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Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in 1972 and 73, not functioning yet still going into deep space. Voyager I and 2 still going in interstellar space over fourteen light years away from Earth. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/am... http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/in...

Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in 1972 and 73, not functioning yet still going into deep space. Voyager I and 2 still going in interstellar space over fourteen light years away from Earth. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/am... http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/in...

Well from what I have read we could meet out existing energy needs by covering 1% of earth's surface with 1% efficient solar panels since the earth receives about 10,000 times the energy from the sun that humans consume daily. Now granted we probably couldn't extract all that energy, and we would need to have some surplus built in for times like cloudy days so something like 10x our current daily consumption should be plenty which is still doable since 5% efficient panels are the really cheap crap and that only would require covering 2% of earth's surface. Now jump up to 10% efficient panels and we are back at 1% coverage and these are common and the numbers only get better with something like the higher end but still fairly common 14% panels. Granted local storage would be needed to provide smoothing and having a large national grid with larger regional storage would also probably be needed (if you have huge local storage this becomes less important) but with more intermittent renewable entering the energy market things like this will be needed anyway.

This also doesn't even get into cutting down on wasted energy which we have a lot of in the US. I don't want to sacrifice my standard of living one bit and I wouldn't want anyone else to either but to say going green would require living a lifestyle comparable to that of a nomadic loner is just being stupid.

BTW, the actual 2001 report from NASA on PED's admits that all the evidence is purely anecdotal and the ONLY thing that attempts to lend the data any credibility is pilot flying hours:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...

Even though ASRS PED events are anecdotal there is one category of the database that provides
supporting credibility to these events--pilot flight hours. The total mean flight time of 10,790
hours from Table 1 indicates that pilots reporting PED events are very experienced. In order to
gain some appreciation of what constitutes a very experienced pilot it is helpful to consider the
significance 10,790 hours converted to years of aviation experience. In today's market a typical
recruiting company's hiring minimums are 3300 military hours or 5300 civilian hours for a
position with a major airline. Once hired a pilot could then acquire approximately 700 to 800
hours annually. If, for example, a military pilot with 3300 hours starts flying with a major airline
averaging 700 hours a year it would take that person about 11 years to reach 10,790 hours.
Finally, if it took 10 years, a conservative estimate, for that pilot to accumulate the initial 3300
hours then 10,790 hours would have taken 20 years to accumulate. That amount of time is
indicative of a very experienced pilot.

So flying hours makes one an electrical engineer? That's some pretty piss-poor science.

Sigh. Not this again.

Airplanes don't fall out of the sky because, first, there's a pilot on board to think about what his instruments are telling him. Second, airplanes usually have back-up systems for important stuff.

NASA has a voluntary database of in-flight incidents. There are issues related to "Passenger Electronic Devices" (Event Type category is "Flight Deck/Cabin/Aircraft Event" and value is "Passenger Electronic Device") that don't cause the plane to crash. However, it can affect aircraft radios used for navigation and voice communication and, on rare occasions, will cause the autopilot to disengage--assumedly due to odd signals being received from the above.

So the whole, "I don't know of any planes that have crashed because of a cellphone call" doesn't mean there isn't interference. It just means that the pilots handle it--sometimes by having the Flight Attendants re-check to make sure that people have turned things off. I remember reading about a pilot who got a signal that one of the cargo doors had opened while at 30,000 feet. He ignored it because if that signal had been true, he'd also see a whole bunch of other warnings about depressurization and the plane would probably be acting strangely.

Recently a Maysian Airlines flight went missing. You may have heard about it in the news. Nobody can understand why the pilots would have deviated from their course and had trouble communicating...

Because we have more CO2 in the atmosphere when we used to have for a long time and the amounts increase fast.

Like so:
http://climate.nasa.gov/400ppm...

So are you suggesting they should publish their methods and data? Good thing that's part of the scientific process. Pick a reference: http://climate.nasa.gov/eviden...

People often deny fact and logic based on nothing more than conviction. If that doesn't make them stupid, it makes them something much worse.

