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Danger Room tells us of a claim made by Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings, a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling government agents, that President Obama was part of a CIA mission to explore Mars beginning in 1980. They say he was teleported to the red planet.
Obama wasn’t the only one making the otherworldly voyage. As “Barry Soetero,” the 19-year-old Obama was one of 10 youths selected to secretly teleport to and from Mars, forming a band of interplanetary Teen Titans. Regina Dugan, the director of Darpa, was another member.
Between 1981 and 1983, Obama is supposed to have visited Mars twice, by way of a teleportation chamber called a “jump room.” Basiago, a fellow chrononaut, told the website Exopolitics that he saw Obama “walk back to the jump room from across the Martian terrain.” To acknowledge his comrade, Obama is said to have told Basiago, “We’re here” — apparently, “with some sense of fatalism.”
It is not known what exactly Obama did on Mars. (Socializing Martian health care, perhaps? Building a birth-certificate printing press?) His mission was a perilous one, according to Basiago and Stillings. The CIA wished to “establish a defense regime protecting the Earth from threats from space” as well as a legal claim to “territorial sovereignty,” making Obama something of a Martian conquistador. Presumably, Obama’s CIA handlers needed him to “acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to their presence” in order to secure the U.S.-Martian alliance. (We’ll bet you weren’t even aware of Martian animals.)
“Simply put, your task is to be seen and not eaten,” an elder chrononaut, retired Army Maj. Ed Dames, is alleged to have told a young Obama.
A spokesman for the National Security Council says that Obama has never been to Mars. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Arikia Millikan)
Photo: Jeremy Hsu/Space.com
The problem with space travel, fashion-wise, is that spacesuits are bulky and – let’s face it – not very chic. Thankfully, private spacesuit designers Nikolay Moiseev and Ted Southern solved this problem:
A spacesuit model arched his back experimentally, flashed the thumbs up and struck other poses that drew chuckles from the crowd gathered inside the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. He showed off a bright yellow pressure suit topped by the dome of a roomy space helmet, with a blue glove on the right hand and a black glove on the left hand.
The blue glove was designed by Moscow-based spacesuit engineer Nikolay Moiseev, who built in unprecedented flexibility at the metacarpal knuckles of the hand. The black glove represented a single-layer design made from urethane by Brooklyn-based inventor and artist Ted Southern, which reduced the torque required to move the fingers to practically nothing.
"In the future, our plan is to actually blend the two and make a low-torque, single-layer, metacarpal glove," Southern said to the assembled crowd. "And it’s going to happen."
It’s bad enough, it would seem from reality television, to spend a few weeks in the same house as only a few others, but imagine spending your time, with five others, for 520 days, in a shipping container with barely enough space to stretch your legs. This is the setup the European Space Agency has created to test the psychological and physiological effects of such isolation which would be required in a journey to Mars. Two crew members have already been chosen, and once four more are found, the ‘journey’ will begin.
There will be communication with the outside world via radio and email, but radio communications will be delayed a full 20 minutes as they would be on a real interplanetary mission and emails will take twice that time to get through. Both will be disrupted periodically, because what’s the point of locking six men in a container if you don’t mess with their heads a bit?
Link – via mentalfloss
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This post gives you a crash course in gravity, specifically how gravity affects the way we travel to (or don’t travel to) other planets.
The more massive and more compact your planet is, the harder it is to get off of. Something like the Moon, which is only about 1.2% of the mass of the Earth but 27% of the Earth’s radius, is way, way easier to escape from than the Earth. To escape from the Earth’s gravity, you need to reach a speed of 40,000 km/hr (25,000 mph) from the Earth’s surface. To escape from the Moon, on the other hand, you only need to reach 8,600 km/hr (5,400 mph).
This explains why it would be so much easier to travel to one of the moons of Mars than to Mars itself, due to the ease of traveling back home from those places. Link
Space travel seems almost out of vogue these days, compared with its heyday in the latter half of last century. However, Richard Branson and Burt Rutan may be about to change all that by launching commercial space travel.
This may sound like a fantasy, but the world’s first commerical spacecraft was revealed by them yesterday – the SpaceShipTwo, and test flights are set to start immediately.
Branson and Rutan will be the first into space with their families, and there is already a huge list of reservations for the twice-daily flights to take place after this. The plane carries just six passengers at a time, each of whom pays £200,000 for just a few minutes of flight.
So as it stands, this is nothing more than a distant dream for all but the super-rich. However, it is certainly the start of something that could be absolutely huge.
Link – via babycreativeblog
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