The fleeting echoes of faded glory
We think of America as a great nation. We laud our accomplishments. Yet, in the face of a new accomplishment, should we even celebrate this new accomplishment?
Why shouldn’t we celebrate another American triumph?
The answer may shock you.
The new Mars explorer Curiosity landed on the Red Planet earlier today. While there was a brief hoopla at first, the real response should be that of mourning, not celebration.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in DC and had a couple of hours between meetings so I walked over to the Air and Space Museum. While they had a few new pieces, like some of the new unmanned aircraft, but for the most part the big exhibits were devoted to our exploration of the moon.
America is the only nation to have sent some of its people beyond Earth orbit.
Do you realize the last time we did that was forty years ago?
While we talk about the incredible efforts of the American Space Program, do you realize they were all in the past?
What are we doing now?
We just landed Curiosity on Mars, but that was a program that was brought on during the Bush administration.
Where is the Obama Regime? Obama is the American leader who grounded America. Thanks to his leadership, America is the first space faring nation to lose the national ability to go into space.
We have an expensive space station in orbit. If we want to get there, we need a ride from the Russians.
Last year, Russia even talked about how it would make a controlled reentry of the International Space Station in 2020. Wait a minute. Isn’t that our station?
China, Russia and India are all talking about manned flights to the moon. China may actually do that in the next few years. Where will America be?
Under the Obama Regime, NASA’s mission is now to make Muslims feel good about their contributions to science. What will its mission be during Obama’s second term? Will it be making Americans feel good about the fact our nation is in decline? Will it be doing propaganda to show that losing the ability to travel in space is actually a good thing?
Obama put out a celebratory press release for the Curiosity landing. Yet Obama, while pumping his chest over this accomplishment, has been gutting the space program.
The only good news here is that the private space program is taking off. Perhaps if we had cut loose the private sector and let them go into the space program forty years ago, we would have a colony on the moon and be making manned trips to Mars.
While the commercial space program is a good thing, America still needs a national space program. Much as we have a commercial fleet and we have a navy, we need that national ability to accomplish national objectives in space. This includes scientific as well as military objectives.
Unfortunately for America, we have leadership in this nation that is committed not to America’s greatness but to see America being diminished.
Perhaps the lunar landings of 1969 were America’s high water mark. The decade of the seventies was the decade of the left where the Party of Treason decimated both the military and space programs so they could fund welfare programs that have little purpose except to create a permanent Democratic dependency constituency.
If America is ever to be great again, we cannot do it with a President and a party in charge who are committed to seeing the end of America as a great power.
Tags: curiosity, cutting, manned, nasa, obama, program, space
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Mollie Baxter on -
I don't know where to begin with this fiction! They can't even decide when their religion began, who penned the books in the Quran, and give Mary credit for being a chosen woman!
WAS QURAN WRITTEN OR INSPIRED?
"Behold! The angels said: "O Mary! God has chosen you and purified you - Chosen you above the women of all worlds." Qur'an-3:42
But I will stick with the faulty science!
Inertia and Mass
Newton's first law of motion states that "An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." Objects tend to "keep on doing what they're doing." In fact, it is the natural tendency of objects to resist changes in their state of motion. This tendency to resist changes in their state of motion is described as inertia.
Inertia: the resistance an object has to a change in its state of motion.
Newton's conception of inertia stood in direct opposition to more popular conceptions about motion. The dominant thought prior to Newton's day was that it was the natural tendency of objects to come to a rest position. Moving objects, so it was believed, would eventually stop moving; a force was necessary to keep an object moving. But if left to itself, a moving object would eventually come to rest and an object at rest would stay at rest; thus, the idea that dominated people's thinking for nearly 2000 years prior to Newton was that it was the natural tendency of all objects to assume a rest position.
