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It's a great achievement, not doubts, however the problem with fusion is to control plasma long enough to have sustained reaction, thus getting netto energy surplus.
At the moment the biggest problem is that plasma leaks through magnetic confinement dropping temperature and shutting down fusion, and short bursts of fusion require more energy for heating plasma than one gets back.

The ITER (international tokamak project) aims at breaking even, there are also other approaches, for which major players are:
- stellarator (W7-X), a very promising way undergoing tests in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- laser fusion, most notably National Ignition Facility in US (some time ago they had a breakthrough with their laser): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- compact fusion, some specialists say it's a viable method, however so far no-one has achieved fusion this way (AFAIK): https://www.lockheedmartin.com... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are also other ways, but they're unlikely to have positive energy balance (aka produce more than require).

Personally I am looking forward for the German stellarator (which seems the most promising) and this compact fusion if shown to work (is small, kind of portable but it requires HE3, which might be produced by other, bigger fusion reactors to complement each other). However, at the moment, people should pursue all viable ways.

You must be one of these bright young engineers surfing a bit of Slashdot on company time.

Those bright young Lockheed engineers fall under the leadership of Rick Ambrose, who recently said, "Lockheed Martin's business model is to bill federally contracted hours". I'd put that in a block quote, but I can't find a link to Rick's speech where he made that statement in an attempt to mitigate the near riotous discontent inside Lockheed shortly after the Falcon Heavy test flight, featuring Starman in a Tesla Roadster. One of those bright, young Lockheed engineers that heard that speech in person conveyed that the room full of engineers he was in became visibly angry at Rick's overall speech, because like the rest of Lockheed's senior leadership, he's completely out of touch. That bright young engineer recently abandoned Lockheed for greener pastures. And overall, Lockheed is having a very hard time attracting and keeping new talent. They've bumped up their pay to try to compete, but their stodgy, bureaucratic and inefficient culture is a bit much to take for someone that is actually motivated and intelligent. There are simply too many more rewarding places to work.

Lockheed pays a lot of money and works hard to polish their public image. Look at all the positive publicity around the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter.

In reality, Lockheed dropped the ball on integrating and testing other vendor supplied components, and they nearly lost this spacecraft. It was saved by some bright folks at JPL, not by Lockheed.

In order to make up for the propulsion system failure and the unintended orbit that this spacecraft is now in, the mission has been extended, and guess who's paying for it? Yep, the US taxpayers! Thanks Lockheed! The press releases have all been polished very nicely. Lockheed really really wants those government checks to keep flowing.

Lockheed definitely has a lot of success in space, but with their costs and whitewashed inefficiencies, and the recent success of a more market driven competitive approach to funding and awarding contracts, why keep throwing good money after bad?

You must be one of these bright young engineers surfing a bit of Slashdot on company time.

Those bright young Lockheed engineers fall under the leadership of Rick Ambrose, who recently said, "Lockheed Martin's business model is to bill federally contracted hours". I'd put that in a block quote, but I can't find a link to Rick's speech where he made that statement in an attempt to mitigate the near riotous discontent inside Lockheed shortly after the Falcon Heavy test flight, featuring Starman in a Tesla Roadster. One of those bright, young Lockheed engineers that heard that speech in person conveyed that the room full of engineers he was in became visibly angry at Rick's overall speech, because like the rest of Lockheed's senior leadership, he's completely out of touch. That bright young engineer recently abandoned Lockheed for greener pastures. And overall, Lockheed is having a very hard time attracting and keeping new talent. They've bumped up their pay to try to compete, but their stodgy, bureaucratic and inefficient culture is a bit much to take for someone that is actually motivated and intelligent. There are simply too many more rewarding places to work.

Lockheed pays a lot of money and works hard to polish their public image. Look at all the positive publicity around the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter.

In reality, Lockheed dropped the ball on integrating and testing other vendor supplied components, and they nearly lost this spacecraft. It was saved by some bright folks at JPL, not by Lockheed.

