Slashdot Mirror
Domain: lakefx.nu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to lakefx.nu.
Comments · 18
-
Re:Hmmm
Professor Marc Herold's results have been pretty thoroughly debunked here, here, and here. Other studies based on reputable sources put the number of civilian casualties at no more than 1500.
Even if the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan were greater than the number in the 9/11 attack (or 10 times as many), there is a distinct difference between deliberately targeting civilians and civilians being killed unintentionally during attacks on military targets. So long as armies insist on fighting in populated areas, there will unfortunately always be civilian causualties. -
Try some real backgroundSome actual background from Dan Hartung:
Here's the UN's own backgrounder on UNOSOM I, which unfolded from limited coordination teams to a Security Council resolution imposing an arms embargo to another unanimous resolution calling for a humanitarian assistance mission. Note particularly that the United States did not participate at this time. A $700B aid program began, but soon deteriorated under the conflicting aims of local warlords:
Implementing the programme proved difficult. Continuing disagreements among Somali factions
In other words, the situation in Somalia deteriorated severely before the United States ever got involved. The forces most viciously opposed by the warlord Aidid were fellow Muslims from Pakistan. In December, the UN Security Council again passed a unanimous resolution (remember: this includes not only the five permanent members, but also the temporary regional members in rotating seats) to authorize the United States deployment of a security force. The US forces remained there under a marginally improved security profile, but the UN remained concerned as aid was not getting to the provinces and looting and violence against humanitarian workers continued.
Finally, under UNOSOM II, the mandate of the force was expanded as follows:
monitoring that all factions continued to respect the cessation of hostilities and other agreements to which they had consented;
That's a pretty heavy workload, leaving little room for "guarding oilmen", and again, this was the goal that all members of the UN Security Council agreed on, with the US presence providing a backbone but hardly the majority of the forces. This phase led to a hopeful, temporary peace agreement and plans for an interim government and disarmament of the warlords.
* preventing any resumption of violence and, if necessary, taking appropriate action;
* maintaining control of the heavy weapons of the organized factions which would have been brought under international control;
* seizing the small arms of all unauthorized armed elements;
* securing all ports, airports and lines of communications required for the delivery of humanitarian assistance;
* protecting the personnel, installations and equipment of the United Nations and its agencies, ICRC as well as NGOs;
* continuing mine-clearing, and;
* repatriating refugees and displaced persons within Somalia.
At this point Aidid's cooperation deteriorated swiftly.
Following the transition to UNOSOM II in May 1993, it became clear that, although signatory to the March Agreement, Aidid's faction would not cooperate in the Agreement's implementation. Attempts to implement disarmament led to increasing tensions and, on 5 June, to violence. In a series of armed attacks against UNOSOM II troops throughout south Mogadishu by Somali militia, 25 Pakistani soldiers were killed, 10 were reported missing and 54 wounded. The Special Representative stated that the soldiers were "murdered as they sought to serve the neediest people in the city". The Security Council adopted [a resolution] strongly condemning the unprovoked armed attacks against UNOSOM II. On 8 June, 11 Somali parties condemned the attacks and expressed support for [this] resolution.
So, we had a US presence as part of a UN humanitarian mission that was starting to deteriorate under the determined opposition of a warlord who stood to lose power under the interim government. After non-American forces tried to disarm his troops, he massacred them, placing the entire mission in danger. If the troops themselves were at risk of outright mob violence and murder, how safe were the humanitarian workers? The next step was explicitly authorized by the United Nations Security Council members. Even though the United States had been expecting to ramp down its presence in Somalia under UNOSOM II, setting a firm withdrawal date of March 1994, the new conflict with Aidid required them to participate in an escalation of the mission, which involved several obvious things like taking control of the radio station and forcibly disarming those militia they could. After the June massacre the United Nations issued an arrest warrant for Aidid. (The UN, not the US.) This is when the Army Rangers went in, later joined by the Delta Force squadrons and temporarily the AC-130 gunships. Even so, it was not until October of 1993 that the fatal raid took place.
