Space Day 2012 from Jim Cline's viewpoint
The internet news this morning had no word of Space Day 2012, but instead was steeped in politicos pointing fingers claiming conspiracy of one brand of religio-gunmen brand vs some other religio-gunmen brand; also another "lone gunman" clad in all-black calmly killing a dozen helpless defenseless strangers in a theater in Colorado - but no mention of the spectacular achievement of people cooperating together on a big project, reaching a milestone way back on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the surface of the Moon, soon followed walking on the Moon by "Buzz" Aldrin.
July 20, 1969, thus eventually became "Space Day" each July 20 in later decades, a time for space activists to set up booths to tell about the wonderous potentials of space.
But the media clearly knows it shapes public opinion through what it portrays as "news" and the spin-opinion those news articles are wrapped in. Well, I want to write a July 20 Space Day 2012 blog post today, honoring a better America, even though apparently my writings here don't seem to find their way to the outside world. That no American currently walks on the Moon, makes it all a news non-item, of course. Still, there ought to have been mention about Space Day.
Space colonization advocates cheered that first Moon landing back in 1969; but fact is, that the Moon landing and first Moon walk only happened then as a "move" in the "Cold War" game with the Soviet Union, both of whom saw each other as having the goal of world domination through military action, and the Moon was seen as a high ground from where missiles could be launched against the "other side." The subsequent years have accented peaceful uses of space, yet has become mere business-profit-maximization guided, instead of guided by civilization-quality-and-sustainability principles.
Perhaps it is "The media givith, and the media taketh away," since the Apollo project itself was instigated by a media article in a Sunday Parade magazine insert in the Sunday newspaper, which had on its cover an artist's graphic portrayal of an imaginative scene of domes and missile launch batteries on the Moon's surface, put there by the Soviets and aimed at us Americans.
This of course "pushed the buttons" of the American public which was freshly recovering from the Cuba missile crisis (where the Soviets were putting nuclear-tipped rockets aimed at us, mere miles off the Florida shores) and the resulting spread of info of how to build emergency fallout shelters, and the public was aware they would have at most some fifteen minutes to get to such a shelter, if the mad men got to pushing the nuke-rockets at each others' countries, us being one of them. We had breathed easier when Cuba backed down re hosting Soviet nuclear tipped rockets aimed at America, no 15-minute warning then, mere seconds to go boom on America from Cuba. But now the media clearly showed how an even more impregnable launch site could be made on the Moon.
Now note that the subject was not one of can humans actually travel to the Moon and back, building a research outpost there on the Moon; it was from the start a portrayal of the Moon being used as a military fortress. And that vision was what got the American public to fork up the considerable money to create the Mercury-Gemni-Apollo project - an amount of money that was less than the sum of quarters that kids put into arcade machines during the same time span back then, or the money that women spent on cosmetics in the same time period. Yet it was a huge amount of money to go the the Moon and back, and only the raw fear for survival got us to clamor for creating a counter-assault on the Moon in conflict with the Soviets.
Surely people can achieve far better things than war games. Yet, the reality-testing of even the recent past, shows the actual data, that in fact people do not choose to do far better things. "But we could have and still can do" I mentally protest. That the facts of the past don't support that fantasy I have, still has not fully sunk into my mind. And that same "media" has suppressed intensely the vision I showed starting in 1989, the "KESTS to GEO" concept, and industry-media-politics still hides those potentials for achieving far better things. Why?
Having indulged in the above rant, much as I have done on prior Space Days of recent years, I now can focus on the booby prizes, the leftover efforts of exploring and utilizing space, that have continued. The International Space Station circles the Earth some 200 miles overhead, now with five men and a woman aboard, ready for receiving a lot of supply spacecraft in the near future, some of them even private industry achievements; this orbiting facility represents the best compromise we can make re space potentials at this time. In a couple of weeks a very complicated new type effort to land a robot on the surface of Mars is set to happen, and if it works as designed, will enable some subsequent years of the robot Curiosity exploring Mars and calling home about what it finds there. Other robotic spacecraft are busy watching other planets including one headed to Pluto, while the old Hubble space telescope reports finding another moon of Pluto. I cheer all these very difficult space efforts on; they appear to be the best that humanity can do at this time, (despite that humanity blew the chance to do so extremely much better) considering that things like people doing shoot-em-ups and blow-em-ups still getting most of the attention, instead of people doing constructive projects based on long-range wisdom.
But the eccentric hoop-shaped internal-centrifugally-supported electrically powered space transportation structure (called KESTS to GEO, http://www.kestsgeo.com ) spanning between the Earth surface and the Geostationary Earth high Orbit, providing continuous lift and lowering of large payloads from ground to high orbit without use of any rocketry, still remains a hidden enormous potential for space, and quite possibly is what stimulates private investors to fiddle with the rocketry game, positioning themselves to get powerfully in the enormous space game when KESTS to GEO (or whatever they choose to name it pretending it was all their thing all along) so as to continue their big business games for wealth and influence over other people.
