April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space. That was 49 years ago.

April 14, 1970: An oxygen tank disrupts on Apollo 13, causing a series of catastrophic malfunctions that nearly leads to the deaths of the three astronauts. That was 40 years ago.

April 12, 1981: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, launches into space. That was 29 years ago.

I wasn’t yet born when Gagarin flew, and I was still too young to appreciate what was happening on board Apollo as it flew helplessly around the Moon instead of landing on it. But I do remember breathlessly awaiting the Shuttle launch, and I remember thinking it would be the next phase in our exploration of space. I was still pretty young, and hadn’t thought it through, but I’m sure had you asked me I’d have said that this would lead to cheap, easy, and fast access to space, and by the time the 21st century rolled around we’d have space stations, more missions to the Moon, and maybe even to Mars.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought it through. Of all these anniversaries, that one is the least of the three we should celebrate.

Don’t get me wrong; the Shuttle is a magnificent machine. But it’s also a symbol of a political disaster for NASA. It was claimed that it would be cheap way to get payloads to space, and could launch every couple of weeks. Instead, it became frightfully expensive and couldn’t launch more than a few times a year.

This was a political problem. Once it became clear that NASA was building the Shuttle Transport System, it became a feeding trough. It never had a chance to be the lean space machine it should’ve been, and instead became bloated, weighted down with administrative bureaucracy and red tape.

More than that, though, to me it symbolizes a radical shift in the vision of NASA. We had gone to the Moon six times — seven, if you include Apollo 13 — and even before the launch of Apollo 17 that grand adventure had been canceled by Congress, with NASA being forced to look to the Shuttle. Ever since then, since December 1972, we’ve gone around in circles.

Now, there’s a lot to be said for low Earth orbit. It is a fantastic resource for science, and I strongly think we should be exploiting it even more. But it’s not the goal. It’s like walking halfway up a staircase, standing on your tiptoes, and admiring the view of the top landing.

We need to keep walking up those stairs. In 1961, the effects of space travel were largely unknown, but Yuri Gagarin took that chance. He was followed by many others in rapid succession. Extrapolating from his travels, by now there should be a business making money selling tours of the mountain chains around Oceanus Procellarum by now. Of the three anniversaries, looking at it now, Gagarin’s is bittersweet.

In 1970 Apollo 13 became our nation’s "successful failure". A simple error had led to a near tragedy, saved only by the experience, training, guts, and clever thinking on their feet of a few dozen engineers. They turned catastrophe into triumph, and now, four decades later, we can’t repeat what they did. Think on this: when the disaster struck their ship, the crew of Apollo 13 were over 300,000 kilometers from Earth. Apollo 13 may have been a successful failure, but it’s a failure we can’t even repeat today if we tried.

I’ve written quite a bit about NASA’s future, including my support of Obama’s decision to cancel Constellation, the program that includes the next series of big rockets to take people into space. That may seem contradictory on its surface, but I support the decision because, in my opinion, Constellation was over budget, behind schedule, and had no clear purpose. The idea of going back to the Moon is one I very much strongly support, but I get the impression that the plan itself is not well-thought out by NASA. The engineering, sure, but not the political side of it. And it’s the politics that will always and forever be NASA’s burden.

It was a political decision to cancel Apollo. It was a political decision to turn the Shuttle from a space plane to the top-heavy system it is. It was a political decision to cancel the Shuttle with no replacement planned at all (that was done before Obama took office, I’ll note). It was a political decision that turned the space station from a scientific lab capable of teaching us how to live and explore space into the hugely expensive and bloated construction it is now.

NASA needs a clear vision, and it needs one that is sturdy enough to resist the changing gusts of political winds. I’m hoping that Obama’s plan will streamline NASA, giving away the expensive and "routine" duties it needs not do so that private industry can pick them up. The added money to go to science, again in my hopes, will spur more innovation in engineering.

And NASA needs a goal. It needs to put its foot down and say "This is our next giant step." And this has to be done hand in hand with the politics. I understand that is almost impossible given today’s political climate, where statesmanship and compromise has turned into small-minded meanness and childish name-calling on the Congress floor.

But I’m old enough to remember when NASA could do the impossible. That was practically their motto. Beating the Soviets was impossible. Landing on the Moon was impossible. Getting Apollo 13 back safely was impossible.

Of the three anniversaries, Apollo 13 is the one we should be celebrating. I’ll gently correct what Gene Kranz said that day: failure really was an option, but not an acceptable one.

Right now, at this very moment, those feats are all impossible once again. But for a time, they were not only possible, we made them happen.

It’s time to do the impossible once again.

Originally posted on The Bad Astronomy Blog.

Moon hoax conspiracy promulgator, astronaut stalker, and Buzz Aldrin punching bag Bart Sibrel was recently arrested for vandalism. Apparently, someone took too long to get out of a parking space he wanted. He parked nearby, got out of his car, and then repeatedly jumped up and down on the offending car, doing over $1400 worth of damage.

