Global Delusion: NASA

Note: The Global Delusion Series is meant to be read in this order -
Timeline of Operations, NASA, Heliocentric Science, Hebrew Cosmology

When I think of NASA, I think of the exploration of space. I think about the incredible amount of effort it must’ve taken to get to the moon. I think about the heroic astronauts being rocketed off into space. In fact everything I believe about space and cosmology I owe to NASA… so how do I know NASA can be trusted? This is a question I had never thought about until recently and it is a very large question that holds a lot of weight behind it. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was founded in 1915. It would eventually be absorbed by the National Aeronautics and Space Act (NASA) in 1958 (if you haven’t read other articles in this series, 1958 was a very big year for “space exploration”…).

As of 2018, about 560 people have been in space. Of the 560 astronauts that made it into space, only 24 have been outside low Earth orbit (LEO). Low Earth orbit ranges from 99–1200 miles into the atmosphere. All 24 of these astronauts that made it outside low Earth orbit were all part of the Apollo missions between 1968–1972 including those that flew to the moon. That means for the last 50 years, no astronaut has flown outside of LEO (1200 miles from the Earth). This range is exceptionally low, especially when you consider how far the moon is (238,000 miles away from the Earth). So why has no one gone outside of low Earth orbit since the Apollo missions? Well one reason could be regarding the Van Allen radiation belts. These radiation belts surround the Earth and extend out between 400–36,000 miles above the Earth. Fortunately they were discovered in 1958 with a Geiger counter which counts ionizing radiation and counted radiation levels a thousand times greater than expected. Unfortunately however, this was bad news for sending humans into space, ionizing radiation has bad effects on human tissue resulting in one of three ways: cell death, cell repairs itself or cell mutation (very likely cancerous). It was also very bad news for the space equipment because of the vulnerability to this radiation:

"Our current technology is ever more susceptible to these accelerated particles because even a single hit from a particle can upset our ever smaller instruments and electronics," said David Sibeck, Van Allen Probes mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "As technology advances, it's actually becoming even more pressing to understand and predict our space environment."

-Studying the Van Allen Belts 60 Years After America's First Spacecraft

Clearly these issues had to have been circumnavigated for the Apollo missions to get to the moon, unfortunately the technology that got us to the moon was destroyed according to Don Petit (NASA astronaut). So it appears we have a critical issue with the Van Allen radiation belts keeping humans from exploring anything above low Earth orbit which we’ve resolved in the past (allegedly) but have destroyed the information that got us there to begin with. In an interview, Alan Bean (Apollo 12 astronaut, flew into space nearly 10 years after the Van Allen Radiation Belts had been discovered) revealed he had absolutely no clue as to what the Van Allen radiation belts were at all. How could this astronaut who had been to the moon 238,000 miles away in space have absolutely no knowledge of potentially the most critical obstacle to space discovery known to man after flying through it twice, there and back?