Space News There is a lot of unusual news to cover today and that is what I intend to do. There has been a lot of talk about aliens, looking for aliens, and exploring other star systems to see if there is any indication of alien life on any of the planets circling them. Meanwhile there has been a study made by an astrophysicist which claims there have been tiny probes released by aliens which have the power to rebuild and clone themselves and go out into the universe. He believes each probe will clone itself and this in a short period of time there will be millions and maybe billions of them out in space exploring everything they come across. He goes on to say the probes are so small the human eye cannot detect the probes but they are the light particles we see when comets streak by. Exciting news has come out about a joint project between NASA and Caterpillar Corporation. Caterpillar has become famous for giant autonomous and remote controlled machines. NASA would like to move some of these machines to the moon and use them for mining and for building bases. They built devices which helped with the Apollo launches 50 years ago. The NASA program is named Artemis. NASA wants to build a permanent base on the moon at the south pole and these machines would be perfect for the job since they don’t require humans to operate them on the surface. A NASA representative said, “There are many synergies between what NASA needs to meet exploration goals and Caterpillar technologies used every day on Earth.” A company has decided to reexamine a proposed program which was turned down in the 1960s. The program proposed using the spent Apollo upper stages of rockets as space stations. If you have ever seen the size of these individual stages you can understand why this was proposed. These stages are huge and there would be plenty of room for a few humans to move around inside and conduct experiments. NASA had named these ideas as wet workshop. The third stage of a Saturn Rocket which was used on the Apollo Mission was 61.6 feet long and 21.7 feet wide. This made it about the size of a double house trailer. Whether you believe climate change is caused by humans or is a natural event which has taken place many times over the life of the earth, NASA is looking into preventing it. A plan was put forth in 1968 to use satellites which would be put in an orbit where the sun’s shadow never covers them. It was suggested they could have solar cells and beam the electricity back to earth, eliminating polluting power plants on earth. This is being looked at again. The satellites would have to be huge and whether this is practical still needs to be looked into, also this would not eliminate all of climate change, but might merely slow it down somewhat. Can red tape affect off world exploration? Unfortunately, the answer is yes and regulations have to continuously be updated to allow us to do certain things off world. It has been suggested we have to reduce the red tape hurting Mars exploration. The worry which has been put forth is contamination of the Red Planet. Will policies be so strict there will be no way to send rockets to Mars because the fear of contamination will be too great and regulations too strict? If I were in NASA, I would tell them not to worry about this nonsense. We have already contaminated Mars with the missions we have sent there. First of all, the decontamination procedures we used did not kill all the germs on the equipment and secondly NASA admitted a year ago or more they forgot to decontaminate one of the drills used on a rover. It is too late to worry about contaminating Mars, but it is not too late to worry about contaminating earth. We have to be extremely careful we don’t contaminate ourselves with some alien disease. There could be diseases out there we may not be able to detect and yet we want to bring back all sorts of samples from other worlds, asteroids and such. Recently, an article on Space.com talked about how we could detect a worm hole. No one has ever been able to do this so far. It was said if we noticed a star making strange wiggle movements it might mean a wormhole was nearby. A wormhole is a connection in space between two areas of space and is sometime called a space shortcut. Some say it is based on the strength of a near by heavenly body and the stronger the gravity the greater distance the shortcut can connect. It is felt the new study into star movements might make it possible for us to detect wormholes as I have said, but this doesn’t mean we will be able to use them yet. Since it looks like we are definitely going back to the moon it means we are going to have to deal with one of the problems there. The dust on the moon is the problem. It turns out it is very abrasive. It can wear through clothing and boots, so this has to be taken into consideration when designing these things. There is another problem with moon dust, it gets into things. When the Apollo capsules returned to earth, they were full of the stuff. Lucky for us it was not contaminated by anything. We are going to have to figure out a way to keep the dust out of our bases on the moon when we build them. NASA has been really busy trying to spot the failed spacecraft from India which tried to land on the moon and disappeared. One would think it would be easy to find, but it could have gone way off target and then shattered into a million pieces. Still given the current state of technology one would have thought we would have found it by now. I am sure there must be some people who are claiming aliens stole it. An article appeared in the Express which stated NASA was very worried we were going to be hit by four huge asteroids. They came close but never hit, but the bad part of all this is they were not detected until hours before they missed us. The NASA detection system has disappointed us far too many times, but we have been lucky. We need better detection, detection which will give us long enough notice of these things so in the future we can do something about them by either changing their angle or destroying them.
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