Slashdot Mirror
Shuttle Politics
TheLoneCabbage writes "Texas Rep. Joe Barton has been quoted today in an AP article saying that he is in favor of grounding the remaining fleet of shuttles. 'If we have to stop manned spaceflight for five or 10 years, then so be it.' The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in every 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable. According to OpenSecrets.org this may have more to do with Joe's friends than how much attention he paid to his math teachers." There's also an interesting piece on testimony given by the first Shuttle program manager.
Problem with his math is that he can't divide properly.
There have been 113 total flights, The true destruction odds are: 1:56.5 not 1:62.5
With his math we'll be safe to send up shuttles another 12 time before worrying about the odds again.
Do you Gentoo!?
From Robert W. Bussard's letter to Congress regarding the Tokamak fusion program:
Seastead this.
Soyuz 1, burned up on reentry
Nitpick: Crashed due to parachute failure, but didn't burn up. (Still not great for the occupant).
One catastrophe involving loss of ground crew on an appalling scale (Nedelin)
This accident predates the Soyuz program by several years.
might as well have a Senator Lockheed-Martin.
Disclaimer: I work for Lockheed.
I don't understand your point... surely Lockheed has proposals and products that compete with the shuttle, but they also have thier fingers in the shuttle as well. they handle the external tanks, where I work we do the data processing computers, they do the thermal protection, they support shuttle missions, provide other shuttle support services, and do other shuttle related work.
So yeah, they'll probably gain when NASA moves to the next-gen space exploration system. But they're by no means missing out on the shuttle action as it stands now. The thing about Lockheed is that they are very diverse... they handle IT for government sites (pentagon, bases, etc), they do package distribution for the US & UK post office, we do traditional rockets, they do air traffic control, airplanes, avionics, missiles, support services of all sorts - the list goes on an on. Go to the main Lockheed homepage and look at the list of products & capabilities. So you can't pull one proposal or project that Lockheed has, and say that they want the shuttle to die because of that.
The politics here are a hell of a lot more complicated than $14,000 in campaign contributions. I don't understand them all, to be sure... but neither do you.
_sig_ is away
Let me say, as someone who actually attended the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee hearing, that this cynical Barton- and government- bashing is ridiculous. What the Yahoo article failed to point out was that Barton unequivocally affirmed his support for manned space flight and ambitious space exploration, and has in fact supported every NASA budget request (read: every ill-designed, failed NASA initiative) over the last ten years.
His remarks were made thoughtfully and deliberately, not banging a shoe on the table. And as to remarks by MagusAptus that "Just goes to show that we elect the brightest and the best to congress. It would just seem reasonable that if we had to have these committees on everything, then the members of those committees should have at least *some* knowledge or background in the area," Congessman Barton has actually been on the S&A Subcommittee since the early '80s; he served when the Challenger crashed. And he also earned a B.A. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
Unfortunately, the soyuz, at a 7.5 ton payload capacity, has only a fraction of the shuttle's 25 ton capacity.
The current state of affairs is that only the shuttle fleet can get so much material into space in one shot. Russia had a few heavy launch projects in the works, but i think they've all been canned due to the dismal financial state over there.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I see Lockheed Corp listed as the Senator's number one contributor, but I don't understand why they would want the shuttle program killed. They own one half (with Boeing) of the company that gets paid to maintain the shuttles. Is there some new system that Lockheed is trying to sell the government that would replace the shuttle? If so, and it's ten years from being ready to use, would Lockheed just as soon forego the trouble of raking in 10 more years of government cash?
This innuendo is confusing. If the submitter has something to say he should say it.
According to the General Accounting Office (PDF document) a single Shuttle launch costs $759 million. I live in the real world, so to me, that still seems like an awful lot of money.
It then does around about 5.3 million miles.
So that's $143 per mile. To do what?
So far NASA hasn't come up with a good explanation why these are sound investments in the future. I'm sure that it could attract more support if it were to be open and say that the Shuttle is a statement of national virility and an essential part of the flag waving exercise.