Were there Western oil interests present in Somalia? Yes. Was there contact with the representatives of those oil interests? Yes. Would a stabilized Somalia be profitable to Western oil and business interests? Yes. But it would also be a humanitarian boon to the people of Somalia, and this was the basis for the 100% agreement of the entire United Nations Security Council on every step of the UNOSOM mission. The US didn't even want to play a central role, with plans to quietly slip out and let the UN run things, until the murder of UN peacekeepers forced a response.
Amazingly, with a globalized economy and free trade covering most of the globe, there is a high likelihood that US or Western business interests will already be present wherever there is a conflict. Noting this is hardly evidence, in and of itself, of murkier, craven motives. To say "we were there to protect American oil interests" is to trivially oversimplify a very complex situation.
Alex Cox, the author of that column [that inspired Dan's piece, not the parent post here], is well known as a left-leaning muckraker given to conspiracy theories. (He's also had at least a moment as a good director.) Cox's narrative "capriciously" suggests that Bush moved unilaterally by "sending in the Marines", but this part of the mission proved relatively peaceful. It was not until the unprovoked massacre of Pakistani soldiers that the UN mission character changed to one of confrontation with Aidid. Cox sneers that the Marines' main task was "guarding oil men" and places scare quotes around the word partners (why not just come right out and say lackeys?). In any case Cox deliberately omits in his story any mention of the massacre which provoked the unanimous response of the United Nations Security Council. Nope; Cox has it that we just "decided that Aidid was [our] enemy". What a foul lie, Mr. Cox. In describing the fatal raid, Cox omits any mention of the deliberate RPG attacks on US helicopters, and suggests that the US troops became "confused" when surrounded by an angry crowd and proceeded to "massacre" Somalis. Cox fails to note that this angry crowd was armed and had been primed over a period of weeks for just such an ambush. The RPG attacks on the helicopters involved planning, procurement, training, and strategizing. Cox would like to have it merely be an "angry crowd" but it was a disciplined militia force that hid inside an angry, incited crowd. Then he goes off on an "all American elite forces are racist" riff that probably satisfies his muckraking impulse but fails to ask a single soldier whether he harbored racist feelings for the people of Somalia. (Most of them didn't; they thought they were doing a good deed, boy scout style.) There was a major error when the Quick Reaction Force attacked an Aidid shura meeting with a missile; accounts vary as to how many died, but it does seem likely that not all of them were military lieutenants.
The indignation Cox puffs up at American "war crimes" is somewhat diminished when one actually reads Bowden's book(which does not omit mention of the incidents, as he suggests). The prisoner praying in custody in an Army 6x6 took an incoming bullet, as Bowden and other sources make clear. The woman who was shot near the crash site was apparently unarmed, but the book adds the information that she was stepping into the street to "spot" for nearby gunmen and pointing out the soldiers' position, making her a combatant. A tough call in any situation, even a firefight for your own life. Update: I've found the Richard Dowden piece that Cox implies is based on independent reporting, but in fact it's entirely derivative of the publication of Bowden's book and Inquirer series, and the wording is Dowden's own spin.
Really, that's a disgusting little piece of distortion and I've lost any respect for Alex Cox now that I've read it. I mean, if you're going to tell this story and say not one word about the massacre of the Pakistanis, how can you lay any claim to honesty? The word Pakistan does not even appear in the article. Cox: for shame. -
Careful -- pr0n!
Their page is obviously a cleverly designed porn attraction. You may not want to check it at work.
Erect Your Own Obelisk!
"Wonder how it works?
Coming soon: interactive obelisk raising simulation!"
I can hardly wait for the MPEG
----
lake effect weblog -
Re:This is why we must militarize space!
One by one, our new high tech miltary tricks are being nuetralized, either by selling the secrets to the Chinese for a few million and a blowjob (thanks Bill) or by cunning high tech ingenuity.
Far be it from me to jump into a political minefield, but you do realize that the nuke secrets were actually stolen during the Reagan and Bush administrations, and the theft was discovered during the Clinton administration?
