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NASA spent ~1,000,000$ on nitrogen pressurized pens so astronauts could write in space. Russia used pencils

Urban legend.

Yep. Check the snopes site here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...

Or the Space Review site here: http://www.thespacereview.com/...

which ends with the conclusion "The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe."

See http://www.thespacereview.com/... and https://www.forbes.com/sites/q... for background. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003 said the shuttle program should be recertified (its safety to fly re-evaluated) if flights were to extend past 2010. Bush announced the retirement in a speech at the beginning of his second term on January 14 2004.

Because NASA didn't have enough money (remember when congressional Republicans were deficit hawks?) to continue to operate the shuttles and develop a successor, they had to end the shuttle to free up funds for a successor launch vehicle.

By the time Obama arrived four years later, the decision would have been a nightmare to reverse, so he didn't try.

Along with additional help from the United States.

But it's hard to do worse than NASA's SLS

http://www.thespacereview.com/...

It has been estimated at a per launch cost of 5 billion a shot, and a cost per pound that makes the shuttle look like Amazon Prime.

How expensive would it be to re-create the Apollo program?

"This graph shows the amount spent by the United States on piloted spaceflight from 1959 to 2015. It shows the importance of the Apollo program ($100 billion spent over ten years) and of the Space Shuttle ($200 billion over 40 years)". A quick search suggests that NASA's total annual budget for this year is something around $19 billion for context, so Apollo would consume a little over half NASA's total budget per year over the same ten-year period. (That $100 Bn figure is inflation adjusted as far as I can see, and yes, that's assuming that it hasn't become more expensive in real terms to do the same thing.)

Awesome article - please upvote!

How expensive would it be to re-create the Apollo program?

"This graph shows the amount spent by the United States on piloted spaceflight from 1959 to 2015. It shows the importance of the Apollo program ($100 billion spent over ten years) and of the Space Shuttle ($200 billion over 40 years)". A quick search suggests that NASA's total annual budget for this year is something around $19 billion for context, so Apollo would consume a little over half NASA's total budget per year over the same ten-year period. (That $100 Bn figure is inflation adjusted as far as I can see, and yes, that's assuming that it hasn't become more expensive in real terms to do the same thing.)

Resources, we have plenty of. Ability to get on with others, we have a real problem with.

If the US spent only as much as China on defence, they could have a complete Apollo AND shuttle AND space station program EVERY YEAR.

http://www.thespacereview.com/...

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

at places like NasaSpaceflight.com, which gets its hands on NASA documents rather frequently and is frequently posted to by people in the industry and in NASA and space journalists.

The subject was also covered in press conferences back then and was also discussed publicly by then-shuttle-manager Wayne Hale.

Here is just one of the related docs to wet your appetite, and here is an NSF article about it, although this one is not related to the study of turning the shuttles over to industry.

Here is a link to an NBC news story about one of the 2011 (3 years into Obama admin) options considered to keep shuttles flying until 2017.

Here's another thread from back then for you to tug on.

Now that you have a starting point and evidence that my post was not the fevered imaginings of an Obama hater, I leave it to you to dig around and discover that some of this stuff was just journalistic fluff as usual, but several of the studies were very serious and involved high levels of NASA people.

The whole "Bush killed the shuttles and Obama was a blameless and helpless victim of it" meme is politically convenient for Obama's more space-geeky followers and fanboys, but as usual when politics are involved, the story is far more complex and the mess is far more bi-partisan. This president is no shrinking violet when resisting Republicans in congress, who have greatly angered their base voters by caving-in to him on everything for many years, so his supporters have long pretended that his allowing the shuttles to die was because it was a locked-in irreversible situation before he got into office. That's simply never been the truth. Note: I am no Bush fan and am not trying to remove any blame from him, I'm just debunking the myths of the koolaide-drinking, pudding-eating, NikeShoes-and-purple-napkin-wearing Obama fans who deny well-documented reality while planning their future lives on the comet of perpetual happiness (google: famous suicide cults).

It's a religious viewpoint fueled by memories of colonizing North America, conveniently overlooking dozens of engineering impossibilities, and a religious foundation of sci-fi ideologies that are very attractive to a large percentage of Asperger's programmer types. They are also very often misanthropic, depressed doomsday cultists.

