Trinity - 74 years later
 

July 16th, 1945. A day that will truly live in infamy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_%28nuclear_test%29

Too bad slakjaw isn't around to lose his mind...well, maybe not too bad...

The world being changed forever...

The Manhattan project is the only project to equal the difficulty of the Moon landing. Both efforts were only possible with the best intellects available.

and slide rules

I've stood on that spot, pretty cool.
They saved a million lives with that bomb.



$21.5 billion a year, almost the equivalent cost of the entire Manhattan project every ****ing year, and they don't even have a ****ing rocket.



http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1563317511.jpg

He lost it here ...wonder if it's still around?

Dat boy wuz a bit "high strung".... I remember yer escapade...posted later :(.

No protests today in LA. Maybe on 6 Aug though the numbers are getting smaller every year. Back in the '90s it was bigger, one year they had llamas and Martin Sheen came to get arrested in civil disobedience. Even then there were more of us labbies gawking at the protesters than there were protesters.

Someday we'll get more of the Manhattan District sites opened up for the public. There's some cool stuff here in LA that's "behind the fence", but at least it's been stabilized and protected. It's fun to take authorized visitors on tours at lunch - some of the sites are mere hundreds of yards from my old office.

The Germans actually spent far more on Vergeltungswaffen, the V-weapon program (V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets) than the US did on the Manhattan Project.
The design and production of the Boeing B29 bomber also cost far more.

the Manhattan project was a total bargain, especially when compared to what we spend on NASA every year.

Maybe we've become accustomed to seeing outrageous spending for so long that we've lost sight of what $21 Billion dollars really means.

We visited my son the scientist (he's a postdoc at LANL) in Los Alamos last week. It was our first trip to LA and we toured the Bradbury Museum and Bath tub row etc......I think the most amazing thing to us was the average age of the people involved with the Manhattan project was just 29!
And the speed for which they were able to pull it all together....truly remarkable. There was nothing there but a boys school prior......

If they had to be as safety conscious as NASA, if they had to triple redundant every power supply and switch and valve, and if they had to outsource to as many unscrupulous aerospace vendors as NASA does, it would have cost much much more...apples to oranges.

Take a look at the toxic sites left behind in Hanford, WA, Oak Ridge, TN and then at Panaflex outside Amarillo, TX.
Long term costs to us all are not yet accounted for. Politicians hide it all in committees everywhere.

Yeah, that whole plutonium and uranium thing doesn't really require much safety stuff.
Especially when you mix it with enough high explosives to fuse atoms together.
And developing the first nuclear reactors … child's play.

But hey, NASA is really efficient! They pay real companies to make something for them ONCE IN A WHILE
And it's all those real companies that are to blame.

The international space station cost around $150,000,000,000 and we have to pay the Russians to fly us up there.

It's PanTex for Panhandle of Texas. NNSA's facility for assembly and disassembly of our nation's nucweps stockpile.

Yep,it is Pantex.

All great vacation sites.

The waste-of-time Iraq war was costing us $1.5B PER WEEK and what benefits did we get out of that? At least the space program helps maintain a base of technical expertise and has provided a good living for a lot of people for decades (myself included for two decades).

Oak Ridge isn't that bad. Nothing like Hanford. I work at ORNL. We have some legacy contamination, etc., to deal with but no "toxic sites". Y-12 has some issues, but not really from the Manhattan Project - it's from 60+ years of nuclear weapons production in general.

I wonder if my ex-wife has that "glow" ? SmileWavy