NASA News 29 December 2023 There are a lot of space projects being planned by NASA and even private American companies for 2024. It should be a very interesting year. I couldn’t help but notice a company seems to have created a space plane which is very reminiscent of the space shuttle but smaller. The original shuttle was designed to be smaller, but the military put the kibosh on the plane and pushed for a much larger vehicle so they could get their secret and large military satellites into space. The vehicle is named Dream Chaser and was designed by Sierra Space. It is said to be launched sometime in 2024. It is now undergoing environmental testing by NASA. It seems some scientists are looking at the idea of putting astronauts into hibernation for long space flights. I don’t know how many of you remember the Star Trek episode called Space See? The Enterprise comes across a ship called Botany Bay where all of the passengers are either in hibernation for years or are now dead. I think this might be the problem with this idea. A crew would have to put their lives in the hands of a computer which may or may not be controlled by artificial intelligence. I know I wouldn’t want that, would you? There is just so much that could go wrong. How many of us have experienced strange problems and glitches with our own computers, or even power failures? No matter how many contingencies are planned for there is always something which was never thought of. NASA has a lot of exciting plans for the future and some will be enacted in 2024. I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t mention going back to the moon. This time we are going to put a permanent settlement of sorts there. We are sending a very advanced rover there to look over the landscape and it is controlled by A.I. The artificial intelligence is used just for navigation we are told and supposedly this will make its trip a lot smoother by avoiding a lot of obstacles which may get in the way. There is a lot of talk about NASA missing the date for the moon shot, but NASA seems to be remaining silent about this as of the writing of this article. I hope they can keep on schedule. The moon is important for a lot of reasons and one is it makes a great platform for launching a rocket to Mars since the gravity is so low. It does have a down side, which is if a country put weapons on it, the earth would be in its sights. On the other hand, missiles would take days to reach the earth, giving us a chance to shoot them down. Let’s hope a treaty will be signed preventing this. Plans are going full speed ahead to develop robots which will be able to penetrate the thick ice cover on moons and planets which are believed to have ice covering oceans. Some of this ice is miles thick and it will take sufficient power for the robots to melt their way through to the water. I would hope we won’t use nuclear energy, because we will have to leave the robot in the water eventually and that always leaves the danger of pollution happening. Speaking about robots, work is continuing on creating intelligent humanoid robots to use as explorers in place of astronauts. I have always said no matter how well they are made, there is nothing as good as a human astronaut for making decisions and if we ever meet extraterrestrials in our travels would we want to have to do it with a robot? Reporters are trying to make a big thing out of the fact China might be able to get to the moon with a manned mission before us. This is all hype. We shouldn’t forget we already landed people there and that can never be taken from us. One would think the history books will always reflect this, but the way things are going today, you never know. China’s space plane is upsetting a lot of people. We don’t seem to know much about it except for the fact it seems to be competing with our secret space plane which we don’t know much about either. The news was a flutter about the fact the Chinese space plane released several objects into orbit and then communicated with them. There will always be secret projects going on. I remember when Sputnik was first launched into space and how scared everyone in this country was and it turned out the satellite was just basically a radio transmitter. NASA has announced a mission to an asteroid heading this way which was named the God of Chaos. It is said to be about 500 feet in diameter and NASA is looking for ways to stop it. One of those ways unfortunately which is being looked at is shooting a nuke at it. One would think there has to be another way. This would give the excuse for others to shoot nukes into space using all kinds of reasons. We have had nuclear reactors which were on satellites crash back to earth and supposedly we were lucky they didn’t contaminate the area they fell in. I remember a Soviet one falling in the woods of Canada and when it was found the shielding was thankfully still in place. The idea of us getting hit by an asteroid which would have the power to either destroy earth or do much damage seems to be on the minds of many people, both in science and out. Maybe they should be thinking more on how to prevent wars first. There is a procedure called Listen which can now scan entire galaxies for a signal from intelligent races. A survey is being made of the 100 closest galaxies, the 1 million closest stars and other areas. This presumes these races would be using something which creates waves we can detect. We have yet to find radio waves which indicate intelligence, but we are trying. Maybe some day we will find a better method. The strangest story about NASA for 2023 has to be the one which tells us NASA still cannot open the sample container containing the asteroid sample from the asteroid Bennu which was returned to earth. One would think an organization like NASA could handle something like this, but they are now saying they are going to have to develop new tools to get the job done.
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