You'll rarely hear about colonizing Mars from real engineers, they know it's not possible. But from programmers? They think all technology just consists of sitting on your ass and typing at a keyboard:

#include warpdrive.h
#include 3d-printer-replicator.h

They vastly oversimplify the complexity of space, reduce dangers, and invent all kinds of fantasy scenarios to justify their beliefs, aka a religion.

www.distancetomars.com
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://www.centauri-dreams.org...
http://www.economist.com/blogs...
http://www.thespacereview.com/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

There have been numerous collisions over that time. For example, this article details eight known collisions. There may have been more unknown collisions of inactive satellites with small debris.

OMG, not the stupid lunar He-3 myth again. - http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2834/1

There are currently NO better-than-break-even fusion reactors.

There are no He-3 fusion reactors.

Any currently purposed theories/technologies which could (theoretically) use the difficult and rare He-3 + H-2 could instead use the far more common B-11 + H-1.

Saying that there's a lot of He-3 on the moon is like saying there's a lot of gold in the ocean.
Technically true, but practically useless.

Shuttle project cost/pound to leo $118 actual $8000/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

SLS/ORION is now looking at 14 billion +/ launch

http://www.thespacereview.com/...

If NASA has a hundred billion for the mission expect to cost several trillion.

Well, According to http://www.thespacereview.com/... to only need to make it to 80K to get your astronaut wings.

That's only because somebody decided an arbitrary limit defined who was an astronaut.

It's like somebody deciding that going to the state next door makes you a world traveller. You get the label because they said so, not because you actually are a world traveller.

The concept of what space IS anyway has been cheapened by considering low Earth orbit is outer space anyway. It's not. The ISS is as close to me as the next major city. It's not even far away.

80KM isn't space. Low Earth orbit should not be space. Even going to the moon, which is as far as we have ever gone, should be considered near space since it is still gravitationally bound to the Earth. Outer space should be defined, in my opinion, as at least beyond the moon, and I really wonder if the term should not be reserved for things literally outside the Sol system entirely.

I know, I'm in the minority here. But the real point here is that whatever name we humans choose to put on something or what category we choose to make it, does not in fact change what it actually IS.

And because President Kennedy died in 1963 (before he could completely back away from the commitment)...

Do you have any evidence that he intended to do that, or are you just looking for an excuse to blame everything on LBJ and Nixon?

It's fairly well known among space historians, though like much of the factual matters surrounding the space program it's practically unknown by the fanboys. Anyhow, a tape containing a discussion between Kennedy and Webb was released a few years back where Kennedy voices his doubts. In 1963 he proposed a joint mission with the Soviets, which has also long been interpreted as a backing away from his original commitment. The Space Review also has a two part story shedding some light on the issue.

And no, I blame nothing on Nixon - after the Congressional budget cuts of '65-'67, Apollo was already essentially cancelled. Nixon inherited a program already running short of funds and operating mostly on momentum and force a habit - and Congress disinclined to change that. He didn't kill Apollo, he just stood by while a patient already in a deep coma and dependent on machines for every bodily function simply slipped away.

And because President Kennedy died in 1963 (before he could completely back away from the commitment)...

Do you have any evidence that he intended to do that, or are you just looking for an excuse to blame everything on LBJ and Nixon?

It's fairly well known among space historians, though like much of the factual matters surrounding the space program it's practically unknown by the fanboys. Anyhow, a tape containing a discussion between Kennedy and Webb was released a few years back where Kennedy voices his doubts. In 1963 he proposed a joint mission with the Soviets, which has also long been interpreted as a backing away from his original commitment. The Space Review also has a two part story shedding some light on the issue.

And no, I blame nothing on Nixon - after the Congressional budget cuts of '65-'67, Apollo was already essentially cancelled. Nixon inherited a program already running short of funds and operating mostly on momentum and force a habit - and Congress disinclined to change that. He didn't kill Apollo, he just stood by while a patient already in a deep coma and dependent on machines for every bodily function simply slipped away.

This article argues that Elon Musk is in many ways like Werner Von Braun or the Soviet scientist Sergei Korolev (who pushed the Soviets into space). One thing I got from this article was that the original and primary motivation for building rockets was to make weapons. Von Braun and Kovolev almost singlehandedly pushed their own countries into building rockets to put people into space. Without them, we might not have had satellites as quickly or at all. Placing satellites into orbit and putting humans into orbit was once considered crazy. American government officials considered Von Braun to be eccentric, but they didn't care as long as he gave them better ICBM's. Now our entire civilization is built around satellite technology, and our moon shots have brought us technology advances such as the microchip.