Agreed, but it is very misleading since not all planets in our solar system share a point near Earth's barycenter. This can lead to a good deal of confusion when asking questions such as, "Does Jupiter revolve around the Sun?" No, it does not. But how many people do you think would knee jerk a "Yes"? So the correct response anytime someone asks if a planet revolves around a star is "No." And that is because they do not. Let's use our words to educate instead of mislead due to a lazy explanation. If we want to teach something to someone who cannot understand what we are trying to teach, we are teaching them incorrectly. They should not suffer due to our laziness. (This comment is directed at our education system; not any of the posts in this thread.) http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/barycenter/en/

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/go...

It didn't work right, did not fully deploy and it was considered a success?

What the summary does not make clear (but which you could have discovered yourself had you followed the second link) is that the part that failed to deploy was a "bonus" test - not the main goal. The main goal was to test the basic handling and flight characteristics of the test vehicle. Two additional tests are planned (and were planned long before today) to test the SIAD and the parachute.
 

Now I see why SpaceX could replace NASA and this is coming from a Sci geek.

Being a science geek doesn't make you an expert on well... anything, it just makes you a science geek. In this case, you haven't [censored] clue what you're talking about - and as proof I invite you to consider the results of SpaceX's first three launches, as well as the preperations for the first Dragon COTS demo, and the second flight's problems as well as the ongoing problems with their current launch campaign. You're just repeating cargo cult crap you've read elsewhere from similarly ignorant soi-disant "geeks". SpaceX has a lot going for them, but unlike you, they and NASA live in the real world. And in the real world, shit breaks. Especially (essentially) one-of-a-kind prototype hardware on it's first flight - like the LDSD.

This is something called a low-density supersonic decelerator. It's probably a bit different from anything else that has been happening "for the last 50 years." It's meant to allow a parachute to work effectively in the low-density atmosphere of Mars for spacecraft that are too heavy for conventional parachutes or the bouncing type of landing that was used for the Mars Exploration Rovers.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/n...

OK, let's assume the Sun has no hydrogen at all, and all its mass is made of the same material as Earth.
According to http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pla... the Sun is about 2e30 (i.e. 2x10^30) kg.
According to ditto, luminosity is 3.85E26 J/s, or W. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... the Earth's inner lava heat comes from
232 Th at 3.27E-12 W/kg mantle
238 U at 2.91E-12
40 K at 1.08E-12
235 U at 0.125E-12
Adding these up you get 7.39E-12 W/kg mantle. Multiplying by the solar mass you get 1.47E19 W, which is much less than the luminosity, by about 26E6 times.

Btw, at 3000 solar neutrinos a year, that's one every 2.92 hrs, out of the 10^28/s*3600*2.92=1.05E32 neutrinos per year (granted most of them fly off to somewhere else, the solid angle of Earth from the Sun is small.) With Avogadro number at 6.023E23, 1E28/s is 16603 moles of neutrino/s, or, on the ballpark of 1 hydrogen atom per neutrino at 16.6 kg/s converted, while the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... page has a picture saying the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen per second. So the fraction of hydrogen atoms fusing that produce a neutrino is that small? 620E9 kg/s vs. 16.6 kg/s?

I'm sleepy now, and I haven't even read the wikipedia page on neutrino detectors yet. But it's the weekend, I'll read up on it, and maybe post more later.

