Nikolai

We're descended from simians. As a result, we have some pretty notable physical flexibility; the range of motion in our arms is amazing, as is the dexterity of our hands. Our physical endurance (assuming we care about maintaining it) is unmatched. We can cover long distances like no other species. We've not only managed to figure out how to communicate with language, facial expressions, and the like; we've learned how to communicate something useful by faking all of that. We've come up with art forms that depend on our ability to fake communication convincingly, but that exercise still manages to communicate. For that matter, art. We can expend effort to communicate something non-vital to survival, and do so with beauty and grace. In other words, we create, and some of the things we create are amazing. We can find out that certain things are true that we might never have guessed at intuitively, and test them even if they lie beyond our ability to sense directly. Space is curved. Solid matter is mostly empty, and most of the stuff in the Universe isn't even matter. All species are related to each other. And so on. And then we can take that knowledge to realize ideas we could only dream about before, flinging ourselves and our machines to other worlds to find out what they're like. There are a lot of things to like about humans.

The CSM's fuel cells produced water as a by-product; the LM's batteries did not. As a result, water had to be conserved, and led to the only health problem in the crew -- Haise returned with a urinary tract infection. (Side note on this: The crew stored all their urine onboard, as a result of misinterpreting an order from the ground to stop urine dumps to prevent altering the spacecraft's trajectory.) Also, to conserve power and water, the LM's Abort Guidance System (AGS) was used to navigate Apollo 13 during most of the coast, since it required less power and water than the main guidance system (the Primary Guidance, Navigation, and Control System, or PGNCS). (It was a smaller system to be used in the event the PGNCS stopped working, and did not have enough power to support landing on the lunar surface. Apollo 11 ended up using it during lunar ascent after accidentally entering gimbal lock.)

The ALSEP experiment designed for the lunar surface was powered by an RTG with 3.9 kg of Pu-238. Since the lunar module was forced to re-enter Earth's atmosphere, they deliberately targeted it for Tonga Trench in the hopes that damage would be minimized if the case cracked. It appears that the case survived re-entry (as designed).

Grumman (the LM manufacturer) was not the grumpy, lawsuit-fearing entity portrayed in the movie. In real life, they worked hard with NASA to ensure the survival of the crew. As the mission was drawing to a close, Grumman wrote up a fake "towing" bill to North American (the CSM manufacturer); IMHO, the best part was the incremental cost per mile towed. You can find a copy of the invoice here: http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5220/5514854302_631f7643b6_o.jpg

It hasn't had much opportunity, but you're right. STS-13, the only possible (manned) contender, was re-designated STS-41C when NASA opted to name missions after their year and order within the year rather than simple planning order. (They switched back after STS-51L.)

All inertial reference frames are relative. Since rotational frames involve acceleration by definition, they are not inertial reference frames, and thus are not interchangeable simply by choosing a different rotational velocity to call "zero". In other words, if you're calling a rotational velocity zero that isn't actually zero, you'll have Coriolis and centrifugal "forces" popping up in your reference frame.

If pictures of bootprints taken by the people who were actually there didn't convince them, why would a rover's picture of bootprints? If congratulations from the United States' biggest political foe at the time (the Soviet Union) didn't convince them, why would an "independent"? I honestly don't think conspiracy theories are about finding plausible reinterpretations of available evidence. They seem more to be ways for the theorist to reassure himself of his own superior cleverness.

I grew up as the kid of a children's reference librarian -- so if I was going to read sci-fi, I was going to read the stuff ratified into classic status by time. Which meant growing up on H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. As such, there's some nostalgia surrounding the overwrought prose and swashbuckling action of Victorian/Edwardian sci-fi for me, and when something steampunk-ish captures that feel, I'm automatically on board for the ride. I'm also a tinkerer, so if your bit of brass and steam does something, I'm immediately more impressed.

As a side note, I'd like to see you defend this. Assuming you reject evolution in favor of some kind of specialized and conscious design, how do you determine what the odds are that this designer would not make life on more than one world?

I'd argue that many younger minds are better "scientists" than many older minds anyway -- things like bias and costs associated with having to re-evaluate things are not really factors. They're ready and willing to change their preconceived notions if reality turns out to be different from what they think. But science is caught in a weird place. It's so phenomenally good at generating information that we have little choice but to throw piles of data at kids for long periods before they have enough information to question what they've learned intelligently. As such, science (as it is taught) tends to be a lot of memorization and very little investigation... and that's a shame, because investigation is what makes science awesome. So yeah, I'd agree with you that a lot of people have a very parochial viewpoint, and science doesn't tend to get much bandwidth. But part of that might just be that very few people have a real understanding of what science is or how it works.