When we talk about putting more humans it can sound a little crazy. However I don't think it is any more crazy than having people climb Mt. Everest, having bases in Antarctica, or sending three small ships westward into the unknown ocean to find a new world. We humans have an inbuilt desire to explore. To ignore that is to go against our fundamental nature.

If only certain key congress members would stop dictating NASA design and build a big ass rocket that will be too expensive to use and really not needed, the resources NASA already has could go into Nautilus-X.

You ought to read this and the origins of ULA.
thespacereview.com
and this
seattle times

...and the Falcon 9 Heavy test launch won't happen until that rocket is ready.

And in any case, the US government isn't paying a nickel for Falcon Heavy design or manufacturing or that test launch.[1] So they have absolutely nothing to complain about.

http://www.thespacereview.com/...

Doesn't the old saying go "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me" ?

What is it when it is fool me endlessly ? NASA does not bring down the cost of space access period. The shuttle didn't none of their boosters ever have. If we get really lucky we get commercial enterprises able to do end runs around them to actually make a little progress.

Really we should have NASA do what it is good at, robotic exploration and high risk high payoff research. Let commercial companies do what they are good at mass production and perfecting technologies.

Oh I believe you underestimate the stupidity of the electorate and the congressional love of pork.

Figures for NASA's SLS costs

http://www.thespacereview.com/...

They are putting the costs at a potential 5 billion/launch before any development overruns.

This is to get us to Mars. Brilliant like we have done so much with the Moon in half century since we went all out to get there.
 

Of course we absolve LBJ from any of this considering he had to curtail most of NASA's activities to pay for Vietnam the Great Society. Even back in the mid 1960s Johnson's administration was looking for a way out and even contemplated doing joint missions with the Soviets. After the 1967 Outer Space treaty NASA's budget was cut, which was before old RMN was in office. Yeah, LBJ he fostered NASA for years in congress and nearly killed it in his own presidency.

Space-X was funded by NASA to develop Falcon-9. Elon Musk stated that they "would have" developed it anyway, with profits from Falcon-1, but Falcon-1 was not profitable. This is not controversial; it is a matter of record. I'm not sure why you think it wasn't.
Falcon 9 was funded by a space-act agreement signed in 2008, "Commercial Orbital Services Demonstration." http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jo...
At that point Falcon 9 did not exist; it was not yet even designed. The contract states:

"The purpose of this Agreement is to conduct initial development and demonstration phase of the commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) Project. Under this Agreement, Space X will receive milestone payments from NASA to develop and demonstrate vehicles, systems, and operations needed for Space X to perform earth to orbital space flight demonstration

(followed by list of capabilities required).

Notice the wording. They are contracted to develop the vehicle, and the payments under this design and development contract were made as the vehicle went through design process, with payments for successful design reviews. (A separate contract, commercial resupply, paid for the actual supply flights to the station.)

Again: this is not controversial. It is well known to anybody who was actually paying attention at the time to the boring details of who is paying. Jeff Foust at Space Review, for example, wrote:
http://www.thespacereview.com/...

"the two companies funded by NASA to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft to ferry cargo to and from the International Space Station, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX... COTS, for NASA, has been a good thing: for an agency investment of about $800 million, it supported the development of two new launch vehicles, Antares and Falcon 9, and two cargo spacecraft, Cygnus and Dragon."

But things like moving mass? There's nowhere to go. We're there already.

No one's colonizing Mars because we got better at making smaller bits.

I wonder what would happen if we looked at space predictions from 1981? Oh all of a sudden they're not "bad", they're rigorous engineering proposals that must be followed to the letter for the benefit of the species. Hilarious.

http://www.thespacereview.com/...

Oh no, suddenly we're no longer bad at making predictions! Uuuhh, it's the evil gubment, it's the species, it's because of this or that! It's never that it simply makes no sense. Weird.

