Yes, sorry, I meant the Van Allen Belt....unfortunately I had been listening to U2 while enjoying a few (quite a few) glasses of red plonk.... However, from the Wiki article you have indicated with the link..... There have been nuclear tests in space that have caused artificial radiation belts. Starfish Prime, a high altitude nuclear test, created an artificial radiation belt that damaged or destroyed as many as one third of the satellites in low earth orbit at the time. Removal The belts (Van Allen) are a hazard for artificial satellites and are moderately dangerous for human beings, but are difficult and expensive to shield against. Sorry, but I'm with the conspiracy theorists on this one........:wink: AL
Oh yeah...I forgot they spent thousands developing a pen that could write in zero gravity, while the Russians used a pencil.....I'd never be able to live without that. :biggrin: Ultra sound technology was just piggy backed onto NASA's budget of billions, and was already developed just not commercially affordable. The bypass technology was on its way anyway and other nations were pioneering it before the yanks, but it was developed in space not the moon anyway, but heyho, like I said it won't change my breakfast in the morning. Oh by the way the post was a tongue in cheek post, for a reaction which the bait was taken for.
Have a read of "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe. Fantastic book. Yeager, Glenn, Carpenter, Grissom, Armstrong, Shepard et al. Brave guys, get fastened into an X1, an X15 or a capsule on top of a Redstone rocket with 357,000lbs of thrust and calmly say "light the candle, lets go"
Actually with regards to the 'questions', there are good explanations for all of them. The easiest one to account is the flag. The moon has no atmosphere as such and very little gravity, so any motion from the flag being planted would remain for far far longer than on earth, potentially hours. The other indisputable items of proof are the mirrors placed on the surface, and used to this day to track the moons distance from the earth.
Apparently that's urban legend. You wouldn't want to risk a bit of. pencil lead getting in somewhere important if it broke.
It must have been so hard to have achieved so much so young; the danger would be that everything else subsequently would seem so mundane. No wonder that some of those early astronauts had problems in later life.
Like after the risks soldiers take and then having to returning to civi street. :frown: It's a way of life that can't be changed once experienced.
Surely one of the reasons Peter Cook went off the rails. He'd done everything by the time he was about 25 (except go to the moon). I'm interested in the conspiracy theory about the moon landings not having existed. The most interesting thing is why one would make up such a theory. Why is landing on the moon so bizarre? I mean, you don't see conspiracy theories about Concorde never having existed or flown anywhere, or the Titanic never having existed or having been sunk by something other than an iceberg (I know - they scuttled it deliberately for some nefarious purpose). Though I have to admit I haven't trawled the net to find out is such strange theories have ever been postulated. They probably have, come to think of it.
Because everyone has head of it, very few saw anything other than a rocket blasting off (to where?) and the scope for weaving stories is huge ? It was also such an achievement to have been almost impossible.
I don't believe anyone has been up to the top of Everest. I've never seen it, it's almost impossible to do (not enough oxygen). Those films and pictures you see could have been taken on any old snowy mountain.
