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Greetings Dowel fans!
This month we are exploring all things space! Including the exciting news that Dowels are already on the moon!
What will this mean for our own space programme? Read on to find out!
IMPORTANT PRE-ANNOUNCEMENT #1
STOP SPECULATING!!
To those who wrote in - no, this is not proof that super intelligent Dowel revering extra-terrestrials
travelled to Earth, planted Dowels on the far side of the Moon and are just
waiting for people to find them – so that the aliens can take the anointed few
Dowel worshippers up to the Dowel mother-ship and show us the
secrets of the Dowel…. that, is a completely different cult.
I would also appreciate it if people would stop emailing me to tell me that no one has ever taken photos of the dark side of the
moon – they have. With that now said – lets carry on with the Dowel news!!
DOWELLING IS BELIEVING
LEADING EDGE RESEARCH PROVES DOWELS IN SPACE ARE VIABLE.
People (non-believers) often sneer at our plans to send Dowels in to space - they site the significant temperature changes,
intense cosmic rays and dangerous solar particles as reasons why the Dowel would not survive in space…
Well, in 2022 researchers at Kyoto University sent Dowels in to space to prove the non-believers wrong. The Dowels
were taken up to the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo of the ISS and they spent more than 290 days in space. The samples were later retrieved by
Astronaut Koichi Wakata and returned to Earth on the SpaceX CRS-26 Commercial Resupply Service mission in November of last year.
Since then, researchers have been testing the Dowel for any signs of fundamental nano-level degradation. The tests included strength tests and elemental and crystal structural analyses of the wood samples.
In May the results from these experiments were released. Tests confirmed no decomposition or deformations, such as cracking, warping,
peeling, or surface damage the results also confirmed no mass change in each wood specimen before and
after space exposure. The results confirmed what we already knew - Dowels are highly durable and their suitability for use in space can not be questioned.
SO, ARE THERE DOWELS ON THE MOON?
Yes. Yes, there are Dowels on the moon. In 1961 – John.F.Kennedy gave a well known speech
announcing that the USA would get a man on the moon by “the end of the decade”. Well it
turns out, and this is less known – that he also insisted that NASA send Dowels to the
moon first. "No man should go to a planet without Dowels" is something he might have said.
The NASA Ranger missions were a precursor to the more famous Apollo missions and the first attempt
by the Americans to reach another celestial body (the Moon). The aim of the ranger project was to fire
a bunch of Dowels at the moon and just hope they got there somehow (the parallels with our own space program are uncanny).
The ranger program was seen by some as a massive failure. Of the first six mission – all of them missed their targets, Ranger
1 and 2 failed to leave low earth orbit, Ranger 3 did escape earths gravity – but missed
its target (the Moon!) by about 37,000 km. For context the diameter of the moon is 3,475 km.
Ranger 4 was a relative success – in that it “rough landed” i.e. crashed on to the far side of
the moon… it is reasonable to assume that the Dowels are still up there. They were enclosed in a
protective balsa-wood impact limiter (pictured below).
The wooden impact limiter held by Systems Design secretary Pat McKibben. Credit: NASA, JPL
Reference 1:
Practical Limits for Balsa Impact Limiters by Don Bresie, Manned Spacecraft Centre, Houston, Texas, Jan 1966. It contains Dowels!
DOWELS IN SPACE!!! A LEGACY!
The Ranger program can be seen as a massive success - as it resulted in the first Dowels in space (Ranger 3) and the first Dowels on the moon (Ranger 4).
Ranger 5 also missed the moon and sent Dowels in to a heliocentric orbit around the sun. The Japanese experiments have shown that Dowels don't degrade in space.
We can therefore assume that the Dowels will remain in space - like a beacon.
MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS?
The success of the Ranger program does raise some questions....
Q: Was John F Kennedy a secret member of the Dowel?
Q: Now that we know there are Dowels on the moon - is our "mission to get Dowels on the moon by 2030 over?
Q: Will the Japanese realise their dream for fully wooden satellites?
Q: Will we ever get a Japanese chapter of the Dowel?
Shame we don't have more time to discuss here - why don't you taken part in this month's "Readers Question of the month"?
READERS QUESTION OF THE MONTH!
Note: this takes you to an outside polling page provided by others.
After the break!
Still to come - marketing, membership news and more!
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