NASA And The UAE Will Collaborate On A Journey To Mars (gizmodo.com) 84
An anonymous reader quotes an article from Gizmodo:
The United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced an agreement Sunday that would allow the two nations to collaborate on matters of space and aeronautics research, including the potential journey to Mars... "NASA is leading an ambitious journey to Mars that includes partnerships with the private sector and many international partners," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "I am confident this new framework agreement with the UAE Space Agency will help advance this journey."
Bolden recently wrote on his blog that "Every single nation can play a part in our journey to Mars, in our scientific journey of discovery and in the next phase of humanity's development as a spacefaring people." UAE Space Agency Chairman Dr. Khalifa Al Romaithi added today that "we believe that working alongside international partners is the best way to accelerate the development of space technologies and the space sector within the UAE." Vice notes that the UAE has had a small "presence" in outer space for about 30 years, and had been working on becoming the first Arab Islamic country to send an unmanned probe to Mars.
Bolden recently wrote on his blog that "Every single nation can play a part in our journey to Mars, in our scientific journey of discovery and in the next phase of humanity's development as a spacefaring people." UAE Space Agency Chairman Dr. Khalifa Al Romaithi added today that "we believe that working alongside international partners is the best way to accelerate the development of space technologies and the space sector within the UAE." Vice notes that the UAE has had a small "presence" in outer space for about 30 years, and had been working on becoming the first Arab Islamic country to send an unmanned probe to Mars.
Will women be banned or will nasa force the UAE to (Score:5, Insightful)
Will women be banned or will nasa force the UAE to be more open?
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No, but they will be limited to serving the men and will make sure the ship is pointed to Mecca at all times.
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What about gays?
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They are usually thrown off building roofs but it might be acceptable to drop them from the stratosphere. There is no exact rule on this and no scholar ruling that I'm aware.
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They are usually thrown off building roofs but it might be acceptable to drop them from the stratosphere. There is no exact rule on this and no scholar ruling that I'm aware.
Fortunately, when you throw a person off a building in space, nothing happens.
Re: Will women be banned or will nasa force the UA (Score:1)
Asteroided to death?
Re: Will women be banned or will nasa force the UA (Score:5, Insightful)
As lon as women have the same rights as men, it's totally fine. If not, your religion is shit and your prophet a goat.
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Western nations need to recognize that they are not alone in the world and they should treat foreign cultures with the dignity and respect they expect to be treated with.
what, so islamic nations want respect from women & gay people that they dont give back? give me a break. we only offer some freedoms - one freedom we dont allow here in the west is to restrict the rights of others. you dont get to play the 'give me tolerance so i can be intolerant' card.
get that through your head, then you will be less confused.
You think you are making a point you are not (Score:3, Insightful)
"you dont[sic] get to play the 'give me tolerance so i can be intolerant' card."
Sure you do, it's the current predominant meme.
Just ask Brendan Eich. After society became tolerant of gays, the gay community was not magnanimous, rewarding tolerance with tolerance, - it went after Eich and got him fired from his job over his political beliefs (which were the same political beliefs both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned on when running for president in 2008. The community made it known that anybod
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Eich was not hounded for his beliefs (as onerous as they are), but for personally funding a group which sought to deny human rights to people. Saying it was just his opinion which people found offensive means either you don't actually know what happened, or are purposefully trying to mislead people reading your comment.
Eich can do whatever he wants. He is not immune from people finding his desires ugly and complaining, however. This is how a society functions. This is not new.
Re: Will women be banned or will nasa force the UA (Score:2, Insightful)
Fuck you, follower of a pedophile prophet, and your imaginary sky friend as well. You contribute nothing to a modern world, only examples to show students of history how the great Arab scholars of old were replaced by hooded savages.
Re: Will women be banned or will nasa force the UA (Score:1)
"In 2008, an Australian woman said she was jailed for eight months after reporting that she was gang-raped at a hotel in the United Arab Emirates. In 2013, a Norwegian woman who reported being raped in Dubai received a 16-month sentence for having sex outside of marriage, though she was pardoned and allowed to leave the country."
Such a progressive country! She was locked up until the Australian government and US strongly suggested she be let go.
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And there's a Dutch woman in jail in Qatar right now, after having gone to the police to report that she had been raped. Meanwhile the female friend she was traveling with is missing, which seems to confirm that this was not just a case of some women getting drunk and doing something they regretted later.
At least the rapist is in jail too, at least for now. But the authorities very helpfully proposed that if she married him, they could both get out of jail.
And we are supposed to be tolerant of those retards
Re: Will women be banned or will nasa force the UA (Score:3)
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I imagine they're just going to contribute a bunch of slave labor.
Really, this is the best international collaboration you could announce?
Hang on to your passport. (Score:1)
UAE will want to keep it until you paid off your traveling expenses
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Well, you give us a pretty good reason to.
