Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon The former director general of Russia's space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin is skeptical that NASA really landed astronauts on the Moon in its historic Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Rogozin questioned the lunar landing in a message on his Telegram channel over the weekend. He claimed that before he worked at Roscosmos, he sent …
In ancient times, like 10 years ago, there still was a difference of "being provocative" and "spitting bullshit, completely disqualifying the speaker for even a simple conversation about the weather".
Could we please re-introduce that distinction?
This is the same bloke who advocated using tactical nukes against Ukraine because Russia is losing the war they started.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-now-no-option-29896415
“It must be said that under our doctrine we have every right to use tactical nuclear weapons,” said Rogozin, dressed in military fatigues with a customised AK-47 machine gun slung over his shoulder.”
“That is precisely what they are there for — this great equaliser.”
“For now, there is a clear disparity in the forces and conventional weapons in favour of the enemy.”
This was due to the West’s supplies to Ukraine, he made clear.
“Therefore the best method to destroy [Ukraine’s] counter-offensive is to use tactical nuclear weapons, with understandable consequences, of course.”
“I think there is no other option at the moment.”
Dmitry congratulated NASA on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landings.
is anti-social. All it seems to do is feed on the lower base instincts of many who choose to participate, mostly narcissism which also is one of the foundations for belief in the conspiracy theories which abound, that being 'I'm telling you a secret, the "truth", and that makes you better than everyone else who believes differently'.
I'm sick of hearing about anti-social "social" media's impact on the selfish, the greedy, and the gullible. If society does indeed end up collapsing, "social" media will certainly be one of the [many] reasons.
Once NASA had succeeded in getting people to the Moon and back, they were left without any way to capture the public imagination and therefore budget.
It seems that this time, they have learned that time is money and that the more time something takes, the more money they get. Or on personal levels of their staff, the longer their people can spin-out a project, the longer they will keep their jobs.
Seems deluded. The US could do it now if they wanted to. They'd just need the budget to do so. But, landing back on the moon hasn't been a political priority. That's not the same as not being able to.
Hell, given a bit of time and more money, SpaceX could do it I have no doubt.
Yes, I could go to the Moon too, it's just that I don't want.
The US could do it now if they wanted to
How ? With what rocket, what lander, what gateway ... ? Humanity is regressing technically, and that concerns also the possibility to go to the Moon: we are not able to fly at Mach 3 anymore, we are not able to fly at Mach 2 as civilian anymore, we can't repair Hubble anymore, we can't build the 3 largest aircraft anymore ... Today, and it's also true on ElReg, "technology " means computer, and by extension online advertisement. That computers are 1/2 century old technology, and that development has halted since at least 10 years, seems to be lost on software people. Technology is now Facebook and Google, not stuff made from titanium or ceramic compound.
Sorry but you're wrong.
We can fly at Mach 3, or we could in a very short amount of time rebuild Aircraft to achieve that (e.g. the SR-71), but it doesnt make economic sense to do that anymore. The previous use cases for Mach 3 flights were mostly spy flights or fighters. For spy flights we can do that much more cheapily, and with zero risk using satellites. For Fighters, modern missiles are Beyond visual range (up to 150-200km away), so you dont need huge speed anymore.
The Mach 2 civilian aircraft (i.e. Concorde), never made a profit, was expensive to maintain, and people as a general rule we're not interested in paying the premium. Boeing looked at desoigning a new Mach 2 Aircraft in the late 90's, early 2000's (the Sonic Cruiser), but the market research showed, people were not willing to pay for the extra speed. We could build it, but the economic reality is not their. We havent lost that technology, and it is in active research development, and maybe one day, people will find a way to make Supersonic flight work more quietly, and at a cheaper price, and then you watch how fast it will get built. But that day is not today.
Most of the things you listed were horribly expensive tasks that only got built or done because it was a way for nations to show off. But to a large degree we've moved past that point, economic reality says if there is a cheaper way to do things, then we do it that way. Bigger and Faster doesnt always translate to better...
"For spy flights we can do that much more cheapily, and with zero risk using satellites" - the entire SR71 fleet (32 of them) cost a total of one billion dollars. If we assume that's 1966 dollars, multiply by ten. One KH-11 satellite costs about 3 billion. Satellites are nowhere near as flexible as aircraft - they are pretty predictable and if you are Terry Taliban you know what time of day to stay in your cave.