You also should realize that there has always been a see-saw effect between military offense and military defense. The European fiefdoms needed castles to maintain their military control; in reaction to the immense defensive structure of a castle, militaries developed the siege engines such as the trebuchet and early demolitions (fire in the hole!). The primacy of the castle-based military was only for a couple of hundred years. Technology moves much faster today.
To believe that nuclear secrets could be held forever, or that stealth aircraft would never be detected, is to ignore history.
----
lake effect weblog -
Important Problems?
Carpal tunnel syndrome isn't a disease of the rich. In fact, it took some time before it was connected with keyboard use. The first instances of diagnosis were of manual laborers, especially farm workers and most particularly slaughterhouse employees. In the US, meat processing is pretty industrialized, and it takes mass numbers of minimum-wage employees chopping away at carcasses to produce the cuts of meat we enjoy in our supermarkets. The production increases have led to people banging a cleaver through meat against a cutting board five times a minute, for eight hours a day.
Now, granted, Lithuania may have problems just getting enough jobs for people, or building democracy, but don't imagine it's a class thing or limited to developed countries.
The cynic in me will agree that RSI did not become a "big" problem that people in the US cared about, until higher-paid office workers began to be diagnosed.
----
lake effect weblog -
Re:regarding pr0n
somebody wrote:
>>Talk about fast moving: 10 years old, and just look at all the pr0n you can snarf. Imagine where we'll be at 20!
and unformed wrote:
>umm...if i remember correctly, porn was a LOT easier to grab when the net was only 6-7 years old....before the Cyber Decency Act kicked in...
umm
You may be thinking of the Child Online Protection Act, which is presently being challenged at the Appeals Court level, with a review of the decision overturning it possible. But the COPA has been under injunction by an Appeals judge since 1998.
It can be a little hard to get to porn from certain libraries and other public institutions, and child pornography enforcement has stepped up (even while occasionally stomping on some Constitutional fingers), but in general porn remains as available as ever.
(Are you sure you're reading the real news, and not just Slashdot? I know from the editorial accuracy around here it would be hard to keep up.)
Oh, I see, you meant porn you didn't have to PAY for. Well, no wonder.
----
lake effect weblog -
Priorities are set by Congress.
I'm not a huge Goldin fan, but you can't blame him for talking about Mars while stuck monitoring coffee. Those priorities are set by Congress, and Congress is very suspicious of any program NASA funds that even slightly resembles preparation for Mars exploration by humans. For one thing, back under Bush, when Dan Quayle headed the Space Council, they delivered an Apollo-style to-Mars-in-20-years program that would have cost half a trillion dollars. Bush had called for the Mars plan, but when he saw the pricetag he didn't know anybody that had their names on it. Congress saw the pricetag and ever since they have believed that NASA is secretly lusting after a twenty-year pork barrel, and they'll try to get it by stealth if Congress doesn't watch carefully.
Meanwhile NASA operational costs are eaten up by a ridiculously expensive launch vehicle and a circular-reasoning space station that, while it has its benefits, doesn't really deliver for the dollar. Science and exploration suffer. NASA is frustrated, but Congress's point of view is that back in 1970 they promised a shuttle that would do A through Z for a dollar, and NASA delivered a shuttle that does A through maybe G for ten dollars.
Short answer: Congress does not trust NASA with money.
The $4B accounting overages in the station program this year are just one more example.
Again, I'm not a Goldin fan, but he does show creativity, as when he persuaded the Italians to maybe come on board the station program as full partners, not just as part of the ESA, by building the US a habitat module, maybe even the CRV. We'll see how that works in terms of actual funding.
For those who aren't aware, there's a nifty Mars explroation proposal called Mars Direct, which would cost a fraction of the NASA proposal -- perhaps $20 to 40 billion. NASA modified it into a $50-100 billion proposal dubbed Mars Semi-Direct. In any case, Congress still thinks a lower figure is a lowball figure and the taxpayer will get screwed in the end.
