Elon Musk, Space Fraud?

[Richard Stanley]

More proof:

At 20 seconds into the return to Earth video we see a cover on the 3:00(?) portal. Perhaps the 3:00 and 9:00 o'clock portals have been permanently covered from the outside, and this is why the one appears black in the interior shot?

 

[le berger des photons]

I notice that you people have avoided scrupulously talking about your theory for the physical phenomenon which prevents us all from seeing stars in the video of the alleged space docking maneuvre. It can't be diffusion by Earth's atmosphere, please explain what does it?

It would be quite helpful to your effort to discredit mr. weisbecker. And without it, you appear to be just as mr. weisbecker described you.

Cherry picking is not something needed when one is telling the truth. Surely you must agree with that?

 

[Jerry Russell]

Hello le berger des photons,

Thanks for visiting.

For whatever it's worth, my theory about the stars is that they are very far away, and therefore much dimmer in brightness than either the Sun, or any object directly illuminated by the Sun. Indeed, they are below the threshold of brightness necessary to excite the photoreceptors in the camera, when it's adjusted to correctly expose the highlights in the image of the spacecraft.

It's exactly the same reason that you can't see stars in the daytime sky from Earth. The atmosphere is just as transparent during the day as it is at night, and the stars are still there. But, the sky is a brighter color of blue, because it's illuminated by the Sun, and the stars are too dim to see by comparison.

Does that seem at all plausible to you?

I know it might seem we're trying to discredit Allan, but we're not. We're trying to have a conversation. It's not easy when he refuses to acknowledge or respond to much of what we're saying, and when he keeps pushing these delusional arguments, and when he accuses us of being spooks. But seriously I do believe Allan's heart is in the right place, and he's right more often than not.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Perhaps the 3:00 and 9:00 o'clock portals have been permanently covered from the outside, and this is why the one appears black in the interior shot?

OK, and that also explains why the 3:00 and 9:00 portals appear almost invisible in the docking video, to the point where I thought you were writing more satire. The question then becomes, whether a porthole that has been covered over and riveted shut, should even be called a porthole? I agree, this could explain the permanently black appearance from inside.

The splashdown portion of the 'return to earth' video, although low resolution, looks like real camera footage to me. The motions of the parachutes in the air, and the waves in the water, are highly articulated and random-looking. That sort of thing is really hard to simulate accurately, and computer animations of those types of phenomena generally look obviously fake.

 

[Richard Stanley]

For whatever it's worth, my theory about the stars is that they are very far away, and therefore much dimmer in brightness than either the Sun, or any object directly illuminated by the Sun. Indeed, they are below the threshold of brightness necessary to excite the photoreceptors in the camera, when it's adjusted to correctly expose the highlights in the image of the spacecraft.

This is a redux of the same problem raised by the late Dave McGowan in his Moon landing analysis. The difference in the effective luminosity of our Sun to other stars is hard to imagine, until one comprehends the difference in distance. Also, because our eyes' irises help to compensate for such differences, to a smaller extent. Try using a PV solar panel inside your dwelling and see how much energy it produces from your lights. Not very much.

In the previous video, watch what happens at about 2:20. The Crew Dragon moves off to the edge of the view and the camera apparently loses control of the luminosity situation. Note all the little round objects that appear at the same time that the camera image senor goes into saturation in the area of the Crew Dragon. I'm guessing that these round objects are stars, or that's what they want us to think they are. Note that the round objects all have different intensities, just like stars.

BTW, at about 2:29 there are a couple of small, bright objects that zoom past from the lower left at about a 45 degree angle to the right.

 

[Jerry Russell]

... the booster recovery landing images look fake. They're too perfect, with the twin boosters touching down at exactly the same moment.

I looked further into this, and I've satisfied myself that the recoverable booster footage is genuine. I had thought all these landings were far out at sea. But some of them (including the double booster landing for the Falcon Heavy rocket, that I was referring to above) happened on dry land, with hundreds if not thousands of eyewitnesses. And, many of those eyewitnesses posted their own video to YouTube, so we have confirmation of the event from multiple viewpoints. Here's a compilation:

And, a nice capture of the entire flight from start to finish, with a Nikon P1000 camera (3000 mm equivalent superzoom):

I suppose it's conceivable that all this has been faked, but I can't imagine how. So I think I owe Elon Musk an apology. Allan CW will not be happy with me, but there seems to be nothing I can say that will ever satisfy him.

Is it possible I've been wrong to doubt Elon Musk's sincerity about his Mars colonization project? Hmm, let's look into that...

 

[Jerry Russell]

Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origins company did a similar trick with their New Shepard suborbital rocket, back in Nov. 2015. In addition to the footage of the landing, what's most interesting about this video is the simulation of happy customers enjoying the ride.

 

[Jerry Russell]

the ISS that's supposedly been in orbit since 1998, but might have long since crashed to earth for all we know.

Sometimes I get away with all kinds of stupid stuff on this website and nobody calls me on it. The ISS is easy to see with the naked eye, or you can take a picture of it with a telescope & a camera.

