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General Discussion / Re: The Artemis Program
« Last post by Luke Pemberton on Today at 11:11:17 AM »
And of course Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency just happens to know a company that can get us back to the moon for a fraction of the price. What a coincidence.

Do you the Trump administration will reduce NASA funding substantially, or dissolve it completely?
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General Discussion / Re: The Artemis Program
« Last post by LunarOrbit on Today at 12:51:41 AM »
And of course Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency just happens to know a company that can get us back to the moon for a fraction of the price. What a coincidence.
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General Discussion / Re: The Artemis Program
« Last post by Peter B on February 08, 2025, 09:03:20 PM »
And now I'm reading reports that Boeing has warned staff at a meeting last Friday that Artemis may be cancelled.

Phrases like "sunk cost" and "about time" are sort of floating around in my head.
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General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by Luke Pemberton on February 06, 2025, 04:50:51 PM »
The EU is composed of individual countries, each with their own head of State. No-one Prime Minister has the control that the POTUS has.

I wasn't really comparing the EU and the US directly in terms of the power of POTUS, more that the EU is providing a focal point for dissent and populism. The political landscape is changing across Europe and that is going to be terrible for folk trying to get by on a day to day basis. The breaking up of the EU is what Putin wants. These are very worrying times globally.
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Other Conspiracy Theories / Re: HBO Miniseries From the Earth to the Moon
« Last post by bknight on February 06, 2025, 11:01:39 AM »
I searched for and didn't find any post newer than about 4 years, so I thought I would start a new thread.
I watched for the first time the first few episodes of this miniseries. 

I first watched it in 2002, and probably rewatched every year or two since.  It's amazing.
Yes it presents a more personalized viewpoint of the program.  I enjoyed it also and will most likely view it again in the future.
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That was my first thought either, but I'm struggling with the term nonrotating
Can we see a rotating Earth from spacecraft/airplanes?  The answer is no the observation is no acute enough to discern and ground movement, although it is there no matter which direction we are travelling.  Take for example a vertical stick place into the ground, it casts a shadow, but that shadow moves in relationship to the Earth's rotation.  The shadow takes a finite time perhaps fifteen minutes to move enough to draw a connecting line between the points to discern the north direction.  The shadow will move faster in the early morning or late afternoon and might be faster than fifteen minutes.
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General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency
« Last post by Zakalwe on February 06, 2025, 09:40:00 AM »

Europe is no bed of roses. It is going to rip itself apart in the next 10 years. I do not think the EU project will survive the rise of the right. Populism is on the rise everywhere, and Europe has a knack for showing the world full-throttle fascism with extra shiny bits.


The EU is composed of individual countries, each with their own head of State. No-one Prime Minister has the control that the POTUS has.
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I noticed that many moon landing deniers are also convinced of the flat earth.

It's the well-known phenomena called crank magnetism.
Once you go down a rabbit-hole you then have to accumulate other nutty beliefs to maintain the original belief.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Crank_magnetism
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Since I am not an aviation expert, I would like to know how this introduction should be understood.

The simple answer (which drives conspiracy theorists nuts) is that if you're not an aviation expert it shouldn't. Papers like this, in any technical field, are written for people working in the field, not laypeople, and certainly not random conspiracy theorists without a hint of background in the relevant disciplines.

However (and not being an aviation expert myself but having some technical background), in essence this appears to be an example of calculation of a simplified set of general parameters that provide the basis of more detailed analyses and models. They have reduced a complex system to some key elements in order to give a model onto which other variables can be added to more closely meet real world situations. Rather like the ideal gas equation, which models movement of gas molecules in ways that don't actually occur in any real situations but which model the fundamental underlying elements.

So, the major assumptions made and my thoughts on them:

The plane is a rigid body that does not change shape. Broadly true but many aircraft have a degree of flexibility in their structures and all have moveable control surfaces to change how they move through the air, up to and including swing-wing designs that have very different flight characteristics depending on the position of the wing.

The plane has a constant mass. Never true since it burns fuel during flight, so mass is always decreasing to some extent. However in most cases the bulk of the vehicle makes up the majority of the mass and the difference caused by loss of fuel mass is quite small.

Flat Earth: Firstly, this certainly refers to an absence of topgraphical variation, i.e. not considering mountains, valleys, hills, cliffs, land or sea etc. Secondly, assuming a spherical Earth with constant gravitational pull at a given altitude, there is no difference between flying around a sphere and flying across a plane, as the aircraft retains the same relationship to the ground in both cases (it doesn't actively work to move in a circle around a spherical Earth), therefore flight around a spherical Earth can be modelled as flight across a flat one.

Non-rotating Earth: This is just removal of the variable of the motion of the ground under the plane.

So, what this paper is referring to is a basic model of flight, which provides the fundamental underlying conditions onto which other variables (such as the rotation of the Earth, or the loss of mass due to consumption of fuel, or the effect of changing topography, or the effect of changing the shape of the aircraft during flight) can be introduced to more closely model real world situations. It is certainly not saying the Earth is actually flat and non-rotating. The flat-earthers who use this as evidence are ignoring that assumptions are being made about the aircraft that are not true in real-world flight situations, because then they'd have to explain why those assumptions clearly don't mean all aircraft have constant mass and rigid structures, while the assumptions about the Earth do supposedly mean that is what Earth is really like.
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Other Conspiracy Theories / Re: HBO Miniseries From the Earth to the Moon
« Last post by Dalhousie on February 05, 2025, 08:43:18 PM »
I searched for and didn't find any post newer than about 4 years, so I thought I would start a new thread.
I watched for the first time the first few episodes of this miniseries. 

I first watched it in 2002, and probably rewatched every year or two since.  It's amazing.
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