I've had thoughts about how we assume that extragalactic space is pure vacuum, when it might actually be pretty dense gas compared to what we think it is, and that could explain why so many galaxies are spiral (spiral galaxies are like fish-swirls on the surface of a pond, when there was no rotation to begin with, just a downward sinking motion, rotation, angular momentum, and swirls generated by the sinking from slight instabilities) and vacuum happens only where the extragalactic smooth uniform gas-soup collapses gravitationally, kind of like throwing a magnet on an iron dust filled paper, it's vacuum near the magnet, and there might be a minimum vacuum point in the solar system), why they lost track of the Voyager probes (true the antenna distance was huge, but it might have been an aerodynamic drag by the weak vacuum,) why extra solar system spaceships then need to be aerodynamic with shuttle like reentry heat shields, and then how other fast flying objects out there impacting this ever permeating "dark energy" hydrogen soup would glow from shuttle like reentry heat shield effects, or shooting star meteorite heating effects, stuff you see on a lot of astronomical pictures (the heat in the rings might be partly exploding material, but what if it wasn't originally glowing when it was propelled to high speed - I don't know, can such a thing be out there? Like what's the temperature of a black hole, can it be cold and can that explode? So anyway, if there is aerodynamic drag past Pluto, then the Voyager probes have a finite distance from us where they will stop due to that drag, and interstellar travel then requires continuous propulsion and very low speeds, but possibly abundant fuel everywhere.

What are the proofs that extragalactic space is full vacuum? Even if all matter has coalesced into mostly galaxies, quite a bit may still be out there, and the vacuum inside galaxies might be stronger than outside them. us Still, what kind of rate of neutrinos does a calibration device generate, and do you have to wait like a whole year before you pick up a signal?

I wonder what they are doing to guard against contamination from Earth bugs. IIRC, the Mars rovers showed up as dirty.

Lots. Europa is in the elite Category III / IV of planetary protection, along with Mars and Enceladus,

“where there is a significant chance that contamination carried by a spacecraft could jeopardize future exploration.” We define “significant chance” as “the presence of niches (places where terrestrial microorganisms could proliferate) and the likelihood of transfer to those places."

The Europa probe is likely to get a little less scrubbing, significantly less than an Europan orbiter, but more than the Juno spacecraft, as, although it will be in a Jovian orbit going near Europa, it can be placed in a "safe" orbit away from Europa at the end of the mission. But, Europa orbiters and landers will get the full treatment.

By the way, even if Mars landers had some bugs, they were sterilized, which undoubtedly greatly reduced the total bio-loading, Just because you didn't wash your hands once before dinner doesn't mean you should stop washing them altogether subsequently.

I wonder what they are doing to guard against contamination from Earth bugs. IIRC, the Mars rovers showed up as dirty.

Lots. Europa is in the elite Category III / IV of planetary protection, along with Mars and Enceladus,

“where there is a significant chance that contamination carried by a spacecraft could jeopardize future exploration.” We define “significant chance” as “the presence of niches (places where terrestrial microorganisms could proliferate) and the likelihood of transfer to those places."

The Europa probe is likely to get a little less scrubbing, significantly less than an Europan orbiter, but more than the Juno spacecraft, as, although it will be in a Jovian orbit going near Europa, it can be placed in a "safe" orbit away from Europa at the end of the mission. But, Europa orbiters and landers will get the full treatment.

By the way, even if Mars landers had some bugs, they were sterilized, which undoubtedly greatly reduced the total bio-loading, Just because you didn't wash your hands once before dinner doesn't mean you should stop washing them altogether subsequently.

A first mission would have a spacecraft orbit just 16 miles over the moon's surface, analyzing the material ejected from the moon, measuring salinity, and sniffing out its chemical makeup.

Actually, the first mission dedicated to Europa will be the Europa clipper, focused on Europa, but not in Europa orbit. The radiation near Europa is so intense (even for machines) that dipping in and out of the field in an inclined Jovian orbit will save about a billion dollars over going into a Europan orbit.

I see many posts pointing to the burning of fossil fuels, and the subsequent release of CO2 as the source of global warming. Presuming that the fuel was once fossils, and the fossils were once something entirely different. Where was the CO2 back then?

I'm not a "denier", and haven't honestly taken a stand in this area, though I'd tend to believe it when I read things like this http://climate.nasa.gov/scient...

taking measurements from inaccurate thermometers and scant coverage from over a century ago, and claiming we know global average temperatures in the 19th century is beyond ludicrous.

The coverage was a lot smaller than today's but it was so much cooler then, that the error is less than the change.

No amount of massaging of data can make credible comparison to today's grid of sensors.

