Initial efforts to clear the Van Allen belts targeted electrons because they tend to get trapped there as the result of high-altitude nuclear explosions. In 1962, a U.S. high-altitude nuclear weapons test named Starfish Prime generated a highly energetic artificial electron belt that disabled the first commercial communications satellite, TelStar 1, so researchers sought ways to protect spacecraft from nuclear weapons used in space.
However, it’s the protons in the inner belt that scientists have recently explored. Getting rid of them would potentially open up valuable new orbits for satellites and make travel safer for astronauts, says Maria de Soria-Santacruz Pich, whose Ph.D. work at MIT was on manipulating the Van Allen belts. It might also be impossible.
Well it’s not like nothing could go wrong or anything like that. /s
James Webb was a pivotal figure in the early history of NASA.
Webb led NASA from the beginning of the Kennedy administration through the end of the Johnson administration, thus overseeing each of the critical first crewed missions throughout the Mercury and Gemini programs until days before the launch of the first Apollo mission. He also dealt with the Apollo 1 fire.
In 2002, the Next Generation Space Telescope was renamed the James Webb Space Telescope as a tribute to Webb.
On February 14, 1961, Webb accepted President John F. Kennedy's appointment as administrator of NASA, taking the reins from interim director, Deputy Administrator Hugh L. Dryden. Webb directed NASA's undertaking of the goal set by Kennedy of landing an American on the Moon before the end of the 1960s through the Apollo program. For seven years after Kennedy's announcement on May 25, 1961, of the goal of a crewed lunar landing, Webb lobbied for support for NASA in Congress, until he left NASA in October 1968. As a longtime Washington insider and with the backing of President Lyndon B. Johnson, he was able to produce continued support and resources for Apollo.
During Webb's administration, NASA developed from a loose collection of research centers to a coordinated organization. He had a key role in creating the Manned Spacecraft Center, later the Johnson Space Center, in Houston. Despite the pressures to focus on the Apollo program, Webb ensured that NASA carried out a program of planetary exploration with the Mariner and Pioneer space programs. Webb was an early champion of space telescopes, like the one that would later bear his name.
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It is believed by some that IF the moon landing project was faked, Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick had a hand in it.
An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the first letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet.
Kubrick’s movie, The Shining - is believed to contain clues from the director that he was in fact, involved in the Apollo project. There are numerous elements which could indicate this, and a most curious one is a type of acrostic message embedded in a recurring phrase in the movie.
Jack Nicholson’s character is both an alcoholic author with a writer’s block, and a deeply disturbed man. At one point in the movie he repeatedly types the phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
Using an acrostic method for the sentence, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” - we take the first letters of each word - A w a n p m J a d b. Using the four base (the simplest and most common) Gematria ciphers - these letters match exactly to James E Webb:
Well there’s a dumb idea.
A - Van Allen Belts aren’t doing anything bad to satellites
B - They’re kinda nice for life on earth
Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
There was a reason that you used to be required to take a couple of humanities classes.
What about the Van Halen Belts?