Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Sixth Man On the Moon, Dies At 85 (examiner.com) 113
MarkWhittington writes: According to a story in the Palm Beach Post, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, has died at the age of 85. He flew as lunar module pilot on board Apollo 14, which flew to and from the moon between January 31, 1971 and February 9, 1971. His crewmates were Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa. Apollo 14 was the return to flight for the moon landing program after the near disaster of Apollo 13 in April 1970, and explored the Fra Mauro highlands on the lunar surface. NASA marks Mitchell's passing as well.
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Ya know... some jokes at the expense of the deceased can "work" (see Graham Chapman).
Something like this is just bad taste...
Re: Sixth man on the soundstage! (Score:5, Funny)
Just like any orgasm you think you might have witnessed.
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I think WWII was faked. I mean really, you think that somehow we're not able to put a man on the Moon, but we were able to to go from propeller planes to nuclear bombs and cryptography and digital speech scrambling in a few years?
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I do that regularly, I'm Canadian, raised in metric, yet I describe myself in imperial units re height and weight.
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All that circular reasoning seems to have left you a bit dizzy.
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Ya know... some jokes at the expense of the deceased can "work" (see Graham Chapman).
Something like this is just bad taste...
See what I mean about the AC trolling? The thoughtful AC commenters will enjoy just as much anonymity if they had to register accounts.
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Huh? You can't see those objects from an earth telescope.
http://www.telescopes.com/blog... [telescopes.com]
Re: Sixth man on the soundstage! (Score:5, Funny)
Get a fucking telescope. Point at Moon. See Flag. See Rover.
That is only because the telescope manufacturers are in on the conspiracy. The telescopes have built in GPS modules that detect when you are pointing them at the moon, and then they project images of the flag and rover onto the lens. Duh.
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Wow. That is the most bat-shit crazy thing I have seen in quite some time.
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I know you're trolling, but I am curious about one thing...
There were plenty of Apollo missions that were manned but didn't land on the Moon. Apollo 7 stayed in Earth orbit. Apollo 8 took the CSM to the Moon. Apollo 9 tested the LEM in Earth orbit and Apollo 10 took a LEM to the Moon, but didn't land it.
Were all of them faked as well?
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"Can you describe this radiation?"
Well, depending on your DNA it can make your body able to stretch really far, make it able to produce flame, make it invisible, or make it extremely hard and rock-like.
Weird (Score:2)
Not a bad deal, really. (Score:5, Insightful)
He had an interesting life; probably never dull and with few regrets.
Rest in peace, astronaut.
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Possibly few regrets... but think about what it would be like, after that event. You were one of the first few human beings to ever walk on another planet, and now... what? What can you ever do or experience in the rest of your life that is going to compare to that?
Well, sure, maybe there are other highly important things to some people, like having children. But that's very different. That's something almost anyone can do, and countless people do every single day. But walking on another world? That's
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Tell you what I'd do... two chicks at the same time!
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Go read Andrew Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon".
Pretty much all of the moonwalkers (and CM pilots) did not experience what you are talking about.
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Indisputably, his life was one of great accomplishment and fulfillment.
However, it's a shame that his post-NASA career took him down the rabbit hole into pseudo-science and UFOs. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not a bad deal, really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it makes the accomplishment even more amazing for its rather humble origin.
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There are people that are exceptional at some things. They'll be mediocre at many others and dangerously incompetent at some.
Always be on guard for the halo effect.
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take the look to independently investigate the research that has been done in this area. There is a lot of bullshit, but there is also work that has never been refuted—work whose significance level is such that it is above and beyond anything except it is adequate in any other area
Please link to this, I am not aware of such research.
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Google would be your friend on this. A good start would be to simply search "Dean Radin". He has done research of his own, but is also pretty much the current standardbearer in this area, and you will find abundant links connected to his name. If you nose around a bit, you can also find the entire history of the ganzfeld research and all of the back-and-forth that has gone with it. Odds against chance in much of this research are huge, and that is sometimes used as a point against it: that such odds cannot
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You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch'.
That doesn't sound like going down a rabbit hole. It sounds more like waking up.
The really sad thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory xkcd (Score:5, Informative)
relevant infographic [xkcd.com]
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Sad in a philosophical sense (Score:5, Insightful)
The really sad thing here is that it is likely that all of the original Apollo astronauts will be dead before anyone else goes to any non-Earth body.
While I agree that this is sad in a philosophical sense, we should also consider that while we haven't sent people to a non-Earth body, we *have*:
1) Landed on a comet
2) Got up-close-and-personal images of Pluto [google.com]
3) Also Charon [google.com]
4) Discovered over 5000 exoplanets [blogspot.com]
5) Send a probe out of the solar system [wikipedia.org] (*)
6) Maintained a manned space station for the last 18 years [wikipedia.org]
7) Sent several robots wandering around mars [wikipedia.org] and taking pictures
8) (And occasionally vaporizing the miniature martian town centers with its "heat ray" [wikipedia.org])
And a bunch of other things, such as mapping the CMB, finding strong evidence for dark matter, imaged [eso.org] an exoplanet, gotten spectrometer readings of the atmosphere in an exoplanet, found an asteroid with rings, and many minor things.
I'm not sure what the utility of sending a human into space is at the present time. Unless there's an obvious use case, it *seems* like the extra effort of sending a human isn't worth the risk, except as a political statement.