In order to make up for the propulsion system failure and the unintended orbit that this spacecraft is now in, the mission has been extended, and guess who's paying for it? Yep, the US taxpayers! Thanks Lockheed! The press releases have all been polished very nicely. Lockheed really really wants those government checks to keep flowing.

Lockheed definitely has a lot of success in space, but with their costs and whitewashed inefficiencies, and the recent success of a more market driven competitive approach to funding and awarding contracts, why keep throwing good money after bad?

Speaking of which, i always loved Kelly Johnson's 14 rules he enforced while running Skunk Works: https://www.lockheedmartin.com...

Rather than helicopter, the natural way to deliver Hyperloop tube sections is via airship .

You mean like ADAM and ATHENA, from a company called "Lockheed Martin"?

The biggest problem with the Terrorism threat level was that it didn't convey any useful information. It was a vague, seemingly arbitrary distraction that didn't tell you anything other than maybe how scared the government wanted you to be (really scared or super mega scared) - and even that just faded into the background. Contrast it with the U.S. Military's force protection levels, each of which had very specific and meaningful implications, and which had very high levels that weren't intended to be maintained, only used in very specific instances when the warnings dictated. Alternately, consider the Hurricane scale, which tells you roughly how destructive a storm to expect - useful information based on clear criteria, of which the Terrorism threat level had neither.

This at least seems to be something more on the lines of a post-incident category to tell you how 'bad' it was, and probably has more in common with something like the "cyber kill chain" ( http://cyber.lockheedmartin.co... ) rather than the Terrorism Color Code. Now, this doesn't mean it couldn't be used to overhype (or downplay) a hacking incident, but it at least does seem to be trying to pass along information of some sort.

The weight figures for VASIMR do not include the cooling system for those superconductors;

Yes, they do.

Two spacecraft may be cheaper in the long run, and it can certainly be made to seem like a good idea with a great many assumptions. So far no one is putting their money down for it.

You mean like the non-nuclear tug that Lockheed Martin just proposed as their CRS-2 project?

Look, when you're in a hole, stop digging. You made fun of the concept of tugs in general as if the concept made no sense and as if the OP made up the concept. Don't be surprised that people are criticizing you for that.

That is assuming none of the recent breakthroughs in technology actually work. EM Drive, for instance. There are also flaws in the article. Conventional fission is 1% fuel efficient, but a breeder reactor with reprocessing is 99.5% fuel efficient. A fusion reactor like the one the Skunkworks is working on is also a possibility (because it would be small enough for a spaceship). There are already fusion and fission fast mars concepts as well that should work fine for interstellar travel.

That doesn't even touch on theoretical stuff like the Alcubierre drive, and wiki doesn't even have some of the workarounds to certain problems such as using metamaterials to divert Hawking radiation. There still are some other serious problems that need to be addressed with that one.

> Cold fusion is bullshit.

Says the Arrogant Coward who pretends to know more then ...

Lockheed Martin:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/...

And the U.S. Navy:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/K...

Your proof is _where_ again?

Even when practical, we're still talking very big, very expensive plants

That's actually not true. When you look at the Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor, it's being designed to be small enough to fit on an airplane. It's a lot bigger than a "Mr. Fusion", but compared to a typical fission reactor, it's tiny.

Here are the typical combat ranges for the various fighters: F15C: 1,967 km, F-35A: 1,135 km, F-22: 760 km, F-18: 740 km, F-16: 550 km.

The range is off for the F-16. Lockheed Martin give it a combat radius of 800 nautical miles. The US Air Force says, "In an air-to-surface role, the F-16 can fly more than 500 miles (860 kilometers), deliver its weapons with superior accuracy, defend itself against enemy aircraft, and return to its starting point."

You would also know that the F-35 has more than twice the range of the F-16

That doesn't seem to be the case. Lockheed Martin and the US Air Force say the F-16 has a range of 1,740 nautical miles whereas the F-35A has a range of 1,200 nautical miles. Even if the F-35A's range improves in the future, it seems unlikely it will ever have twice the range of the F-16. Maybe if the F-35 gets a new engine in the mid-2020s its range will improve.