----
lake effect weblog -
Sens. Russ Feingold D-WI & Pat Leahy D-VT
One politician who deserves to be recognized is Russ Feingold, the idiosyncratic senator from Wisconsin. Best known for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill (and one of the few politicians to refuse PAC money in a campaign for national office), Feingold has also long been one of the few tech-savvy people in a notoriously over-age, anti-tech government body. His finest hour in this regard was the Leahy-Feingold bill to overturn the Communications Decency Act, which was left to the courts to litigate; but he's often spoken out on issues near and dear to the EFF, with support for encryption freedoms and online privacy.
The only Senator who really outstrips him in this area is Patrick Leahy, D-VT, who takes the lead on more tech issues (Feingold often being a co-sponsor), especially since Feingold has put so much effort into the campaign finance issue.
But especially in those early days around 1995, when hardly anyone really knew what the internet was, Feingold said on the Senate floor,
Guaranteeing the Internet is free of speech restrictions, other than the statutory restrictions on obscenity and pornography which already exist, should be of concern to all Americans who want to be able to freely discuss issues of importance to them regardless of whether others might view those statements as offensive or distasteful. Shifting political views about what types of speech are unsuitable should not be allowed to determine what is or is not an appropriate use of electronic communications. While the current target of our political climate is indecent speech (the so-called "seven dirty words"), a weakening of First Amendment protections could lead to the censorship of other crucial types of speech, including religious expression and political dissent. I believe the censorship of the Internet is a perilous road for the Congress to walk down. It sets a dangerous precedent for First Amendment protections and it is unclear where that road will end.
Very impressive. Remember, this was nineteen-ninety-five, TIME magazine was running cover stories suggesting the internet was some sinister force creeping into our homes, and most people still had to have the word explained to them. In those days, it was difficult to find anyone who would stand up for the rights of internet users, who were seen as a fringe group of suspicious characters, hackers, pornographers, terrorists and worse -- rather than today's view that the internet is a basic utility to be enjoyed by all citizens. Fortunately, shortly after this I attended a Rotary Club meeting where he spoke (we are from the same home town), and in the Q&A time I stood up and let him know that a lot of people online considered him a hero.
----
lake effect weblog -
Space Station Command and Control Systems
It's too late now, but at least this will be in the story when it gets archived.
There are more than 100 computers on the space station, just counting built-in. Indeed, each individual experiment rack -- about the size of an apartment fridge -- will include its own computer and custom software written for that experiment, all intended to link into the ISS network for data transmission and science interface. Many of the racks in Destiny (and future modules like Columbus and Kibo) provide station functions such as robot arm control, and each of these has its own computer as well.
But the core functions are called CDH (Command and Data Handling), including everything from navigation to turning the lights on and off: really, it's just the network infrastructure. Cabling is Thinnet. These computers are provided to NASA under contract by Honeywell, and are called MDMs, for Multiplexer/Demultiplexer. Think of a rack-mount swappable-processor system and you'll be close. These run the RTOS (Real Time Operating System) called VxWorks (from Wind River) -- the same RTOS used on the successful Mars Pathfinder mission, and custom software written by Honeywell and specific system vendors using Matrixx from the same vendor.
The crew use laptops, and there are quite a number of them judging by photographs, many seemingly permanently linked into one or more MDM functions. Since the MDMs have no other interface to the crew, this makes sense. The laptops that link to the MDMs use Sun Solaris and a custom client that provides data feedback and a semi-graphical user interface, depending on function. These laptops go by the generic name PCS (Portable Computer System) and conform to specifications set during the mid-1990s. The PCS model in use is the IBM Thinkpad, and contrary to popular belief, these models have evolved along with the Shuttle and Station programs -- just more slowly than the commercial market. Models need to be constructed with higher-quality components and undergo flight qualification. The laptops available to Expedition One were (I believe) at least Pentium I-MMX class machines.