Yes it can. It's just that the error bars are larger back then.

Short answer yes.

It's not clear from the summary (or the linked article), but this isn't a mission at this point. This is a concept selected for Phase I study.

From the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) news release:
"NIAC Phase I awards are approximately $100,000, providing awardees the funding needed to conduct a nine-month initial definition and analysis study of their concepts. If the basic feasibility studies are successful, proposers can apply for Phase II awards, which provide up to $500,000 for two more years of concept development."

This effort is independent of the ongoing Europa mission studies (e.g. the Clipper concept.) The Draper concept may end up getting a mission if the results prove promising. Personally, I have doubts that this will prove credible, but that's the whole point of the NIAC studies.

It's not clear from the summary (or the linked article), but this isn't a mission at this point. This is a concept selected for Phase I study.

From the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) news release:
"NIAC Phase I awards are approximately $100,000, providing awardees the funding needed to conduct a nine-month initial definition and analysis study of their concepts. If the basic feasibility studies are successful, proposers can apply for Phase II awards, which provide up to $500,000 for two more years of concept development."

This effort is independent of the ongoing Europa mission studies (e.g. the Clipper concept.) The Draper concept may end up getting a mission if the results prove promising. Personally, I have doubts that this will prove credible, but that's the whole point of the NIAC studies.

It's not clear from the summary (or the linked article), but this isn't a mission at this point. This is a concept selected for Phase I study.

From the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) news release:
"NIAC Phase I awards are approximately $100,000, providing awardees the funding needed to conduct a nine-month initial definition and analysis study of their concepts. If the basic feasibility studies are successful, proposers can apply for Phase II awards, which provide up to $500,000 for two more years of concept development."

This effort is independent of the ongoing Europa mission studies (e.g. the Clipper concept.) The Draper concept may end up getting a mission if the results prove promising. Personally, I have doubts that this will prove credible, but that's the whole point of the NIAC studies.

Many of the 3rd stage boosters from Apollo are either in a heliocentric orbit, or smashed into the surface of the moon after the Command Module separated from them.

Historically, we aren't very good at not littering bits of spacecraft all over the place when we do these kinds of things.

If he wants to put a live human on Mars, or at least make martian orbit, he has to solve the radiation shielding problem. In order to do that he will have to basically carry a large bulk shield into space. Water is ideal for this purpose because it contains a lot of hydrogen that can absorb the secondary neutron radiation that is formed when protons that make up the solar wind cause spallation in the material of the vehicle. To deflect charged particles in the first place you need a strong magnetic field which requires a power source. Here is a link. http://www.nasa.gov/directorat... . This is the only unsolved problem, besides who will pay the bill.

I grew up with this this list. It used to be on paper. That was kinda funny.

I'm sure every TLA or FLA in the US has a similar LOA.

It's a pressure vessel full of sweating and breathing people with the outside skin temperature probably in single digits of Kelvin most of the time.

You mean, on average? http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...

NASA makes drinking water from piss up there. I wonder if it has repercussions for the taste buds. Espisso?

composition and concentrative properties of human urine

By the way my latest OSHW machine can do drinking water from urine too:

Twibright Distillcooker

That depends on what kind of ship it is, how it is powered, how big it is, etc. A small enough ship - or one with an exotic enough propulsion system, could wind up being undetectable to us.

Then again, if the aliens had FTL travel, they could equip a small projectile with it, crank it to 99% of the speed of light, and crash it into Earth. The resulting explosion would likely end all life on Earth. (See https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/.) Even if they began the projectile's journey by Pluto and we detected it immediately, we'd have about 6 hours until impact. Plenty of time to panic, but not enough time to come up with an effective defense.

Can you speculate why you think space might be competitive? Space resources are mind-bogglingly plentiful. Just the main belt asteroids have enough to support 10 quadrillion people. Imagine dismantling moons or even Mars-sized planets for raw materials. You can sustain unimaginably huge civilizations. Why would there be a need to fight for resources?

Hey... Citation was requested... I provided.

