Dammit, noooo! Now I'm lumped in with Limbaugh!
I'm really curious to know if terraforming would truly be possible on Mars.
. Without showing my position on this (you might guess), everything I have read about the technology we have now and what we had then just does not spell a successful MANNED moon mission. What is known about the Van Allen belts, the ionosphere temperatures and the alloys we used to build the rockets, and especially the problems being encountered in 2018 by other nations wanting to "repeat" our accomplishment. I want to see people from another nation go there, just to prove once and for all that it is possible with existing technology. 
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yes, i know about those, but like many things in nature, they are exploitable/passable
now when it comes to this i am almost nearly using quotes (because, i am me and non scientific consumer
IMO though and given what I have read, limit of traverse through the belts, place where they re crossed and the shielding of the craft and personal suits made from materials and tech we have now would greatly minimize this danger
and, people have vastly over estimated the effects of radiation before-- the after math of Hiroshima and Chernobyl are two examples.
here is an excerpt from an article by an astro physicist from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillia...allen-belts-barrier-spaceflight/#5f2ec4306f8d
depending on the energy those particles deposit, the density of those particles, and the length of time you spend being exposed to them.
In the case of the Apollo missions, the solution was to minimize the second two factors. We can’t control the energy of those particles, though they can be large. The density of the Van Allen belts is well known (from sending uncrewed probes through them), and there are hotspots you can definitely avoid. In particular, the innermost belt is a rather tightly defined region, and it was possible to stay out of it for the trip to the Moon. The second belt is much larger, and harder to avoid, but there are still denser regions to avoid. For the Apollo trips, we wanted to send the astronauts through a sparse region of the belts, and to try and get through them quickly. This was necessary in any case; the crafts had to make it to the Moon in a reasonable amount of time, and the shorter the trip, the less exposure to all sorts of radiation the astronauts would get.
In the end, it seemed that these tactics worked; the on-board dose counters for the Apollo missions registered average radiation doses to the skin of the astronauts of 0.38 rad. This is about the same radiation dose as getting two CT scans of your head, or half the dose of a single chest CT scan; not too bad, though not something you should do every week.
Your brother is right that both the atmosphere and the Van Allen belts can be dangers to space exploration, but with careful observations, orbital maneuvering, and inventiveness, we’ve navigated our way beyond them many times. Hopefully, we'll continue to do so in the future many times more.
I am an Assistant Professor in Physics & Astronomy at Oberlin College. I received my Ph.D in 2014 from the University of Victoria, studying the interactions between galaxies in the nearby Universe. I have been running an outreach blog called Astroquizzical since 2013, w...
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I am an Assistant Professor in Physics & Astronomy: @Jillian_Scudder.
well you are entitled to your opinion
problem is, by listing the countries you say you would not believe you have nearly wiped out any one who is anywhere near capable of doing this verification for you
its like asking a kindergartner to disprove a negative. Nearly no one else is capable of giving either the evidence of absence or absence of evidence that you require
"There are too many liars on the US government payroll"
Well, yes there are. But consider this-
how many people were involved in the mercury and apollo missions? thats the crews. the engineers, the designers, the control room people, etc,etc?
over all of those years--10's of thousands
how do you get that many people to keep a secret of the magnitude you suggest?
now look at the secrets that the US govt has been caught on. by comparison to moon mission numbers, very few people knew of things like WATERGATE, or the Gulf of Tonkin incident or that Iraq really did not have the type of WMDS we were made to believe they had.
but, the secrets or rather, knowledge that A SECRET EXISTED and therefore needed to be researched by a journalist or someone else, still got out
out of all the tens of thousands of people involved in apollo and mercury, not one who has said anything has been proven independently to be reliable.
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now, on the other hand, isn't china building a near moon probe to scan and map the moons surface?
<< holy crap! while looking this up I see where the chinese just announced the landing of their probe 2 days ago!! >>
so they went to the dark side of the moon, does this mean they accept the fact that both the US and Russia (unmanned) have been to the light side?
(and maybe this success lends to some of their recent cockiness in other world events?)
https://www.apnews.com/c4dc6858a32b4b61bdbc6aebf5459a91