The muslim outreach point is merely taken from a clumsy statement by a NASA Administrator, and as far as I'm aware doesn't correspond to ANY budget item. (feel free to point one out) The other study you criticized involved 3 individuals, one of whom was a grad student, and took somewhere on the course of a few months... let's be generous and suppose each person costs 100k/yr, 3 people * .5 years = $150k. This is about .001% of NASA's budget. Considering that it might meaningfully inform NASA policy (unrest on Earth could conceivably impact discussions about colonization efforts, technological solutions to environmental problems, or exploration of off-planet resources) I think this is quite defensible.

SLS, on the other hand, really isn't. Consider that SpaceX (which has an excellent track record of fulfilling their promises) is planning on selling the Falcon Heavy for $135 million. At that price, very few people are going to go for the far more expensive but similarly capable SLS. Perhaps 1 launch a year might be achieved, with only NASA and perhaps secret DOD missions as customers. With all the development costs and staffing requirements for the system, a launch rate of 1/year would mean that the cost for each would be $5 billion. If things shake out more like what's on the current manifest (1 or two launches a decade) then that will turn into $15 billion. Source: http://www.thespacereview.com/...

How would any responsible politician push for such a program, when it is 30-100x more expensive than free market solutions?

Lifting all the "strands" necessary would take many thousands of launches.

Not from what I'm seeing. At least one source says that a 'starter' cable can be had as light as 9 metric tons. Another says 20.

A Falcon Heavy can lift over twice that to orbit, though maybe not all the way to geosync...

After you get the first thread down, you use that thread to lift more mass to increase capacity.

The original comet rendezvous-er is coming back to Earth 35 years later. I hope we do more than just wave as it goes by.

I wonder if this will ever be viable as a form of travel rather than just space tourism, or if it will always be cost prohibitive. Most people can't afford a quarter million dollars, but for a few thousand dollars, I think a lot of people would love the opportunity to fly in space at Mach 2+ and get across the country in a couple of hours.

The funny thing is that when you get to significant distances where suborbital spaceflight matters, you might as well try for orbital spaceflight as the energy needed is the same or even more.

A couple of years back Scaled Composites + Virgin Galactic did suggest they would build a "Spaceship three" vehicle. I haven't heard anything about it for some time and it seems like that idea has been dropped or at least shelved for a very distant future (more than a decade away). I suspect that if the current vehicle produced by The Spaceship Company (yeah, that is its name) finally gets into operational status and some of the deposit backlog becomes actual flying customers, you will start to hear about the next generation.

Some interesting other businesses besides people going for thrill rides includes bona fide space research, where there are some people interested in using SS2 for testing components on spacecraft prior to sending them into orbit. They currently use sounding rockets, parabolic aircraft, drop towers, and other sorts of systems for this kind of activity, and it is cheap enough (in comparison to orbital spaceflight) that it provides a good practical testing environment. Indeed several universities and even NASA research grants have already been signed explicitly to do this kind of activity. Many of these contracts are generic enough that they are not tied just to Virgin Galactic either, and this looks like a long term and sustained application for this vehicle even if the trill ride market dries up completely.

Point to point delivery of some manufactured goods is definitely an application being looked at, where being able to deliver a component over a distance of several thousand miles in a couple of hours would be considered justification for a flight all by itself. Yes, there are some things that spending a quarter of a million dollars or more to save a few hours in shipping time would be worth the effort. It also gets the rather strange notion of delivering something if "it absolutely, positively, has to get there yesterday" (when crossing in the right direction over the International Date Line).

Another application that has been considered is delivering Rangers or SEALs in a "space plane" that could literally go anywhere on the Earth and arrive in just a few hours. There are definitely some drawbacks to such a vehicle and it has been debated as to if it is even worth bothering to try this concept at all, but there are definitely potential military applications for a vehicle like this.

I mention these other applications for revenue that Virgin Galactic and/or the Spaceship Company could have simply to point out that the only way it will become cheap enough for mere mortals like you and I to use something like this is if other much more profitable business opportunities also exist using the same technology. I'm sure other business opportunities can be found for a vehicle like this, but unfortunately most business ideas for space usually require substantially cheaper transportation options than currently exist, thus profit margins so low (at least to start with) that even well financed companies with investors looking at the long term prospects are unlikely to invest in developing such vehicles. It really is trying to find a way to make a profit, and once that happens other ways to utilize a vehicle like this can be found.

I'm not convinced that the price will go down that much simply because the just slightly cheaper business opportunities simply aren't there.

good engineering projects for students, but of little use otherwise--and possible, in large numbers, an orbital debris nuisance.

or you might even find, with a simple Google search, that CubeSat collisions have already occurred.