We know how to build reactors that burn nearly all nuclear waste but Democrats killed that program because they were too ignorant to understand that the design required passive safety and even succeeded in testing a worse-than-Fukushima scenario The ONLY valid concern they had was proliferation risk, and as the Russians have proven at Beloyarsk, a once through design without reprocessing still burns 70% of the fuel (you can then reprocess it at a secure site), MUCH higher than the 5% at best for current reactors and typically .7-1%. Integral Fast Reactors cost quite a bit more to build, but you more than make up for that with fuel efficiency.

There also has been renewed interest in stuff like LFTR and the like (I'm more a fan of Terrestrial's Uranium version - single fluid 30 year run before recycling - this was also proposed for the MSRE). The anti-nuclear people complain that leaves long lived actinides, but you can separate these and add them back into the fuel for the next 30 year run. The anti-nuclear folk then complain that you still have some highly radioactive fission materials, and I say yeah - and the worst of them decay to background radiation levels in 300 years, not millions. I'm also very curious about the skunk-works version of fusion. Tokamak design was never realistic and far too expensive.

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/...

just for example.

This is open information. You can get it on Wikipedia FFS. Calculate the wing load yourself. The information of speeds reached by other fighters, their wing load, their thrust to weight ratio is also not a secret. Do the math. You'll see F-35 for the lame duck it is.

Insulting other people just because they tell you some facts you don't like is both dickish and makes you look like an idiot.

Not to argue with large scale stuff, but you are far too hasty to through out the small scale stuff that hasn't worked in the past. We didn't have teraflop computing resources in the past. There are at least a couple of small scale plasma confinement technologies that require the solution of a hard computational problem in electromagnetohydrodynamics (quite a mouthful, I know) plus some clever engineering in order to work, but we are actually to the point where we can contemplate solving precisely that difficult a problem. As I probably mentioned above, Lockheed-Martin announced that they had this problem licked six or eight months ago, that they were building a prototype that would produce positive energy, that it would take five years, and that a 100 MW plant would fit inside a semi.

The Skunk Works at LM is not to be taken lightly.

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/...

They could be wrong, of course. But then, in 10 years they could become the richest corporation in history, so wealthy that it is downright scary. Two trillion dollars and rising per year. Lot of money on the table.

And this isn't the only effort along these lines that I know of. There are lots of people working on compact confinement in a steady state, not large scale inertial. It is probably now a solvable problem. Which is one of many many reasons I don't take global warming too seriously. In thirty years we won't be using coal for energy even if we do absolutely nothing but follow our self-interest driven noses in the meantime, because burning coal for power is dumb and expensive in the long run, however relatively cheap it is now.

rgb

Good news! Its happening as we speak: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/...

It's just bad journalism. The actual press release doesn't make this claim.

Contrary to movies, spy satellites do not watch every inch of the planet. Nor can you easily steer them into another orbit for live James Bond style feeds.

ZERO spy satellites point at the open ocean, nothing interesting going on out there.

Meet SBIRS - From the page "SBIRS, considered one of the nation’s highest priority space programs, is designed to provide global, persistent, infrared surveillance capabilities to meet 21st century demands..."

I would find it illogical for the United States to only be monitoring continental lands, it would be akin to taking a picture and cropping out everything but the subject.

My bet is no government wants to out their level of sophistication in the surveillance world... It's a massive tactical advantage.

This is what has been bantered about in the news this morning. Many countries have been slow in revealing what they know, but have adopted a "we can confirm that" approach - much to the criticism of others. Never mind the satellites wouldn't be up there "confirming" things were it not for hefty spy budgets. No doubt some can detect nuclear submarines which think they are all unknown in the murky depths of the oceans. We can probably detect an ant fart in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

More information has been forthcoming in recent days, because a little tipping of hands has been regarded in some quarters as a better policy than playing it entirely dumb.

Contrary to movies, spy satellites do not watch every inch of the planet. Nor can you easily steer them into another orbit for live James Bond style feeds.

ZERO spy satellites point at the open ocean, nothing interesting going on out there.

