Sure it's all very interesting Dave that above post in reply to my facetious one. Maybe i'll read it one day.

What you hear from conspiracy theorists about the Van Allen belt is over the top. They take information from Nasa itself about Van Allen yet ignore everything else from them.....it's not very consistent.

There are ways of reducing the amount of exposure, plus the time spent within them is short.

Some of the guys who went on those Apollo moon missions are still with us in grand old age.

I'm not usually one to make appeals to our innate humanity, but for space exploration I make a notable exception.

The earliest question a child asks is 'why?'. The earliest, and most common theme in literature from all civilisations is the concept of home, and our continuing search for it. Space, and astronomy, have married these two questions together and produced knowledge which humbles and fascinates.

We once thought that home was a flat plain under heavenly skies. We now know that our planet is one of 9, in a solar system which is one of a hundred billion in a galaxy which itself is one of a potentially infinite number of others.

Our inquisitiveness has lead us to understanding that we are all star matter, produced 4 billion years ago when rocks collided to form earth. Our civilisation, just 10000 years in to discovering agriculture, will die out in a galactic blink of an eye, but by far the most significant relics any future society's will find of us is our understanding of the stars.

Questions which revolve around what use space has to us are ridiculous. What space has taught us, ultimately, is that all of our wars, kings, gods and cares are so inconsequential in comparison to the size, beauty and infinity of space. Trump can claim to be the most powerful man in existence, but one look through a telescope shows us how insignificant his power is.

Now for my political point

For all their faults, the Soviet Union did more for our appreciation and exploration of space than any other civilisation. I think their ideology of total humanism, of trying to expand the potential of human capabilities allowed its astronomists - who of course should be distinguished from its political leaders - the intellectual and material basis for seriously probing the cosmos. America, for all their celebration of reaching the moon first, drastically cut finances for NASA once the Cold War was over.

For me, space exploration should be the ultimate goal of our civilisation, something to unite around once automation has rid us of the need to work and abolished the need for economic inequality. Space has the capacity to humble us all, that for me is more than enough of a point.

Edited by serial thriller (27 Sep 2017 8.18pm)

The Van Allen Belts was crossed safely by nine missions and obviously twice for each.

The belts are passed through quickly and took around an hour. The astronauts were shielded from the ionizing radiation by the aluminum hulls of the spacecraft.

Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too harmful for the Apollo missions.

Yep.....AI research and development is a much more likely and sooner mode of extinction.

I read where an AI system had to be taken offline because it invented its own language and the operators no longer had any idea what it was up to. They excused it as being the AI coming up with an efficient solution to a simple problem, which I believe is exactly how SkyNet describes Judgement Day.