Talk:Mike Bara

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[edit] Explorer 1

Orbital mechanics is a tricky thing, so debunking Bara's calculations is a bit less trivial than presented. Someone on the Forum Formerly Known as BAUT did the calculations and found out that the differnce in thrust was something like 5%, as far as I can remember (in all cases, <10%), something well within the usual tolerances of solid rocket motors at the time. Try searching the forum for the thread. I had bookmarked it, but on another computer.--ZooGuard (talk) 18:24, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

TVM for the comment. Well, certainly some aspects of orbital mechanics are tricky -- like calculating the instantaneous velocity -- but the semi-major axis is simple arithmetic. Actually the velocity at entry to orbit was 4.6% excess, which is in good enough agreement with your hand-waving 5%.
Some useful formulae are in the main wiki as Orbital_speed
A technical report on Juno is online (search string Juno_Final_Report), with many useful things including the launch profile (showing that, at first-stage burnout, the stack was already at altitude and traveling horizontally -- thus any "anti-gravity effect" is meaningless). The report also discusses variability in solid fuel thrust, justifying the general consensus that 5% excess energy is easily accounted for by this factor. There is no need whatever to hypothesize any paranormal nonsense. Ithaca (talk) 21:10, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

[edit] Adam Parfrey

An unlogged in user (129.79.70.161 from indiana.edu) deleted Parfrey's name from the small list of people who were described as too ignorant to understand that Mike Bara's work is garbage.

I'm not going to revert but I'd like to point out that Parfrey really is ignorant, at least in terms of the subject matter of Dark Mission. Parfrey apparently knows next to nothing about planetary astronomy and the history of spaceflight (he has that in common with Mike Bara himself.)

{{citation needed}}

OK, OK. Peruse this comment thread and see if you agree. Ithaca (talk) 00:44, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

[edit] The great thing about truth ...

From the article:

*Responding to Neil deGrasse Tyson's dictum "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it", Bara wrote "The great thing about truth is that it eventually becomes self-evident no matter what the scientific materialists believe."

The problem with Bara's quote is that he conflates the activity "science" with "what scientists believe". Theoretically science should always be getting closer to the "truth" (whatever that may mean) although individual scientists may be mistaken along the route.--Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 18:09, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

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