Or, you can simply go on blindly putting your foot in your mouth, criticizing comments on subjects you know nothing about.

Argentina is not China, Russia, and has never been an enemy, or at war, with USA.

At least officially.

If Argentina would have gotten lucky and sunk a carrier you might have found out whose side we were really on. It is probably a good thing you didn't, or you might glow in the dark. Hell, we even gave them access to Vortex. The relationship doesn't get any more special than that.

Seriously, President Kirchner is shaping up to be a replacement Hugo Chavez. You're not a US or UK ally. Do not overplay your hand.

You know, I know the US plays hardball in its own interests.. most nations do. But I would not count on screwing around with the UK, Australia, or Canada and not expect to end up with the US in the fray on their behalf.

Not only not enforceable: I always thought that there were treaties against this, as in no private company from any country can claim anything outside the atmosphere without some sort of international agreement. See Outer Space Treaty.

You are right, but it is stupid and outdated. It was promoted in the heat of the Cold War - mainly to prevent "weaponization" of NEO and to prevent the cause perhaps of a territorial war over say, the Moon. Even thogh neither power could hardly do that at the time. There is an excellent article HERE Good credentials.

Actually hardness corresponds EXACTLY to cost in engineering.

There is no such correspondence. To build a single blue LED requires a vast amount of knowledge and infrastructure. But an actual blue LED costs a lot less than the oh, trillions to tens of trillions of dollars of infrastructure and knowledge required to make it.

Plus, I think the cost of a Mars mission is vastly overstated despite its difficulty. Apollo is not a good choice for a comparison because it was a rushed, prestige project (unless of course, a Mars mission becomes a rushed, prestige project as well). There was almost no interest in controlling costs till by the first manned landing in 1969 (by which most of the money had been spent).

Err, we have this thing called 'gravity'. I hate to be such a realist, but if you don't switch to some other means than rocketry, you won't get to that price. see: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/233/1 And most of the other technologies are not 'feasible' yet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

NASA is careful to point out that the "recommendations are not legal requirements"; rather, they are guidelines "offered to inform lunar spacecraft mission planners interested in helping preserve and protect lunar historic artifacts and potential science opportunities for future missions." Although complying with the NASA Recommendations will make mission planning more difficult and expensive, GLXP teams have non-legal incentives to operate responsibly near the Apollo sites, including public scrutiny of their missions and a desire to protect their reputations. ...
... No US government agency, however, currently has jurisdiction to regulate the conduct of non-governmental spacecraft on the lunar surface. NASA can establish requirements for its own missions, but not for those conducted by a private entity.

Neil Armstrong, my here. I would love to fly there someday and see those footsteps in the lunar dust, if the micrometeroids have not destroyed it. They'll probably put up a velvet rope around it to keep us tourist riff-raff away. If only. I wish. I truly wish. [Fly me to the moon!!! ;>) ]

NASA has strict regulations on what can be touched on the moon, as I recently found out while working on the Lunar-X prize. I wanted our vehicle to spring launch 20 or so tetrahedrons with cameras, and was shouted down due to huge amounts of paperwork that would be supposedly be required...

See this for more info

A trip to L2 is said to take longer but be cheaper per kg than that to L1... http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1808/1

I think that the energy (and mass of fuel) required to launch from L2 is a lot less than L1 since l2 is on a gravitational "tether" of about 450,000 km (more or less). launching at a particular spot in the orbit means it has a considerable initial velocity.

A trip to L2 is said to take longer but be cheaper per kg than that to L1... http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1808/1

The world (especially voters and politicians) believe in nutjob armageddon/rapture bullshit and are hell-bent on making sure it happens as soon as possible

Let me help you out there -

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, AKA the Soviet Union, governed by the religion suppressing atheistic Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" operated according to the "scientific principles" of Marxist-Leninism, built an actual Doomsday weapon, that is still active: Soviet Doomsday Device Still Armed and Ready and Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine.. Apparently secular socialist progressive totalitarians are just as crazy as anyone else. Salud.

Related: Moscow arms against nuclear attack

Nearly 5,000 new emergency bomb shelters will be built in Moscow by 2012 to save people in case of potential attacks.

