Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Sixty years ago, on July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, paving the way for the official opening of NASA's doors just a few months later, on Oct. 1.
The drive to create an American civilian space agency began with the shocking revelation on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had beaten the US to the punch and launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile. The USSR was quick to tout its success in launching Earth's "second moon."
"Sputnik 1 was a phenomenon: You could go see it in your backyard," recalled physicist and engineer Guy Stever, who was on the faculty of MIT at the time, in a 1992 oral history workshop on the origins of the law.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/how-nasa-got-its-start-60-years-ago-sputnik-eisenhower/
(Score: 3, Funny) by isostatic on Monday July 30 2018, @08:27AM (7 children)
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 30 2018, @08:39AM
Oh, mate, that's a very bad attack of Mondaytis you suffer of.
Is the job that you need to do really that stupid?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday July 30 2018, @10:19AM (2 children)
Quick Google search
https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Moon [knowing-jesus.com]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 30 2018, @06:59PM (1 child)
Allowed scripts on knowing-jesus.com - and still had a crummy disjointed page. I didn't allow third parties to run scripts. If there had been a .cdn or -cdn in the list, I might have tried that. Javascript sucks just as bad on Jesus sites as it does on earthly pages. You think maybe we should mention it to the archangels?
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday July 30 2018, @09:38PM
That's probably why the Doctor Who-verse has the Weeping Angels: java script and Jesus sites.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @01:42PM
What about the shadow object? Can we conclude that the shadow object is also man-made and didn't exist prior to 1950?
Lemme throw this out there. Consider Gervase of Canterbury [wikipedia.org] and the June 18th, 1178 event. As we know, that was not actually the moon that was observed. I propose that the Medieval Warm Period was early weather war experimentation, possibly with very early steampunk technology. What was observed at Canterbury was actually a boiler explosion in the weather control satellite that the monks were deceived into believing was the moon! Thus, the Medieval Warm Period concluded shortly thereafter as the weather control equipment was no longer functional.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @04:12PM (1 child)
Obviously, you've already been subverted. If you really were in on the Truth, then you would know that the Sun rotates around the earth.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday July 31 2018, @02:33PM
FTFY
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @09:08AM (12 children)
The change from NACA to NASA (air and space) was mostly a name change? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Advisory_Committee_for_Aeronautics [wikipedia.org]
NACA started doing aeronautical research (in Gov't test centers and elsewhere) in 1915.
(from Wiki)--The NASA Technical Reports Server provides access to a collection of 14,469 NACA documents dating from 1917.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?Ne=2&N=17&Ns=PublicationYear%7c0 [nasa.gov]
My father had an incomplete set of NACA published annual reports (one or more volumes each year), larger than a set of Brittanica encyclopedia and beautifully done by the Government Printing Office (heavy paper, precise line drawings/plots, sturdy binding). I donated the set to a small aircraft museum--their librarian was really happy to get it. For anyone interested in the technical evolution of aircraft (and doing restoration of pioneer airplanes) this is a major resource.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 30 2018, @12:45PM (10 children)
Not in the least. The name change also came with a massive increases in space activities. Keep in mind that 11 years later NASA was landing people on the Moon and spending 2% of the US's GDP.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @01:38PM (9 children)
According to the Wiki history, NACA had already been involved in X-15 (edge of space) and had a rocket semi-ready to put a satellite in orbit before Sputnik (but obviously missed doing that first). Further, Dryden from NACA wrote the proposal that started the funding increase...and along with that the name change to NASA. Things were already underway to start the space race.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 30 2018, @02:11PM (8 children)
Ok. So it was more than just a name change.