Meet SBIRS - From the page "SBIRS, considered one of the nation’s highest priority space programs, is designed to provide global, persistent, infrared surveillance capabilities to meet 21st century demands..."

I would find it illogical for the United States to only be monitoring continental lands, it would be akin to taking a picture and cropping out everything but the subject.

My bet is no government wants to out their level of sophistication in the surveillance world... It's a massive tactical advantage.

Show me one prominent/influential neocon or conservative that is in favor of intervening in Syria.

There you go.

Up 32% YTD. I'm be-investing that it will end the year at ~133 if nothing changes, 145+ if we decide to 'help' Syria. Either way the investors win, and the Syrian people lose.

SAIC was the registered agent for the DoD's Global Information Grid (GIG) because they were the prime contractor for the contract that managed that IP space and the associated networks behind it. That information is aged because the current contractor is Lockheed-Martin. The correlation of the address belonging to the NSA is very likely not related to the fact that SAIC shows up as the registered agent.

How about cyber-industrial complex instead. Cyber warfare and defense is becoming the new way to milk the Federal government for contracts and money, from the same people who've brought you the defense-industrial complex for the last 70 years, so it shall continue, whether you like it or not.

These would be Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, plus a few new players like Palantir. Wonder how Palantir is able to buying up all the free real estate in Silicon Valley?

Chances are they will be gutting your Internet freedoms as a regrettable side effect of making the Internet safe for freedom.

A smartphone with a REALLY big screen -- http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/80-inch-windows-8-tablets/ . Steve Ballmer thought of it. They are going to release a line of clothing that will allow you to carry it, too - http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/hulc.html .

oops, wrong link: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/K-MAX/index.html

Environmental factors, notably wind, are a much larger factor than barrel perturbations. Modern, precision rifle barrels virtually do not move when heated to the extent of a sniper's fire rate. The much more significant development is the previously reported Lockheed DARPA contract for a wind-detecting Laser sight that superimposes a true aiming point into the field of view. I have made many first-round hits on targets of interest to 1600 meters using old-fashioned experience, estimating wind effect. The Lockheed sight would greatly reduce the possible environmental error.

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/news/press_releases/2010/052610_LM_DARPA_rifle-scope.html

Systems similar to the Oak Ridge development already exists on long-range tank guns, correcting for the sun's heating, and subsequent bending, of the gun barrel.

I suggest that everybody read about Orion at the Lockheed Martin Website.

I highly recommend this video.

I suggest that everybody read about Orion at the Lockheed Martin Website.

I highly recommend this video.

Frankly, I think the astronauts taking this tank into orbit have to be nuts.

Right you are. That's why they will not take the tank to the orbit. It separates at T + 8 minutes 50 seconds, which is about 69 miles.

Since the summary link is dead.

Includes video: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/news/press_releases/2010/0921_ss_orion.html

Most rocks that come this close to Earth are in orbits tied to Earth's and will come close again every few years. If we wanted to put a probe (or a manned lander) onto one of these, we could target one we've spotted before and arrange to intercept it on a future visit. There's no obvious incentive to visit one the moment we spot it.

Surprisingly, the Obama administration is proposing a manned mission to some of these smaller chunks of rock. Lockheed-Martin wrote a white paper on a proposed mission to an asteroid using the Orion spacecraft that can be accessed here:

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/ssc/Orion/Toolkit/OrionAsteroidMissionWhitePaperAug2010.pdf

The missing planning is still at a very early stage and there is no reason to believe that Congress will necessarily fund such a project, but it seems like this is a cheaper option than going to the Moon or to Mars, and at the very least would help to prove deep-space manned spaceflight capabilities for missions to other places.

While there won't be an incentive to visit an asteroid right after it is spotted, there are some smaller asteroids that have already been spotted that might make some interesting targets in the future.

You know- it occurs to me, this video is a lot more apparent to me on a 24" screen than it may be to the pilots on 4" or 6" screens.