Out of sight but not out of mind

William Burrows’ classic 1986 book about satellite reconnaissance, Deep Black, opened with a vivid scene of retired US Air Force Major General George Keegan recounting how in the early 1970s he had become obsessed with Soviet civil defense preparedness. As head of Air Force intelligence, Keegan had ordered his junior officers to gather all the satellite photography that they could of Soviet underground shelter building. Eventually he compiled a massive amount of data indicating—he claimed—that virtually every large apartment building erected in the Soviet Union since 1955 included a fallout shelter, factories had underground bunkers, and there were “seventy-five huge underground command posts.” A few of these underground facilities housed command centers for the Strategic Rocket Forces and were buried in the Ural Mountains. In particular, Yamantau Mountain (“Evil Mountain” in the local Bashkir language) and Kosvinsky Mountain were considered to be the Soviet equivalents to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, home to NORAD (not to mention the W.O.P.R. and the Stargate).

Shelters part of long-term civil defense plan - Shanghai leaders stress the date of 2012 is purely a coincidence
Assessing PLA Underground Air Basing Capability

Bunkers for all

Switzerland is unique in having enough nuclear fallout shelters to accommodate its entire population, should they ever be needed.

IKEA in Hell - The interior design of Sweden’s giant nuclear bunker.

Israeli leaders spend day in 'Nation's Tunnel' nuclear bunker

The frightening truth of why Iran wants a bomb

According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World. In every generation, the Imam chooses 36 men, (and, for obvious reasons, no women) naming them the owtad or "nails", whose presence, hammered into mankind's existence, prevents the universe from "falling off". Although the "nails" are not known to common mortals, it is, at

No state can conquer the moon or put weapons on it according to the Outer Space Treaty. This author says "The current doctrine of international space law is restrictive and suffocating. For real progress in space to be made, the Outer Space Treaty and its res communis doctrine must be rethought in terms of the realities of today."

The problem is this isn't international but interplanetary, and the Outer Space Treaty is a lot more restrictive. It's a topic that's been the subject of a lot of discussion lately.

Maybe they should try magnetic shielding. For a human spacecraft, it'd be quite an undertaking, but for protecting a small electronics module, maybe it wouldn't be so difficult.

Then, three years later, it was the Atlas program’s turn again. On March 25, 1993, an Atlas 1 lifted off from SLC-36B at Cape Canaveral AFS, carrying the first of the US Navy’s new UHF Follow-On communication satellites. The launch proved to an inauspicious start to the new program.

A mere 22 seconds after liftoff the vehicle’s sustainer engine began to lose thrust, ultimately reaching only 65% of its nominal thrust level at T+103 sec. The Centaur second stage performed normally, but was inadequate to the task of making up for the low performance of the sustainer. The payload ended up in an orbit far below the desired geosynchronous transfer orbit. The spacecraft used its own onboard propulsion system to climb to a higher orbit, but one that still proved to be too low to meet mission requirements.

Analysis showed that the sustainer thrust decay was due to a simple problem. The Atlas sustainer engine thrust level was controlled by a regulator that was adjusted by turning a screw. A set screw was to be tightened to ensure that the adjustment screw did not move due to in-flight vibration, and that had not been done properly. The result was another fatal Oops!

The Ariane rocket was brought down by a forgotten rag in 1990.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/826/1

i think there was one USSR spacecraft that may have been designed to carry weapons, but i think it failed during takeoff and i'm not sure it actually carried any weapons. unfortunately i couldn't find a website that mentions it.

one country stationing nukes in space would be a sure fire way to trigger global space race though. too bad science would take a back seat

Wikipedia
NASA*
About
Spacepen
The Space Review
BBC History Magazin

If you've done the research provide an opposing source.

* NASA admits that they originally ordered pencils for over $100 each but backtracked. Latch on to that if you want to bash wasteful government spending, but remember they did respond to the public backlash.

"Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means. "

The US is a signatory, which makes this law for any US registered company. How long the treaty remains viable is another question.

The preamble of the OST states, “Believing that the exploration and use of outer space should be carried out for the benefit of all peoples irrespective of the degree of their economic and scientific development.” Like the “common heritage of mankind” language in the LoST, this opens the way for an attempt at control and taxation of the commercial space activities by international bodies.