Some of these laptops are dual-boot with Windows NT on the other partition. Windows NT does have a function on the space station, but it is in no way linked to the command and control systems as outlined above. The major purpose it serves seems to be e-mail, but probably also record-keeping and recreation in the form of games or playing portable media such as CDs or DVDs. (There is also a built-in DVD player in one module that the astronauts can gather around for "movie night".) Windows NT can behave perfectly well when given a known, well-defined set of hardware and a well-tweaked configuration. The astronauts have access to spare hard drives that have images created on Earth using Norton Ghost. In one incident during Expedition One this was insufficient, and a spare hard drive was sent up during the current shuttle mission in order to bring that laptop back into service. But since they have plenty, it probably did not materially affect operations to be missing one.
----
lake effect weblog -
Only one was down.
It sounds really rather scary to me. Apart from the fact that three redundant computers going down at once just should NOT happen - if Endeavour hadn't happenedto be docked, they'd have no voice/date uplink
Three redundant computers did not, actually, go down. ONE of the Command and Data Handling computers shut itself down, and Cmdr. Helms was unable to shunt functions it performed through the other two computers on the first day of troubleshooting. So, only one was actually down; the other two were part of the problem, or part of the solution, depending on your point of view, but they were not actually "down".
----
lake effect weblog -
Re:Deep link
sllort asks:
Now what do you guys make of this?
... This would have been much easier with some bootable media that could run Windows. (Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that "other" operating system).
According to this Expedition One crew debriefing, Shep answered a provocative question thus:
Ops LAN
? Was the service pack distribution system easy to follow?
Shep: Yes. No problems.
Sergei: I'd like to have a little more explanation of what is in the service pack.
Shep & Sergei: That way we would have known if it was really critical to load the new version or not.
? Was the desktop configuration (SSC Client, SSC File Server) easy to navigate? Any suggestions on how to improve the desktop layout?
o Shep (joking): Go to a Mac OS.
This fits with the wording: Shep is a Mac user. The log is tweaking him for being less technical because he uses a Mac. It's unclear if this section of the log was written by one of the cosmonauts, or possibly Shep tweaking himself. But he's known to have a real sense of humor.
----
lake effect weblog -
Re:that's what's wrong with blogger and the like
You know what the future likely hold for Blogger and Trellix: either they'll go out of business or they'll get bought by AOL or Microsoft. That's not the place to put anything you care about.
Trellix has been around quite awhile -- ten years, I think. Maybe they will get bought eventually, but most weblogs have a pretty short lifespan, it seems. It's probably "good enough" for almost everyone.
The kind of freedom you're talking about comes at a price. Not everybody wants to be a programmer.
Note that by posting to Slashdot, you're creating content that allows a business you don't own to make money, and that content is stored on a server you don't control, and it could go away at any time. Likely? Maybe no, but think a moment. There's a difference in complexity, but not in principle.
I think it's better to put personal data on your personal site, with a company you have a paying relationship with, that provides a commodity service. Those companies tend to stay in business, and if they don't, you can always switch to a different one. Yes, you may have to download a PHP script or use a web editor.
Note that Blogger output is on your personal site unless you're using blogspot.com. If Blogger goes away, you won't be able to edit anything in the Blogger app anymore -- but all your ba
----
lake effect weblog -
Re:Blogger critic
mborland writes:
[nice things about Blogger, then]
I've been concerned about the service and its future for some time, not without good reason. The company, Pyra, has itself seen very hard times, and last I knew was down to one employee, its president (evhead). This is largely because they've been unable to figure out how to make this thing make money. And if it's not viable, it will cease to be useful.
Note that this Trellix deal, which is the kind of thing they'd been pursuing last year without success, marks a significant turn for the better. Licensing fees from Trellix will underwrite Blogger's main service, as well as Pyra's development efforts. Pyra has already hired a second employee again.
Personally, I've found stablity and security to be a big problem with this service. It has had major problems with downtime
Major is debatable. There have been a couple of hours-long outages, to be sure, but that happens even with major, well-funded services.
because of the immense scalability it must endure--users * # of posts, with both increasing. Also, from looking at its errors it seems sort of programming-error prone--direct calls to SQL Server thru ODBC, no parameter checking, that sort of thing.
