9361

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: On the notion of FES reunification

« on: November 29, 2014, 06:46:49 PM »

I say we have two logos, just as NASA has two logos. There's the "meatball" logo which is more for public display and consumer use, and then there's a more formal logo for VIP events, award presentations, and press conferences.

9362

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Request for Interview

« on: November 29, 2014, 06:32:55 PM »

Bad idea Tom.  If he posts the questions here, he's going to get a debate, not an interview.

Posting questions gets answers. Pushing agendas get debates.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Request for Interview

« on: November 29, 2014, 05:48:13 AM »

Post your questions here and we will answer.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 09, 2014, 04:00:00 PM »

...The ability for a single rocket to reach escape velocity and get to the moon all in a single craft would be an economic impossibility: "That would require, according to von Braun, a rocket taller than the Empire State Building—and ten times the weight of the Queen Mary!"...

Tom, why would we need either to limit ourselves to a single rocket (The first stage of the Saturn V had 4!) and to reach escape velocity (All moon shots are still within the gravity well of earth!)? (Total accuracy disclaimer: some stages of the Apollo missions are in earth-sun orbit.)

You seem to be arguing that it's impossible to get from NYC to LA by walking in less than a month, so it's impossible to get there faster by any other means.

They knew about multiple stages and adding multiple engines per stage to the rocket. That wasn't some later innovation. Look at the illustrations of the 1952 Collier craft.

9365

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 09, 2014, 03:45:54 PM »

Sigh. GM as in General Motors and combustion engine as in Internal Combustion Engines. GM can't expect to increase the performance of a car's engine by 200x because physics says that it can only be so efficient or powerful.

First of all, how are you defining performance?  Secondly, are you suggesting that a 1 HP moped engine and a 1000+ HP race car engine don't use pretty much the same basic technology?

In 1885 1000+ HP race car engines were theoretically possible according to the understandings of thermodynamics and combustion when automobiles were first invented. There was nothing saying that they couldn't exist.

However, these rockets NASA is claiming to have invented for go against all scientific understanding. Combustion, thermodynamics, and rocket physics was well understood in the early 1950's. The scientists of the time understood what could and could not be done.

Yes, because when scientists say that something can't be currently done, they are never proven wrong later on as technology improves. 

Technology can't overcome physics.

9366

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 09, 2014, 03:37:26 PM »

Right, and by 1958 all technical limitations were overcome, all rocketry limitations became a thing of the past, physics was blown wide open, and the US Government could begin sending things into earth orbit and beyond through the next decade with much smaller and cost effective rockets. Keep dreaming.

The Collier articles aren't describing a technical limitation in rocketry.  They're just Von Braun saying, "here are some rockets we could build using only 1952 technology."  He's not saying that those are the smallest rockets possible in 1952.  He's just saying that 1952 could build those huge rockets if it wanted to.

I don't get why you think that the rockets used to achieve orbit in 1958 break the laws of physics.  Can you be more specific?

The Collier articles are absolutely describing a technical limitation in rocketry. They need to build them big because they have to be big. As stated in the article, to carry 32 tons the rocket would need to be as big as a light naval cruiser, and goes on to explain how the things we ended up with, the shuttle and other heavy lift rockets with a capacity of around 32 tons, being much smaller.

Why would they build huge rockets because they wanted to? They had to build them that way because that's what the equations called for. Von Braun complains that to make a single rocket to get to the moon and back would be so big as to be an economic impossibility.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 03, 2014, 05:24:39 AM »

Physics are physics, markjo. GM can't improve a combustion engine by 200x beyond present technology, no matter how many billions they poured into it. Try not to play ignorant. It is obvious and transparent.

Who said that NASA claimed to improve the combustion engine by 200x

Sigh. GM as in General Motors and combustion engine as in Internal Combustion Engines. GM can't expect to increase the performance of a car's engine by 200x because physics says that it can only be so efficient or powerful.

