I Have a Doubt

Articles like this make me begin to seriously question NASA:

The launch of a privately funded US space module, Genesis II, has been delayed by a month for testing, the second such delay for it, its American makers said Monday.

Genesis II was scheduled for launch in Russia by a civilian Dnepr rocket, based on a modified intercontinental ballistic missile. But a Dnepr launch vehicle crashed shortly after lift-off last year.

The Nevada company Bigelow Aerospace, which constructed Genesis II, said on its website: “The Russian authorities have requested additional tests on the Dnepr rocket and its ground equipment.”

If I’m to believe NASA and the Soviet cosmonauts, we’ve had objects in space since 1957. Yet, 50 years later, we can’t figure out how to send one rocket up without doing a gazillion tests on it first. Why not use one of the rocket technologies that have supposedly worked so well for, oh, the last 50 years? Why the endless testing of tried-and-true techniques?

Incidents like this make me seriously question whether or not we’ve ever even really been into “outer space.” I’ve never been there; have you? Weren’t we supposed to have moonships charting us all to jobs on Mars by now? Yet when it comes time to put their money where their mouth is, NASA has been backing down for at least the last 40 years.

I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist. But things like this do give me pause:

Genesis II will test new systems, as well as carrying additional cameras and pictures and items that are part of a “Fly Your Stuff” programme.

Under the programme, the public has been able to purchase slots to provide photos and other small mementos to be carried aboard the craft for a fee of 295 dollars (220 euros).

The photos and items will be photographed and recorded by Genesis IIs interior cameras and displayed on the Bigelow Aerospace website.

There’s definitely a huge financial incentive involved in hoodwinking the public, if that’s what’s going on here. Conversely, the uproar if the space programs were found to be a hoax would be quite enormous.  Mobs would tear Cape Canaveral apart, for starters.

Philosophically, I’ve always had some qualms about the space race. After all, it purports to discount the idea of ether, which makes much more sense to me than a huge vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, so if the Universe consisted of one, why wouldn’t all the planets and stars be pulled apart trying to fill it? Also, NASA is a Kennedy program, so you have to think to yourself, “Money Pit.”  There’s nothing Democrats like more than a cash-siphoning boondoggle to their corrupt cronies; even when I was a Democrat, that was one of the triggers that made me vote Republican on occasion.

 The third problem I’ve always had with arguments for the space race are that scientists, as a class, seem so smug and dishonest to me.  Not to besmirch the reputation of every single scientist, but as a class, they seem like the kind of people who’d tell you that Martians colonized the Earth just because they found some rock with weird marks in it.  Snake oil salesmen, to put it in laymens’ terms.

None of that is necessarily reason enough to disbelieve NASA, of course. But the more I read of this website, the more questions I have.

As we begin to make this argument, we acknowledge beforehand that we are aware of the property of matter known as friction. Yes, we realize that whenever two surfaces are held together by any force there will be a static frictional force that will resist any motion by either surface in any direction other than parallel to the force. The example we are using is an extreme situation, and would involve the object in question to travel a considerable distance (tens of degrees of latitude) from the “top” of the planet.

Using the “round Earth” theory, setting an object on the earth would be like setting grains of sand on a beach ball. Certainly a few grains would stay – right around the top, the surface is nearly horizontal – but when you stray too far from the absolute top of the ball, the grains of sand start sliding off and falling onto the ground. The Earth, if round, should behave in exactly the same fashion. Because the top is a very localized region on a sphere, if the Earth were in fact round, there would be only a very small area of land that would be at all inhabitable. Stray to the outside fringes of the “safe zone”, and you start walking at a tilt. The further out you go, the more you slant, until your very survival is determined by the tread on your boots. Reach a certain point, and you slide off the face of the planet entirely. Obviously, something is wrong.

In order to avoid the aforementioned scenario, (which obviously is inaccurate, as you very rarely hear of people falling off the face of the planet) we are forced to assume that, in the “round Earth” theory, there would be a gravitational field radiating from the center of the planet. All objects, be they rocks, insects, humans, or other planets would have, under Efimovich’s theory, have a gravitational “charge” that would, under a certain alignment, cause them to be attracted to the center of the Earth. Unfortunately, like a magnet in a stronger magnetic field, it would undoubtedly require a long time to re-align an object’s gravitational charge, were this the case. And so we go to argument four, which deals with difficulties in having different “downs” for different people.

I can’t say I’m sold on this yet, and I can already envision the reaction the Helioleftists (hat tip: Marcia P.) will have to this post. But I’m serious. I think we need a dialogue- how do we know that NASA has, in fact, been into space? If they haven’t, how can we prove the world is round, instead of being (for the sake of argument) a flat disk with all continents perched on top? I know this sounds crazy, but at one point in time people thought the idea of splitting the atom was crazy, too. Or, probably, slicing bread. Or controlling fire. Or building an Ark just because God told you to.

 The point is, sometimes if we discuss things that sound crazy, we can arrive at the correct answer. I think that’s much better than, when someone proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth doesn’t move, a bunch of yes-men glad-handing one another by citing telescopic data from rocketships they’ve never been on and have never conclusively proved even went into space. Why do you people keep asking me to assume the Bible is wrong, if you won’t, yourselves, assume for a moment that NASA might be lying, too?

That’s all I have to say about that for now. I acknowledge that my thoughts on it are all pretty muddled, but I’m keeping an open mind on the issues. Let’s discuss this in a civilized manner- I’ll refrain from calling you Darwinists if you’ll refrain from citing Darwin and Copernicus to blaspheme against my religion. Is it a deal?

UPDATE: Articles like this only deepen my suspicion.

The strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now has been unearthed by NASA’s Spirit rover.

A patch of Martian soil kicked up and analyzed by Spirit appears to be rich in silica, which suggests it would have required water to produce.

Assuming this “rover” on Mars even exists, it found silica (sand). That, to them, indicates there was water there. Why? Because they rely on Darwinist geology, never even questioning the broader implications of their junk science.

Maybe there was water on Mars 5,000 years ago. Maybe not. But any attempt to look for water older than 5,000 years is doomed to fail, and if NASA had any grown-up thinkers in the show, they’d know that. Instead, they get all a-twitter over allegedly finding some sand on what they tell us is a barren red rock thousands of miles from here. What articles like this make ME think is that these scientists had a hot weekend in Vegas with YOUR tax dollars. They invented this story to cover up the expenditure of taxpayer dollars, to keep the money train rolling.

If President Brownback wants to keep NASA as a back-door means of funding programs he doesn’t want the moonbats to find out about, I’ll understand. I won’t say peep about it, either. Otherwise, he should shut this boondoggle down and kick these hedonists out on their posteriors. Let them find real jobs, doing real work.