Show me the money (Score:4, Insightful)
So, basically, NASA just found their Sugar Daddy...
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Excellent! If UAE wants to help pay for it and share some credit in exchange, as an American taxpayer I find that a good deal, if it plays out right.
The risk, though, is that political entanglements will get in the way someday, and delay things.
Will the vessel be named "Rocket Khalifa"? (Score:2)
I thought (Score:3, Funny)
I thought they were going to use an Amiga emulator to go to Mars!!!
SpaceX (Score:3, Insightful)
The aggressive program to Mars is from SpaceX, not NASA. Unfortunately NASA is ossified and pupetted by Congress.
Uh huh (Score:5, Insightful)
o.0 Seriously? SpaceX has produced nothing Mars related to date but hot air and stroke material for the fanboys. The only concrete result has been an increase in demand for tissue paper.
Meanwhile, NASA has actual functioning spacecraft in orbit around Mars, and actual functioning rovers on the surface of Mars. They're bending metal on the next generation, and planning the generation after that.
Does it matter? (Score:2)
Does it matter? The spacecraft called Eagle that landed on the moon was build by Grumman in New York State and not next to the launch pad by NASA themselves. Why should they change now to doing everything internally when they didn't do that at their peak?
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You are looking backwards, not forwards. SpaceX has plans for many more missions than NASA over the NEXT 10 years.
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0.o Child, did you even read what I wrote before posting?
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NASA is doing Mars stuff *with public funds*. That's unjustifiable because nothing on Mars, or about Mars, will be of any use to the rest of humanity here on Earth in the foreseeable future. Nothing discovered on Mars will help us to address a single pressing or practical problem here on Earth in the foreseeable future.
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> Public funds can only be used for the public good.
Yep
> How about "war"? That's for the public good?
If not, we should protest that use of public funds too.
> What public good were roads developed for?
You're asking that seriously?
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> Have you considered the fact that our entire species and everything on Earth could be wiped out by a catastrophe like a giant asteroid striking our planet?
Yep, and that's not a realistic scenario. Firstly, such an event has virtually zero probability of occurring in the foreseeable future (hundreds of years, if not thousands). Secondly, public funds should instead be spent on *detection and deflection*. *That* would help humanity on Earth -- by saving Earth's population.
> Living on another planet wo
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Unfortunately NASA is ossified and pupetted by Congress.
Probably with Musk greasing politician pockets to avoid the competition.
Is this what Bolden meant (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously. Why the fuck should NASA be sucking up to guys who were half a notch below 'desert savages' fifty years ago when we were already in space. There is no good explanation for this. It's either an act of gutless PC to make good on the 'promise' of Muslim outreach or its whoring out what are supposed to be our best and brightest to some tin-pot dictator in the desert.
I thought Bolden was an idiot from day one. Now I have incontrovertible proof.
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UAE knows that oil is the past, space is the future, and why not buy expertise from the best? USA gets funding in the form of a small percentage of our gas money back.
It's win win for everyone, except for right wing nutjobs who believe in phrases like "glass parking lot", which I'm only barely surprised you omitted, so as not to be immediately modded Troll.
A funding bill from congress is good for this year only, and external support seems to be a far more predictable way to budget.
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Because NASA has had it's funding cut since then and they are following the example of half the Presidents in the last few decades who have been sucking up to 'desert savages'. Working Bush, vacation Bush, Reagan and even Clinton would do whatever the House of Saud wanted and the UAE bunch are closely connected.
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Apostrophe fixed!
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There are big human rights issues in the UAE, and so I think NASA should tread carefully in what technology and knowledge they contribute to a country with such a record.
But beginning cooperation is probably a better method of effecting change than being antagonistic and trying to impose our views from the outside. Give them a better glimpse of what a country like ours is like and it might slowly shift views to be more tolerant, get religion out of government, respect human rights, and increase women's rig
UAE had presence in outer space for 30 years (Score:2)
Summary and TFA says "UAE has had a small "presence" in outer space for about 30 years". The source is a link to spacesafetymagazine.com [spacesafetymagazine.com], which tells about the UAE first satellite launched in 2009, which does not make 30 years.
Same article notes UAE space agency was created in the 1990s, hence we should probably read "UAE has been engaging space activities for 30 years".
Well, NASA is finally accomplishing its mission (Score:1)
In June of 2010 Obama's NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden went on Al Jazeera TV [youtube.com] and stated that Obama had given him three goals as administrator of the space agency that one put men on the moon:
1. Inspire children to study math and science
2. Expand our international relationships
3. "Third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and, ah, engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations, ah, to help them, ah, feel good about their historic contribution to science and
Surprising... (Score:2)
The US, yes, I can understand that, but UAE? It is a tiny nation - if you fart and spit at the same time, you risk breaching border security in two places at the same time.
And on the matter of conserving water /food needs (Score:1)
why not have a few folks that live in deserts??
While not all of Islam is extremist... (Score:1)