in a way just an attempt to save face. They just had to have liquid-fueled, throttleable engines, three of em, lest people look at it for what it was – a thundering skyrocket, a spit and shoepolish, brute-force orbital system. So, even though they could have made the SRBs smaller, sans tank and liquids, they went ahead with the liquids, which necessitated that godawful engineering monstrosity called “the external fuel tank” with its lethal foam insulation that led to the loss of Columbia and her crew.
Lastly, they never developed the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicles, which had been meant for use in higher orbits, above the shuttle’s operational ceiling, and also for lunar excursions. And that was that. We went around and around and grew zero-G bacteria in petri dishes.
We were also out of space between ’75-/80, while the Soviets kept throwing their big liquids at the void, getting a lead on us in the actual process of living and working in space. Sure, it was distinctly “Soviet-Bloc” style stuff, but it worked, and that was what mattered.
Then the shuttle flew, in 1980. With 800 “criticality one” items. That is, items for which their was no redundant backup, the failure of which would mean the probable loss of the Challenger and its crew.
All throughout the program, due to lack of funds and components, they routinely cannibalized one orbiter to service another, just to keep them flying. Then there was the mandate to keep the shuttle flying, no matter what the cost, which in turn led to them ignoring the problem with the secondary O-Ring on the SRB unseating in the moments immediately after liftoff. We know how that turned out.
I’m not saying NASA is completely blameless in all this. NASA has been assailed by many problems: a persistent “can-do” sort of attitude even when it wasn’t warranted or wise; playing the “impress the committee” budget game by trying to hide problems and making it all look better than it really was, for the sole intent of keeping the money flowing; becoming so big and decentralized, with so many “managers” that the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing.
So, here we are, 2007, a bloody insane war raging in Iraq that many of the American public seem to have shut out of their minds with the N.I.M.B.Y ethic, and as for our “shuttle fleet,” this is what the NASA page says:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/resources/orbiters/orbiters.html
Operational Shuttle “Fleet”
Discovery (OV-103)
Atlantis (OV-104)
Endeavour (OV-105)
No longer in Service [one blew up, and one burned up]
Challenger (STA-099,OV-99)
Columbia (OV-102)
I wouldn’t call five vehicles a “fleet.” It wouldn’t be a “fleet” in any other industry. Imagine if UPS had a fleet of five of their ticking brown trucks. You get my point.
And losing two out of five. Well, no need to say any more about that.
The second thing apparent in this page is the way Challenger and Columbia are listed as “no longer in service.” This is a kind of unique pathology at NASA to try to, as much as possible, de-emphasize the massive, spectacular failures. It was like one newsman said after Challenger. He noted how, immediately after the accident, the public commentator said “controllers are looking carefully at the situation. Obviously a ‘major malfunction.'” Regarding the “major malfunction” comment, the newsman said, “It was almost like no one could bring themselves to say, “THE DAMNED THING BROKE.”
I think this page still reflects this tendency. And if you never heard about the tragedies, and followed the link to either the Challenger and Columbia pages, you would never know that either had been destroyed, all-dead, all-dead, until you reached the very last link on each page. Up to that point, it’s all successes and milestones.
The final links are:
Challenger:
10. 51-L (1/28/86 – Crew and vehicle lost during launch)
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/mission-51-l.html
Columbia
28. STS-107 (1/16/03 – Crew and Vehicle lost during re-entry 2/1/03)
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/sts-107/mission-sts-107.html
The pages describing the accidents are very “clinical.” For example, this is the last paragraph of the Columbia page:
At 8:59 a.m. the Tire pressure sensor caused an onboard alert that was acknowledged by the crew. Communication with the crew and loss of data occured shortly after while Columbia was at a Mission Elapsed Time (MET) of 15 days 22 hours 20 minutes 22 seconds. The vehicle broke up while traveling at 12,500 mph (Mach 18.3) at an altitude of 207,135ft over East Central Texas resulting in the loss of both vehicle and crew.
And that’s it. All the shit nested at the end of every page. Yet, the failures actually represent greater failures of the Executive Office, the Congress, NASA, and lastly, the American public, for being apathetic about the whole thing.
I wouldn’t expect the public apathy to go away, even if a thrust is made for the moon, again. We have learned fuck-all from our mistakes with the shuttle program, and the next thrust will be a politically motivated buttload, too, if it even gets off the ground, and the money isn’t apportioned to saving the “planet from burning up” a la, the Goreacle at Nashville’s doomsaying.
No one would like to see the space program get back on track more than I. I just have serious doubts given the schizophrenic nature of the Congress, the fickleness and short attention spans of the collective American public, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, etc….that it can ever become anything other than a sideshow.
Except for the unmanned planetary missions and the astronomical and earth satellites. They have given us an enormous wealth of knowledge, and more and more NASA is learning how to accomplish amazing things on a shoestring budget, without risking human life through hairbrained schemes. In terms of NASAs unmanned planetary exploration program, and the various orbital scientific packages, I have nothing but praise for NASA. And for ESA, too.
Here’s the URL to the Shostak story again. I spazzed pasting it before.
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_shostak_science_070215.html
JESUS H. BLOODY CHRIST HERE’S THE LINK
Heh! Thanks.
I think I commented on that piece some time ago, can’t remember exactly when though.