Mike Benz

I mean, if you think about this, you know, Bill Clinton had this funny thing in his biography about

about this that anyone could look up.

But there are successive presidents since Bill Clinton have pledged to go back to the moon.

Barack Obama had the famous constellation program inherited from the Bush era where the goal was to use this sort of Orion adjacent, Orion constellation program

program, it was going to have a manned space flight at some point during the Obama administration.

James Van Hoften, who was a international space station, NASA astronaut, then retired and joined the National Academy of Sciences, penned a series of long memos to the incoming Obama administration, cautioning him not to attempt to go back to the moon.

having just been on the International Space Station and serving for long periods there, they felt it was completely unsafe and anyone who attempted the program would end in disaster.

Any of the astronauts on board with the current technology and state of the program would die and that we don't actually even have good scientific data on the exposure that astronauts would have on the way there because at that time in 2008, there were only approximately 12

American scientists that were all in their 70s who even studied human biology space radiation issues due to a number of reasons.

But he basically said we need to completely swap out this manned space flight program for a completely unmanned one and replace the humans with basically electrospectrometer devices to do this mass measurement so that we could actually know what we're up against.

on the way there.

And he cited in particular that there's something called the North Atlantic Anomaly, which is the point at which the Van Allen belts start early because of the tilt of the Earth's axis.

It's basically over Brazil.

It's this point where

know typically the belt started around 300 miles above the earth's surface it starts about like 50 to 100 miles earlier over this particular section of the earth they said we get shooting stars through our eyes every time we pass through the north atlantic anomaly uh the shuttle itself the space station itself has malfunctions during that period so we need to shut off certain electronics

It's an unsafe period simply in low Earth orbit.

And that's at the very, very, very tip of what is effectively a 65,000 mile traverse through that as it gets more and more intense.

And it turned out that the readouts from that, which were a giant FOIA fight between the independent research community and the government data collected,

Showed that the data, you know, the radiation levels were like 3,000 times higher than what I think like the IA, the, what is it, the IA, the IE9, yeah, not the IE, it's that the models had predicted and that this has caused this,

dash to try to solve this catch 22 issue that the the giant paperweight program, you know, we spent, I think, $15 billion on this