The Blue Marble myth

Owen Benjamin explains how technology outruns the Big Lies:

What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done as part of your job at Goddard?

The last time anyone took a photograph from above low Earth orbit that showed an entire hemisphere (one side of a globe) was in 1972 during Apollo 17. NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites were designed to give a check-up of Earth’s health. By 2002, we finally had enough data to make a snap shot of the entire Earth. So we did. The hard part was creating a flat map of the Earth’s surface with four months’ of satellite data. Reto Stockli, now at the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, did much of this work. Then we wrapped the flat map around a ball. My part was integrating the surface, clouds, and oceans to match people’s expectations of how Earth looks from space. That ball became the famous Blue Marble.

I was happy with it but had no idea how widespread it would become. We never thought it would become an icon. I certainly never thought that I would become “Mr. Blue Marble.”

We have since updated the base maps by increasing the resolution and, for 2004, we made a series of monthly maps.

Notice that ALL of the hemisphere photography we think we’ve seen has turned out to be nonexistent. It’s becoming clear that from the evolution fairy tale to the Blue Marble fraud to the dinosaur fraud and the satellite myth, the world is very, very different than we have been told it is. What is the point? To deceive you into serving Satan rather than God.

The satellite balloon technology also explains how the US can keep putting up satellites despite not having any rockets capable of sending up astronauts. I particularly enjoyed the video of the NASA satellite released by the Space Shuttle that was dangling from a wire.