[OT] Mission to the Moon

[Brian Densmore]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Kelsay
> 
> >I think I'm joining the David Nicol wild idea club with this one, but
> >it seems to me that KCLUG could put Apache in this little box on the
> >moon and serve a website from the moon!
> >
> Do you know what the comms are like between Earth and Moon?  
> I read that for Earth to Mars (Spirit rover) it was something 
> like 5-25 bps.  That's BITS boys and girls.   The guys and 
> girls at NASA have partners around the world with BIG dishes 
> so they can communicate w/ the astronauts.  Adelaide, AU is 
> one, might have one in India or Pakistan, Houston,TX and 
> can't remember where the rest are.  You must be able to point 
> dishes at the Moon from mult.points due to rotation of Earth. 
>  But you knew that didn't you?  
One signal strength decreases geometrically with distance, so
comparing signal from Mars to Earth and Moon to Earth is useless.
Not that I support this harebrained idea. As you mentioned you'd need
to have a dish that tracks the Moon, and of course there would be
times when of course you'd have no signal at all (roughly 2/3 of every day).

> I saw Jaywalking on the Tonight Show last night and all the 
> id^^pedestrians didn't know who had been to the Moon, how we 
Well you got to take into account were talking about people from L.A.
here? Or is it New Yawk City? ;)

> she'd make it past Saturn though.  She thought since it is 
> made of gas, that she could pass right through.  Maybe after 
> you were crushed in the gravity.   But it looks so small on TV.
Well, you know it would be possible to fly through Saturn if you
could build a ship to withstand the heat and pressure and you didn't
fly through the center, but stayed high enough in the atmosphere,
but it would be kind of a waste of energy because you'd have to fly in
at an angle to keep from burning up and would probably wind up making 
a complete orbit around the planet. But I digress... ;)

> 
> 
> >Anyone willing to invest? We could probably do it for less than five
> >figures and a whole buncha technical know-how.
> >
> >We could rent webspace at http://www.servingfromthemoon.org/ and
> >allow others to serve their sites from the moon, too. And even
> >send email "from" the moon. Who has $9,000 to spare?
> 
> How do you get $9000 from 5 figures?  /me scratches head.  It 
> might work up to the point that it gets posted to Slashdot.org.
Her did say *less* than 5 figures. ;)

I'm off to get some coffee and aspirin now. ;)