I couldn't just leave this alone. Many scientific disciplines depend on our concept of evolution being substantially accurate -- and all of them contain evidence, independently gathered and analyzed, that evolution is true. (They don't have to prove it true by replicating it in its entirety any more than forensic scientists need to replicate a murder in order to reconstruct the scene.) Evolution is used to develop better vaccines and better antibiotics, and tells us where to dig to find fossil fuels. Evolution is also used to understand the virulence of parasites; it helps us use natural resources wisely through its predictions concerning biogeography; it unifies biology under a central theory (removing it from being a useless collection of facts, and suggesting productive new areas of research); it provides a basis for bioinformatics, a billion-dollar industry, with its assumption of descent with modification; it is used to manage fisheries for greater yields; it is used to induce beneficial mutations in plant stock; it is used to create better pesticides, removing pests and producing greater yield in our agriculture; it helps us retrieve species from the brink of extinction (e.g., the kakapo bird); it shapes public health policy; it predicts unknown gene function, which aids in pharmaceutical development; it helps us idenitify disease reservoirs; it helps us predict the step-by-step transmission of disease, permitting greater control over its spread and treatment; it allows us to identify micro-organisms that cannot be cultured or recognized except through phylogenetic analysis; it helps us create and enhance antibiotics; it helps us create and enhance flavors; it helps us create and enhance strains of bacteria to break down biohazards; it helps us create and enhance enzymes; it helps us create and enhance biopigments; it helps us discern the function and folding of proteins and enzymes; it aids in creating genetic algorithms, which have applications in architecture, data mining, electrical engineering, finance, geophysics, astrophysics, aerospace engineering, pattern recognition, military strategy, robotics, materials engineering, and systems engineering; it was the basis for the creation of countless statistical analysis techniques, including linear regression analysis and analysis of variance, which are used in innumerable ways to study many other things; its analysis techniques can be applied to determining the history of manuscripts and languages; and, in a non-trivial sense, it satisfies some kinds of curiosity and inspires others. If evolution were not substantially correct, none of these would yield correct predictions. Now, if someone could name one practical application of creationism (other than keeping dishonest teachers gainfully employed), I'd be seriously impressed. To be technical, we're talking about roughly 3.5 billion years of single-celled organisms. But that doesn't diminish your larger point. Odds calculated a posteriori tell us nothing.

Yes, exactly. Few Americans saw the point of continuing Moon missions after Apollo 11. I mean, we'd won, right? What more could there possibly be to do? The sad thing is that things were just starting to get interesting. The Moon is much more peculiar and fascinating than some kind of homogenous pockmarked gray ball. But to find that out, you need to dig underneath the surface... and a lot of people just have more pressing things to do with their time.

You completely left off the relevant part: "confirmed by observation, experiment etc.". It's like atomic theory, or germ theory, or the theory of universal gravitation -- it's an idea with considerable empirical support. And "conjecture" appears nowhere in the part relevant to sciences. Not the theory of evolution's problem, anymore than it's the theory of universal gravitation's problem to explain where mass came from. It's not. It's the process of life adapting to its environment. No presumptions are made about "better". Because evolution affects populations. It's why there are European Americans and Europeans. It's why there are African Americans and Africans. Also, man didn't evolve from modern-day monkeys (or, to be more precise, apes). Man and modern-day apes have a common ancestor. Houses and highrises do not reproduce. Therefore, they are not subject to descent with modification. The theory of evolution has nothing whatsoever to say about houses or highrises. The theory of evolution doesn't posit this, either. Nor does it posit that something as sophisticated as a modern-day amoeba was the first form of life. The ridiculous set of ideas you're calling "evolution"? Probably not. Evolution itself? Most certainly.