"Concorde [...] never made a profit" - BA certainly ran it at an *operating* profit, once they'd found out that the passengers had no idea what their tickets cost.
SR71 flights needed a lot more than the 1 aircraft and 2 crew. Tankers, AWACS no doubt, fighter assets for their exit points etc.
KH11 may be predictable, but it is also repeated, for months. And militarily, stopping your opponent doing something so it isn't observed is not without value.
If you were Spacex or ULA or the US DoD, would you not have a spare spacecraft or two - the next KH (we hatefer current model is) or that drone spsceplane, and s booster available for use in a day or so?
@lglethal :
Sorry but you're wrong ... Most of the things you listed were horribly expensive tasks
logic is not your thing, is-it ? You're admitting yourself that we can't do all the things that I listed and yet you say I'm wrong and you find excuses why it's actually good that we don't do those things anymore. Do you know the story about the fox and sour grapes ?
A scheduled service to LEO or GEO, almost.
They have expertise and frequent practice in docking in orbit.
They have 2 well,-tested crew capsules, and one that'll probably work, one if which is known to work round beyond the Moon.
They have well-practiced propulsive landings.
They have the plans if the Apollo ascent stage.
They have much better mapping of masscons and the lunar surface.
They don't have a compelling reason to bodge that together into a minimum soonest mission. TMA-1 might bf there, but if so it has been for a million or ten years, and any waits well.
all lot of if's there.
and all irrelevent if the engines are shit.
long way for breakdown services to get to you before you starve or suffocate.
musky's plans need multiple launches at short intervals to do the refuelling in orbit (dangerous procedure just to do one in orbit), you can't wait weeks or months between them as the fuel will end up boiling off, and you really don't want lox boiling in a sealed container with no way to cool the container (only cooling in space is radiative, no atmosphere for conductive!) so they will have to allow escape to release pressure. too long waiting and poof, your fuel is gone.
So it's fucking stupidity, unless your a musky dick rider.
They already bodged a test launch due to stupid musky rushing, it's bodge's all the way down/up.
They already bodged a test launch due to stupid musky rushing, it's bodge's all the way down/up.
They've recently reached 200 orbital launches in a row without incident. This is more than any other company. They have more expertise in orbital rocketry than anyone else, who else would you trust?
The point is it's prior knowledge, so it should take one rocket, fuel and some astronauts. 54 years on, with the technology and resources we have it should be childs' play, a walk in the park, piece of cake. Why then isn't the US raising the flag on the moon at least once a year every 4th of July? Because Brandon, Bama, Billary and the Bush'es are incapable and when you had the golden orange opportunity you wasted it on fake news and racist riots to put back the lawyer class in charge of not landing on the moon.
As has been repeatedly explained. The reason we don't is cost.
Sure, we could simply rebuild the same old rocket and landers from the Apollo era, but they want to do it safer and cheaper than back then. The Apollo missions cost $257bn in today's money.
Vs Artemis predicted to cost less than half that. And SpaceX's system costing a fraction of that.
The question is - what's the value of going back in exactly the same way we did before? What do we learn? What do we gain in not improving the technology and making it safer, cheaper and then developing a sustainable system for doing so?
I was given a copy of "Apollo Remastered" by Andy Saunders. A masterpiece. A large, heavy book with more black photo-ink than I've ever seen in one place. Some of the pictures make you just stop and marvel at what it was to be there, and really complement the text-based works on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes. I ended up reading it in small chunks, wearing my head-tourch on a diffuse setting, to help my aging eyes pick out the detail of the pictures and the sparse text provided with each.
Not proof that they went there of course, but a marvel of photographic restoration and presentation.
"What about the 5 other times NASA landed on the moon? Were they all faked too?"
No. One of them had nip over to Tranquility Base on the qt to leave the laser reflectors :)
I once shut one of these loonies up by saying that you could see Armstrong's bootprints on the lunar surface using the most powerful terestrial telescopes - seemed reasonable to me at the time but actually isn't true :( or apparently due to the limits of optics ever likely to be.
I cannot imagine any of this party making diligent inquiry to prove the lie :)
If I were Roscosmos I would have sent him instead, a copy of Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach."