The only "errors" I've encoutnered -- apart from some difficulties with FTP posts way back in 1999, when they were still tweaking the service -- is the log file overflow problem. Evan finally fixed that on all servers last week.
Well, there is an issue with archive indexes. That's still a sore point with some users. But it's not a deal-breaker for most.
And worst of all, it seems to store (though it is an option) people's usernames/passwords to their ISP accounts, making the site a major cracking target. If I were them I'd be very concerned about the liability of holding people's passwords in plaintext in a database.
Note that the SQL server is behind a firewall, and only communicates with the Java Pyra client. There's a security issue there, to be sure, but it's handled here as well as at any e-commerce site. Besides, if you're concerned, you can always put your weblog up on a free service with its own password, or set up (as I can) a password with access only for Blogger. Just as with any security problem, this can be managed.
And though I very much respect the cult that has built around it, without solid answers to the problems of income, operating stability and security, people are setting themselves up for disappointment.
Did you READ the news release?
Sorry to be a sour puss. I do wish Blogger success, but think they have set out a hard road for themselves.
It's April, not February. You're reacting to the last bad news, not the recent good news. Catch up.
Even so, in the end, it's just a simple publishing service. I love using it, and it would be a chore to change over (one reason I haven't), but it wouldn't kill me if it went away.
----
lake effect weblog -
This is a Good Thing (tm).
This is good because it ensures the long-term survival of Blogger. The licensing deal gives Pyra Ltd. the money to continue to maintain (and scale) its servers, upgrade the technology, and possibly work on a more viable business model (like selling Blogger Pro, or finally completing the underlying architecture, the project-management software simply called Pyra).
Meanwhile, the most popular and easiest-to-use weblog-software gets an even bigger audience, through Trellix partners such as About and Tripod. Soon people at those services will have something like a checkbox option to start a blog; won't that be an explosion! This will lead to competitive pressure for other services like Geocities to offer something similar.
For those of you too young to remember, Dan Bricklin of Trellix is one of the original independent software developers, from back in the 1980s. His first major product, Visicalc, basically invented the spreadsheet program concept from scratch. [You can even download an MS-DOS executable!] Maybe someone else would have had the idea of putting a paper spreadsheet on the screen and letting you enter not only numbers but equations, but he was the first, and it revolutionized the PC industry. Later he was responsible for Dan Bricklin's Demo (a quick way to mock-up several screens of potential software for clients, sort of a mix of Powerpoint and Flash in its day -- and still sold as Demo-It!), and then Trellix, which was ahead of its time as a templating engine. Templates are all the rage now, but they weren't an obvious next way to go a few years back.
And basically it shows what kind of a guy Bricklin is; his company could easily have jealously set out to clone Blogger instead, but he saw an existing userbase and brand and also saw a way to redeem karma points (you know, the OLD kind of karma points, the kind that accumulate until you die) by saving a company roughly the way that Lotus (in those days the #2 or #3 commercial software vendor) saved HIS company way back when.
Blogger is certainly limited in some ways. It's dead simple, which makes it easy to set up for your grandma, and it offers online posting from almost anywhere. But it doesn't have discussions (said to be in unreleased Blogger Pro) and it doesn't let you do anything outside the blog format, so you can't use it to manage your entire site. And if you're at
I started out with Blogger (I was one of the first users), and though I've been working with a couple of the more comprehensive products behind the scenes, for other purposes, I still do my weblog with Blogger. There's just no reason to change. And now with the Trellix investment, I don't have to worry about Pyra doing the fish-on-the-beach thing.
Just remember that not everyone is interested in -- or capable of -- hacking code just to post their thoughts every day. If you want to play with code, and I have no problem believing that's true of most Slashdotters, Blogger may not be right for you. But it's probably right for a lot of people.
----
lake effect weblog -
Re:They should manage a .wipo tld
Let the WIPO manage their own tld, a
WIPO can do their own decisions on which party or any should get the
Ah, of course. And that would magically eliminate all disputes over ownership in OTHER top-level domains. How ingenious!