NASA is a contractor agency which has a large R&D wing. Generally, NASA doesn't build rockets anymore. Rockets have been assembled by maybe by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but there are contacts out to others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NASA_contractors

While NASA should receive *more* funding for bleeding edge R&D, like permanent moon base and then Mars, a lot of the money is sent to NASA contractors and subcontractors and subsubcontractors. NASA leverages commercial opportunities and have been doing that since their inception.

Where do you think Integrated Circuits (ICs) come from? NASA private sector contractors. NASA was buying up almost all of the early silicon for the Apollo program. Without these "deep throated corporations", we would not have had computers that we do have today and that is just one example.

Anyway, this is complementary service to sounding rockets. This is not even going to orbit.

http://rscience.gsfc.nasa.gov/srrov.html
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1228/1

Finally, there is really nothing "special" anymore about flying a sounding rocket, or even getting to LEO. This can be done by commercial services. Where R&D is needed is long term projects like survivability in space, Mars, outer solar system and beyond.

NASA has to retrieve the camera because it may contain proof that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings!

If there's someone Lou Friedman should be complaining about, it's Senators Nelson and Shelby and their fixation on providing pork to large aerospace contractors in return for bribes, I mean campaign donations.

I would have hoped that someone in his position would be better informed, frankly.

Actually, while the summary doesn't mention this, this is pretty much exactly what Friedman says in his piece:

http://thespacereview.com/article/1947/1

Having caved in to Congressional special interests on the Space Launch System (SLS), the administration is now prepared to sacrifice science and exploration programs in order to prematurely start its development, with requirements that will neither be met nor needed for more than a decade.

I get a little frustrated every time I see people confidently asserting this. The assumption seems to be that because there was no market in the past this will be true forever...after all, if it were possible wouldn't somebody already be doing it? This same argument could have been used prior to the advent of the transcontinental railroad or the internet. In each case it was difficult to see more than a marginal business case before it happened and took off. The same is true with space. That being said, there are a lot of smart people whose job it is to look closely and try to see a pathway to a genuine market, who think it can happen. There are a lot of Newspace players I could cite, but since they are easy to dismiss as dreamers, lets look at Boeing instead.

Boeing is a conservative company and I think if they are going to do the CST-100 they are going to want a fairly fault tolerant business case to help mitigate the risk of fielding it. I think they are willing to give it a shot (in competition with 3 other players) only because there is a mixture of different market possibilities which provide redundancy if any single market does not work out for them.

-NASA ISS servicing
-Future non-ISS NASA missions (if Orion never flies)
-Sovereign Clients to Bigelow stations
-Tourism to Bigelow stations
-Private research to Bigelow stations

This last one is something which I think is often overlooked and which could be bigger than people think because I think many people ask "How many companies would have both the big $$$ and the research needs to rent a module and fly their own astronaut?". I think this question makes some fundamental assumptions that are probably wrong and consequently leads to the answer (not very many) which causes this type of demand to be sidelined in the discussion.

The more likely scenario is the rise of some companies that act as middleman human tended in space lab operators. These companies are the ones holding the leases with Bigelow and flying the astronauts, and then they turn around and provide a turnkey, low hassle, cost effective, user friendly way for companies and universities to get their research projects flown. Because the projects are paying for only what they need and not having to personally manage astronaut staffing & station leasing, the market is open to a much broader set of users than might otherwise be possible.

Because of the commercial nature of things, I am sure Bigelow and these middleman companies will be happy to keep CCDev craft flight rates and station facility sizing in line with the demand from the market so there won't be long waits in line for research projects to fly like you've seen with ISS and other options which have been available historically. Potientially this could cause what has historically been a fairly minor market to bloom into a much larger one.

Don't believe it'll work out? Have a look at the success of Nanoracks on ISS:
http://www.thespaceshow.com/detail.asp?q=1591

Beyond that, history does seem to give us a high degree of confidence that there will be at least a minor tourist market of a couple people per year based on flights of anousheh ansari, charles simonyi, dennis tito, eric anderson, greg olsen, guy laliberte, mark shuttleworth, etc. particularly since Bigelow would be cheaper than a Soyuz/ISS trip. Beyond that, there even seems to be a market for beyond earth tourism: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1855/1

Even if tourism is a relatively modest business, it adds to the cumulative business case provided by the research market.

Then there are the soveriegn clients: http://www.space.com/9358-bigelow-aerospace-soars-private-space-station-deals.html

It is unclear at this point how large this market is, but it looks real enough to at least