Galileo, a premier scientist in the seventeenth century, developed the concept of inertia. Galileo reasoned that moving objects eventually stop because of a force called friction. In experiments using a pair of inclined planes facing each other, Galileo observed that a ball would roll down one plane and up the opposite plane to approximately the same height. If smoother planes were used, the ball would roll up the opposite plane even closer to the original height. Galileo reasoned that any difference between initial and final heights was due to the presence of friction. Galileo postulated that if friction could be entirely eliminated, then the ball would reach exactly the same height.
Galileo further observed that regardless of the angle at which the planes were oriented, the final height was almost always equal to the initial height. If the slope of the opposite incline were reduced, then the ball would roll a further distance in order to reach that original height.
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/newtlaws/U2L1b.cfm
GEOGRAPHY, CIRCUMFERENCE OF EARTH
The ancient Greek scholar Eratosthenes is commonly called the "father of geography" for he was the first to use the word geography and he had a small-scale notion of the planet that led him to be able to determine the circumference of the earth.
Biography of Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes was born around 276 B.C.E. at a Greek colony in Cyrene, Libya. He was educated at the academies of Athens and was appointed to run the Great Library at Alexandria in 240. While serving as head librarian and scholar, Eratosthenes wrote a comprehensive treatise about the world, called Geography. This was the first use of the word, which literally means "writing about the earth" in Greek. Geography also introduced the climatic concepts of torrid, temperate, and frigid zones.
http://geography.about.com/od/historyofgeography/a/eratosthenes.htm
ECLIPSES
We may know there's a scientific explanation for them, but solar eclipses continue to exert an almost magical power over us. It's not at all clear we've decreased in gullibility since the days when Columbus used his fore-knowledge of an eclipse to hoodwink the Jamaicans. And even though we know better, during each total solar eclipse, there will be people blinded by the too tempting sight of an eclipsed sun.
Eclipse Omens
Eclipses have been seen as evil omens whose presence changed the course of battle. In the eclipse of 585 B.C. -- the one Thales of Miletus, is said to have predicted -- five years of fighting ended between the Medes and Lydians as a result of an eclipse. In 413, the frightened Athenians suddenly abandoned their plan to move from Syracuse when a lunar eclipse appeared. The result was a rout by the Syracusans.
Scientific Understanding of Eclipses
The Babylonians have been credited as the first to calculate the regular intervals at which eclipses occur*. It was through contact with the East that Thales of Miletus was able to make the prediction that marked the beginning of the Greek scientific/philosophic era. While there is some doubt as to whether Thales accurately predicted the eclipse attributed to him -- because he didn't fully understand all the cycles necessary to calculate the date and because Herodotus' reporting leaves room for doubt -- he is credited with predicting the May 25, 585 B.C. eclipse.
Thales predicted a total solar eclipse which was visible in Asia Minor in the midst of the battle between Media and Lydia. Herodotus mentioned in his Historia, Book 1, 74: "Suddenly a total solar eclipse took place in the midst of the battle between Lydia and Media. Thales of Miletus had predicted that that solar eclipse would occur at that time and at that place."
Today we can calculate the dates of the total solar eclipses which could be seen in Asia Minor where that battle took place: September 30, 610, June 21, 597 and May 28, 585. In his Natural History, Pliny says of Thales: " ...it was the fourth year during the 48th panathenaia." Since the first Olympic Games took place in 776, the 48th Olympic Games took place approximately 588 B.C. -- in other words, the May 29th, 585 date.
Addendum (2009): According to Early Greek Philosophy, by John Burnet, the date given by Thales, according to Pliny (NH ii/53), is OLXLVIII.4. "Olympiadis XLVIII anno quarto praedicto solis defectu...."
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/eclipses/a/SolarEclipses.htm
I will give them credit for our illogical Arabic numerical system! 1 inch divided into 16 parts, 12 inches is 1 foot, 3 feet is 1 yard, and so on. But in the metric system you don't have to remember how many of whatever to the next measurement, you simply go up or down by 10. It is the language of science and medicine to this day!
I could add a lot more in the sciences but it late and I am tired.
-
Permalink Reply by Vern Shotwell on -
Thank you for demonstrating the validity of the old adage..."Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then!"