July 20, 1969, thus eventually became "Space Day" each July 20 in later decades, a time for space activists to set up booths to tell about the wonderous potentials of space.
But the media clearly knows it shapes public opinion through what it portrays as "news" and the spin-opinion those news articles are wrapped in. Well, I want to write a July 20 Space Day 2012 blog post today, honoring a better America, even though apparently my writings here don't seem to find their way to the outside world. That no American currently walks on the Moon, makes it all a news non-item, of course. Still, there ought to have been mention about Space Day.
Space colonization advocates cheered that first Moon landing back in 1969; but fact is, that the Moon landing and first Moon walk only happened then as a "move" in the "Cold War" game with the Soviet Union, both of whom saw each other as having the goal of world domination through military action, and the Moon was seen as a high ground from where missiles could be launched against the "other side." The subsequent years have accented peaceful uses of space, yet has become mere business-profit-maximization guided, instead of guided by civilization-quality-and-sustainability principles.
Perhaps it is "The media givith, and the media taketh away," since the Apollo project itself was instigated by a media article in a Sunday Parade magazine insert in the Sunday newspaper, which had on its cover an artist's graphic portrayal of an imaginative scene of domes and missile launch batteries on the Moon's surface, put there by the Soviets and aimed at us Americans.
This of course "pushed the buttons" of the American public which was freshly recovering from the Cuba missile crisis (where the Soviets were putting nuclear-tipped rockets aimed at us, mere miles off the Florida shores) and the resulting spread of info of how to build emergency fallout shelters, and the public was aware they would have at most some fifteen minutes to get to such a shelter, if the mad men got to pushing the nuke-rockets at each others' countries, us being one of them. We had breathed easier when Cuba backed down re hosting Soviet nuclear tipped rockets aimed at America, no 15-minute warning then, mere seconds to go boom on America from Cuba. But now the media clearly showed how an even more impregnable launch site could be made on the Moon.
Now note that the subject was not one of can humans actually travel to the Moon and back, building a research outpost there on the Moon; it was from the start a portrayal of the Moon being used as a military fortress. And that vision was what got the American public to fork up the considerable money to create the Mercury-Gemni-Apollo project - an amount of money that was less than the sum of quarters that kids put into arcade machines during the same time span back then, or the money that women spent on cosmetics in the same time period. Yet it was a huge amount of money to go the the Moon and back, and only the raw fear for survival got us to clamor for creating a counter-assault on the Moon in conflict with the Soviets.
Surely people can achieve far better things than war games. Yet, the reality-testing of even the recent past, shows the actual data, that in fact people do not choose to do far better things. "But we could have and still can do" I mentally protest. That the facts of the past don't support that fantasy I have, still has not fully sunk into my mind. And that same "media" has suppressed intensely the vision I showed starting in 1989, the "KESTS to GEO" concept, and industry-media-politics still hides those potentials for achieving far better things. Why?
Having indulged in the above rant, much as I have done on prior Space Days of recent years, I now can focus on the booby prizes, the leftover efforts of exploring and utilizing space, that have continued. The International Space Station circles the Earth some 200 miles overhead, now with five men and a woman aboard, ready for receiving a lot of supply spacecraft in the near future, some of them even private industry achievements; this orbiting facility represents the best compromise we can make re space potentials at this time. In a couple of weeks a very complicated new type effort to land a robot on the surface of Mars is set to happen, and if it works as designed, will enable some subsequent years of the robot Curiosity exploring Mars and calling home about what it finds there. Other robotic spacecraft are busy watching other planets including one headed to Pluto, while the old Hubble space telescope reports finding another moon of Pluto. I cheer all these very difficult space efforts on; they appear to be the best that humanity can do at this time, (despite that humanity blew the chance to do so extremely much better) considering that things like people doing shoot-em-ups and blow-em-ups still getting most of the attention, instead of people doing constructive projects based on long-range wisdom.
But the eccentric hoop-shaped internal-centrifugally-supported electrically powered space transportation structure (called KESTS to GEO, http://www.kestsgeo.com ) spanning between the Earth surface and the Geostationary Earth high Orbit, providing continuous lift and lowering of large payloads from ground to high orbit without use of any rocketry, still remains a hidden enormous potential for space, and quite possibly is what stimulates private investors to fiddle with the rocketry game, positioning themselves to get powerfully in the enormous space game when KESTS to GEO (or whatever they choose to name it pretending it was all their thing all along) so as to continue their big business games for wealth and influence over other people.
Labels: Space Day 2012
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