Do you really think that the pilots of gunships from the world's most advanced military force use 4" screens as their viewing platform? Please. They were probably using the Lockheed Martin Arrowhead, which is equipped with high-resolution full-colour imaging, optical and digital zoom, night-vision, infra-red, auto-target tracking and auto boresight. The video feed that has been leaked is a heavily compressed grayscale signal meant for real-time transmission via low-bandwidth satellite and AWACS uplinks. It bears absolutely no relation to the kind of data the men in the helicopter have available to them.

Yes, private companies are pretty good at sending small satellites into orbit

Pretty good? You really need to learn just a wee bit more before pontificating.
 
  Lockheed Martin alone has built more than 34 satellites of a single design, and 96 in total. Nor are these small birds - the A2100 weighs in the two ton range.

Microsoft, from all people?

Microsoft and Lockheed Martin been partners on high-profile military projects for at least the last ten years:

The alliance builds on existing relationships between Lockheed Martin and Microsoft on projects including the U.S. Air Force Integrated Space Command and Control (ISC2) program, a comprehensive upgrade of the North American Air Defense (NORAD) Cheyenne Mountain Complex; the integrated warfare system for the U.S. Navy's next nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, CVN 77; the Global Command Support System-Air Force; and the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Messaging System. The companies also are members of the Blue Team, which is competing for the Navy's next-generation land attack destroyer, DD 21 Lockheed Martin, Microsoft Form Alliance Focused on U.S. Government Market [May 24, 2001]

The Blue Team lost on what would become the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class - Multimission Destroyer.

CVN-77 is the tenth and last of the Nimitz class super-carriers, the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77)

Microsoft has announced two more partnering agreements with large training and simulation companies for its recently unveiled Microsoft ESP visual simulation platform.
Lockheed Martin and FlightSafety International both will use ESP as part of their efforts to lower costs in their simulation on aircrew training. Those companies join Northrop Grumman and SAIC as large integrators who have joined with Microsoft on use of ESP, which was announced in November and became available Jan. 1. Lockheed Martin, FlightSafety to use Microsoft ESP platform [February 21, 2008]

His server software is horrible bad!

Lockheed would seem to disagree: Microsoft Case Studies: Lockheed Martin gains Enterprise-class capabilities with SAP on Windows, SQL Server [July 20, 2009]

I second the opinion that the $1.4B is for proof-of-concept. Reuters reported that the contract was for the System Design and Demonstration phase of the contract, with which the Army buys two orbits of two aerostats (likely engineering design models) for testing and evaluation.

Regarding the aerostats floating over Iraq and Afghanistan now, these are likely the Persistent Threat Detection System.

How can commercial entities, who have so far demonstrated only toy rockets, possibly be closer to achieving space flight than NASA

Huh? Maybe you should look up who builds the Atlas and Delta boosters. Commercial entities have been flying rockets, *big* rockets, for decades.

"Yeah, it does."

No, it doesn't. You can cool things only by radiation in vacuum. And radiation is quite slow, on Earth the major contributor in cooling is convection.

Well OK this is very Slashdot, your point of view is that radiative cooling is pretty bad in comparison to convection cooled cooling towers on earth, or phase change cooling towers (with water misters) or conduction cooling if near a nice cool lake/river. And my point of view is that radiative is pretty good, compared to having to build a reactor cooling tower plus an atmosphere, or build an ocean. Really, radiative cooling is pretty good considering that its dumping heat into "nothing" or into the universe in general. Usually you don't get anything at all for nothing.

For some actual numbers:

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/HeatRejectionRadiators/index.html

So, the ISS is radiating 1/2 into space and 1/2 into the earth and about ten KW takes about one ton of radiator. Move into a gravity well it'll need to be stronger and heavier, but maybe you can thermosiphon. On one hand, with proper insulation and something to block the sun, you can radiate into the black cold 2.7 degree sky, on the other hand, blocking the sun and moon surface blocks alot of angular area to radiate into. Its looking like radiating a KW takes about 100 pounds of radiator. Not too impressive compared to my car radiator, not too bad for radiating heat away into a vacuum "nothing".

This article didn't seem to mention the fact that other companies also received the same amount for concept development.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/07/15/raytheon_gets_space_fence_contract/
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/news/press_releases/2009/063009_LM_AirForce_SpaceFence.html

Actually, after searching google news, no article paints the complete picture with awards going to all three competitors, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.

