I bet the producers of Armageddon would argue that the BA was never innocent.
[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

One example: I suppose you will agree that the moon is composed of 10% titanium. Titanium is an element with a high demand and a limited supply on Earth.

After doing a simple internet search, I do not agree that the moon is 10% titanium (actually I never did). First of all, titanium primarily exists on the moon as titanium dioxide. This material has an atomic weight of approximately 80 with titanium contributing 48 and the two oxygen contributing 32. In other words, for any given sample only 60% is actually titanium the rest is oxygen. If you look at the following website and there are many others, you will see that the 10% number you quote only occurs for some of the Lunar Mare and for the Lunar Highlands, is 2% or less. Again, this is for titanium dioxide not pure titanium.

http://silver.neep.wisc.edu/~neep602/neep602.html

Look at this one and you'll see that the lunar surface has some locations where the titanium dioxide is less than 1%.

http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/June00/lunarMaria.html

Furthermore, we only have results for the lunar surface, not the core. The core is mainly iron. See below.

http://lmms.external.lmco.com/newsbu...999/99.01.html

Finally, I again disagree with your statements that titanium is expensive and in high demand. Read these websites and you'll see that is not the case. Actually, right now and in long term forcasts, the world has excess capacity. One more thing to note, Titanium is the fourth most abundant metal in the earths crust. Hardly rare.

http://www.webelements.com/webelemen...xt/Ti/key.html

http://www.titanium.org/

Yeah, the Only Real Problem, is that, it Seems that The very Same Qualities, that Make it a Such a Useful Metal, also Make it, Really Fun, to Extract, Particularly The High Tempertures Needed, to do so!

But, Thanks to New Smelting Techniques, some Involving, Literally, Space-Age Technology, are Making its Production, Both, Easier, and Cheaper, Every Day!

__________________
If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Another thing to think about is, even if titanium was found in great quantities on the Moon, the technical difficulties and expenses involved in going to get it are much much higher than just working to improve the extraction methods we have on Earth. This is simple economics, which (I don't want to sound antagonistic but it appears to be true) is something else that ngant17 seems to have trouble with.

If ever the need for titanium or any other substance becomes strong enough to merit going to the Moon for, you can be sure we'll figure out a way to do it. But for now, there's nothing there that we need that much.

__________________
...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

Tony has had a BBC Tv series which teaches his memory mapping technique and it is this TV series that I suspect is being referred to on David Percy's website (if you look closely he never claims to have invented the technique).

Fortunately I didn't gather from Percy's posted resume that he claimed to have invented Mind Mapping. But I did gather that he was the creative force behind the videos. He says that "his" video on the technique is being sold by BBC. In the context of his claim to be an "award-winning film and video producer" the possessive would indicate such a role.

However, Tony Buzan's material says he produced those same videos. And since he unquestionably invented the technique and is quite active in teaching it, I rather suspect he, not Percy, is telling the truth. Buzan seems gracious about giving credit to his many collaborators and co-authors. But I have yet to find where he gives credit to David Percy for anything, or indeed mentions his name at all. I would like to know exactly in what capacity David Percy contributed to the Mind Mapping videos.

In the course of my former employment I interviewed a great many candidates for engineering positions. I used to say, somewhat cynically, that the purpose of a job interview is to determine just how much the candidate lied on his resume. You're allowed -- even expected -- to fib a little, but this is bordering on outright deception. Claiming credit for someone else's work is foul play.

Percy's qualifications and experience are material because he has elected to make them so. He has weighed in to the debate as an expert in photography and filmmaking, and he wishes his opinions to be considered as expert opinions. Classically there are three ways to examine an expert witness:

1. demonstrate that he is not an expert.

2. demonstrate that he is not speaking in the capacity of an expert (e.g., that he's joking).

3. demonstrate that a significant number of other experts disagree.

With the revelation that Percy may have inappropriately padded his resume comes the realization that he may not be as expert as he claims, even in photography and filmmaking. To be sure, one cannot fake his way to an associateship in the Royal Photographic Society. But that in itself is insufficient because the type and degree of expertise required to analyze Apollo photos is not implied by the mere associateship.

And having submitted Percy's assertions regarding lighting to physicists, photographers, and lighting designers whose qualifications and experience are impeccable, I can say with great certainty that there is considerable disagreement with Percy among the expert community.

