A STRANGE WEEK OF SPACE NEWS: PART ONE
This last week, as I indicated a few days ago, has been a very strange week for space news, stories that you may have missed with all the focus on BREXIT and its implications. What I noticed, however, is a strange sense of timing hovers over them, as they're all coming out more or less in the same time window. And, as has become a familiar pattern, curiously it's the Russian media sources that are giving them play. Many regular readers here contributed many of these articles, so let's start with this first one: a video of a US Army recruiment campaign, clearly referencing "combat with aliens" both at the beginning, and at the end:
Ok, so what, you say? Well, on its own it's not too significant. But combine that with recent Boeing stupor-bowl halftime commercials, statements by General Kinney at military gatherings that we have to be ready to fight "ETs", and other high strangeness coming out of the military-industrial complex (think Lockheed-Martin in Antarctica here), and I cannot help but get the distinct impression-intuition-suspicion (I don't know quite what to call it), that "something is up" and that we're slowly being prepared for "it".
Then there was this, from Russia's Sputnik, and I cannot help but ponder this strange article:
http://sputniknews.com/world/20160621/1041648568/new-vision-innovates-space-warfare.html
Now, when one reads this article in depth, there is of course no reference to "fighting beyond the stars" or "aliens" or "ET" or anything of the sort. But it is Sputnik's choice of title and sub-title for the article that intrigues me. The title - "Space Weapons: The US Seeks to Innovate How America Fights Beyond the Stars" - does compel certain speculations and imaginations, for note the use of the present tense, not the future tense: How America Fights beyond the stars, not, How America will fight beyond the stars, &c. Shades of British computer hacker Gary McKinnon, who claimed to have hacked into US Department of Defense computers, and have found curious reference to a hidden "space fleet". Of course, we know what happened to him: the US pitched a hissy-fit, demanded extradition from Britain, so it could throw him into a deep dark hole. Britain refused. (And that, to my mind, was suspicious in itself, in today's terrorism and hacking-conscious age, when allies are supposed to "stick together," unless of course, his hacking was perhaps tied to MI-6? "Just what are the colonies doing up there?" &c. McKinnon's protection by the British government I always found to be as suspicious as the hack itself).
Then there's the sub-title to the Sputnik article: The Air Force has devised a new framework for interstellar warfare called Space Enterprise Vision." Now, I don't for a moment attach much suspicion to the US AIr Force having war plans for wars against some off planet invader. General staffs do this sort of thing all the time, and it would be the height of irrationality to assume that the US Air Force, Royal Air Force, Luftwaffe, Royal Canadian Air Force, and so on, do not have such plans in their safes, and that they do not wargame such events. From time to time we hear stories of such wargames. No surprise there. What is interesting about this subtitle is that this is being done under the aegis of something called "Space Enterprise Vision," in other words, as I've been arguing, if you're going to commericalize and privatize space, you have to "protect the sea lanes" and that requires, so to speak, "ships of the line", i.e., great big platforms carrying lots of guns hiding behind thick wooden planking designed to slug it out with anyone presuming to interdict those sea lanes. You get the idea: the commercialization of space implies - and requires - its weaponization.
Obviously the focus of the article itself is on terrestrial possibilities and a potential enemy's "bright lines" or trigger points, the lines in space that we, or they, cannot or should not cross without triggering a "major incident", the polite euphemism of such studies for "war." But it takes little imagination to see that such studies could be, and probably are, extrapolated to deal with "other" potential enemies.
THen there were these stories, shared by Mr. S.D.:
Experts says a 'space base' halfway between the Moon and Earth could be built in 10 years
The first article reveals the basic plan for a permanent Russian human presence on the Moon, and the plans are similar to other plans being advanced in Europe, China, and the USA:
They said the process of constructing the base would be done in stages, likely extending over a decade or more. The agency is reportedly developing a rocket to transport portions of the base to the moon over six separate launches.
It is a grandiose undertaking for a space agency that saw its projected budget for 2016-2025 trimmed by more than half last year, falling to a commitment of 1.5 trillion rubles, or roughly $30 billion.
In May, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told Interfax, a non-governmental Russian news agency, that “Russia will never catch up to the United States in the space race.” He claimed Roscosmos had fallen behind NASA and SpaceX founder Elon Musk by “ninefold.”
What's going on here? I suspect simply that this means Russia intends to be a part of this lunar base effort, rather than to attempt it on its own. However, it has an advantage that few appreciate: it has studied long term effects of zero and lower gravity on the ISS and its MIR space stations, and also has a large, servicable, and workable booster technology. As we also saw earlier this week, Russia is also investing money in the development of cyber technologies, including robotics: the presence of any Russian components in such an international mission would eventually and most likely require a Russian presence to service them. Keep that "international" component in mind here, because it will bear fruit in tomorrow's blog
I've blogged about the second article before, i.e., about the idea of basing a space station halfway between the Earth and the Moon. It would be, as the article notes, a rational place to position a station, one not only designed to replace the International Space Station, but as a base for lunar expeditions and other solar system expeditions. Note also that this is coming from the German....er.... European Space Agency. Note that the station is to be placed in an orbit at the equigravisphere between the Earth and the Moon:
"Let me take you on a thought experiment about 10 years into the future," David Parker, the ESA's Director of Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration, told the media at a press conference in Germany this week, celebrating the safe return of British astronaut Tim Peake to Earth.