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 30 2018, @02:46PM (7 children)
And it was significantly less than the first initiative to go to space, as plans for the first American satellite were well underway before Sputnik launched. That article has a not-untypical tone that we were caught with our pants down and miraculously formed and agency out of whole cloth to launch the first US Satellite as pure reaction to the Soviets. The reality was plans were already well underway in the US to launch a satellite and the US already had a successful launch of a miltary rocket (Jupiter C) which was more than capable of delivering a satellite to orbit. Sputnik only accelerated the US timetable and NASA was created, in part, to make sure that the effort was A) civilian, and B) settled the Army-Navy spat as both had rocketry teams who wanted to be first. Von Braun was Army rocketry and on the NACA board, then went to NASA. But most histories I've read generally downplay the prior efforts towards an American satellite.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 30 2018, @02:59PM (6 children)
Given that the US went from establishment of NASA in 1958 to landing men on the Moon in 1969, I disagree. NASA signaled far more than a name-change, it was a reordering of the US's entire efforts in space to considerable near future success.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 30 2018, @04:36PM (5 children)
I didn't say it was nothing more than a name-change. I agree that the coming of NASA brought a singular civilian focus to what were previously scattered military projects under the Project Orbiter umbrella which was coordinated by NACA.
I am saying that the first United States satellite launch has nothing to do with NASA, since it occurred well before the creation of NASA. NASA was established by law as above July 29, 1958. The Army's "civilianized" Explorer 1 launched January 31, 1958, in the wings of the December, 1957 failure of the Navy's Vanguard TV3. Thus the creation of NASA was not the first initiative to go to space. The ground had already begun to be paved by its predecessors.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 31 2018, @04:58AM (4 children)
Six months is not "well before". And who has been claiming that NASA launched the first satellite?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday July 31 2018, @02:40PM (3 children)
"Well before," as in the Explorer 1 launch happened, unquestionably, before NASA was created. No rhetoric points there.
The first satellite was launched before NASA was created. The plans to do so were in play before NASA was created. Space initiatives were present before NASA was created. It's that simple.
So we agree that the first initiatives in space exploration existed before NASA, that NACA to NASA was a transition of an already functioning space program by mostly the same principals from the former to the latter, and that it became much better organized specifically for space exploration and funded post-change.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:03PM (2 children)
Neither happened in a day.
And yet, they greatly accelerated all those plans when Sputnik happened.
Yes and no. It's like claiming that sure we spent several times the initial value of a car in upgrading engine, suspension, body work, etc and then characterizing all that work as merely repainting the car. "Sure, it has triple the horsepower it originally had, but the car existed before we painted it red."
So first, we have a direction cause-effect chain between the launch of Sputnik, the creation of numerous US government committees to figure out how to deal with that a few weeks later, and the creation of NASA the next year with an explicit "context" of "large-scale development, management, and operations" (which the NACA didn't have). This is all completely unrelated to the launch of the first US satellite except as it didn't happen before the launch of the first Soviet satellite.
Another strike against your observation is that the first US satellite, Explorer 1 was launched by a Jupiter C [wikipedia.org] rocket which was US Army-built not NACA. NACA was a peripheral player at the time.
So let's review some of the major changes that went into the transition from NACA to NASA. First, the US shifted to an explicitly civilian, explicitly space program (NASA was no longer an aeronautics agency that dabbled in space with most of the work being done by the US military). Second, it meant even before Apollo a huge escalation in US space activities - there was now someone assigned to plan and enable big space projects). Finally, all the scattered space projects that had existed before NASA were grouped under NASA. That allowed for the epic development teams that created such things as the Saturn V rocket.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:03PM (1 child)
The launch of Sputnik gave urgency and impetus to the space program, true enough, and NASA had a much more limited mandate with greater authority in that mandate than NACA did. (Limited in the sense of being more space-focused, but even then and continuing to today they have a role in aeronautics generally). And it was civilian and not military focused.
But the actual transition was subsuming all those disparate players into one agency. Much of the early leadership came direct from NACA (the peak of that being Hugh Dryden.) The ABMA, including Von Braun, were subsumed directly and became Marshall Space Flight Center.
Differences, sure there were differences! But I'd liken the analogy much more to having a 747 airframe at Boneyard 1, a pair of working engines at Airport 2, landing gears at airport 3, and a singular person buys all of them, gets them together at Facility 4, then purchases new avionics and hydraulics and incorporates them into the frame. Now you have a 747-800 VIP instead of a 747-200. (Yeah, the analogy falls apart a little because I think there were actually some airframe changes). I'll readily agree that it wasn't the "same" and wasn't just a name change - it became much more than that. But the core parts were already there, awaiting engineering and assembly.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 02 2018, @01:23AM
No, it's more like having a number of groups that know how to make some of these things at a much smaller scale, bound together by a business with massive funding, who then creates the plan for the 747 (none of the groups were thinking that big at the time) and then the groups, with the massive funding, develop everything, including most of the necessary technological know-how to make it happen.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 30 2018, @07:53PM
A few times I saw a NASA public service commercial in which they emphasized the "Aeronautics" part of "NASA" then showed a really cool video of dropping an airplane nose-down vertically from a tower.
