Discovery crew relaxes, prepares for return after successful mission, adding Japanese Kibo module to International Space Station.
GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) successfully lifts off into orbit.
Phoenix Mars Lander begins analyzing first soil sample.
"Stay out of space and don't mess with nuclear power"
I come back every now and then and look at
Dutch's latest. It's always good for a laugh. But this line is still the funniest of all.
For those of you who are new to this thread since I last posted here (ending on page 13) - where I showed, among other things, that Dutch's "system" relies on systematically incorrect intervals, uses meaningless accuracy figures, cannot account for natural events of far larger magnitudes than his arbitrarily-chosen manmade ones, ascribes equal significance to the date an event actually occurs and to
the date any given article is published about that event, and literally
cannot distinguish significant events from insignificant ones - I thought I'd just present a little summary of the success record of U.S. nuclear power in space. After all, if we take
both "major themes" and combine them, that's pretty important, right?
22 successful launches with 23 spacecraft containing 41 radioisotope generators, starting with Transit 4A in 1961 and with the most recent being Pluto-New Horizons in 2006. Every single one functioned exactly as designed. Voyager 1 and 2 are still going strong after
31 years; Cassini is still exploring Saturn; New Horizons roared past Jupiter last year on its way to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
3 aborted missions with 3 spacecraft containing 4 RTGs. In each case, the launch vehicle or other part of the spacecraft malfunctioned, and the RTGs reentered; and in each case, the generator/heat source performed exactly as designed.
There have also been
well over two hundred isotope heater units launched, including several on the three solar-powered Mars rovers launched to date. Again, every one of them has performed exactly as designed. (The RHUs aboard
Spirit and
Opportunity have played a major role in keeping them alive so long past their design lifetimes.)
The U.S. has also launched
one nuclear reactor (SNAP-10A) into space, which operated for about a month before an unrelated spacecraft failure caused the reactor to shut down automatically. Again, the unit functioned exactly as designed.
I post this only for the interest of those on the thread who may not have read back to what I wrote earlier, and who might have wondered what dire results would arise if one combined
two "major themes" warning against space travel and nuclear power. It's a giggle; he literally wound up trying to rewrite the definition of "success". Poor Dutch. A nice man, evidently, but too heavily invested in his astronumerology to admit it's nothing more than word salad.