Do you not understand the difference between making something bigger and making it more efficient? For example, the F1 engine is a very large rocket engine that burns a lot of fuel very quickly (several tons per second).  I don't recall anyone ever claiming that it was a phenomenally efficient design, just a phenomenally powerful one.

Von Braun was well aware of what happens to a rocket engine when you make it bigger or smaller.

I was, which was why I assumed you had some other source of information you were relying on. What you just described does not qualify as impossible. What is the maximum energy that can be derived from kerosene-oxygen combustion and hydrogen-oxygen combustion?

Sure it does. If scientists of the time say that it is not possible, and NASA does it, NASA has just done the impossible. It doesn't matter what the numbers are. The fact is that NASA is claiming to have done the impossible.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 03, 2014, 03:22:03 AM »

Can you please substantiate the claim that what NASA did was physically impossible?

Please follow along. Scientists of the time said that much bigger and economically unfeasible rockets would be required and then NASA had some kind of undisclosed breakthrough immediately after being founded which allowed them to push liquid kerosene/hydrogen/oxygen beyond physical ability.

9369

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 03, 2014, 02:37:04 AM »

NASA is doing the physically impossible and all I hear is willful denial and avoidance. Instead of beginning to seek out the truth for your own self, you comply to kneel down and bury your faces into the lap of an organization with the motive and the means. If the government says so it must be true. No question or doubt about it.

Physics are physics, markjo. GM can't improve a combustion engine by 200x beyond present technology, no matter how many billions they poured into it. Try not to play ignorant. It is obvious and transparent.

9370

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 03, 2014, 01:23:20 AM »

The things NASA is claiming are not improvements. The claims break physics themselves. It is absurd that anyone could sit and entertain the idea that one can make a M67 grenade, using the explosive material Composition B, explode with 200 times as much force as it already does. It's simply not going to happen, no matter how much money is thrown at it. Physics are physics.

9371

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 03, 2014, 01:02:35 AM »

The difference between physical propellant engineering improvements and the improvements in other technologies such as computer chips, is that with computer chips there was never a theoretical limit in the 1960's saying that a silicon chip could not compute cycles at 4 GHz. With rockets, there is a theoretical limit to how much they can lift and whether it could achieve escape velocity.

NASA is claiming something entirely contrary to rocket physics. The scientists of the time knew all about liquid oxygen and kerosene. They said it couldn't be done. But then comes US Government, in space heat, creating an organization which immediately invents this fantastic technology, using known fuels, using an engine which adopts the same basic operation of the V2 weapon.

Clearly questionable. The simplest explanation is that they did not do that.

9372

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 03, 2014, 12:34:20 AM »

Right, and by 1958 all technical limitations were overcome, all rocketry limitations became a thing of the past, physics was blown wide open, and the US Government could begin sending things into earth orbit and beyond through the next decade with much smaller and cost effective rockets. Keep dreaming.

You mean engineering was blown wide open. There was no meaningful advance in physics from the rocket engine. Your argument from personal credulity continues unabated. Can you propose a single engineering reason why there could not be a quick advance in technology over a relatively short timespan given sufficient logistical, intellectual and financial capabilities?

As I said, NASA is claiming to have created never before seen rocket technologies. It's a fantastic claim to have created something thought to be impossible. Despite that the Saturn V rocket engine is using the same basic operation as the V2 weapon from WWII, using fuels well studied for many years, we are expected to believe that they somehow broke the mold and achieved an improvement by a fold of 266 which allowed the US Government to gain moon victory.

It's simply an absurd claim. Anyone with a basic understanding of engineering knows that physical technologies don't improve like that. Shame on you for believing it.

9373

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 03, 2014, 12:00:16 AM »

Right, and by 1958 all technical limitations were overcome, all rocketry limitations became a thing of the past, physics was blown wide open, and the US Government could begin sending things into earth orbit and beyond through the next decade with much smaller and cost effective rockets. Keep dreaming.