WIPO is just acting as a mediator like any of the other ICANN-accredited mediators. They don't have any special power, the only difference may be that they have vested interests in protecting trademark owners. But so does ICANN: if they can't do the job, they disappear.
----
lake effect weblog -
Re:Rumsfeld wants a space plane.
NASA doesn't have a demonstrated need for a shuttle replacement? According to one estimate I've heard, it takes 20,000 people to launch a shuttle. Instead of a cheaper way to get into space -- as it was originally intended to be -- it turned out the most expensive. The shuttle's operation is so costly that it's eaten up much of NASA's (continually shrinking) budget, leaving other programs with scraps. And of course, there's the International Space Station -- made more complex and expensive by the need to launch and assemble many small modules, the shuttle being unable to loft large ones. To me, all of this adds up to a *pressing* need for something better than the shuttle.
Oh, I certainly agree. But Congress doesn't. They have shuttle and don't see a point to funding another program that makes the same claims and may well end up failing to meet them just as dramatically (even though you have to go back 30 years to find those claims, or 15 years to get still-unrealistic but much diminished pre-Challenger ones, Congress has a long memory for this sort of malfeasance).
Classic divergence between penny-wise capital spending and pound-foolish program spending.
Thing is, we don't know that we can really do it more cheaply. (Though somehow the Russians manage to scrape by.) US prestige is heavily invested in the idea of RLVs and going "backward" to an EELV, no matter the underlying tech achievement, would be seen as a failure.
Congress doesn't want that. NASA doesn't (really) want that. Inertia rules.
----
lake effect weblog -
Rumsfeld wants a space plane.
Color me not surprised on this one. The military applications of X-33 and X-34 were well understood; when Rumsfeld chaired the Congress-chartered Space Commission last year, they came up with a report favorable to suborbital weapons-delivery technology.
And that's what this is, really: the tech in X-33 and X-34 is optimized for getting stuff places quick, not for carrying people there safe. (The latter is still being studied in the X-38 program, which may lead to a CRV for the space station
NASA is already redirecting its money toward more promising tech directions. The money they were sinking into X-33 and X-34 is now available for use in the Space Launch Initiative, which is a wider-ranging grant program supporting third-party launch system development. This seed money will be spread around the industry and help fund smaller, more innovative projects. At last NASA is moving away from the military-industrial-complex model that served them so well during the Cold War, and toward a more robust, creative, and less expensive approach that will let dozens of companies try out different concepts and cut out a lot of the political gamesmanship that the big boys always played.
NASA did kind of want a shuttle successor, but so far Congress was showing no inclination to fund it; we've hardly used the launch system we have (29 flights for the most heavily-used shuttle, with 71, yes, 71 to go before the airframe-rating is exceeded). With upgrades and rebuilds these birds can last a long time, and better yet, the ISS is optimized to their capabilities. NASA may want something else, but it doesn't have a demonstrated need for it.
No, the cheap access to space breakthrough is going to come from the SLI if it's going to come from anything in Washington. Maybe it won't even be a grant program, but it will be something that gets funded by investors because the company was able to build a great R&D team under SLI.
----
lake effect weblog -
What is this, Free Republic?
Reinventing the wheel is yet another fine use of our 39% tax bracket that the Clintons invented.
Yeah, after all, it wasn't Ronald Reagan who spent $3.3 billion (just the part not in the "black" budget) on the X-30 National Space Plane scramjet project that never reached a prototype flight. No, it was the Evil Doppelganger Democrat who was really running the White House back then! In fact, while Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, he was secretly controlling President Reagan with his mental emanation telepathy superpowers! Powers Clinton must still be using on Dubya, in an evil plot to make him spend the People's Money (tm), even after January 20, 2001!
The only solution? Aluminum foil wrap around the White House, and tinfoil hats for all Republicans.
By the way, you forgot to include the Clinton Death List (tm). It's not too late to prosecute him for the Lindbergh kidnapping!
----
lake effect weblog