Now, there is certainly a vast array of snark just quivering to be let loose here. Sibrel is largely responsible for the dumbosity of the Moon hoax still being around, and has used arguably slimy tactics to keep it so. He has lied about me, and still says things that are provably wrong even when I have told him to his face (well, over the radio) that they are factually wrong. Yet he keeps on saying them.

And, of course, there is the potentially huge ad hominem about a conspiracy theorist who goes ballistic over such a minor issue as a parking space. It’s certainly easy to assume he’s a nutsoid goofball who’s just a NASA photo away from losing it completely. But that should be avoided: I know I myself have daydreamed of what I would do to people who take too long to pull out of a parking space — generally at some point large electric shocks applied to delicate body parts are involved.

But the difference, of course, is in idly fantasizing about something versus actually doing it. The real irony here is that Sibrel’s Apollo claims are fantasy, and aimed against people who actually did do something.

So I won’t go out of my way to engage in beating this particular zombie horse. Instead I’ll let you idly daydream about it. Try not to write anything slanderous in the comments, but the best "parking space travel" joke will get the kudos of the Skepticblog community.

OK, can we first screw our heads on straight here? If you’re claiming that astronauts routinely take video of alien spacecraft, and that NASA is desperately trying to cover them up, why in the frak would they release the video?

Hello, McFly? I mean, seriously?

Anyway, the videos usually makes me laugh, because the "UFOs" in question are just ice particles on the Shuttle dislodged when they fire the maneuvering jets. And when they fire the jets again, the expanding plume of gas makes the particles change direction and accelerate away. It’s really that simple, yet there are elaborate conspiracy theories created to say these are alien spacecraft, and lots of people buy into it.

I saw a presentation by an astronaut a few years ago debunking the claims of a UFO guy who swore up and down that these particles were spaceships. The astronaut — my friend the late Ron Parise — showed that the "UFOs" also seemed to change directions right after the vernier jets fired. The UFO guy said that Shuttle rockets are hugely powerful and it’s silly to think that was the cause; they’d move the Shuttle around! But as Ron points out, the jets are very gentle, designed to slowly and carefully change the Shuttle’s attitude — its pitch, yaw, and roll relative to Earth. Those generate only a few pounds of thrust, enough to slow the Shuttle’s attitude drift, for example.

This was a clear case of some guy not doing any research at all, and then reaching for the most ridiculous and elaborate explanation he could think of. That’s typical for conspiracy theories.

But it’s almost always the wrong thing to do in, y’know, real life.

Isn’t it cool enough that we put people into orbit in multiton winged spacecraft so that they can do science and exploration and extend our knowledge of the Universe? Why do people insist on making up nonsense about this?

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Jim Oberg.

Even in hard economic times, we have to fund research. If we don’t, we make things that much harder on ourselves later. Now please, don’t tell me we can’t afford anything for science, or that I’m asking too much. This argument is not so clearly black and white: I am not saying we can afford to fund everyone’s research at the levels we do during economic boom times, of course. But unless this country (and in fact the whole world) slides into a vast depression, then we certainly do need to keep some money flowing, even if only at a tighter level, into research. We don’t know what major advance will come out of some medical research, or engineering research, or even space research. So even if we restrict the flow, it’s important to keep at least some flow.

This does mean some research may get funded at the expense of something else, but the last thing we need is squabbling inside the fence of science between projects that are all facing cuts. Doing that poisons the scientific community. And doing it in public is ugly and extremely bad form, since that cannot help but make the public turn against science in one form or another.

That’s why I am particularly unhappy with an editorial in the Huffington Post by Amitai Etzioni. It’s an attack on NASA, set up as a false dichotomy between space research and ocean research, and uses narrow-minded opinions that I don’t think reflect those of the American public.

To start off, Etzioni complains that the Kepler mission — designed to look for the signatures of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars — is essentially a waste of money:

NASA has a very effective propaganda machine. Whatever modest little mission it pursues, it frames as if it was of grand importance not merely to the United States but to the human race. The most recent example is the launch of a telescope which costs a ‘mere’ six hundred million dollars, the immodestly labeled ‘Kepler’ mission. For those who have not kept up with the philosophical implications of their astronomy lessons, Johannes Kepler revolutionized our view of the world by revealing that we are not the center of the universe, that we are among a bunch of other planets which are circling the Sun rather than Mother Earth.

Dr. Ed Weiler, Head of Science Missions at NASA, told NPR that Kepler “is a historical mission. I maintain it really attacks some very basic questions that have been part of our genetic code since that first man or woman looked up in the sky and asked the question: Are we alone?”

[...]

One could say this is merely one overblown piece of PR, dished out by those who try to justify why they are spending hundred of millions of dollars on projects that will yield very little.

"Yield very little"? Dude. Seriously? The question of whether we are alone in the Universe, and even if there are other planets capable of sustaining life, is certainly deeply ingrained in our minds. This is one of the biggest remaining unanswered philosophical questions in science! For Etzioni to poopoo it is not only insulting, but so egregiously wrong-headed that it boggles my own mind.

There are a lot of big questions in every field of science, but I think asking if there is life in space transcends any one field, if only because the question itself involves so many scientific disciplines: astronomy, geology, biology, physics, and more. And now, for the first time in history, we can make solid progress towards answering that question.