9374

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 02, 2014, 11:44:26 PM »

I don't know why miniaturization strains your credulity. We went from having room sized computers in the 60s to the first desktops by the late 70s. MBs of memory in the 90s to GBs by the 2000s.

Your analogy is meaningless. Not everything advances at the rate of computer chips. The efficiency of the internal combustion engine has barely improved over the last 20 years. Spoons haven't improved over the last 20 years. Rockets have not been doubling in efficiency every year.

In fact, improvements in computer chips are increasingly no longer the case. Core clock speed has not improved by any significant margin for years. The clock speed of a core is still 3 to 4 Ghz and has been that way since 2004.

The improvements now come from combining multiple chips together into a multi-core chip. Now you can burn a dvd and play a video game at the same time. This is not an improvement in computer chips. I could have bought two computers in 2004. That's like saying that car technology is improved by a factor of 2x if you buy two ferraris.

9375

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 02, 2014, 10:56:20 PM »

The ability for a single rocket to reach escape velocity get to the moon all in a single craft would be an impossibility: "That would require, according to von Braun, a rocket taller than the Empire State Building—and ten times the weight of the Queen Mary!"

You do realize that was for a 50 man crew to go to the moon, not a 3 man crew, don't you?

The link does not say that he's talking about the 50 man mission. Von Braun had also stated in works he had previously written that a rocket would need to be of that size to get to the moon, and discounted the idea of a single rocket to the moon as an impossibility. The 50 man mission proposal with the space plane and space station published in the Collier 1952 magazine is a separate comprimise.

The fact is that von Braun and the experts believed that enormous rockets would be necessary. As stated in the article, a cargo rocket which simply could get into earth orbit to provide supplies to a space station, with a cargo capacity of 32 tons (a cargo figure similar to the shuttle and heavy lift rockets), would need to be the size and weight of a light naval cruiser, which is far larger than anything NASA has ever built.

9376

Flat Earth Theory / Re: On the notion of NASA's "never before seen technologies"

« on: November 02, 2014, 08:53:56 PM »

Tom, you seem to enjoy dragging out this tired piece of copypasta, but you never seem explain just what it means.  For example, exactly what "never before seen rocket technologies" are you referring to and who said that NASA invented them from scratch?  You do realize that solid propellent rockets were invented hundreds of years ago and liquid propellent rockets were invented more than 30 years before NASA was even founded, don't you?  What rocket technologies did NASA invent for the moon program that didn't already exist in some form or other?  If anything, NASA pretty much just scaled up the rocket existing technology.

NASA created a rocket with such fantastic technology that it broke the mold for how rockets scale up. Check out this article: The Great 1952 Space Program That Almost Was

In the early 50's the great physicists and aerospace scientists of the time, including Wherner Von Braun (before he was put in charge of NASA), got together and carefully calculated what would actually be required to get into space and to the moon. The conclusions were that a single rocket to the moon would need to be 1250 feet tall and weigh 800,000 tons. And yes, they knew all about rocket staging, and coasting with inertia in space, which is mentioned several times in the article.

Here are the requirements for what would be required merely to reach earth orbit and provide supplies for an orbital space station:

"The orbital spaceship would be a monster rocket, 265 feet tall—as tall as a twenty-four-story building—and would weigh 7,000 tons, as much as a light naval cruiser. By comparison, the Apollo program’s Saturn V was 363 feet tall and weighed 3,211.5 tons. The Space Shuttle, which the Collier’s ship most resembled in both form and function, was 184 feet tall and weighed 2,250 tons at takeoff."

The ability for a single rocket to reach escape velocity and get to the moon all in a single craft would be an economic impossibility: "That would require, according to von Braun, a rocket taller than the Empire State Building—and ten times the weight of the Queen Mary!"