Two things: * I hope such a thing would rekindle interest in manned space exploration. Society as a whole in the U.S. seems to be significantly less forward-looking than it was in the early 1960s, however; it seems more likely to me that the national reaction would be closer to "Been There, Done That" (accompanied by a yawn) -- though I'd happily be proven wrong. * Another "flags and footprints" series of missions would be detrimental to what we, as a species, should (IMHO) be aiming for -- sustained presence in space. While races like this might do some interesting things for national prestige, they do little for making sustainable infrastructure... the kind of thing legislators can spin as enormous savings if they cut back (I'm looking at you, Senators Proxmire and Mondale), and very few seem to mind when it's dismantled. As such, a second space race could do far more harm than good. (Consider how stuck we were after the first space race. No attempt to return to the Moon was fielded seriously.)

I know I'm kind of late to the party, but let me just try to express my extreme gratitude at this project. I downloaded it a few weeks ago, but finally got some free time and decided to give it a try -- reluctantly, since I tend to be something of a purist. I knew there were a host of impressive changes, but the only ones I remembered were "Kerbin is now a moon of Jool" and "comets", and that was enough for me to want to check it out. Stunning. My daughter, who likes to look over my shoulder while I fly, suggested that I put a space station into Jool orbit. Fair enough. I slapped together a core, lobbed it into orbit, and set up a nuclear stage to dock to it and carry it Elsewhere. As I started closing in, station core in front of me and sun behind, I thought, "I should check to see how much more sunlight I've got." My finger didn't even have enough time to hit the M key when CRACK. BOOM. Midnight. Oh, yeah. There's no ambient light in the dark anymore, is there? Thankfully, I'd remembered some lights. Even so, docking in the dark got the adrenaline moving -- and it's been a while since I felt that without leaving Kerbin orbit. Space is dangerous again, and I love you for it. Thanks so much for this mod.

No, because from your reference point, time is not moving at all. Velocity of other objects cannot be measured.

In Stephen Baxter's Titan, the Columbia is destroyed in a crash landing. The pilot has enough time to get the other astronauts out via parachute and tries to bring the orbiter down safely, but the hydraulics operating the control surfaces fail at the last moment.

Not true. At 1:22, you can see his right wing hit and even kick up some dust. (There are plenty of other examples at around 4:15 as well.)

Yes. Yes, I do. In fact, I'll be giving a couple of lectures about diverting potential impactors at the local science museum next month. Really, really excited for the opportunity.

Not for a constant angular velocity, which is what lajoswinkler seemed to be looking at. In fact, the centrifugal force goes up linearly with radius for a constant angular velocity.

Sounds like someone is demanding tweakable Kerbals.

If the only gravitational bodies under consideration are the planet and the potential moon, it can't. However, planets can already have existing moons -- or, in the case of asteroidal moons, it's not unreasonable that a potential moon might have a companion. Or, if it's close enough, even the Sun might play a role. The interaction of more than two bodies can allow a moon to be captured. Note, too, that capture is not the only way for planets to have moons.

How about the way aliens are monolithic in their religion, art, language, and fashion sense? Or the way aliens are reducible to single characteristics (usually flaws), even when humans are not -- e.g., Klingons are warlike, Ferengi are greedy, Romulans are sneaky, Borg are vampires, Vulcans are logical, etc.?

Like, for example, the way that you just know that people who want a dose of realism in their sci-fi do so because they want to show off their hard-won knowledge? That may well be true for some, but not all. Speaking for myself, my interest continues to be drawn to space travel because space travel is hard. It's very counterintuitive, and challenges our best attempts to understand. That challenge is not only interesting -- it's inspiring, even more so because people attempt to live and work within it. I, for one, would like to see some of that inspiration transferred to some of my entertainment -- people struggling to understand a hazardous and confusing environment that still operates according to consistent rules, and managing to use that struggle to understand as the leverage they need to succeed. Honestly, even though (for example) Gravity didn't get every detail of physics correct, it got enough right to still meet this criterion without dumping information on the viewer; in my opinion, it succeeded beautifully. Sometimes, my brain likes to be entertained, too. We can understand why movies about sports figures struggling and finally winning make for inspiring entertainment, or people trying to figure out how to succeed in the business world; why not struggling and succeeding in the face of realistic challenges in space?

Mars. My parents bought me a kids' science magazine when I was five, and the back cover was a small column about Mars -- which I had thought up to that point was just a thing some storyteller had made up. The fact that it was real was much more nifty than any old story, and I was determined to learn as much as I could about the real Mars. I still have something of a soft spot for stories with Martians in them, though; War of the Worlds is one I come back to over and over, and I even relish Edgar Rice Burroughs from time to time.