You can't see individual bootprints but you *can* see the walking tracks, plus the lunar equipment
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/09/06/new_lunar_images/
One could also question as to how, in the 60's, Russia was able to keep a dozen or more soviet republics in line, and propped up with puppet governments, when they cannot do so now. Or question as to how Russia managed to feed and employ it's own population in the 60's, which it cannot do now. Or had a military that made the west quake in their boots and kept us awake at night in fear, while now they cannot even invade a fairly defenceless neighbour now without it becoming a total farce.
I would suggest that's because Putin and his Oligarch buddies have pretty much stripped the nation of resources, which surprisingly is not something that Stalin did too much of. Well apart from "human resources" of which Stalin killed many millions of his own people. Putin of course is working on that too, with the conscripts in Ukraine, but I'd doubt even he could match Stalin there.
Still since Putin pretty much stripped the Russian military to the bear bones, and then surrounded himself with people who would only say yes to him, is it any surprise that the only way he's made any progress in Ukraine is by firing long range missiles and drones (with relatively minimal effect), and going the tried and trusted Russian cannon fodder route?
a fairly defenceless neighbour
you mean the one backed by the entire NATO and its military budget that is 10 times that of Russia ?
without it becoming a total farce.
Do you mean by that the latest sanctions where the EU forbids to sell toilets to Russia : https://news.yahoo.com/european-union-ban-supply-toilets-125924966.html ? A farce indeed
"Nice little vatnik."
I'm quite surprised any sane person would even try such an obvious cause-and-effect switcheroo as Zolko did. "Of course Japan had to attack Pearl Harbor because US firebombed Tokyo"
While many go beyond the call of duty apologising for Russia's terroristic actions, I'm left wondering how many is posting the garbage just to avoid decomposing on an Ukrainian field.
Ah, but back then, we thought that the Russians had an effective military.
What is different now is that the Russian army was turned back by the Ukrainians on their own, which showed that Russia was not nearly as potent as had been previously thought.
On the surface, Russia should have steamrollered Ukraine out of existence in mere days. Everybody expected that. But they didn't.
Once it had been shown that Russia's tactics were seriously flawed, and that their soldiers were poorly trained, and their equipment was not as plentiful or capable as was previously thought, it became a war of attrition which Russia would eventually have won without the West backing Ukraine.
What is interesting is the perception that Russia has a lot of financial resources (they certainly had a lot of military resources, although much of it has been proved to be obsolescent). Their vaunted cutting edge military hardware has barely figured in this fight, probably because the size of the Russian economy does not support making a lot of it, as their GDP is less than the UK's (at least the nominal GDP). People equate Russia with the USSR, which was much, much larger as it included the GDP of many Eastern European states, including Ukraine. It's really not surprising that they are struggling keeping the war going.
What is feared now is the possibility that Putin may try to save face (at least in a historical context) by deploying tactical nuclear weapons to 'win' this war. How the West would react to this is an interesting question, one I'd rather not be shown the answer to.
"Russia was able to keep a dozen or more soviet republics in line"
"how Russia managed to feed and employ it's own population in the 60's"
"a military that made the west quake in their boots and kept us awake at night in fear"
First question - a huge and merciless military that's always been very good at crushing unarmed protestors with tanks.
Second question - the Soviet Union's agriculture was woefully inefficient, even after reforms by Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev. There were regular shortages of basic food products (bread queues etc), and it used income generated by exporting precious metals to buy grain. They also had the Ukrainian output which they no longer have.
Third question - they had, on paper, a huge and powerful military that had overcome the Nazis in WW2 (along with a lot of other factors they basically threw manpower into the effort). The threat of nuclear war was also never far below the surface in any consideration of military conflict with the Soviets. Oh, and a vast amount of propaganda.
Since Putin and other oligarchs came to power, military spending has been heavily inhibited by private individual's self-aggrandisement. Private yachts account for a substantial portion of the Russian naval budget. They still only have one aircraft carrier that sails everywhere with tugs for when it inevitably breaks down.
Hang on, but doesn't GBeebies, sorry, GB News, occupy that part of the broadcasting political truthiness spectrum these days?
Every workday morning, "Great, British, patriots" groggily celebrate the similar glories of Brexit in the beer-stained halls of certain pubs (by golly, they do! <ahem>), followed by an ever-more-expensive slurry pasty… Truly these lucky few are living the best life!
[Different AC]
We must admit Putin did one thing right: now Russia is again one of the top grain producers, as they privatized the insane communist system to a large degree. During communism they had to beg their most powerful opponents for grain, now they are one of the largest exporters !