-
Permalink Reply by John Olson on -
Maybe we would have had the money if the Muslim Kenyan Idiot hadn't have been dolling out trillions of dollars to his cronies in the form of a so called stimulus!
-
Permalink Reply by ekim on
-
STOP donating to our competitors thru " foreign aid " and use that money to continue Nasa's funding in a lessor degree just to keep our place and capability !
-
Permalink Reply by Doug Nicholson on
-
I agree, but we need to do more than "...keep our place and capability". I don't know about any of you, but I certainly do not trust China or Russia, both of whom are nuclear powers and basically communists, to have the "high ground" that is orbital/outer space, much less control of the moon.
If you don't understand where I'm coming from, read Robert A. Heinlein's, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, (not only educational, but very entertaining) in which he takes the story of the American Revolution and replaces the English colonies in America with Earth colonies on "Luna" (the moon). The moon colonists (the "good guys") are able to successfully revolt by literally "throwing rocks" down the gravity well which exists between Luna and Earth. I do not want either China or Russia to have that capability, but with nukes instead of rocks!
And for those of you who don't know who Heinlein is, he was known as the Dean of Science Fiction and was the only writer, SF or otherwise, invited to be in NASA's Mission Control on July 20, 1969, when we first landed men on "Luna".
-
Permalink Reply by Melissa Ortiz on
-
Very true. While he was not my first choice, we must support Romney for the WH...if for no other reason than to get BHO out of there.
-
Permalink Reply by George C. McMurtry on -
If we made even a halfhearted attempt to eliminate fraud and corruption in the "entitlement" programs, we would have more than enough money to keep our superiority in space for future generations (for both military and commercial reasons). Besides that, NASA contracted out nearly everything except control of projects. Private enterprise created thousands of jobs in order to produce the materials necessary for the space program. This is one government run organization that actually helps the private sector and that is pretty rare.
-
Permalink Reply by ekim on
-
There is enough rampant fraud in every aspect of government to fund whatever we decide to fund. Problem is those who are in place to do the work of the government are either incompetent or too lazy to get the job of enforcement and policing accomplished on a daily basis !
They want more money from those paying the majority of the taxes and those folks want to know why they should fund more ridiculous FRAUD ! WHO is WATCHING the WATCHERS !
-
Permalink Reply by Andrew Asnip on -
While NASA has some of the brightest and most dedicated scientists and engineers working for it, it also has a huge albatross around it's neck; government bureaucracy.
For forty years, our space program had no real purpose in life, and existed as a highly-technical pork barrel. Obama did a really great thing by allowing the huge jump in privatization of space flight. Sure he did it for all the wrong reasons, and any success was purely unintentional, but it will remain as his one actual accomplishment.
For space to be explored and conquered, it will take actual people, not governments, to make the leap to space and learn how to survive and thrive in the most inhospitable environment we have ever encountered. A free-market approach is the best way to quickly determine the most cost-effective and safe methods for overcoming the risks. and it doesn't need a single tax-payer dollar to achieve success. In fact, the best thing government can do is just get out of the way. Hmmm, that seems like a good solution for most of what the Federal government now does!
-
Permalink Reply by Lee Hoecherl on
-
The Moon thing and the space Station are great Feats of enginerring as is the landing of a object on Mars,but we will never as a people live on them as a replacement for Earth.It may have some value as a place to station Missiles to use from space if needed.But we do need to keep our ability to do such sharp.
-
Permalink Reply by Darrell Russell on -
This is true, we are a great nation or at least in 2008 we were.The entitlement mentality is growing worse than a consumer and this is what the progressives want. This translate into votes, yet they are against letting the military vote on the early ballot as the law stands in Ohio. Whats the difference? The entitlement recipients will vote for Obama because they want more. The military will vote against Obama because they deserved more.
-
Permalink Reply by John Bellaire on -
The Rover thing is good news. About everything else happening in the government is dirty as sewer water.
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next ›
© 2013 Created by Judson Phillips.
