POLITICS SCHMALITICS

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, ewsieg said:

Want to know what is outrageous though @Tigeraholic1, that we have 33k homeless veterans and past presidents, including some of our most recent ones like Biden and Trump haven't done much to improve that number.

 

Yeah, what about Biden?

[romad1]

21 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Yeah, what about Biden?

He was trying to fund VA as much as was practicable because he had a veteran son. 

How many veterans in the Trump extended universe? 

Edited yesterday at 12:20 AM by romad1

[oblong]

“Homeless vets” is the new “moon landing”. Just the lazy reference used to complain about something totally unrelated. “We can land a man on the moon but we can’t….”

 

[chasfh]

10 hours ago, oblong said:

“Homeless vets” is the new “moon landing”. Just the lazy reference used to complain about something totally unrelated. “We can land a man on the moon but we can’t….”

 

I can’t add any more reactions today, but Like.

Actually, this is a sort of flip side thing, isn’t it? “We can land a man on the moon but we can’t [insert Make America Great Again™ thing here]” is kind of the flip side of, “we can [insert thing that doesn’t Make America Great Again™ here], but we can’t help our homeless vets” … gets the same point across.

Edited 12 hours ago by chasfh

[Motown Bombers]

 

[CMRivdogs]

Actually with Musk basically in charge of the Space Program (or so it seems) I'm not sure this administration could find the moon, let alone land on it.

[oblong]

SpaceX is tasked with the lander for Artemis III but NASA recently opened up the option for someone else to do it.  Artemis II, which will go around the moon in a free return trajectory rather than Lunar Orbit, doesn't involve SpaceX.  I would not bet $500 of my own money that we land on Artemis III.

That's what makes me laugh about the "We can land a man on the moon but we can't...." trope.  It was extremely costly and took 400,000 people to do that.  In 1966 NASA was 4.4% of the budget.  In 1968 before we flew a manned Apollo mission, they already cut productions of the Saturn V rockets, 15 total.  2 were kept for Museums and 1 was used for Skylab, 2 were unmanned.  If JFK didn't die when he did there's some that think we never would have even done it.  The drive to do it came from him issuing the charge and then getting assassinated.  Congress couldn't wait to pull funding from Apollo. 

And we're finding out it's not that easy even with modern technology.

We're never going to Mars.  I don't see it.   Check... maybe someone will attempt to go, but they won't land.

 

[gehringer_2]

23 minutes ago, oblong said:

SpaceX is tasked with the lander for Artemis III but NASA recently opened up the option for someone else to do it.  Artemis II, which will go around the moon in a free return trajectory rather than Lunar Orbit, doesn't involve SpaceX.  I would not bet $500 of my own money that we land on Artemis III.

That's what makes me laugh about the "We can land a man on the moon but we can't...." trope.  It was extremely costly and took 400,000 people to do that.  In 1966 NASA was 4.4% of the budget.  In 1968 before we flew a manned Apollo mission, they already cut productions of the Saturn V rockets, 15 total.  2 were kept for Museums and 1 was used for Skylab, 2 were unmanned.  If JFK didn't die when he did there's some that think we never would have even done it.  The drive to do it came from him issuing the charge and then getting assassinated.  Congress couldn't wait to pull funding from Apollo. 

And we're finding out it's not that easy even with modern technology.

We're never going to Mars.  I don't see it.   Check... maybe someone will attempt to go, but they won't land.

It's a scale problem from multiple directions. If you look at the 15th/16th century voyages of exploration, they were relatively large robust projects - multiple ships full of supplies and survival tools, big crews, and they still often suffered terrible losses. These are tiny missions, tiny crews, no support equipment available or even possible - and to lose a crew would not only be tragic for the individuals but politically disastrous for the sponsoring industries/nation.

[oblong]

6 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

It's a scale problem from multiple directions. If you look at the 15th/16th century voyages of exploration, they were relatively large robust projects - multiple ships full of supplies and survival tools, big crews, and they still often suffered terrible losses. These are tiny missions, tiny crews, no support equipment available or even possible - and to lose a crew would not only be tragic for the individuals but politically disastrous for the sponsoring industries/nation.

It was one reason why management at NASA didn't push too hard for more funding. As much fun and cool it was to land on the moon, it was very costly and they knew it was just a matter of time before someone died doing it, let alone failed like Apollo 13.  Every mission had severe points that could have been a disaster.  I could list them all right now.  We just need to see what happened with the Shuttle program.  It's statistics.  

I've watched videos describing how a Mars misssion would work and there's still issues with fuel and weight. 

For scale purposes... a standard schoolroom globe.  The moon is a volleyball.  The space station is currently about a cm above the globe.  The volleyball moon is 17 feet away. Mars is a few miles away.  (the distance to Mars is not absolute as we are in different size orbits around the sun and there's advantages/disadvantages to picking the right time to go).

 

[gehringer_2]

6 minutes ago, oblong said:

(the distance to Mars is not absolute as we are in different size orbits around the sun and there's advantages/disadvantages to picking the right time to go).

which is exactly what drives so much of the risk. You only have the capability to make the trip on closest approach and if something goes wrong and say you miss the return window, you are dead. Magellan's crew could fish, find land and kill wild boar to stay alive if they had to rebuild a broken mast.

[oblong]

3 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

which is exactly what drives so much of the risk. You only have the capability to make the trip on closest approach and if something goes wrong and say you miss the return window, you are dead. Magellan's crew could fish, find land and kill wild boar to stay alive if they had to rebuild a broken mast.

I just watched a video last night talking about how it's not about the fuel to "get" there or to "go that way" but to be able to brake so that you can get into it's orbit, then to land.  It takes fuel to stop!  

Going to the moon they went out on a free return trajectory so that if anything went wrong they would just whip around and come back with no requirement to change anything on their end.  Ironically Apollo 13 was the first one to NOT do that, one of the burns they had to do was to get back on that trajectory.  The landing site they wanted wouldn't have worked on a free return path because the sun and it's shadows had to be favorable or else couldn't keep the perspective on mountains and boulders while trying to land.

[romad1]

7 hours ago, chasfh said:

I can’t add any more reactions today, but Like.

Actually, this is a sort of flip side thing, isn’t it? “We can land a man on the moon but we can’t [insert Make America Great Again™ thing here]” is kind of the flip side of, “we can [insert thing that doesn’t Make America Great Again™ here], but we can’t help our homeless vets” … gets the same point across.

"We can land three armies on the beach at Normandy but..."

"We can pulverize all the cities on Earth in 45 minutes but..."

"We can identify a vaccine for childhood diseases impacting millions and feed the planet robust meals and participate in collective security agreements to prevent undue aggression between the superpowers for the better part of 70 years but..."

 

[gehringer_2]

7 minutes ago, romad1 said:

"We can land three armies on the beach at Normandy but..."

"We can pulverize all the cities on Earth in 45 minutes but..."

"We can identify a vaccine for childhood diseases impacting millions and feed the planet robust meals and participate in collective security agreements to prevent undue aggression between the superpowers for the better part of 70 years but..."

 

and TBH, there will always be things we don't succeed at, but the worst are the things we do know we can do but won't.

Edited 4 hours ago by gehringer_2

[romad1]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

and TBH, there will always be things we don't succeed at, but the worst are the things we do know we can do but won't.

Or chose not to do because its easier to hate the foreigner. 

[Motown Bombers]