A refresher course in rocket equations

        Over on the "official" Dark Mission blog, Mike Bara has been urging his followers and Hoagland-sycophants to tune in to two recent interviews featuring himself. The interviews were conducted, respectively, by Skylaire Alfvegren of UFO Examiner and Regina Meredith of The Conscious Media Network. It's clear that neither of these ladies has any comprehension of science — but since the ideas and propositions of Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara have nothing in common with science anyway, that's spookily appropriate and probably harmless enough.

        The text interview with Alfvegren is full of hilarity such as Mike Bara confusing the initials ISS (for International Space Station) with Isis, a God of Egyptian mythology. The video with Meredith shows us Mike in fuller confusion, asserting that "everyone who IS anyone at NASA" is either a Nazi, a Freemason, or a follower of Aleister Crowley (I'm not making this up, sadly).

        I was personally distressed to notice that he's apparently still unaware that Hoagland's thesis titled Von Braun's Secret is based on mathematics that would shame a high school math student. I must have notified him of this about ten times since he first endorsed the totally erroneous theory. I posted yet another reminder to the blog, but of course it never saw the light of day. Mike Bara considers the darkmission blog "sycophants only." FWIW, here's my brief text.

Mike, you dolt, you've completely swallowed Hoagland's faulty math in "Von Braun's Secret." I thought you were supposed to be an engineer!!

Refresher:

* The Tsiolkovsky equation CANNOT be applied to three rocket stages all at once. It MUST be applied stage by stage. That's the whole point of rocket staging, really, Mike.

* Hoagland utterly failed to evaluate the logarithm in the equation.

For a rigorous dismantling of Hoagland's math, refer to this prior blog post.

Deeper into the slime

        Mike Bara waded yet further into the slime of ad hominem debate today, referring to me as "douche-bag." The occasion was yet another iteration of his completely mistaken idea that NASA is a primarily military institution. This ignorant fantasy occupies the first few pages of Hoagland & Bara's wretched book, in fact, and is very easily refuted.

        You probably ought to read the blog-post to get the full context. He quoted Buzz Aldrin, and then exercised his right as moderator to suppress my reply, which was as follows:

>>"...a military entity converted for the purpose of winning the space race.”<<
I think the key word there is "converted." Converted into a non-military entity, he means. The military entity he cites would be the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which incidentally gave us the Internet without which we couldn't be enjoying this pleasant discussion (pleasant, that is, if you overlook Mike Bara's fondness for personal insult as a substitute for logic.)

The first text Bara quotes from his co-author is based upon a hilarious mis-reading by that author. Here, once more with feeling, is a link to US Code Title 35. See if you can comprehend, by inspection of the number of times the word PATENT appears in just the first screen, what this Title is all about.

The second quote, about classified information, simply expresses what every NASA-watcher with any insight has always known -- NASA sometimes deals in classified activities and those don't get published. Richard Hoagland was negligent in not realizing this when he was advising CBS News, and perhaps he should now return some of what that organization paid him. The >50,000 sales of the error-filled "Dark Mission" should ensure that doesn't hurt too badly.

Buzz Aldrin does have a point. NASA was unquestionably formed in an atmosphere of intense Cold-War competitiveness, and Kennedy's committment to the Moon was likewise a direct challenge to the USSR with miltary implications. However, if that's ALL the agency ever was, as Hoagland & Bara appear to think, it would not only have been downsized in 1972 but utterly disbanded in 1991.

        By the way, as one who was lucky enough to have French girlfriends in his youth, I've seen douche-bags, believe me. Plenty. It's not a nice thing to be compared to but, y'know, they aren't actually slimy or anything. Just saying.