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posted by takyon on Friday July 10 2015, @07:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-them-up-in-one-piece dept.

With the 46th anniversary of humanity's first steps on the surface of the Moon 11 days away, NASA has announced the names of the astronauts that could be the first to fly into space aboard commercially-produced spacecraft. The quartet will now prepare to do something NASA has lacked the capability to do since the end of the Shuttle Program in 2011 – fly to low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Each of the four astronauts selected has already traveled to orbit at least once. They include Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Douglas Hurley, and Sunita Williams. Each will work with Boeing and SpaceX, the two companies producing private spacecraft to travel to and from the International Space Station (ISS ).

SpaceX is currently working to prepare a crewed version of their Dragon spacecraft while Boeing is developing its Commercial Space Transportation (CST-100) capsule. It is hoped that these two vehicles will be ready to fly by 2017.

http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/missions/human-spaceflight/nasa-announces-first-commercial-crew-astronauts/

[Also Covered By]: Popular Science, Universe Today

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday July 12 2015, @07:13AM

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 12 2015, @07:13AM (#208086) Journal

    Oh dear, you seem to have triggered my rant mode, maybe it's because I both agree and disagree. Apologies offered to everybody :3

    So while I kind of agree with you (truth is valuable in my opinion) I understand why they don't or can't convince themselves to even though that makes them liars. It's a small price to pay: “everyone” lies about everything anyway, in double-speak it's called having a career and/or having a life. It gives a silver lining to being a failure :)

    Most people don't even have any idea of how much effort was put into the Apollo program (2nd only to everything done to prepare, start, and complete the D-day invasion) or how many lives were lost (although in this case it was “voluntarily”), and I'm not thinking of the capsule fire [wikipedia.org] but the army of workers. It was perceived as an actual race, an important race, people worked themselves and others to death or illness. Even that fails the fluffeh criteria and those dead ones might as well have the sun shining out of their ass in comparison to what you're talking about (although you might not know it yet).

    Germans? Look I like Wernher von Braun (as far as it goes from what little I know of him as a person in the US) and even I have trouble with this [wikipedia.org] and that Wikipedia article is /still/ polite to the extent of lying. You just don't get your SS-Sturmbannführer (major) rank in the mail “just because” no matter what Wernher von Braun claimed and no matter how many historians play along: and why pretend when many of the rockets were built by slave labor and were weapons against civilians? (Not that the Allies didn't also target civilians, they sure did and not just the firebombs and atom bombs; strategic bombing of civilians was a British policy in Europe. And in case people are deluded about Stalin there's a reason the Russians are so quick to recognize the current nazis using barrier troop [wikipedia.org] battalions in Ukraine (not to be confused with penal units)).

    From the Nordhausen [wikipedia.org] entry:

    The Mittelbau-Dora Nazi concentration camp, established in 1943 after the destruction of Peenemünde, was located on the outskirts of Nordhausen during World War II to provide labor for the Mittelwerk V-2 rocket factory in the Kohnstein. Over its period of operation, around 60,000 inmates passed through Dora and its system of subcamps, of whom around 20,000 died from bad working conditions, starvation and diseases or were murdered.

    I'm sure there's actual books written about it, I just haven't read any of them.

    No Braun = no A-4 / V-2 = no Apollo = no moon landings.
    No Hitler = no slaves = no A-4 / V-2 = no Apollo = no moon landings.
    No Mengele = no human experimentation = no knowledge about the effects of very high accelerations and speeds etc. on living and soon to be dead humans, and on and on and on…

    The truth is ugly.

    Maybe even Unit 731 [wikipedia.org] (or related units) managed to contribute something that was used (maybe some of the Unit 731 “extreme environment” stuff).

    Of course it wasn't all nazis: Kennedy was delusional just as the rest of his shitty family, a megalomaniac adulterer, a psychopath, and a total asshole. Of course he was elected as a popular US president but I repeat myself. His eventual final response to what started with what amounted to the most rudimentary cubesat possible (a communist metal sphere going “beep” every so often in orbit) was to go to the moon. Not one fibre of sanity in his body.

    No Kennedy = no megalomania = no dead Kennedy = no funding and no stubbornness to complete.
    No Kennedy = no “humanity”.

    The flannel (yes, flannel, why not make use of the word) about “humanity” (an utopian carrot) replaces the hogwash about “the master race” (another utopian carrot). Meet the new boss…

    Operation Paperclip is just one of the more easily defensible “mergers”, realize that von Braun is only a small side dish of worms, there's plenty more where that came from and even more is sure to still be classified (the “release in 70 years” lie), and not only from WWII. Papers are messy, digital will be so much better (or so the current “spiel” goes), and history is still leaking out troublesome truths from all the dark places: if Hitler hadn't been doing “too much” of all that “pesky” invasion stuff or maybe just have a been a touch cordial then it could have ended up looking very different because it seems just about every European politician and monarch secretly sympathized (look at bankers/“the mercantile class” today and it's not hard to see why). And let's not forget that Roosevelt had to “trick” the US into gradual participation in the war (cash and carry, lend lease).

    All the above is where you can end up if you start asking for truth. I doubt anyone really knows precisely where the lies end and the made-up bullshit and apologetics start (and please note that nothing I wrote is meant as apologetics: the nazis destroyed Europe, some of them still are, but yeah they got an awful lot of help too).

    So yeah, “humanity” *spit* nothing of the sort.

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