A citation was requested, but you did not provide any citation worthy of consideration.

No idea to whom the website belongs.

It doesn't matter to whom the website belongs. What matters is whether the citation is either to a recognised (eg ISI listed) peer reviewed journal appropriate to the subject matter, or to some similar source of data carrying due authority and credibility. I mean a citation to someone's slashdot comment, for instance, would hardly be admissible would it?

Right this moment - the global warming appears to have leveled-off. These are simply facts... no parlor tricks here.

Just for a quick check throw the yearly anomalies (here's the GISSTEMP data) into R and see if the slope is flat. Here ... I'll make it easy for you to get stared (but do improve on this and double check my numbers for the likely transcription error %-) ) :

year <- c(1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013)
anom <- c(33, 46, 62, 41, 41, 53, 62, 61, 52, 67, 60, 63, 50, 60, 67, 55, 58, 61)

Then plot it and draw a line of fit. (For interest you can check the correlation using cor(year, anom).)

plot(year, anom)
fit <- lm(anom ~ year)
abline(fit)

Does that even look flat to you?!

Now given that this is part of a curve which is showing an unequivocal rise over the last 50 years, let alone the entire record, please devise a test to demonstrate that these 18 years show any significant "levelling off" of the long-term trend. And then get back to me with the code. Hell no, get back to the scientific community, with your code ... fame awaits you!

The real question you ought to ask however, is what relevance so short a period (15, 16, 17 or even 18 years) has to data which is not only extremely noisy, but is known to be subject to multi-decadal cycles? If someone asks you to look at climate data over a period of less than at least half a century ... grab your wallet tightly!

Facts? No parlor tricks? Having examined the data for yourself, do you still believe that?

Actually the Armstrong limit describes the PRESSURE at which water and similar fluids boil at body temperature. Yeah, if you withdrew some of your blood and put it in an open container, it would boil. But the blood in your blood vessels is not at outside pressure. Arthur C. Clarke had it right in 2001. You can experience a vacuum briefly without the blood in your blood vessels boiling. You do need to mind your eyeballs, mouth, trachea and alveoli though.

You probably know this already, but the truth of the matter of exposure of the human body to a vacuum is a bit less horrific than uninformed lurid speculation has it. You're not going to last long, but your body does not quickly blow up like a balloon from the blood boiling. There is actual experience of 10+ second exposure.

What wavelengths get through without attenuation/distortion, then?

1550nm, which is the same range used in long-range optical fiber transmission.

More info on the projects linked from http://esc.gsfc.nasa.gov/267.h...

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/... " It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small."

Yes, but the question is WHY did this one person feel it necessary to hide some defect from management?

If you'd just RTFA, you'd see that the defect had been widely reported within GM and brought up at many, many review meetings. What let things go wrong was that no engineers were willing to declare that the result of the malfunction would be a safety issue rather than an annoyance (like VW window switch issues that just cause the window to stick).

No GM engineers were willing to pull an Allan McDonald http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_Colloquium1012.html ala the Challenger launch. A difference between GM and NASA being that GM had lawyers who knew that once an engineer categorizes a defect as a "safety" issue they're screwed if they don't fix it. It can be scary for a late-career engineer to take responsibility for committing that much spending until they're very sure that it can be justified.

And there's not a durn thing GM execs can change to prevent thus from happening again because they can't accept the costs of treating every sneeze like its MERS.

And I use http://spotthestation.nasa.gov... myself, and don't want a $1500 electric bicycle, but there are people who like cute little LED gadgets and have $150 to spend on them, and who want hipster-cool, retro-styled, expensive electric bicycles. So why should I knock them?

And 100th repeat: Slashdot doesn't get paid for running positive stories about a person or device or whatever. Sometimes it's nice to look at something and say, "Y'know, that's kind of cool and the person making it is kind of likeable." That's pretty much Tim's thought process at a show or conference when he points his camcorder at someone or something.

What OP meant was that all the R&D done by and for NASA from 1945 through 2006 or so gave SpaceX the knowledge, technology and expertise to improve the exercise of going to LEO.

