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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how hard it would be to launch small payload to the moon without being noticed.

If I were a billionaire and could figure out a way to do it, I would send a hoax backup of Planet Earth, artificially aged 201 million years (Triassic–Jurassic extinction event). It would include small statue of previously unknown dinosaur species holding a tool and Rick Astley song encoded in a way that takes long time to decode.

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> I wonder how hard it would be to launch small payload to the moon without being noticed.

Hard. The US (and probably other militaries) has a whole bunch of satellites monitoring the planet for ballistic missile launches, and so would detect any rocket launches.

After that, the US also a bunch of stuff monitoring space junk, and so any payload would be picked up on radar. It would not take many observations to calculate your payload's orbit, and if that orbit suddenly changed it would probably be noticed.

Now, if you suddenly change your payload's orbit to start a trajectory to the moon there would be nothing anyone could do about it, but it would at least be detected.

Announce that you are launching a dummy payload at escape velocity+ to test your new heavy lift vehicle. Something silly, like a Tesla roadster. Once it's beyond radar range (a few tens of millions of km should do), discard the silly shell and fire up the ion engine. Let it run for six months, then wait a couple of years for the final rendezvous maneuver with the moon. With nobody looking for it, the small, stealthy, silent probe which you hid inside the Tesla shell is very unlikely to be detected.

NASA can track stuff that's quite small, so it's going to be hard to be "stealthy":

> Currently, about 23,000 objects larger than a baseball are tracked by the US Air Force from the ground. Knowing their position, satellites can be moved if they’re in danger of a collision, and even the entire ISS can be moved to avoid hitting something.

* https://www.iflscience.com/space/space-junk-as-small-as-a-gr...

New space-based sensors are detecting very small pieces:

> Now, NASA hopes to learn more about the dust-size microdebris orbiting Earth with the Space Debris Sensor (SDS), set to be attached to the International Space Station (ISS) following a 4 December cargo launch by SpaceX.

* https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/nasa-sensor-study-sp...

Those are a few hundred km above Earth. The moon is 384 thousand km further away, and there is no particular reason to watch it closely.

To get to the moon you have to pass through LEO et al. So while the moon specifically may not be watched closely, the paths that you have to cross to get there may be.

Yes, and that's why the solution (which you can read three levels above your reply) is to launch something on an escape trajectory, and then loop back toward Earth once it's out of sight.

> If I were a billionaire

It's a shame how we've moved from being a millionaire to being a billionaire in such a short amount of time...

You will be dismayed...

https://www.quora.com/What-would-you-do-if-you-were-a-trilli...

You can thank inflation, the government's biggest hidden tax. And of course, it hurts the poor the most, those without the financial know-how to invest, buy CDs, T-Bills, etc. Yet there are still no moves to stop inflation. Why? Because it's good for business. Cheaper money.

Deflation also hurts the poor, because the remaining debt balance they have stays the same while the price they are paid for the fruits of their labor decreases, and it also encourages those with money to sit on it instead of spending or investing.

The populist policy in 19th century America was to ditch gold for a more inflationary silver standard.

Not all poor are in debt. You are correct that deflation can hurt top; let's judt go back to the gold standard.

This is why we don’t deserve to meet alien life.

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