It's really cool and all, but these guys are being paid to do this by an aerospace company (Lockheed) and are graduate researchers. Calling them amateurs and students is slightly insulting (I realize the amateur part is just the way these ballooning things are described, to separate them from NASA, but it's still an unfortunate word in this case).

These guys need to present themselves as professionals for their own sake. Part of the reason school administrators do stupid things like raise grad student tuition and cut grad student benefits is because they do not realize how much on-campus research is done by graduate students. I spent several years when I was in grad school trying to explain to deans, chancellors, and regents that graduate "students" were not just older undergraduates (some of these people were shocked to find out I only took classes for 2 out of 6 years of grad school... they had no idea what science and engineering graduate students do all day).

This kind of stuff drives me crazy. These guys did a great thing, and to play it off as "look what this group of students did" implies this was a small side project done in their spare time, or something a more senior person taught them to do, when this was well funded research which will likely go toward their degrees (and obviously has not been done before). Incidentally, Lockheed Martin's press release uses the phrases: young engineers, early career engineers, and employees. The word "student" is not present, only referenced by "employees' graduate studies." They get it.

It's maximum 10 mph for short bursts, 7 mph for longer marches. This information is presented in this PDF file: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/mfc/PC/MFC_HULC_Product_Card.pdf

I strongly suggest you see if you can get a few weeks of academic internship with these people. Also know as 'Those who write the right stuff. They actually do know how to write software.

Other places to look for: Linux Kernel team. Donald Knuths Tex/Latex.
Or, believe it or not, Blizzard Entertainment. They actually are the only entertainment software company I know of with a proven track record of extremely high quality software compared to others in the field.

But any core team of non-trivial low-level open source software technology will do actually. Python core team, PHP core team, your favourite Linux IO crew, Apache, OpenLaszlo, KDE, Haxe, Blender, ... whatever. And while people will start bickering that Apache or Blender code is oh so crappy in this or that area, rest asured that all projects of that kind, *incuding* the aforementioned *all* have core team members who are very well aware of the downsides of their software. And thus can help you out in your pursuit for details on professional software developement, because they also know the pitfalls.

Bottom line: Join some tight crew of people that build stuff everybody uses or many people rely on to work. Hang with them for a month or two, then you'll have a better idea how exactly to approach your topic.

Who on earth needs a skillset like that?

Then, he will scoop up all of the unemployable engineers at slave labor wages, laughing the entire time while sitting atop his throne made of golden skulls. In fact, this article was probably penned while he sat atop said throne.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids.

I was discussing this with an engineer friend. Let's say we wanted to get back into the race? Simple enough, you just dust off the plans for the Saturn V, setup the tooling, and...
 
Oh, shit... Not only don't we have the tooling, but we don't even have enough kids trained in running a drafting pencil to design the tooling. WE WOULD HAVE TO OUTSOURCE THE DESIGN AND FABRICATION TO --- Yup. Asia.

I thought hellfires were laser-guided. Don't they have to wait until the opponents are vapor above a crater before they go home?

I think you are thinking of the old TOWs, which are wire guided. The Hellfire missile is a fire and forget missile. Once it's launched, it independently seeks its target.

Nearly all launch vehicle platformsin the US outside of the shuttle are privately owned.

Atlas V is Lockheed Martin
Delta is Boeing
And my current personal favorite due to the recent perfect ride they gave us, the Minotaur is Orbital.

Not to worry...the next generation, the F-35 fighter cures this problem....at only a cost of a few billions of dollars or more.....

the official word from NASA on this is that man-rating is a very very expensive process. Neither the Atlas V nor the Delta IV were designed with man-rating in mind (that saved them a lot of development money) and believe it or not, going back and man-rating either would actually be more expensive than designing from the ground up with man-rating in mind - especially when you can use components that are already man-rated.