I will quite happily stand as an expert in space travel and the design and operation of spacecraft, and say that not only does the relevant expert community disagree with Percy, they disagree to a man. But of course Percy doesn't claim any expertise in space travel. Or does he?

He claims membership in the British Interplanetary Society. Very well, no expertise required. I can join on their web site, so long as I remember to send them a check. He claims to have written on the subject of the history of manned space exploration. (Very well, that's Dark Moon, and since his qualification to write that work is what we're testing, we can't include that.) He claims to have written on future techniques of space exploration. I would like to read some of those articles, because a man who can't even compute the hover thrust of an existing spacecraft or the distributed static load of a weight in lunar gravity can't be expected to contribute much to that field.

Hey Jay,

Remember, this is the British Interplanetary Society. You need to send them a "cheque". [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Need a smiley for "tongue in cheek".

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

for any given sample only 60% is actually titanium the rest is oxygen.

I think he can be cut some slack on this one issue. He was discussing titanium in the context of mining, after all, and titanium dioxide is often the form it is found in.

the 10% number you quote only occurs for some of the Lunar Mare

And more specifically, Apollo 11's mare basalt samples have 10.41% Ti02 by weight and 7.94% in the soil. Apollo 17's mare basalts are 11.94%, with the soil measuring 2.84%. (Source: Lunar Sourcebook)

I think what the engineers should do is build a colossal crowbar and fly it to the moon. I bet they could wedge it under the edge of a mare and pry the whole thing right out of its basin. Then they bring it back to Earth, anchor it off the eastern seaboard, and force the HBs to mine it for us as slaves. Everybody's happy that way: The HB's get their proof that we went to the moon, and we get our cool titanium cars and boats.

I will attempt to steer our topic back to where it needs to be.

Re: the radiation in the Van Allen belt.

I categorically refuse to look at any data which has been
supplied by NASA in order to prove (or disprove) that NASA's moon
program was a sham. NASA controls a major share of information
on data collected in outer space. So I simply suspect there is a
conflict of interest here. You would not want to hire the fox to
guard the hen house, so why would you want to rely on NASA to
prove that NASA did this or NASA didn't do that?

Although the Aulis video gives evidence to support its assertion
that the Van Allen belt is far too dangerous to cross, I would
definitely like to see data on the radiation levels in the Van
Allen belt coming from Russian and Chinese scientific research
departments, which should be relatively independent of NASA.
Let's get independent confirmation that the Van Allen belt is
perfectly harmless, as NASA is suggesting, even during the solar
flare cycles (according to the Aulis video, the first Apollo 11
moon mission was launched in the beginning of the 11-year cycle,
probably the worst possible time to be going through the Van
Allen belt in terms of radiation levels).


If you want to redeem my faith in NASA, let's have someone point
a spy satellite or something like the Hubble telescope at the
lunar surface and take a clear shot of the lunar buggy and other
assorted junk which the Apollo astronauts left there 30 years
ago? Is there a problem with that? Wouldn't that help to end
this argument once and for all?

Someone asked me where I got my information about the moon being
composed of 10% titanium. I got this from an article in a Soviet
space book about 10 years ago, I can't remember the name of the
book, and it is obviously no longer published since the fall of
the USSR. I thought this was public knowledge. Doesn't NASA
publish this stuff anyway? They've had plenty of time to analyze
lunar geology by now.

If I were a smart business man, and I knew of a substantial field
of titanium deposits, I would try to finance a project to exploit
the element. If it could be done for a profit, of course. The
problem is that no one has ever devised a way to mine titanium on
the moon and get it back to earth and make a profit on it. Least
of all the people in NASA and their assorted 'space contractors
in the private sector' (a self-contradictory phase or oxymoron,
since the very life-blood of such businesses like the United
Space Alliance, Boeing Space Division, Martin Marietta, ect. are
heavily socialized under state monopoly capitalism as it
currently exists in the USA).

re: the privatization of NASA.

We can see a precedent in the fall of the Soviet Union which,
among other things, produced a dramatic reappraisal of the
state-subsidized space agency in Russia. It basically went out
with the original socialist state. People realized what an
endless drainhole of the peoples' taxes it was. Because the
people received nothing substantial from it for themselves,
except some kind of vague "prestige factor", which hardly puts
food in the mouth of the starving peasant on the streets.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest the functions of the Russian
space agency disappeared the way of the dinosaur, but the form of
it did certainly did, the people in the Russian space agency are
much more cognizant of the socio-economic costs of their business
today.

