No.  I do NOT believe this... but it is fun :).

Yesterday it finally came up to the public level, that there is some possibility that Phobos Grunt was a victim of ... something.

Check it on the Register here.

Now, here's the fun.  Last month some say Putin made a veiled statement about HAARP or something else being used agains Russia.. in the form of "tone" (interpreted by nuts as 'frequencies') being set followed by a "signal" being sent. 

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My copy of Groom Lake had been at my doorstep yesterday afternoon, finished it early this morning.  Go into it with low expectations, it's not bad, and if you know the LA area and Joshua Tree it's fun.  If you recall that Burbank, specifically the Bob Hope Airport, was the original Lockheed "Area 51" then the shipping address is a neat part of the ploy. 

Anyway, I check the logs for smithvoice and know when Marshall and Johnson are peeking (Al Razaq... got ya), but don't scan enough to notice when a local drops by.  This morning I was walking home from Peets on Ventura and an acquaintance happened up to me and said with a smile "So do you feel a little silly about pushing Phobos Grunt?"

I had to say it... "Did you read Groom Lake?  What'd you think of Desmond?" :)

The vicarious robot jockeys are smugly smiling this morning, as Phobos Grunt remains in Earth orbit.  Apparently the upper stage automatic fire didn't start so the Mars trajectory phase didn't begin. Word is that there is still a possibility to get it corrected, we'll all just have to wait and see.

However, the big point is that Red Planet has begun.  Even if this craft is deorbitted and this head of Roscosmos has to step down, the test of this set of components to this stage has been done and with the next launch window this issue can be corrected ... and perhaps more money can be put into the next one.

But there is no doubt that this is still an exciting beginning... UNLESS there are factions in Russia that will use this to try to bring Russia (but not China) back into the money and time and Human-focus losing ESA-NASA robot program.

Monitoring all the major TV networks and not a peep. But the Bankok Post and Atlanta Journal COnstitution both broke to the top of Google News two minutes ago...

Successful lift off.  Red Mars has begun.

"The Phobos-Grount (Phobos-Soil) craft was successfully launched by a Zenit-2 booster rocket at 12:16 a.m. Moscow time Wednesday (2016 GMT Tuesday) from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It will take the robotic probe a few hours to conduct a series of preliminary maneuvers before it can shoot off to the Red Planet."

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10:16 Pacific, just two hours away form the first phase of the infamous Red Mars project.  If all goes well with this sample return from Phobos ("Grunt" is Russian for "soil") then the beachhead is created for instantaneous telerobotics on the Mars surface... years or decades before us smart Americans ever do the work we promised decades ago.

Funny thing... did you notice that when it appeared 100% true that the Russians could actually pull this off, the front page of Space News shouted: "ESA [and NASA] Formally Invites Roscosmos To Join ExoMars Mission as Full-fledged Partner."  Yep, just like MIR going down to keep ISS alive, get them tied up in an expensive fiasco and get them off track... hopefully this time the answer will be NYET!.

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Summer 2011 NASA Human Body In Space Status Forum.  Suits (a history lesson), Medical (solid information presented very well.. but nothing in the vein of breakthrough revelations), and Astronaut Experience. Plus Q&A..  And the status is?  You could take this and change the date to 2001 or even 1991 and probably even an expert would not see any difference.

Pics of Goldstone DSN dishes

Wow.  If this is what a "Professional" is now expected to know, I'm sad for .Net.

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It's all so frustrating that it literally wakes me up at night.  I know that that is stupid, but it keeps happening.

MARIE was the First And Only post-Apollo experiment specifically designed to gather data in advance of Humans travelling past LEO.  And yet, this important experiment has just fallen off the NASA and NRC maps.  Like it never happened. 

Radiation in Space is unquestionably the Big Meanie, it is used as an instant end-point any time anyone starts getting too excited about Humans having jobs above the atmosphere.  Yet, for it being so incredibly important it is stunning that so very little has been done.

Or is it?  Someone sent me an interesting  Atomic Energy Commission booklet and one of its sentences spoke volumes.

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Back in 2008 Obama and McCain sent pretty high falootin reps to Boulder for a debate on Space Policy.  I did the YouTube edit for the Mars Society and knew from the mixing sessions that there was no banking on either side.

Through their reps and from their own mouths nether had any real intention of standing up for their Space related campaign schpeels, but probably McCain would have done more to at least keep Humans in the mix, whereas Obama made it clear as a bell all along that "Health Care Is This Generation's Apollo." 

But what about this time?  Pretty much I firmly believe that every single one of the options on both sides are liars.  Flat out and about everything every time they open their mouths.  Well, except for one...

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Time Travel is Impossible.  That's what they say now ... and that's what they might say in 100 years... but in that same future universe a century later still another group may be surprised to find that their ship and crew are back in 1969 just before the Apollo 11 launch.

It time travel impossible?  Or do we just have to wait for more time? 

I've been taking a great Interplanetary Flight overview course at the Art Center in Pasadena.  The sessions are run by JPL alum Dave Doody and it's all been more than worth the tuition price.

The other week my class had a private visit to JPL.  Following a nice leasurely time in the Spacecraft Museum (so much nicer than being in the shuffle with thousands at the yearly open houses) we got a mega-big-screen (Windows OS on all demonstration 'puters, by the way) show of the new JPL online feature applet Eyes On the Solar System directly from project Technical Consultant Doug Ellison.

JPL had some visitors last night

"Hi Smith! Remember the project that needed to allow entry of date values but the users couldn't be forced to any specific precision?  I have the same requirement and can't remember how you did the precision metadata, we're on SQL Server, not Oracle, was it a PLSQL ability?"

:)  Uh... you're thinkin' too hard, budd.  All I did was add a sibling column to the DATE field and packed it with the id/enumval of the desired datepart precision.  

I gotta laugh about my saying that you're thinking too hard, it's ironic...

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