"After 25 years of service, the International Space Station is coming to the end of its life, but now 1,000 times further out in space a new star has risen," he added. "A human outpost in deep space, located far out, where Earth and [the] Moon's gravity balance, a kind of crossroads in space."
According to Parker, the remote location of the space base would mean it could serve as much more than just a replacement for the ISS, enabling new kinds of scientific study in space – and chiefly, far greater access to the Moon.
"This is our deep space habitat, a new place to live and learn how to work in space, a kind of base camp for exploring the Solar System and reaching back down to the surface of the Moon," he said. "[Astronauts] can look down on a Moon untroubled by humans in more than 50 years. We want to go back there, we've barely scratched the surface."
Now, this story and idea appeared before, but note the date: it is being trotted out again, and within the same time frame as the other stories. The choice of the equigravispherical orbit is also logical, both from a practical, scientific, and needless to say, military point of view.
So what's going on? Well, for that, we'll have to await the high octane speculations of tomorrow's blog:
See you on the flip side...
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am i reading the last few weeks of joseph’s entries and comments right? is there a trend here to feel that mr global was caught off guard by brexit? or that mr global’s off balance on any recent news memes that keep getting run by us?
seems we gain an insight elsewhere and forget it as the propaganda we focus on requires us to forget
a moment ago the vast majority of us stood under the premise of false flag prevalence and the routine repeated tactics that come from perpetrators of such predatory behavior.
we all also seemed to recognize that whatever is published is for the further deceptive guidance of us mere masses as the breakaways break away further.
seems we’re missing joseph’s central point here. the mic’s marketing winds are changing. and yep the masses are dumbed down alot since we first noticed such winds. so it takes a lighter and lighter wind to blow the younger dumber masses off course.
so yeh the folk who voted in ’64 were propagandized into dumber masses than in ’60 and on for ’68 compared to ’64 and on and on and on. (albeit they got wised up fast by a few oddly obvious assassinations)
so yeh, there are a bunch of folk dumb enough now to aggressively vote for killery and/or the rump. and even more who think a vote for bernie will save them from either.
My bad; I meant John LEAR the pilot
This idea about placing a station on the equigravisphere between the Earth and the Moon has triggered a memory…
I am recalling that John Leer has maintained for years that the specific gravity calculations used for the moon are incorrect. It’s been awhile since I heard an interview that he described but did go into a fair amount of detail. My next statement will sound kind of hollow in light me not being able to remember exactly what his main points were, am pretty sure it had something to do with either the core of the moon or the dark side or both.
Anyways, with the same vibe I get from the Chelyabinsk meteor shoot down and the Chinese rabbit moon lander ala Hoaglands presentation, I wonder if there could be something hidden behind this announcement. A kind of time ticking disclosure bomb. Because if Leer is right about his calculations then surely the equigravisphere is NOT actually where scientists think it is. And perhaps in the discovery of an error or multiple errors in the standard equations we might also stumble, ahem, upon paradigm shifting truths not previously known (as the moon seems to be chalk full of mysterious stuff).
The alternative is that Leer has been completely off base on this. It’s making me think that for the sake of the curious community out there; somebody should find him and ask his opinion on this story. Ok, I’ll be right back.
Ah yes more space and military propaganda, all of these governments are lying to their citizens and stealing tax payer money to boot, I will believe this nonsense when I see some actual proof that we have been in space, so far zilch
In the Boston tea Party they dressed as red skins.
The updated, twisted version are green skins.
In this case your fighting for?
The .00001%?
When the humans win, the .00001% can return to killing the planet?
All those still living can return to their debt peonage existence?
Looks like a false flag that’s been being developed.
Just like the geoengineering, it’s all CO2’s fault, engineered propaganda.
World unite and fight as one – under the umbrella of your owners.
I refer to the recent return of an astronaut who spent a very long period on the ISS, he came back with severe physical problems.
So anyone who thinks we can put men and women into space for long periods better think again. You can have all the tech gadgets, but when it comes down to it, they had better solve the human “reaction” to space and weightlessness for sustained space flight.
Just a small detail that “they” are not telling us.
Perhaps, that ‘small detail’ will finally get NASA/ESA/etc. off their cans and force them into building ‘artificial gravity’ rotating sections. It could be simple, like a Ferris wheel section, or go all the way to a Willy Ley/Werner von Braun-style true, circular, rotating space station. One hopes…
Sweet, now we’ll be able to determine the actual equigravispherical point between the Earth and Moon.
