Astronomy and space exploration

You wont change the speed of light with gravity even when going against a black hole the photons dont lose speed they lose frequency

 

U.S. Has No Explanation for U.F.O.s, Does Not Rule Out Aliens - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
June 25, 2021

 

Thunderf00t has done an excellent series of calling BS on those 3 videos:

1

2

3


and some followups




I haven't figured out WTF the angle is on the official Pentagon support for this but its clearly intentional participation in info-war BS of some sort.
Or US Govt truly is full of fucking idiots.

 

Military pilots / radar see thing they can't identify. That is a national security issue whether it's an actual thing or pilot /systems error. It's right for the military to investigate and seek to improve reporting.*

Ask them, or ex presidents "is it aliens?", the correct answer is "we can't rule it out". They should probably add that it's incredibly unlikely.

I've not watched Thunderfoots videos, as I find him irritating, but presumably he's highlighting the ways in which objects in the released videos could have mundane explanations. It's a mistake to assume that the military as a whole doesn't know these too. They're just unclassified videos, they're not playing behind an official on stage saying "Look! Aliens!".

Anyway, isn't this widely off topic as none of this is happening in space (aside from taking the broader view that everything is)?

* One of the more recent Pentagon groups was sponsored by a senator who was a full alien nut with alien nut friends. There's some reporting that suggests the rest of the Pentagon thought they were nobs.

 

Well maybe watch the first at least.
Short summary: Unusually the HUD numbers are uncensored giving stuff like aircraft altitude, speed, heading & target range, zoom FoV, and vertical/horizontal angle to target which means you can do the maths.
When you do the maths its something about 1m wide at about 1km up and travelling about 100km/h ie probably a Canada Goose.

 

There are other videos doing the same thing, along with talking about IR and zoom lens artifacts etc. They just don't feature BUSTED in the title. That guy's just not my cup of tea, even though we share a sentiment on the likelihood these incidents being aliens.

 

Yeah, but it might be from another planet.

Pentagon can't rule it out.

Cheers

 

Maybe this one

 

Most powerful rocket ever assembled (and yet to fly).

 

And now it's 52 years since we went to the moon.

We peaked a long time ago.

Cheers

 

Politics happened since then.

 

Politics were the only reason Apollo happened. You could argue that we'd have tracked a slower but more sustainable route to the moon without Kennedy's need to show American superiority.

 

That was politics between countries. They no longer have a need to be unified to rally against the Soviet Union. It's since became a battle between internal US political parties, as to which companies get an unending supply of income from the government without need to show progress towards a goal.

 

To be fair, space technologies actually progressed by quite a lot. It's just that going to the moon is not really that useful. Sending satellites to low earth orbits, on the other hand, is very useful, and we actually are able to do it much cheaper and more reliable than before, and that's progress.
If there's gold on the moon then I guess we'd already have mining sites all over

 

I dont know if thats really space tech, thats more just tech has progressed heaps, and its being used in space.
Wasnt the moon base alpha disaster meant to happen 22 years ago? And back when they were writing it early 70s that could of been somewhat imaginable (though not the part about loosing the moon) that was just the LSD talking


Thats part of the reason Im a huge elon fanboy, the guy is doing something, like with wagner etc the poisitives far outway the negatives

 

The problem with expanding our spaced based activities /economy is cost per kilogramme to orbit. This is the thing that hasn't really moved on much since the 70's. For heavy lift it's gone backward if anything.

It's not like they're haven't been attempts. The Shuttle was the most obvious, but as a large government project it never stood a chance in reducing costs. There were the like of Beal and Kesler that never made it over the initial hump to become viable businesses.

SpaceX are the only organisation right now that stand a good chance of breaking through that launch cost ceiling (floor?). Even there, they don't have external customers for megatons to orbit yet. A large part of their success to date though has been finding customers, so there's a good chance of them making it work.

 

The problem I have with Elon is he's the transport version of Sean Murray

 

In that that initial product is far less than promised but a few years down the line it's really good.