Sounds like bull to me. Lockheed Martin claims they either meet most of the man-rating standards or can economically incorporate man-rating tests into their unmanned launches. Ie, put the system to be tested on the unmanned vehicle and presto! you have a launch and a test at the same time. The linked paper is light on cost details but I think NASA is vastly overstating the cost of man-rating active launch vehicles.

I might make an analogy to a software development project. Sometimes, it is faster and better to throw out the old and start over. How many times have we said that about Windows? Microsoft keeps patching it. If there was some goal to have some extreemly low number of bugs, I think it would cost more for Microsoft to keep patching windows trying to reach that goal, than it would be to build from scratch and just be careful this time. Their goal with windows was to get it to market. If they started over with the goal of fewer bugs, they might achive that.

I strongly disagree. Proper refactoring through incremental changes is IMHO a much safer way to achieve that since at no time do you actually break functionality. We can look at actual cases where a restart has been done. Both Netscape and Microsoft have effectively redone their browsers from scratch. That has resulted in a huge lag between versions and incurred substantial costs for the companies. When Netscape did it (as they created Mozilla), they lost virtually all their browser market share. Microsoft more recently did the same with the new IE 7. Again they lost market share though they managed to maintain their market domination.

Also, in the case of the Atlas V, it'd be equivalent to starting with a working program with relatively few bugs. And the problem here isn't reducing the bug count. Most of that work has already been done, but rather certifying the program for a particular high reliability application. I just don't see the need.

It is NOT repeat NOT the best system that can be developed. Not even close. It was chosen for strictly political reasons - many associated with the financial state of ATK (old Thiokol) that make the solid rocket boosters. They fought like mad for the present architecture and one of their business development people is now a deputy director at NASA. Geez what a coincidence! The could see that any modern vehicle design would eliminate large, costly and completely inflexible ( from a mission design standpoint) segmented solid motors. So they fought back with all the political arm twisting they could muster. And won. It was masterful really. A victory of fear ( of loss of jobs at ATK and NASA) and back-room politics over basic engineering.

Many other ideas were put forward that were far cheaper and had superior performance. More importantly they could be applied to the moon and be directly extended to Mars ( and be applied to unmanned probes as well). These ideas were systematically suppressed by Griffin and Horowitz by their insistence that papers presenting these alternatives be removed from space-related conferences. Dozens were pulled at the last moment to protect their hallowed ideas and make it appear that their architecture was clearly superior and had no challengers or alternatives. And make no mistake- these men are vicious and vindictive. They may put on a happy face for the public but their behavior to engineers who have posed serious questions is reprehensible. They see nothing unethical in the deliberate suppresion of engineering or cost data. Recent CBO assessments (delayed by nearly a year) of the EELV-derived alternatives bloated their costs and took NASA at their word (cost wise) and the ESAS was STILL $4B more expensive to do. This was taken by NASA spin doctors as VINDICATION of their ESAS architecture.

What is funny is that major anchors of the ESAS architecture have had to be abandoned as they were found to be unworkable. The four segment SRB, and use of SSME were KEY to ESAS and both are now gone. Replaced by an essentially brand new 5 segment solid and the non-man-rated RS-68 and a brand new "derivative engine" the J2-X. This forces three essentially new engines into the system at huge cost and risk. This shows the half-baked nature of the ESAS architecture- it was done by people who have never done an expendable launch vehicle before and have no real idea of the consequences to sophomoric design. Why should they? They are spending someone else's money!

If you want to see the vehicles that CAN take you to the moon and then Mars check out: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp= fec&ci=17607&rsbci=14917&fti=0&ti=0&sc=400

They can deliver all the mass you want with NO new engines and with a development time that is HALF of what NASA is planning. And at a cost that is less than 20% of the ESAS launcher development cost (when you remove gratuitous CBO bloat factor).

Does anyone else question the intentions of the sponsors of this event? The competition is sponsored by the SpaWar Systems Center (where the competition was held), the US Navy, and other military industrial greats such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing.

Given the substantial non-military uses of autonomous robotics do we really need the military funding? I for one do not welcome our autonomous-deathsub-controlling overlords. In fact, I hit on this point in a blog yesterday.