Likewise. But that's all that any of us have to offer: views and opinions. There's almost nothing corroborative to work with here. No useful data from the past, nothing reliable to correlate against. Not even from the immediate era before NA$A hijacked the science. By 1947, the notion of "artificial satellites" was already seeded in the public psyche. And for centuries before that, astronomy was riddled with wild speculation, piss-poor science, and far-fetched claims, mostly issued for financial gain.lux wrote:Thank you for posting your views, EE.
The idea that comets brought disease, and asteroids were volcanic spewings from far-off planets, were just two popular and very wacky ideas. Yet accepted as fact well into the 20th century.
But perhaps the most important perversion of astronomy - for our interest - was the Victorians' crude beliefs about "shooting stars", "falling stars", asteroids, meteors and "meteorites". Their obsession was not with the "moving star" itself, but with the celestial rocks, some "rich in precious metals", encrusted even with diamonds, which supposedly fell like gifts from heaven, with the star's passing.
The 19th century press gave regular reports of professional "meteorite hunters" who made a keen living following the paths of these "shooting stars", in search of these heavenly rocks. No mean feat! What a lost skill! Their (fake) trophies displayed in prestigious scientific exhibitions, and sold at great profit to gullible museums and private collectors of Victorian curiosities (just like "dinosaur bones").
The Royal Astronomer of Ireland, Sir Robert Ball, wrote two popular astronomical works of the 1890s, The Story of the Heavens and Star-Land. In the latter is a dedicated chapter titled Shooting Stars where he doesn't even challenge these extraordinary "meteorite" finds - they're just accepted as fact! So where are the Meteorite Hunters of today? Was it only a Victorian pursuit? Why did this lucrative business die out when there are so many more modern techniques for tracking heavenly bodies? Could "meteorites" be yet another hoax?
My main point here is that even by the turn of the 19/20th century - just 40 or so years before NA$A & Co seized the stage - that was already the state of astronomy - dire. There was not even the taste, at least not publicly, for the study of the paths or orbits of asteroids or meteors, or shooting stars. It's doubtful that even the "best" of the Victorian astronomers, like Bell, had any recognition that some of those moving objects are in earth orbit.
Those two aforementioned books by Bell were hugely popular, especially with juveniles. Favourite stocking-fillers of their day. NA$A and its fake satellites hadn't even been dreamed of. So there was no motive, back then, for hiding the orbital nature of certain asteroids/meteors. And yet Bell doesn't even hint at such a thing. Which says to me, the idea of orbiting natural satellites hadn't even been considered. See for yourself:
http://archive.org/details/storyofheavens00ball
http://archive.org/details/starlandbeingta02ballgoog
Between the end of the Victorian era and the arrival of NA$A et al in 1940s, we had two world wars. Many discoveries - not just in astronomy - were concealed behind the veil of "national security". No doubt it's where that wisdom stayed - hidden from there onwards. By the early Fifties, the existence of Flying Saucers was widely believed, and then in 1957, the Soviets gave us the fake launch of Sputnik. By then, astronomy was officially no longer a public science. It was now way beyond the comprehension of the common man.
Simon posited the Plane Theory and set out his reasoning in depth. It would be interesting to learn why he now distances himself from his earlier (tentative?) support for the NEO Switch Theory. That Theory seems to serve so well to explain not just the ISS Thingy, but every other orbiting object that is supposedly a man-made satellite or bit of space junk.
...all at the same time, in just 2.5 cubic meters of volume- 