 

[Jerry Russell]

..what's most interesting about this video is the simulation of happy customers enjoying the ride.

I'm going to have to broaden the topic of this thread, or else start a new one. There's a lot going on in what's been called "Space 2.0". I hardly know where to begin. But, let's have a look at the space tourism business. I have to ask whether we're looking here at priest training for the Space Jesus religion to come.

The first space tourist program was arranged by Space Adventures, Inc., which apparently arranged the deal directly with the Russians. Beginning in 2001, seven "private astronauts" went to the ISS with Space Adventures. The arrangement came to a hiatus in 2010, reportedly because of an increased need for official crew members at the ISS.

The last tourist was Guy LaLiberte, a co-founder of Cirque du Soleil. The price for his ticket was reportedly $35 million. LaLiberte used the flight to promote his charitable foundation devoted to water conservation. He hosted a two-hour variety program from the ISS, called "Moving Stars and Earth for Water". Out of the two-hour show, this brief clip from Associated Press seems to be all that's currently available.

Not to be outdone, Elon Musk in 2017 floated the idea of a ticket for a flight to the Moon, also to be priced at ~$35 million. The first ticket got snapped up by Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, who booked the entire flight with plans to bring along perhaps 8 or 9 friends. The flight is currently scheduled for 2023. Here's the promotional video:

 

[Jerry Russell]

While Musk and Space Adventures are hosting billionaire artists, two other companies are aiming to bring space tourism to the mass market.

At the moment, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic seems to have taken the lead by flying their very first "tourist", Beth Moses, last Feb. 21, 2019. (Well, technically she's an employee, but it was "the first time a non-pilot flew on board a commercial spaceship to space.") Moses and two actual pilots went for a sub-orbital flight on the SpaceShipTwo. The success was a culmination of a long and dangerous process: three employees were killed in a 2007 oxidizer flow test explosion. The first prototype spacecraft crashed in 2014, killing one pilot. The hybrid rocket engine was redesigned several times along the way.

No matter, the company says they have 650 reservations for flight tickets at $250,000 each. "Branson said he hoped the price of a space flight would come down to around $40,000 or $50,000 over the next decade," Branson told CNBC.

But at this moment, the bargain basement operation is probably Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Zero Hedge speculates that their price will be $200,000, undercutting Virgin Galactic by $50K. Official pricing has not been announced and reservations are not available, but prospective astronauts can get on Blue Origin's mailing list by volunteering their contact information here. I wonder if a salesman would call.

FWIW, my guess is that Bezos will be able to maintain a cost advantage. His rocket can be reassembled and refueled for each flight, while the solid fuel portion of Branson's SpaceshipTwo appears to require something more akin to a remanufacturing process. Also, Branson's flight plan involves a boost and a drop from a host airplane, requiring its own crew for takeoff & landing, while Bezos's rocket ship proceeds in a simple arc from liftoff to touchdown.

On the other hand, the Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft requires cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuels, which pose their own logistical challenges.

I was curious about the possible ecological impact of the new "space tourism" industry, so I did some rough calculations. Figures have not been released. Working from an illustration at the Blue Origin website, I estimate that the fuel tank of the New Shepard is about 43 feet tall, and 9.8 feet in diameter. This would correspond to a fuel tank volume of about 90,000 liters at most, depending on the thickness of the tank walls. Applying another guesstimation, this would support a mixture of 17,000 liters of LOX (liquid oxygen) and 73,000 liters of LH2 (liquid hydrogen), depending on whether the designers chose a lean or rich fuel-oxidant ratio. This 73,000 liters would have a mass of 5100 kg, which is roughly equivalent to 5100 gallons of gasoline on a BTU-for-BTU basis.

So with 7 passengers on board the New Shepard, that's only 728 gallons per person. That's hardly enough to run an F150 truck for a year of typical driving!! Now if they can get enough flights out of these ships between engine rebuilds or crashes, I can easily see the cost coming down well below $10K per ticket.

This beats Vegas for a "White Trash" honeymoon destination any day of the week!!

But the flight only covers about 60 miles across the West Texas desert, so we're talking 10 gallons per mile. Not MPG, but GPM.

 

[Jerry Russell]

Could there be any typology here? The "New Shepherd" rocket? Follow Moses into space?

 

[Richard Stanley]

I was going to say you're off your rocker, but then:

In 1968, Stafford stopped by Shepard's office and told him that an otologist in Los Angeles had developed a cure for Ménière's disease. Shepard flew to Los Angeles, where he met with Dr. William F. House. House proposed to open Shepard's mastoid bone and make a tiny hole in the endolymphatic sac. A small tube was inserted to drain excess fluid. The surgery was conducted in early 1969 at St. Vincent's Hospital in Los Angeles, where Shepard checked in under the pseudonym of Victor Poulos.[83][96] The surgery was successful, and he was restored to full flight status on May 7, 1969.[83]​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shepard​

After my having discussed the prior homage paid to the Gemini twins, Apollo, and such, now we have another Paul, a Victor no less, the original who rode on a ship, the Castor and Pollux to Rome.

Maybe all these tourist flights are just a cover story for the Big Hologram preparations.