Now compare the Soviet situation vis-a-vis NASA and the USA. I
realize that's a difficult comparison in the first place, since
most people in NASA and its space contractors have never been of
the communist persuasion. Besides, to make it more confusing,
the political left wing in Russia today supports capitalism, and
the right wing in Russia are typically of the socialist
(Stalinist) persuasion. The leftwing/rightwing political
dichotomy is essentially reversed in the US. But we can see
useful parallels between the two space agencies. They both did
live off the public teat quite well, the NASA bureaucrats have
done as well as any of the communist nomenklatura ever did in
Moscow, relatively speaking of course. But NASA is totally
ignorant of the socio-economic impact its subsidized bureaucracy
has on US society as a whole. Or they simply could care less,
and think of their own self-interest even as they speak of the
great benefits which space science is bringing to humanity.

Probably because any government bureaucracy which kept Nazi war
criminals on its payroll for decades could hardly ever really
gave a hoot about saving a few thousand or a few million lives
here and there. Unless it was about saving other Nazis, perhaps.
Or it was just the typical PR salesmanship which it has to
project to gain public acceptance of its endless space welfare
program.

In my view, I really don't think satellites are needed if they
can't be cost-effective and self-financing. The bottom line is
that the government foots the bill for them. So you want to pay
$100 million dollars to send a satellite up in the sky so you can
have an extra day's notice of where the hurricane might be
heading? Be my guest, just don't take it out of my pocket.
Besides, we can hardly predict the weather with any more
reasonable degree of accuracy with or without them. Another
point is that hurricanes take at least a week to hit the mainland
US. Shortwave radios travel fast enough to give us all ample
warning.

A step backwards, you say? I would say it's a step forward in
our understanding of economics and democracy, which must co-exist
to be a viable system for humanity. Therefore, the only solution
is to privatize NASA and let the chips fall where they may.

__________________
Our welfare cheats aren't driving Cadillacs in the ghettos of New York. They are manuevering Space Shuttles through extra-terrestrial junkyards.

Even if an Earth-orbiting telescope could resolve objects that small on the moon, and I don't think they can (yet), I don't see why you would believe a photo provided by NASA or the government.

Besides which, it's a phenomenal waste of resources to direct these satellites onto a target of absolutely no military or scientific use, especially when the majority of people don't need convincing of this point.

There was a fairly recent picture from moon-orbit that showed the blast pattern from one of the landers. Anyone have a line on that? (Not that that is likely to convince this guy either...)

Was this a troll?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Paul Unwin on 2002-06-19 20:03 ]</font>

[quote]
On 2002-06-19 20:00, Paul Unwin wrote:


And here is the link to the article:

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...os_010427.html

That's exactly what I was thinking of. My mind blanked on the name of the probe. Thanks.

ngant17 said a number of things...

“I categorically refuse to look at any data which has been supplied by NASA in order to prove (or disprove) that NASA's moon program was a sham. NASA controls a major share of information on data collected in outer space. So I simply suspect there is a conflict of interest here. You would not want to hire the fox to guard the hen house, so why would you want to rely on NASA to prove that NASA did this or NASA didn't do that?”

*You* don’t have to trust NASA. But a lot of private companies do. All satellites in geosynchronous orbit (for example, communications satellites) are operating in the Van Allen Belts. If NASA was giving out bodgy information about the radiation, the satellites would malfunction more frequently than what was expected. If that happened, companies would sue NASA.

“If you want to redeem my faith in NASA, let's have someone point a spy satellite or something like the Hubble telescope at the lunar surface and take a clear shot of the lunar buggy and other assorted junk which the Apollo astronauts left there 30 years ago? Is there a problem with that? Wouldn't that help to end this argument once and for all?”

Unfortunately, there are no telescopes with the resolution to see anything we left behind. Spy satellites orbiting the Earth aren’t any use either, because the Moon is much farther away than things they normally look at. The only alternative is to send a satellite to the Moon. But I don’t think anyone feels like spending the money to do that.

In the meantime, you can look at all the reports generated by geologists from around the world who’ve had the chance to study Moon rocks. None of these scientists have suggested the Moon rocks were faked, and there is simply too much lunar material to have been retrieved by any method other than humans going there and picking them up.