Oh, and we're seriously considering mining asteroids. How cool is that?
(*) Depending on the definition of the boundary, and the current definition is "cloudy" at that point, so that the probe seems to be going into and out of the boundary that defines the solar system edge.
Re:Sad in a philosophical sense (Score:5, Insightful)
The utility of humans in space is the long list of minor things that didn't make it onto your list of headlines. Crystallography, metallurgy, chemistry, biology, physiology, and materials science, to name a few, are all fields that have benefited from research on the ISS.
For having so many small experiments and projects to maintain, a human presence is really not that much more effort compared to building robotic versions of each experiment. The human is also far more adaptable, able to repair and rebuild systems as needed.
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For having so many small experiments and projects to maintain, a human presence is really not that much more effort compared to building robotic versions of each experiment. The human is also far more adaptable, able to repair and rebuild systems as needed.
Well, except that humans are pretty much stuck at the landing site. Mars has half the circumference of earth or about 20000 km, you can get the equivalent of the lunar rover and cover maybe 20 km before you have to turn back. Sure, the rovers are a snooze feast but we got several of them in different places. For the same reason it's not practical to repair them or return samples to base either, even if we had a man on Mars.
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How to put this? Hmm... I'm in Florida for the winter. I'm in Panama City Beach area. I've done a whole lot of traveling in my life. Yesterday and today have been Mardi Gras and, at this one, it's "family friendly." Sending robots to the exclusion of sending humans is like going to Mardi Gras in Florida instead of Louisiana. Yeah, you can do it and the results are the same in that you can say you went to Mardi Gras but they're just not the same.
I'm not against sending robots. I'm against the trend that I se
Not just now, but Apollo too (Score:3)
I'm not sure what the utility of sending a human into space is at the present time. Unless there's an obvious use case, it *seems* like the extra effort of sending a human isn't worth the risk, except as a political statement.
It wasn't worth the risk in 1969, either, but it sure was a political statement back then.
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And yet, towering over all of these in importance is the kind of shirt the spokesman is wearing when he makes the announcement that humanity has arrived at some great new achievement.
"If you can force a rocket scientist, celebrating the accomplishment of a lifetime, to cry and grovel and beg forgiveness on international TV for wearing a shirt, you are not unempowered."
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We should celebrate the achievement, certainly. Were I to meet one of these guys I would thank them for their service. But regretting the passing of the era of manned lunar flights is like mourning the end of the steam age. Yes - the steam age was a great advance over what came before. Yes, it is steeped (now) in romanticism. But what have now is far superior to the technology to steam technology. Let's not pretend we've regressed because nobody rides a steam engine from London to Oxford.
The
Re:And is an example of the worst... (Score:5, Interesting)
You might also remember that the 60s were generally a decade of prosperity, not just for the 1% on top but for pretty much any and all people in the US. It was a decade of economic growth, people could actually afford building new homes, two cars and still pay off their mortgage.
How much thereof was due to the moon program? Directly? Probably little. But indirectly the program had incredible impact on the US economy. Due to its secrecy and the "we" spirit, pretty much any and all work had to be done inside the US, creating jobs. New inventions, not only in technology but also in process management and management itself, boosted the economy further than anything before. The inertia of this all led the US well into the 80s.
If anything, we'd need something like this again. Something that means more domestic production jobs, innovation and new possibilities. Right now we do have corporate welfare as well. But in the worst kind. Where the people pay for corporations to take jobs abroad.
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One reason why there was prosperity for all and not only the top 1% was related to the strength of unions. As the unions in the US got weakened and disbanded, so did the salaries and rights of workers decrease. The working class lost a lot of their negotiating power, and by now even lost the memory of those different times and conditions.
In the 50s, 60's and 70's, being left-leaning actually meant something. Today it's often a synonym of politically correct moron. Back in those decades the ultra-rich feared
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As an European it sounds really odd to me to equate "liberal" with the political left. A liberal over here would be considered a right winger. Actually, "conservative" is something you'd put further to the political middle than right over here. Which, oddly enough, makes our "conservatives" usually more left leaning than the "liberals". Not by a lot, mind you, by European standards they're both firmly entrenched to the right of the middle of the political spectrum.
Maybe because we actually do have socialist
Re: And is an example of the worst... (Score:1)
Never mind the whole thing was kicked off by a democrat and continued by his democratic successor only to be canceled for costing to much by a republican.
Payed attention in history class? Guess not.
The political crap from the uninformed is getting old. But hey it's /.
Re: And is an example of the worst... (Score:2)
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The Sixth Man (Score:3)
Believed in aliens ... (Score:5, Informative)
He said he had had an "epiphany" in space and later devoted his life to studying the mind and unexplained phenomena. He said he believed that aliens had visited Earth. ... Mitchell left the US space agency Nasa in 1972 and set up the Institute of Noetic Sciences which aimed to support "individual and collective transformation through consciousness research".
Source: BBC [bbc.com].
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All the things that everyone knows are true, yet science won't dare to tread there.
You wrapped up rumour, hearsay, and gossip into one tidy package.
And like most people who prattle such nonsense as yours, you obviously think of "science" as some nebulous agency that does stuff, whereas it's nothing of the sort—science is a method whereby we find out stuff.
65 Years (Score:1)
http://xkcd.com/893/
Oh, (Score:1)
What a lonely place to die....