If only he could see his good work in economics and retire into sunset...
> What, you think he should avoid staircases or windows, which do seem to be problematic for critics of the current regime!
staircases, windows, hospitals, international holidays with the family, domestic holidays with family, ropes (suicide by hanging), walking the street, cliffs, guns (suicide by gunshot), bodies of water, cigarettes, ... Wikipedia list of suspicious Russian deaths.
TBH, picking up a rifle and joining the frontlines in Ukraine (on either side) is probably the safest place to be.
Surprised about just one UK entry on the suspicious deaths list, Sky's Once Upon a Time in Londongrad documentary made six episodes out of them all.
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This post has been deleted by its author
"Rogozin was born in Moscow to the family of a Soviet military scientist. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1986 with a degree in journalism, and in 1988 he graduated from the University of Marxism–Leninism under the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU with a degree in economics.[2]
His thesis on "Philosophy and Theory of Wars" earned him a Doctor of Philosophy while a Doctor of Technical Sciences was awarded him in the specialty "weapons theory, military-technical policy, weapons systems". Both were earned while he was professionally engaged in politics."
This sounds like he never build anything real, but prolly took part in the bullshit generation out of Piter. BS carried them a long time, but no longer. If only they could call it a day and focus again on BS instead of kinetics and cybernetics.
Indeed. What is the "mil tech" of a journalist ? They actually all follow the expertise of their top, virus-phobic man.
They now have an entire cadre of these people and if BEZMENOV is to be believed, this has always been the main occupation of Moscow elite. And if you think about it, there is a certain elegance in messing without opponents mind instead of the hard work of weapons R+D and manufacturing. Also, it is the least deadly-risky form of warfare.
Why won't anyone take this man seriously? Of course no-one got to the Moon in the 1960s!
You can't get to the Moon 'cos it is *above* the plane of the Earth and the only way for us to leave is to drop *down* over the edge! If you straight up you'll just bounce off the Bowl of The Heavens[2], as ane fule kno.
Which is why the USSR signed the Antartic Treaty in 1959, to hide the fact that they had failed in their attempt to pull the Glorious People's Magnetic Ladybird up the outside of the Ice Wall when (ex) Corporal Ivan claimed he could "make it dance" by quickly flipping over the magnets on the inside[3].
What's that? Nap time? Thank you, Nurse.
[1] The Truth shall make ye fret!
[2] Bowl! Revisionist nonsense, promulgated after the People's Committee airbrushed the Goddess Nut out of the photographs and changed the story of the great steam train journey carrying the hero to The Russias, so that it now carried the Glorious Revolution across the sky, spitting out hot embers to form the stars
[3] This is the reason that searching for "magnetic ladybirds" nowadays will only show results for fridge magnets and not the original "two round black magnets" technology; don't be taken in by conspiratorial claims that the round black magnets were just cardboard props used in early TV broadcasts to hide the fridge light from the cameras.
He may be afraid of falling from a window if he doesn't lick Putin Khuylo's boots well enough.
Last week I had a colleague ask if I "really" believed that we'd been to the moon, or that Elon Musk was landing rockets vertically... I said that yes I do "really" believe that and that I wouldn't continue a discussion on whether it "really" happened as anyone who believes or entertains the contrary is clearly an idiot and simply not worth my time...
Alas even if they were to ‘see it with their own eyes’, they can simply claim that it as was a massive illusion, produced by <insert bullshit, made up, impossible technology here>, so yes they are still ‘right’ and it’s all a fraud.
Unfortunately, some people are beyond helping, doesn’t mean we should't keep trying though!
He was disgraced, and forced out.
He's fanning the current "state reinforced" patriotic messaging to recover some pull with Putin and the rest of the great brainwashed..
Ignore him. Ignore them. I see this in every country that is driving aggressive responses to a state declared emergency. Some countries allow the dissenting press, some do not.
It pains me to see the most impressive Soviet and USA accomplishments cast so casually around.
And the earlier comment about the "Glavny Konstruktor' (Mr. Korolev), and his imprisonment during most of the 2nd WW and most untimely death is very sad and very accurate. Our lone satellite could very well have been "Red " 1st..
Political bunderfluff aside: Imagine what we could have done as a RACE, not a fractured "Mob"
( Ex Love-In Hippie peace-nic far-sighted ramblings OFF )
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