And we're all dumber for him saying that. I realize that the trillion dollars or so squandered by NASA and similar projects is an impressive sunk cost. But we can still choose to recognize that just because a lot of money was spent, doesn't mean that the result is a significant contribution to the modern world or to SpaceX in particular.

The problem here is that as some people have noted elsewhere, this is a fifty year old problem. But it's a fifty year problem with almost no progress made by NASA over that entire period. All that money, effort, and fancy vehicle development just didn't help.

SpaceX has taken that remarkably weak start and turned it into a viable business. But rather than recognize their efforts, I see a variation of the "spinoff" myth. NASA money taints the history of research of rocketry and hence, it's all due to NASA. There's a meatball in the woodpile.

Yes. SpaceX is a classic example of privatising profits and socialising costs.

And your post is a good example of speaking before thinking.

All the tech was essentially hard won through government spending, 'big science', and 'big engineering'.

We don't have to take an anonymous coward's word for it. When NASA studied what SpaceX had done through November 2010, including access to SpaceX's internal records, and asked "How much would it have cost?" for NASA to contract out the same effort (here, developing the Falcon 9 and two initial launches of that platform, plus development of several rocket engines), they found that they would have required a contract of almost $4 billion dollars (revising it to $1.4 billion after access to internal SpaceX information) while SpaceX actually did it for $300 million.

It is NASA's own determination that they would have taken at least ten times as much money (not counting cost overruns!) by the usual means that NASA employs (contracts of cost plus fees) to match the feat of SpaceX's development of Falcon 9. That's the facts which you ought to learn about.

The real tragedy of the commons here is that we continue to burn huge sums of public money in known, deeply flawed approaches to doing anything. SpaceX didn't "privatize profits and socialize costs" here. It make gold out of stuff that the US had discarded and ignored. SpaceX made somewhat more useful those many decades of vast squandering of resources and people.

So lets see. This is an NRC report that ONLY considered using SLS as the launch vehicle, and concluded that you cannot get to Mars with that, something has to be done differently.

How about _trying_ something different then for a change, stop trying to build redundant launch vehicles, we already have plenty, and actually invest in enabling technologies that DO get us to Mars.
Like, putting spacecraft together from modules like was done with ISS and other stations before that - except without involving costly human ops. How about refuelling the spacecraft on orbit. How about doing research on partial-g environments, and launching a centrifuge. How about sending some rats en route to Mars to study different radiation shielding approach effectiveness. The list is endless. Actually, NRC PRODUCED all the enabling technology roadmaps, they are available here :
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oc...
How about actually fricking following these roadmaps ( SLS is NOT in there ) and getting some stuff done ? Advanced radioisotope stirling generator that was outlined as the CRUCIAL enabling technology piece for future exploration ? Cancelled ! Funds are required to build a monster rocket to nowhere instead ...

But, if you keep doing the same thing over and over, no reason to expect a different result. Kill the waste, and start investing in future.

You must prove your case, which has not happened.

Oh yes? Has it not?

AGW makes a handful of claims. First, that the earth is getting warmer.

Second, that the oceans are getting warmer.

Third, that sea levels will rise

Fourth, that arctic ice will retreat.

Fifth, that Greenland's ice will melt..

Sixth, that antarctic ice will melt.

I could go on, but let's make #7 that man is causing it.

So do tell what's missing here. Again, please use scientific evidence in the peer reviewed literature. Most of the links I've provided above refer you to their sources and extra reading and come from such things as IPCC reports. And again, I'll wait.

Nasa talks like that. Musk knows his audience. http://history.nasa.gov/SP-420...

Your intuition fails you in this case (and the scientific method is in fact your friend). It turns out we can measure this with the CERES satellite and we find that low thick clouds cast a refreshing shadow and reflect sunlight back into space, while high wispy clouds reflect little sunlight but will trap the infrared heat beneath them.