“If I were a smart business man, and I knew of a substantial field of titanium deposits, I would try to finance a project to exploit the element. If it could be done for a profit, of course. The problem is that no one has ever devised a way to mine titanium on the moon and get it back to earth and make a profit on it. Least of all the people in NASA and their assorted 'space contractors in the private sector' (a self-contradictory phase or oxymoron, since the very life-blood of such businesses like the United Space Alliance, Boeing Space Division, Martin Marietta, ect. are heavily socialized under state monopoly capitalism as it currently exists in the USA).”

Well, at the moment, it’s very expensive to lift anything out of the Earth’s gravity well. That’s the main reason why space mining hasn’t taken off yet. Socialism doesn’t alter that fact. Anyway, if a large amount of any commodity is released on an open market, the price of that commodity will drop, so any plans to mine the Moon must take into account that the very material being mined will affect the market.

“Probably because any government bureaucracy which kept Nazi war criminals on its payroll for decades could hardly ever really gave a hoot about saving a few thousand or a few million lives here and there. Unless it was about saving other Nazis, perhaps. Or it was just the typical PR salesmanship which it has to project to gain public acceptance of its endless space welfare program.”

I don’t see the relevance of this to whether Apollo was hoaxed. Anyway, don’t forget that the Soviet Union employed large numbers of ex-Nazis as well.

“In my view, I really don't think satellites are needed if they can't be cost-effective and self-financing. The bottom line is that the government foots the bill for them. So you want to pay $100 million dollars to send a satellite up in the sky so you can have an extra day's notice of where the hurricane might be heading? Be my guest, just don't take it out of my pocket.”

As far as I know, companies which want to put satellites in orbit have a choice of NASA, the European Space Agency, Russia, China, and possibly one or two other launchers. By the looks of it, that’s an open market.

“Besides, we can hardly predict the weather with any more reasonable degree of accuracy with or without them. Another point is that hurricanes take at least a week to hit the mainland US. Shortwave radios travel fast enough to give us all ample warning.”

Now them’s fightin’ words! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] Have you actually checked the accuracy of weather forecasts? According to a colleague of mine who recently retired from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, surveys consistently showed that the public rated the Met’s accuracy more highly than the Met did. You obviously don’t rate accurate weather forecasts very highly, but lots of people do.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Peter B on 2002-06-19 20:51 ]</font>

You´re welcome ! You may also want to visit this page, where Mike Bara has posted a little gem regarding the picture:

http://www.lunaranomalies.com/coffin.htm

For now, [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img] will have to do.

__________________
"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." [Carl Sagan]

That'll work, too. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_razz.gif[/img]

__________________
"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." [Carl Sagan]

A quote from Jim Scotti´s site -
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jsco...faked/FOX.html

"A telescope's diffraction limited resolving power depends linearly on the aperture of the telescope. Groundbased telescopes also have to look through the murky and turbulant atmosphere so without corrective techniques that are just now becoming common in large telescopes (called adaptive optics), a telescopes resolution is limited by the atmosphere to about 0.5-1.0 arcseconds (3600 arcseconds are in one degree and 360 degrees around the whole sky). That limits groundbased telescopes to a resolution of about 2 kilometers on the moon. From space, a telescope is limited by its diffraction limited resolution. For the Hubble Space Telescope, that is a little less than 0.05 arcseconds or about 90 meters at the distance of the moon. To resolve the LM descent stage which is about 10 meters across, one would need to have a resolution better than 10 meters, perhaps 2-3 meters which means we need a telescope some 30 times larger than the HST in orbit around the Earth to resolve the largest equipment left on the moon."

Even IF it was possible to take such a picture, the hoax believers would merely respond by saying something like:

"Yeah, well, OK. Of course the equipment is on the lunar surface NOW .... but it was NOT there in 1972. Clearly NASA has landed this stuff on the moon using unmanned probes in the 30 years AFTER 1972".

OK, here is the URL for the World Data Center for Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Moscow, go to it!

http://www.wdcb.ru/WDCB/wdcb_stp.shtml

The IKI data archive with data from: Prognoz-7, Prognoz-8, Prognoz-9, Prognoz-10, Arcad, Active, Apex, Gamma and Interball (Russian required)

http://www.iki.rssi.ru/da.html





<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Karl on 2002-06-19 21:36 ]</font>

I reason I pointed this out is that typically the percentage of materials in the Earth's crust are given in there percentage elemental weight. I assumed that ngant17 was following standard methods

http://education.jlab.org/glossary/abund_ele.html

Amen

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jrkeller on 2002-06-19 23:59 ]</font>