They did so in an effort to make passenger craft safer.
Do they still do NACA work?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by MyOpinion on Monday July 30 2018, @02:35PM (5 children)
You are all aware that it will soon be 50 years since this bunch married the public to this lie.
Nowadays, with HD imaging and all, the show they put up back then does not really stand up to scrutiny.
And just the other day, Buzz Aldrin (the "second man to the Moon") sounded like admitting to a 8-year old that he didn't go to the Moon.
This is an opportunity for NASA to come clean for the Moon landings, hoping that this will remove the attention from the fact that the rest of NASA's "missions" are probably all CGI as well.
Truth is like a Lion: you need not defend it; let it loose, and it defends itself. https://discord.gg/3FScNwc
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 30 2018, @07:07PM (2 children)
The best response I've ever seen or heard to your kind of claims is a Youtube video. Thirteen minutes of your life can make you free of all that stupidity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_loUDS4c3Cs&t=0s&index=5&list=PLdINUnNfanbVkwmtbO4on2hyb6aTAtOY- [youtube.com]
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 0) by MyOpinion on Thursday August 02 2018, @02:37AM (1 child)
I never claimed I went to the Moon and back, did I?
Proof burdens the claimant, and NASA are doing a poor job providing proof (but they are good at loosing it)
This is the "Space Age", CGI and fireworks in Florida dont really cut it. Fine if you chose to go with your faith, I'd rather stick to facts and what's provable.
Truth is like a Lion: you need not defend it; let it loose, and it defends itself. https://discord.gg/3FScNwc
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 02 2018, @02:49AM
Obviously, you didn't watch the video.
When they sent the moonshots up, they didn't have CGI. Try to keep up. A flight to the moon was risky business, that could easily have failed in any number of ways. Any attempt to fake the television coverage would have failed for certain. Rocket science was more developed than video science.
One of the key points of the video is, it would have taken far more computing power to generate a convincing fake than was available to NASA, and probably to the entire US government, at the time.
Just because you have a multi-gigahertz multi-core CPU at your fingertips today, doesn't mean they were available in the '50's and '60's.
The burden of proof is on you. Prove how the television coverage could have been faked.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:16AM (1 child)
If you had something more damning than erroneous minutia, you'd have presented it by now.
A typical example of the huge camel in the tent that keeps getting ignored. There were almost half a million people working on Apollo and the USSR, a hostile power with the resources to discredit any fake efforts by NASA, apparently just went along on this. Nor do we have a credible explanation why both the US and the USSR would go to so much trouble to fake stuff.
Finally, what's the end game here? This is yet another example of peeling of the onion where your true beliefs and motives remain hidden till the ignoble end. The last time someone claimed the lunar landings were a hoax, it turns out Satan in conjunction with the Freemasons was purportedly at fault. If they had started with that, it would have been painfully clear from the start what sort of idiots they were and much time could be saved.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:54PM
MyOpinion, very interesting opinion. Look at his very first tweet. He says there's no Space Age, there was never a Space Age, it's all fake. I own some property in Florida, I've seen the rockets going up -- looks INCREDIBLE, by the way -- I don't agree. But there's so much Fake News, I think a lot of folks just decided, "oh, it's all fake!" And I don't blame them. I don't blame them.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 30 2018, @05:31PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claimed_moons_of_Earth#General_surveys [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday July 30 2018, @05:59PM
"That's no moon, it's a space station"
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday July 30 2018, @10:30PM (1 child)
That seems pretty unlikely, given that it was (at least) 200km away and 58cm across.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday July 31 2018, @05:31PM
Telescopes are useful for this sort of thing, and they're portable enough to take into your back yard.