NASA's Living with a Star

[philojones]

According to McCanney, NASA's "Living With a Star" should be called,

"How the Hell do we get thru the Van Allen Belts."

comments?

[Morrolan]

comments as in: what on earth do you mean?

(edited to add) welcome to the board, but i think you'll find that one line posts like your above one are too simplistic to get a serious response.

maybe you could start by giving us your view on what McC was again trying to imply without much success.

[philojones]

McCanney says we never went to the moon because we can't get through the Van Allen Belts. Now, he says that NASA wants to break through and are hoping to get some ideas via this program.

[Wolverine]

McCanney says we never went to the moon because we can't get through the Van Allen Belts.

As is the case with numerous other claims, he's wrong (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html#radiation). Very wrong (http://www.clavius.org/envrad.html).

[Hamlet]

McCanney says we never went to the moon because we can't get through the Van Allen Belts. Now, he says that NASA wants to break through and are hoping to get some ideas via this program.

We've been going through the Van Allen belts for more than 40 years. We have satellites that are orbiting there right now. This is another example that McCanney has no idea what he is talking about. Go over to JayUtah's excellent Clavius (http://www.clavius.org/) site for some real information on the Van Allen belts and the Moon Landing.

[sts60]

I work for a company that makes (among other things) satellites that work in the Van Allen belts. They wouldn't work very well if the engineers didn't understand the environment quite well. This understanding is substantially based on data provided by NASA, much of which was used for Apollo mission design.

I don't work on those birds, but my company doesn't get paid for products that don't work. In other words, we have a strong disincentive to ignore physical reality.

Mr. McCanney, who does not design or otherwise produce products which must conform to reality, has no such disincentive. He is therefore free to say whatever wild and malicious thing garners him a little attention from the ignorant and paranoid, especially those who have a little cash to plunk down for his books or videos or whatever.

He is, in the purest sense of the word, a crackpot; not a charmingly eccentric crackpot, but a nasty and unpleasant one. You will thus forgive me that when it comes to whether or not manned transit of the Van Allen belts is possible, I accept the scientific opinon of Dr. James Van Allen (no particular fan of manned spaceflight) over that of McCanney.