CERES is a package of three telescopes that watch our planet from Earth orbit. "One telescope is sensitive to ordinary sunlight," says Wielicki. "It tells us how much solar radiation is reflected from clouds or ice." The other two telescopes sense longer-wavelength infrared heat. They reveal how much heat is trapped by clouds and how much of it escapes back to space. - http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...

more heat causes more evaporation, which causes more clouds, which causes less heat.

There is no such balancing effect. Clouds can reduce or can increase heating, both, depending on local climate and time-of-day.

Furthermore, water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas. You don't want more of it!

"Because water vapor is a greenhouse gas, this results in further warming and so is a 'positive feedback' that amplifies the original warming."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"On balance, scientists arenâ(TM)t entirely sure what effect clouds will have on global warming. Most climate models predict that clouds will amplify global warming slightly."

http://www.earthobservatory.na...

"Therefore, the overall net effect of contrails is positive, i.e. a warming effect. However, the effect varies daily and annually"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This has been withdrawn. From

http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/g...

We therefore do not believe this source to be in outburst. Instead, it was
a serendipitous constant source in the field of view of a BAT subthreshold
trigger.

This circular is an official product of the Swift-XRT team.

Manned space flight still takes up a huge chunk of NASA's budget. $3 billion for ISS operations alone in 2014, a lot more than the $1.3 billion allocated to astrophysics (from what I can tell, roughly half of that $1.3 billion is development of the JWST).

Anyhow, the U.S. didn't lose manned spaceflight capability because of budget problems at NASA. It lost it because our Senators inserted too many provisions requiring NASA to use certain designs and/or parts contractors. It was engineering design by accounting committee in the worst possible form. NASA, rightly IMHO, balked and refused. The engineers in this country are capable of great things, but not when Senators take the engineering decisions out of their hands and force the design to be based on who contributed most to political campaigns, rather than on sound engineering principles.

Decades ago the US GPS gave wrong coordinates to civilians, a few 10 meters off. That is what I call distortion.

Deliberate distortion, aka "selective availability" was turned off.
There are multiple other sources of distortion.

The ionosphere does not distort or hinder GPS signals, why should it? The signals are in the wrong wavelength for that, and: they come from the outside. Again: easy to google.

Yeah, you should really give this google thing a try:

GPS and Ionosphere
The influence of the ionosphere on GPS Operations (contains a nice "Summary of GPS Errors")
Ionospheric Effects on GPS
There even are pretty pictures.

Hey FatLittleMonkey:
What I'm on about if real world data and performance.

Reading off from SpaceX marketing pamphlet doesn't make it magically happen on the launch pad.

Progress has a payload of less than 2.5 tonnes

It's just too bad NASA says the latest Falcon 9v1.1 CRS-3 had a payload of less than 2.1 tonnes (where did the missing 1.1 tonnes of payload disappeared to? Up Elon's anus?)
And as mentioned earlier, the Russians are cheaper than the $133million commanded by SpaceX.

The whole return payload issue is irrelevant.
The only return payload of any consequence is astronauts, most everything else is waste that can just burn up during reentry.
And my SpaceX marketing pamphlet says the Dragon is not capable of returning anything with a pulse.

So instead of reading off fro SpaceX marketing pamphlet, I suggest you put it to some real use like wiping your asshole after taking a shit.

I've been to DC, more times than I care to think about. I presume you're talking about the Udvar-Hazy museum and to KSC as well as JSC and yes there are a few rockets around but one rocket does not a program make and there were problems with Skylab and after the last mission the did push it further up and then vented the atmosphere inside. Skylab as a project was a last minute, "hey we have a few Saturn Vs and 1Bs hanging around" type of deal but studies had been conducted all the way back to 1960 on an orbital lab,

Sorry, I followed the the space program very carefully back then. I even followed it more closely when I worked for a NASA subcontractor on the shuttle but that was another life.

First there was Apollo 8 and the uproar that was created when they interrupted a football game. Never get between a football game and scientific discovery, we know who will lose that argument.

