4 ms·
How easy it is to forget the cold war. In 2012, we cannot look back at scientists of 1976 and say "you should have read and believed this obscure Russian scienc
by unreal37 14y ago
How easy it is to forget the cold war. In 2012, we cannot look back at scientists of 1976 and say "you should have read and believed this obscure Russian science journal and the argument would have been put to permanent rest". 1976 was a different time in Russian-American relations especially when it came to space.
The article ends by saying our belief of water on the moon has improved from "one part per billion" in 2006, to "one part per million" today, like it's a huge revolutionary improvement. I know it's 1000x, but its still just one part per million. So it takes a million gallons of moon rocks to extract one gallon of water?
Which makes me wonder what the water ppm of Earth is.
- rbanffy 14y agoFor the surface, at least, it's about 750K ppm, but most of it is around 1M ppm.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago23000 per million, 23 per thousand or one per 4400 (assuming parts are measured by mass)[1] 1. http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/aug97/868365319.Es.r.html http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/aug97/868365319.Es.r.ht...
- huhtenberg 14y agoPsst... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz_Test_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz_Test_Proje... Note the date.
- Create 14y agoI think that mission "only" came to be, because both sides had to have a backup/rescue kit. The hot-spare became useless when both capsule-based (Soyuz/Skylab-Apollo) programmes came to an end with their last flight. By combining, they both got another "free" flight: it was too good to pass up the billion dollars found free with the deal.
- huhtenberg 14y agoInteresting, haven't heard this before. My point was that there was far more cooperation going on in the space exploration area, despite of the Cold War.
- lotharbot 14y agoI once had the privilege of driving a bunch of astronauts and cosmonauts around town. They all expressed the attitude of "regardless of our political differences, we've all experienced the same extraordinary thing, and that makes us brothers." Though the space programs in the 60s were very competitive in a political sense, those who were actually dealing with the realities of space (including the engineers on the ground) had tremendous respect for each other. There was a huge amount of cooperation between the two sides.
- someperson 14y agoWow, that's so cool. Could you tell us the entire story about driving the astronauts/cosmonauts around together? :-)
- lotharbot 14y ago
- batista 14y ago>How easy it is to forget the cold war. In 2012, we cannot look back at scientists of 1976 and say "you should have read and believed this obscure Russian science journal and the argument would have been put to permanent rest". 1976 was a different time in Russian-American relations especially when it came to space. That makes no sense. Actually BECAUSE of the cold war Americans should have studies Russian scientific results more at the time, even to the point of spying on them, not just reading published journals --after all you don't want the "enemy" to have an advantage over you.
- wdewind 14y agoWhich just brings it full circle one more time: the Russians would know this and thus be incentivized to plant misleading stories.
- eru 14y agoThomas Schelling argues in The Strategy of Conflict that in a cold war situation the belligerents might actually encourage spying to make sure the other side has accurate information. (The accurate information being necessary for effective threats of mutually assured destruction.)
- planetguy 14y agoThe article ends by saying our belief of water on the moon has improved from "one part per billion" in 2006, to "one part per million" today, like it's a huge revolutionary improvement. I know it's 1000x, but its still just one part per million. So it takes a million gallons of moon rocks to extract one gallon of water? If we believe the Russian data then they found one part per thousand. By mass. So a gallon of water would only require you to process three hundred gallons of rock. And the "processing" isn't that difficult: heat it up and collect the vapor. Besides, even if it is parts per million, that ain't bad. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-pit_mining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-pit_mining gold can be economically mined at a couple of ppm, while copper and nickel are mined at parts per thousand.
- sambeau 14y ago1:4400 (0.02%) http://www.universetoday.com/65588/what-percent-of-earth-is-water/ http://www.universetoday.com/65588/what-percent-of-earth-is-... Of course, a sample taken from the Earth's surface would provide a widely different result (ranging ~0% to ~100%) depending on where it was taken.