Not only that, but Kepler will yield vast amounts of data useful in a lot of astronomical subdisciplines. It’s not like all we’ll get out of it is a simple statistic like, "1 out of every 18 stars has planets". Any type of survey undertaken in astronomy is incredibly useful in cross-disciplinary work. Perhaps Etzioni should have talked to an astronomer before writing what he did.

His basic premise in the HuffPo piece is that we should be spending that money on deep sea research, and not space. This is the false dichotomy I mentioned earlier. Here’s a thought he doesn’t talk about: why not fund both? Yes, there is not as much money to go around as there used to be, but why suggest we cut off funds for one kind of research to feed another? Sure, oceanography is important, interesting, and could yield economic boons, but so does space exploration. His strawman argument of NASA helping create Teflon is pretty awful; he ignores the impacts of, say, weather satellites, communication satellites, solar weather prediction, the huge benefit computers got from Apollo, and the creation of the digital photography industry.

Just to give you some piffling examples.

You can read the links I provided at the top of this article for more. And if you think Etzioni is not really attacking NASA — and hurting all of scientific research — in his article, then read how he ends it:

Granted, Obama has more urgent priorities than worrying about either outer space or deep oceans. However, presidents have assistants, and they have assistants. Somebody, one cannot but hope, can bring some sense into setting priorities in spending those dollars dedicated to exploration. These may well be dedicated to discovering ways to fight disease and finding sustainable new sources of energy. But do not look for NASA for much help.

That is, to be blunt, ridiculous. Not the first part; he’s correct there. But that last part simply and baldly pits all of research against NASA, and that is grossly unfair. Not only that, it’s dead wrong. For example, the NOAA — which does the type of research Etzioni is suggesting we do instead of space exploration — got about an 8% increase in its budget from 2008 to 2009; NASA got about 5%. DOE science got 15%. In total numbers, NASA’s budget is much larger than NOAA, but that’s not surprising since, in general, it’s harder and more expensive to get into space than it is to explore the oceans. But we do spend quite a bit on the exploration Etzioni is supporting.

So.

To Mr. Etzioni: we’re all in this together. You may note that in this essay I am not saying we should ditch one kind of science to support NASA, or vice-versa. I am saying that to do this the right way, we need to support everyone. Scientific in-fighting, back biting, and narrow-minded territorial defensiveness will not help anyone, and in fact hurts everyone.

It is not only possible, but I believe mandated, that all of us who love science and want to further the knowledge of humanity support each other’s endeavors. The public does in fact have a great interest in many fields of science, including space exploration, ocean exploration, biological exploration…

The key word there is exploration, and there’s enough Universe out there for everybody.

Tip o’ the poisoned pen to Richard White.

The latest volley in this war is about (drum roll please): the Moon Hoax. Yes, The Mirror has discovered this 40 year old rotting piece of cabbage and is serving it up like a fine box wine. Breathlessly marked "EXCLUSIVE" — as if they are the first to have stumbled on this news — the article goes on and on about the usual tired and long, long-debunked claims of the Moon Hoax crowd.

This article is slightly different than most "fair" articles on these topics in that the writer, Dennis Ellam, actually does give explanations for some of the dumb conspiracy claims, but also uses a writing tone that is somewhat sarcastically dismissive when discussing them. I’ve seen this many times; it allows the writer to fan the flames of the conspiracy while also innocently claiming that they present both sides.

Ellam was pretty confused over the provenance of the conspiracy though. After a description of some of the claims, he then says, "But the HBs [Hoax Believers; a term I coined back in 2001] have begun to gather important allies." Who would these important allies be? Why, Bill Kaysing! But Kaysing originated the Moon hoax idea, so how could the HBs have gathered him as an ally? And Ellam, like every other conspiracy-fanner, neglects to mention that Kaysing had some pretty crazy ideas, like that any kind of space travel is impossible and that NASA blew up Challenger on purpose to keep Christa MacAuliffe from revealing the truth about NASA’s fakery.

Yeah.

Ellam also quotes astronaut Brian O’Leary as saying it’s possible the landings weren’t real. That quotation — unattributed in the article, for shame — comes from the wretched Fox TV show back in 2001, and O’Leary claims he was taken out of context, in fact now saying quite succinctly that the landings were real.

Ellam also relates the incident where Buzz Aldrin punched Bart Sibrel as the act of a guilty man lashing out against a truth-seeker… when we know for a fact that Sibrel was harassing Aldrin and physically intimidating him. Sibrel tried to sue Aldrin for the punch, and the judge threw the case out of court.

Ellam presents all these points in a very misleading way, but all of them are easily debunked. He could have trivially fact-checked them by contacting either me or Jay Windley (who runs the clavius.org website, another Moon Hoax mythbusting site). It’s not like either of us is very hard to find when it comes to this conspiracy; perhaps typing "Moon Hoax" into Google was too much trouble.

So why bother checking your facts, backing up your claims, or doing, y’know, research, when instead you can write something destined to stir controversy where none exists?

I guess, in the end, people in the UK need something to line their birdcages, and The Mirror is only too happy to provide.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Peter Backus.