$5M Moon Rock Stolen From Malta Museum

On Fri, 04 Jun 2004 00:45:58 -0500, Pat Flannery wrote:

If they were unguided, they would be considered "rockets" not "missiles"
by the standard use of the two terms in regards to them

I'm pretty sure that missile is just the general term for a weapon that is
thrown or projected. A rock is a missile if it's thrown or projected
towards a target using a slingshot or the like.

Otherwise the term guided missile would be redundant. The term unguided
missile is also in use.

Scott Hedrick ) wrote:

: "Henry Spencer" wrote in message
: ...
: There was even an early-70s proposal to commercially finance a final
: Apollo mission, although it didn't get very far, at least partly because
: NASA's reaction was total hostility.

: Which it would still be, but they'd do it, because now they wouldn't get
: funds any other way.

: Why aren't we selling advertising on our birds?


So, you want the government to be in the business of business? Damn
commie!

Eric

"Christopher M. Jones" wrote in message
...
Pat Flannery wrote:
Christopher M. Jones wrote:

The missiles Henry is talking about simply went up and
down. The reason they needed advanced flight control
systems was to get close enough to the target so that a
megaton nuke would actually do some damage to it. That
tells you the level of accuracy and sophistication we're
dealing with here.

Here are some of the Circular Error Probabilities of the first ICBM's:

(A lot of snipping)

Atlas- 2 nautical miles.

Back in the early days of Atlas missile full range testing with active radio
guidance
when everything worked the warhead was falling into a .5 nautical mile
circle most of
the time and within .25 nm quite often. If things went seriously wrong the
warhead
ended up nowhere near the target.

Command guidance was regarded as undesirable because of vulnerability to
enemy countermeasures so there was a shift to interial guidance systems.
The
figures I saw on this were 5-10 nm. Quite close enough for soft targets
such as
cities. Not good enough for taking out launchers in silos.

This is circa 1960and inertial guidance systems became much more accurate
later. One of the biggest advances in target accuracy was achieving more
accurate
mapping. If you don't know where you really are at the launch point and
don't know
exactly where the target is then accuracy is just a bit hard to achieve.

I bet Henry Spencer could give us a real lecture on this.

Mike Walsh

Rick DeNatale wrote:

I'm pretty sure that missile is just the general term for a weapon that is
thrown or projected. A rock is a missile if it's thrown or projected
towards a target using a slingshot or the like.

In the original definition of the word, yes...rocks and arrows were
called missiles.
In the present aerospace usage fin-stabilized unguided rockets aren't
called "missiles"; otherwise Mighty Mouse and Hydra rockets would be
Mighty Mouse and Hydra missiles...as would Bazooka rounds; although if
an unguided rocket gets big enough, or has an atomic warhead, then
people start calling it a missile (i.e. Honest John).
Does the "missile" designation apply to unguided surface-to-surface
rockets only, as opposed to air-to-air or air-to-surface unguided rockets?


Otherwise the term guided missile would be redundant. The term unguided
missile is also in use.


Not very often, and usually in reference to a guided one that isn't
working right, or something with an atomic warhead on it, like the
above-mentioned Honest John. Guided missiles usually have an ability to
home on their target after launch, either via internal homing apparatus
(Sidewinder) or with external aid (Sparrow) or via external commands to
the missile (TOW).
I think the whole thing is in a state of flux between dictionary and
common usage; rather like the whole "shrapnel" mess in which the term
shrapnel is used in regards to fragments from an explosive's casing, as
opposed to a specific type of air-bursting shell designed to project
spherical sub-projectiles.
Then of course there are the gun and the rifle; and the clip and the
magazine.

Pat

In article ,
Mike Walsh wrote:
Command guidance was regarded as undesirable because of vulnerability to
enemy countermeasures...

Also because the launch site needed an elaborate set of radars which were
virtually impossible to harden against attack in any meaningful way, and
could be used for only one launch at a time. Almost any credible scenario
for *using* the things required either rapid-fire multiple launch or the
ability to ride out attacks, so command guidance just did not make much
sense for large-scale deployment.

One of the biggest advances in target accuracy was achieving more accurate
mapping. If you don't know where you really are at the launch point and
don't know exactly where the target is...

In particular, apparently there was some unhappiness when people realized
that the relative locations of the *continents* were not known accurately
enough for ICBM targeting. Within a continent it was possible to do quite
accurate surveying with aerial photos and the like, but accurately
determining the precise distance between North America and Eurasia was not
so simple, and some effort had to be made in a hurry.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

On Sat, 5 Jun 2004 15:58:20 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

In particular, apparently there was some unhappiness when people realized
that the relative locations of the *continents* were not known accurately
enough for ICBM targeting. Within a continent it was possible to do quite
accurate surveying with aerial photos and the like, but accurately
determining the precise distance between North America and Eurasia was not
so simple, and some effort had to be made in a hurry.

This isn't of the same magnitude, but until about 1990 the charts for
the Levant were still using Beaufort's mapping from 18-something.
There wasn't anything better to use.

Beaufort also invented a wind scale that's still in use.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

"Terry Goodrich" wrote in message . ..
Hi All,

I was just wondering, we have a 10~20 gram stone worth 5 million. Surely
someone could design a robot to go to the moon and pick up 20 kilo of rock
(pebbles, dirt, etc. it probably wouldn't matter). Assuming that the value
of the rocks would decrease in value as much as 90% due to the fact that
they would be on the open market, 20 kilo of rocks could be worth as much as
500 million dollars. One should be able to build and launch a probe for
that much.

Terry



Moonstone feldspars weigh about 3g per cc and could probably be
cut as thin as ten microns, about 30 sections per cc with waste dust.
Thats about a million gemstone sized sellables, out of your 20 kilo of
rock.
If documented with optical and electron microscopes and sold with
a CD that tells the story of its collection and selenological science,
they might go for a thousand dollars a shot, for the first batch.
A billion dollar haul that with the internet, could be certified
the real McCoy, by any jeweler. A small sample vaporized by a laser
and analized by a mass spectrometer, could reveal an age of over four
billion years, if you pick the right rocks. Lead in Uranium oxide
crystals that is turned into something a hundred times more valuable
than gold.
If there were just some way to get that kind of money at the front
end of the enterprise....

Stephen Kearney