Page 238 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

witnessed in airplane development. From short solo trips into space by the first cosmonauts and
astronauts, longer duration orbits around the Earth were made. Then came the development of the
Space Shuttle and a series of small, orbiting space stations. The current state of the art is the
International Space Station, which orbits at a height of 200 miles above the Earth. Only now can man
think about going farther, but they have so far been unable to solve the problems preventing them
from taking the leap beyond low Earth orbit into space.

Removing the myth of the Apollo program, we are left with a more plausible history of space
exploration which still remains in its infancy. We find that in the 55 years since Yuri Gagarin
reportedly first orbited the Earth, man has only been able to extend the time he can remain in orbit.
The record is 437 days by Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in the Mir space station in 1995. Man has
made life far more comfortable in low Earth orbit, and is able to carry out a far wider range of
experiments, but he still is unable to travel through or beyond the Van Allen Radiation Belts.

America’s government continues to announce plans to send men to the Moon, Mars and beyond, but
these announcements continue to be pushed back further and further. The more years pass without
men going beyond low Earth orbit, the more apparent it becomes that man has never traveled to the
Moon and back.

On July 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI).
The SEI proposed a long term initiative, longer than the decade prescribed by Kennedy in his famous
speech in 1961. The goals of the SEI were to first create a new space station dubbed Freedom, then
send men to the Moon, and eventually send men to Mars. The President’s speech followed by two
years the report entitled Leadership and America’s Future in Space, also known as the Ride Report
in honor of astronaut Sally Ride who chaired the committee who produced it. The Ride Report,
published in 1987, called for the establishment of a permanent Moon base by 2010.

Bear in mind that the Ride Report followed Apollo 17 by 15 years. Establishing a lunar base should
have been doable if man had already placed astronauts on the lunar surface on 6 different occasions.
Additionally, the goal of the Ride Report lay 23 years into the future. The Ride Report was
suggesting that a permanently manned Moon base be established 38 years after the last Apollo
Mission. Surely that must be considered an obtainable goal, representing only an incremental step
beyond what man had achieved during the Apollo era.

Nevertheless, the Ride Report’s goals were never met. Men continued to go no further than a few
hundred miles from the Earth’s surface. On January 4, 2004, President George W. Bush, son of the
President who proposed the Space Exploration Initiative, announced the Vision for Space
Exploration (VSE). The VSE called for a human return to the Moon by 2020. In response to the
VSE, NASA launched the Constellation Program.