President Obama's recent announcement regarding the set back in space exploration does not surprise me in the slightest. In fact, it's a case of 'I told you so.'Over the past year, and mainly due to the 40th Anniversary of the alleged Apollo landings on the Moon, I have been contacted by NASA supporters regarding the proposed mission to go back to the Moon by 2020 and Mars by the mid 2030's. I said at the time that it would not be possible within that time frame, and this weeks announcement seems to strengthen my argument.
If we look back into NASA's history books, President Kennedy announced in 1961 that man would go to the Moon by the end of the decade and 8 years later, they allegedly did. In 2004, President Bush said that 'man will return to the Moon by 2020.' But why would it take NASA 16 years to send man back to the Moon when they had allegedly done it 6 times already? Why hasn't technology moved forward and why would the project take twice as long to plan?
NASA's greatest acheivement since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the Moon on July 20th 1969 is the Space Shuttle. A clunky and lethal craft that James Lovell (Apollo 8 and 13 astronaut) described as a 'white elephant' during his speech at the 40th Anniversary of Apollo celebrations. There has been no end of problems for NASA in the past quarter of a century, such as the Columbia and Challenger Shuttle disasters and the crashing of probes into the Martian surface. The Mars Surveyor, launched in 1998, was lost due to a miscalculation in trajectory caused by an unintended and undetected mismatch between metric and English units of measurement. Quite a costly mistake at US$193.1 million!
Since the Apollo project, man has ventured no further than 400 miles above Earth. And the simple reason is because of radiation and other deadly conditions that are encountered once you leave the safety of low Earth orbit. For man to travel to the Moon and beyond, he has to fly through massive bands of radiation which are known as the 'Van Allen belt.' Renowned cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev, who set the record for his stay of 221 days in Earth’s orbit in 1982, has lost his eyesight as a result of the space radiation he encountered. The journey to Mars would take somewhere in the region of 440 days - and then you have to get back! (ufos-aliens.co.uk)
