Thursday, February 9, 2017

Srsly, is there ANYBODY who believes Kerry Cassidy?

        In her barely-literate style, Kerry Cassidy recently commented on a couple of space hardware failures. One was the failure of nine clocks on board ESA's Galileo navsats. Each sat has four clocks, and only one of the four needs to be functioning for the system to be effective and accurate. Eighteen (of an eventual 32) units have been launched so far, and clocks have failed in eight of them.

Kerry, being utterly ignorant in matters of spacecraft engineering, wrote this:
"This recent sabotage of the 9 clocks on the satellites would seem to be a warning issued by way of an Artificial intelligence it seems to me.  Although possible targeting by craft based or particle beam weapons aimed either by a competing space program, likely run by the American side is also a possible culprit for this maneuver."

        The "competing space program" would have to be either the American GPS, the Russian GLONASS or the Chinese BeiDou system (a.k.a. COMPASS.) But what possible motive would any of them have for attempting to disable a different  nav system? They serve different populations in different ways. I was going to write "There's plenty of room up there in orbit for everyone," but that may be controversial. Navsats predominantly occupy MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) centered on 20,000 kM, and there will come a point at which interference will be a problem. However, we are very far from that point right now.


credit:wikipedia commons/Cmglee own work

       Another ESA failure also caught Kerry's attention--the crash of the Schiaparelli  EDM Mars lander last October. ExoMars is actually a joint program of ESA and Roscosmos, but to Kerry, everyone is vulnerable in the space wars:
"This is likely no accident but the result of a space war that took down the craft since we know that Mars is a planet with constant territorial disputes between at least one “ET” race and the American Secret Space Program."

"You can also see how the efforts of various countries along with the so-called commercial space endeavors by independent companies such as Elon Musk and others would pose a threat to the primary Secret Space Program operated by the Americans and their allies.  Those ‘allies’ being space races such as Reptilians, Nordics, Raptors and many others according to my whistleblowers.  The recent sabotage of the Elon Musk SpaceX launch being a case in point."
        Of course, failure of Mars landers and orbiters is a not uncommon feature of solar system exploration, so nobody with any actual knowledge would have any reason to be suspicious of Schiaparelli's crash. But to a paranoid mind like Kerry's, "it seems to me" and "according to my whistleblowers" is all the evidence needed to declare anodyne reports of ESA's problems barefaced lies. What I wonder is, is anybody at all swallowing this garbage?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Has anybody ever even heard of Cerry Kassidy, until you mentioned her here? You erect strawmen simply to knock them down.

Is Adrian a boy or a girl?

expat said...

I suppose that's a fair question--but she does rate a Rational Wikipedia article, and she claims the Project Camelot Youtube chan has 122,000 subscribers.

Trevor Gale (tgale@xs4all.nl) said...

I for one would hope that nobody believes the sort of tripe that Cassidy is clearly trying to spread.

So many issues... for a start anyone seriously wanting to "sabotage" these satellites or the program then knocking out a few clocks amongst a redundant set would be ineffective and a stupid waste of effort.

Leaving aside the childish cloak-and-dagger theme, most people in the legitimate scientific community will know the serious demands made on space hardware during launch - which is why (in Europe) we have such massive and thorough test facilities to emulate launch conditions on the ground - and will also know how complex and precise an instrument such as an atomic clock actually is.

To keep such an fine instrument capable after launch is a difficult challenge and there are always going to be the occasional failures - hence the backups in the first place.

The failures which have so far occurred do not bring the program itself to a stop, (again, the backups...) and when one views the whole 'package' of 32 satellites (2 as spares) each with 4 clocks then things are brought into a better perspective than the distorted view of Cassidy would suggest.

On another tack, the Schiaparelli mission is one part of the overall EXOMARS program and it has NOT been a 'failure'. That the lander entered a late-stage problem with what appears to be timing, perhaps caused by a sensor failure, did not prevent the greater deal of the required measurement and other data being received on the ground.
That was the major requirement of it - recall that is was the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module - which indeed did demonstrate with measurements and other data the factors involved in entry, descent and landing. That's a success, even if there was a small disappointment in the final step.

The results of both the sets of activities (navigation with Galileo, exploration with Exomars) are progressing and doing so in a positive sense without any nefarious 'goings-on' that Cassidy seems to be dreaming about.

Chris Lopes said...

Kerry is world famous in the woo world. She and her former partner Bill Ryan played at being a real life Mulder and Scully by interviewing pretty much anyone who is anyone in the alt-reality community. She's spoken at any number of conferences and even run a few. So yeah, she's someone of note in her little corner of the universe.

Anonymous said...

[quote]
I for one would hope that nobody believes the sort of tripe that Cassidy is clearly trying to spread.
[/quote]

Sadly, I think Kerry Cassidy and her ilk hold a strong appeal for not-very-bright people.

The thing about science articles is that you have to be willing to sit down, read them (sometimes several times), and *understand* them in order to get anything out of them.

Meanwhile, the Woo World doesn't require all that much from the reader in the way of understanding or comprehension: barely literate articles appeal to barely literate people. A large (and, I am sorry to say, ever-growing) segment of the population is part of that unfortunate demographic. I think we can look forward (if that's the needed phrase) to Kerry Cassidy's appeal broadening as barely-literate people try to understand the world they inhabit whilst lacking the basic literacy and numeracy that such understanding requires.

I notice that most conspiracy theories only hold up *provided* the reader does not subject them to any sort of scrutiny. When you're barely literate, I expect you are too busy congratulating yourself on having been able to read the theory *at all,* let alone scrutinise it.

WS


Anonymous said...

@WS

So you are the smart one then I gather ??

" notice that most conspiracy theories only hold up *provided* the reader does not subject them to any sort of scrutiny. "

You fail to notice and/or mention that a high percentage of what you call "most conspiracies" do hold up when subjected to scrutiny! Maybe you should look up the definition od the term conspiracy theory AND do some background research on the who and why "invented" this term and go from there.

good luck

Adrian

Unknown said...

@Adrian

http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/nope_it_was_always_already_wrong

Figure since you expect others to do the work for you, take a gander at that.

expat said...

Thanks, good piece. Notice that nowhere is my article does the word conspiracy appear. Although it could have.