[FPSPACE] Confusion on the Launch Pad

[E.P. Grondine]

Quote: “About the only questions I have is why you're
wasting my time with this”



> Comment: Pot – kettle – black.  Why don’t
you two >bore/annoy each other in private rather than make us all >suffer?It does just keep on going on and on and on and on and on, doesn't it? And why should any of it interest you?
The reason I write about comet impact is because comets and comet fragments have hit and killed a huge number of people; entire nations have disappeared.For example, 90 to 95% of the people living in North America died due to cometary impact ca. 10,900 BCE. There have been other recent very devastating impacts (Rio Cuarto, 2,360 BCE) involving extremely large losses of life. 

Now what does this have to do with space flight, "spaceflight news"? Well, the means for detecting and diverting both comets and asteroids require space technologies - your journalistic beat. 

But the story gets even better. Given the reflectivity of dead comet fragments, my estimate from 1998 is that large man tended Moon based detectors are going to be needed to deal with the hazard they and Long Period Comets represent:

http://www.geocities.com/epgrondine

For a better engineering estimate of this, see the Langley team's CAPS estimate here:
http://www.nss.org/resources/library/planetarydefense/index.htm

In other words, since comets present the bulk of the impact hazard, there is a requirement for manned spaceflight which no one ever realized existed before, and furthermore an unavoidable requirement: a fundamental shift in the paradigm of manned space flight.

Given Jens latest research into Baptistina, perhaps his  rationalization is at an end.  On the other hand, denial is not just a river in Egypt...

When I started writing on this, both George
Brown Jr and Eugene Shoemaker were alive, and I expected the problem to
be dealt with within a few years. Once again, Weiler and Morrison need to be relieved.

Significantly, we will be in the midst of Comet Schwassmann Wachmann 3's debris train in 2022.



E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas
(write me off list for the fpspace special)



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