Wanna buy this Sputnik? It fell off the back of a spaceship…
As mad bad Putin threatens again to launch a speed-of-lightning nuclear attack on the world, just how do we survive?
Do we take off our internal doors and make a ‘wooden tent’ out of them in our lounge so that we can be with our families for a few weeks, as Maggie Thatcher told us to do in the early Eighties?
Protect and Survive it was called. Believe me, if the UK had been attacked her civil defence plan wouldn’t have protected us and we would not have survived.
Lying under your car for a couple of weeks ‘til the nuclear fall-out halves its life wouldn’t have worked and setting up home in a ditch was just plain daft!
So, the survivalists of this world with their garages full of plastic bottled water and baked beans are saying we should look at escaping to Mars again.
There’s not, of course, a scrap of evidence that it would work. There is however a lot of evidence of scrap up there! It’s like the Harold Steptoe Space Agency …
You can hear Harold’s dulcet tones; “You wanna buy this Sputnik, it fell off the back of a spaceship!”
Isn’t it funny – and so very human of us – that we can’t really afford to turn the red planet into stellar real estate – but we have already turned it in to a scrapyard!
Look at these beautiful evocative pictures of a planet that everybody on earth from the UK to Moscow have coveted. And what do we see?
The wreckage of our space dreams, that’s what!
At least 35,000 pieces of space junk are being tracked by the Department of Deference’s global Space Surveillance Network all the time. Much more debris — too small to be tracked, but large enough to threaten spaceflight – exists in the near-Earth space environment‘
The European Space Agency says Earth is surrounded by more than 3,000 abandoned satellites, 35,000 objects bigger than four inches, and millions of small fragments travelling fast enough to cause damage to spacecraft.
At least one telecoms satellite has been killed off in a crash, and experts fear a series of catastrophic failures as thousands more satellites are launched in the 2020s.
In another incident astronomers Cliff Johnson and Clarae Martinez-Vazquez were working on an international survey at an observatory in Chile when they became aware of something bright obstructing their view. Martinez-Vazquez said a train of 19 Starlink satellites owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company interrupted their research for six minutes.
So, we might as well dump some other technical detritus on Mars too!
The Ingenuity helicopter captured these images, including ones of the gear that helped land the Perseverance rover on Mars.
During its one-year anniversary flight on April 19, the little chopper took photos of the striped parachute used during Perseverance’s landing — often referred to as “7 minutes of terror” because it happens faster than radio signals can reach Earth from Mars — on February 18, 2021. It also spotted the cone-shaped backshell that helped protect the rover and Ingenuity on the trip from Earth to Mars and during its fiery, plunging descent to the Martian surface.
The engineers working on the Mars Sample Return program, an ambitious and multimission process to return Martian samples collected by Perseverance to Earth by the 2030s, asked if Ingenuity could gather these images during its 26th flight.
As an afterthought, we have already managed to dump 400,000 pounds of trash on the Moon.
After the Earth, Mars is the most habitable planet in our solar system due to it’s soil contains water, it isn’t too cold or too hot, there is enough sunlight for solar panels and gravity is 38pc of that on Earth.
So, it makes sense doesn’t it – litter infinity with all this high-tech trash and leave a little pile on the planets too.
Nice pics though!
#space #debris #sputnik #steptoe #mars #earth #nasa #agency #musk #branson #dump #pollution #putin #war #ukraine