Despite being able to show this milestone in audio and visual communications, a spokesman for CBS said nearly 1,000 calls of protest were received in short order after the network left the game. The calls all were in the vein of “How dare you interrupt the game?” One person even said he hoped the astronauts “never came back,” according to the CBS spokesman.

Next congress took away funding for missions going to the moon, the typical "been there, done that" mentality crept in. We'd also gone to the moon, landed there etc. Many members of congress felt that there was little value to continue the moon landings. James Webb was no longer in charge of NASA and Johnson was out of office. Oddly, the public never spoke up or argued with that decision to stop the moon landings.

Even NASA's own statement on Apollo says this:

Finally, the Apollo program, while an enormous achievement, left a divided legacy for NASA and the aerospace community. The perceived "golden age" of Apollo created for the agency an expectation that the direction of any major space goal from the president would always bring NASA a broad consensus of support and provide it with the resources and license to dispense them as it saw fit. Something most NASA officials did not understand at the time of the Moon landing in 1969, however, was that Apollo had not been conducted under normal political circumstances and that the exceptional circumstances surrounding Apollo would not be repeated.

The Apollo decision was, therefore, an anomaly in the national decision-making process. The dilemma of the "golden age" of Apollo has been difficult to overcome, but moving beyond the Apollo program to embrace future opportunities has been an important goal of the agency's leadership in the recent past. Exploration of the Solar System and the universe remains as enticing a goal and as important an objective for humanity as it ever has been. Project Apollo was an important early step in that ongoing process of exploration.

An anomaly in the national decision-making process. That's why we can't seem to do anything "difficult" in this country unless it's war related.

As for keeping Skylab going, there's three 1Bs left and that's the only vehicle we had until 1981 to even get to Skylab. There were also two "could fly" Saturn V rockets, one's at KSC the other is at JSC on display. The one at the Rocket Center at MSFC was never flight ready it was for testing, that means two which were intended for moon landings. So that means we could have done at least 5 more missions to Skylab possibly until the shuttle came along. It could have been fixed, nursed, etc. but the costs of operating it and doing all of that outweighed the national priorities. There were also real world things going on like two interceding oil embargoes and double digit inflation that happened as well in the 1970s. Congress' attention and the public was focused on other matters.

Another view from some space guy, Dr Phillips: http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...

1) The franchise did need a swift kick, just not to the head (it had enough of that with Voyager/TNG movies/Enterprise).

2) Actually, Star Trek was the most expensive pilot in history and pushed the boundaries by having a black woman, a Russian, an Asian, etc. Those things were unheard of at the time. In the original pilot "Number One" was a female character - she was cut/replaced because she didn't test well with women oddly enough. As to the utopian nature of Star Trek it was intentional. Roddenberry wanted a world that had moved past racism/nationalism/war/social ills. The reason for this was two fold, one was that it allowed them to explore social issues in a non-threatening manner. Two, that the aliens/situations could represent aspects of humanity as they were in the 50s/60s contrasted against a utopian ideal.

3) The science grounds the story. Even if the science is just theory and in the end is proven to be false, the strength of scifi is that these things that are and might be possible. It's that grounding that inspires and brings scifi above just another special effects mind numbing waste of time. Star Trek is far from perfect in that regard, there's a lot of stuff that's bogus/wrong, but there's also a lot that was based on actual science and some that became reality http://www.nasa.gov/topics/tec...

Give me all the mind blowing special effects you want, so long as common sense/logic/basic intelligence are respected along with a solid story being told. I don't expect the next revelation in film - just something that has more intelligence than Love Guru.

To add to this, also sterilize it to practical limits given danger to the flight hardware. Many of the early Ranger lunar-impact missions had hardware failures on the way, eventually strongly suspected to have been caused by damage due to heat-sterilization:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...

          Once they backed off on the degree of sterilization, the rate of random failures dropped dramatically.

Not only great science. Great and sound engineering, also. The document behind the second link has visibly been written by good engineers, who understand their trade. Remember the old tongue-in-cheekish adagium: "without engineering, science would be only philosophy"....