The government and the military needed to get into earth orbit and to the moon with realistic figures. The resulting product after Kennedy's moon speech was a single Saturn rocket to the moon which was 266 times smaller than what what was predicted. Suddenly going to the moon wasn't such an impossibility anymore. So yes, NASA is claiming to have invented fantastic new technologies contrary to all physics, rocketry, and engineering.

Also, when did NASA ever claim that they were doing the impossible, let alone on a daily basis?  I think that you also have a rather unconventional notion of "constantly" when referring to moon landings and Mars probes.

NASA is constantly in space, and therefore constantly doing the impossible. Space travel is a military fantasy and a scientific delusion.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Start from the VERY top!

« on: November 02, 2014, 12:50:05 AM »

The layout of the earth given on this site is hypothetical only. The only mapping project the FES engaged in was in the mid 1800's. Samuel Birley Rowbotham cataloged hundreds of logs from vessels, explorers, and contacted naval sources of the time to produce a 1/8th representation of our local area. The map was a pie slice containing Europe and Africa, and proved that Africa was wider than it was tall, contrary to Round Earth Theory. The map is reproduced in Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Start from the VERY top!

« on: November 01, 2014, 11:38:23 PM »

What shape is Earth if it is a plane?

This is unknown. The outer reaches of our local area exists in ice and inhospitable conditions. Some speculate that the earth is infinite in extent beyond this. Others speculate that there might be an ending somewhere beyond our local area.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Start from the VERY top!

« on: November 01, 2014, 11:35:07 PM »

If the Earth is a plane, I should be able to see much further past the horizon than I currently do, no?

The atmosphere is not perfectly transparent.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Start from the VERY top!

« on: November 01, 2014, 11:20:10 PM »

The Flat Earth Society is a group of intellectuals who believe that the earth is flat. The earth is flat for many reasons, and much evidence points towards its flatness.

It's obvious

Just look out your window. What do you see? Flatness everywhere. We live and exist on a plane. Wherever we go and whatever we do, the earth is flat all around. All beginning arguments must, therefore, start under the assumption that the earth is flat. When we start from the basics the reality is that the earth is a plane. It must be proven to be round, not the other way around.

Few pieces of circumstantial evidence

Much of our education system is based off of antiquity. The idea of a round earth is one of those things that is blindly assumed to be true, based on ancient theories of philosophers.

In classrooms Aristotile's three proofs are still the primary reasons given reasons for why we know that the earth is round: The shadow which appears on the lunar eclipse is round, when a ship sails into the distance it disappears hull first, and the North Star decends as you travel southward. This is not "proof" by any measure, but a few pieces of evidence. Apparently the only evidence outside of NASA propaganda, too.

It's all a matter of interpretation. Any round body between the sun and moon can align periodically to cast a round shadow to cause the eclipse. When a ship recedes into the distances at sea it is shrinking behind the waves in front of it, clearly. And if the stars were close to a flat earth they would also descend as you traveled.

Water Convexity Studies

In extensive studies of the water's convexity, Samuel Birley Rowbotham proved that the surface of standing water is not convex. His work can be read in the book Earth Not a Globe, which can be found for free online.

NASA is clearly a scam

Several things are suspicious about NASA. There are many examples, but here are a few.

The lunar lander, for example, is held together on the hostile surface of the moon with tape, of all things, and seems to be built of low quality materials. See: A Close Look at the Lunar Lander

The lunar rover is missing tracks behind the tires in several shots. See: Apollo Moonbuggy Problems

A sneaker footprint on the moon? See: Sneakers on the Moon

The mars missions are equally suspicious. A rodent on Mars was recently spotted. They are also apparently faking the color of the mars sky.

Conclusion

So, what is the simplest explanation; that NASA has successfully designed and invented never before seen rocket technologies from scratch which can accelerate 100 tons of matter straight up at 7 miles per second, and that NASA can do the impossible on a daily basis, explore the solar system, and constantly wow the nation by landing a man on the moon and sending robots to mars; or is the simplest explanation that they really can't do all of that stuff?