I think someone did the calculations on the costs of repeatedly-reboosting the old ISS in low Earth orbit versus ‘mooring’ the new ISS at the equivalent of a Lagrangian point with little ‘station-keeping’ fuel needed. Evidently, the costs balanced or the “equigravispherical point” won…
I think my single biggest eyebrow-raiser was the name “Space Enterprise Vision,” when I came across it in “Aviation Week” not long ago. This, of course, comes about through the use of “Enterprise” (in the sense of NCC-1701). This is probably the first time I have seen this word used in a military setting. To use such a science fiction ‘keyword’ indicates either a coded-signal from those in the know, or we are being messed-with big time…
More Space Meme:
“Inside ULA’s Plan to Have 1,000 People Working in Space by 2045”
http://www.space.com/33297-satellite-refueling-business-proposal-ula.html?cmpid=514648
Anyone wants to speculate what mess our overlords have been up to in space for the last forty plus years. Since the official winding down of the manned space program have they been doing pillage and rapine like they did during the age of exploration and colonization sixteenth to nineteenth century. And have their victims been shopping around for protectors to deal with these scoundrels.
Pardon my skepticism. Where is the Port Royal of the Space Program? In a comment awaiting moderation I cite Dr. Carol Rosin. Dr. Von Braun said that aliens would be used as a false flag. I don’t think there are living victims out there. And I believe if there were wealth coming back here then Shanghai, Chicago and London (to name three) would have even more – visible – inequality than there is.
This actually sounds like very crude propaganda to me. And it comes at a time when the suppression, rather than cooptation, of so much criticism breeds cynicism and mistrust. Johan Vorster said, “A free press can give you hell – and save your neck.” I think too many people have forgotten or never learned that.
To me the scariest part is the political parallels to the period of the marriage between Formalism and Modernism (end of the Gilded Age to the Great War). In particular I’m thinking of an encomium I read to Siegfried Sassoon and the War Poets which tried to whitewash that he had been at one point investigated for treason by His Majesty’s Government.
This certainly makes Dr. Rosen’s account of Von Braun’s timeline credible – but I remember someone publishing a piece in 2001 about how 9/11 killed post-Modernism. I think this was on the NYT Opinion page. I couldn’t believe they would say something so superficial. This was followed of course by an acceleration of the closure of public discourse to certain points of view. They didn’t go away though. I was listening to an interview with a self-described “activist” this morning on the APR radio program Marketplace which didn’t have the socialist rhetoric of Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” but shared with that Jazz Poem its eloquent defense of looters.
These stories are as crude and blatant as the stories I’m talking about (including so many defenses of Woodrow Wilson whose record is comparable to Truman’s). It really didn’t work then. It was more successful after Roosevelt because “subversives” like the Weavers were more welcome in Popular Culture than the equivalents back then (or recently). In other words they were coopting dissent which they have stopped doing. In today’s cynical environment I cannot actually believe people will allow themselves to be mobilized to support things this expensive except through the Black Budget. The Brexit vote – whether good as I understand most people feel here (I prefer to wait and see) – or not and Donald Trump are literally examples of the PTB saying, “Nobody will cut off their nose to spite their face” then watching with incomprehension as it apparently happens.
I was reading a New England Arts Magazine in the Doctor’s Office yesterday (Take) which featured an article about Peter Schlieman’s Bread and Puppet Theater and one about one of its progeny. Both as the articles (by the same author) stressed deal with social change but from different perspectives – like Scott-Heron and that activist I mentioned above. And the Doctor had never heard of the Bread and Puppet Theater but he had certainly heard of more than one of their progeny. We discussed them. That this is no longer part of official discourse does not mean it is no longer part of social discourse. And again, Brexit and Trump suggest that keeping people ignorant is going to not make them more more docile. It just means the PTB will be caught flat-footed more often.
I shared these articles with my folks and they act like there’s nothing to get all worked up about. It’s just sad and pathetic how people are living out there lives completely oblivious to the true nature of our planet and its history.
The alien battle scenes are from the just released “Independence Day: Resurgence” movie! Which is a woeful effort, but in the film they made quite a deal in explaining how they had “reverse engineered” the aliens weapons after the victory in 1996’s “Independence Day Movie” ….
“Russia will never catch up to the United States in the space race.” – Talleyrand would have loved this!
Yes, but… Is it more polite to say it this way if the United States is actually behind in the space race? We assume they stopped private research when the old USSR collapsed. But that doesn’t mean they did. If the Russians realized how cheap the hidden technologies really were…
Do I believe it? I honestly cannot say. But someone needs to say it.
Okay, that was about the most creepily Hollywood-meets-Orwell 30 second bit of propaganda I’ve seen since, well, the last video clip I watched from Fox News or CNN.
A bit OT, but seriously, just what the heck is going on with the blatant fusion of corporate advertizing and news? Or in this case, the military? I don’t watch teevee so I don’t often see this stuff, and this comes as a bit of a shock (though not really; one grows inured to such degradations after several decades of dizzyingly paced decline).
I’m much more worried about this than I am about yet another space FRN-vaporizing boondoggle.