But to claim that the Shuttle or the ISS are vital for industry or medical research is fatuous, and preparing for the manned Mars missions - well that would be just another black hole for flag waving.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The Russian Soyuz spacecraft has made 1500 successful launches in a life of over 30 years. Several hundred of those have been manned, with only one catastrophe. This is inaccurate in several respects. The Soyuz/R7 launch vehicle has a 97.5% success rate (1 failure per 40 missions). 106 of those launches have been manned with 2 fatal failures (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) and several aborted missions, including the Soyuz T-10A, where the launch vehicle exploded and only the recovery system saved the cosmonauts.
Think so? Let's compare and contrast that amount (the sum total) against 1 (one) B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber.
B2 Info
Hrmmm.. how many bombers do we have at 1.16b a piece? How many do we really need? Keep in mind that this doesn't even remotely account for the support infrastructure like the NASA budget did.
Thus we arrive at the moral dilemna. Let's see, we can fund science and space exploration, learning about our planet and ourselves in the process... or we can produce machines whose only viable purpose is to destroy human life and their surroundings. How much is just -one- of those snappy laser-guided missiles that we seem to be so fond of shooting at other humans?
Cruise Missle
$600,000 a pop to kill a handful of humans? I suppose I should be honored to be senselessly slaughtered by such expensive weaponry! Except I'm too [expletive] dead to appreciate it.
How about this? Let's go for the -BIG- picture for DoD:
DoD Budget
It's a problem of priority. There are some of us that feel that advancing human knowledge is worth more than producing more machines of warfare. What a senseless waste. Perhaps Darwin was on to something.
That's the posterior probability. It can't be used to predict what's going to happen, whether it be 1:56.5 or 1:1,000,000.
After all, you don't have to have all seven million tickets purchased for someone to win the lottery; it could be the second ticket sold.
Not to defend the man, because this is a stupid stance to take, but he represents an area near here at the University of Texas at Arlington, and the primary reason he would have such a high level of contributions from Lockheed Martin is because they have several locations in this area.
Opensecrets.org is based on how much employees of that company give; there's a MUCH higher than normal concentration of Locheed Martin employees in this area and in his district.
When making allegations like that, you should probably check into the facts. I'm sure that LMCO has some sort of sway with Joe, but there are many, many other corporations in this area that have just as much sway, if not moreso. For once, I don't think this politician's actions are based on something shady a campaign contributer has asked them to do. These stupid remarks really were just his thoughts on the issue. Scary.
I think you mean France (profits off oil-for-food) China (arms sales) Russia (both of the above).
Michael Moore is pretty funny at times, but he is not exactly a reliable source of information. If you want to learn something about American politics you would be better off reading a good biography of a President or two. You will find plenty of sensational dirt to keep you entertained, and you might actually learn something.
Seriously, saying that you learned about US politics from "Stupid White Men" would be like me saying that I learned everything I need to know about German politics by listening to "Die Gerd Show".
There's something called SGLI...Service Group Members Life Insurance. For ~$20/month, you get ~$250k coverage. That should pay for a nice little funeral (assuming you're announced KIA and not MIA).
It's not a million bucks, and you have to pay for it, but imho it's easily affordable and (more importantly) worth the expense.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
you aren't familiar with a math principle called reduction? 1-in-62.5 is equal to 2-in-125
The shuttle has flown closer to 125 times than it has to 62.5. I think that the Columbia disaster occurred on missios STS-107, which according to NASA, was the 113th mission of the shuttle.
FWIW, the STS-# designation of the mission is it's originally scheduled launch sequence - that is, STS-107 was slated originally to be the 107th launch. In the end, though, the launch order changes for a variety of reasons. The various recent problems with cracks, crewing issues, shuttle readiness, payload readiness, etc, cause NASA to shift the actual launch order around quite a bit.
woof!
With regards to "There's also an interesting piece on testimony given by the first Shuttle program manager.", the author of this op ed is well known for wanting to scrap all human in space activities. This should be considered when reading the article.
Rep. Joe Barton (news, bio, voting record), a member of the House Science Committee's space and aeronautics panel, wants the government to build a new, safer space vehicle or modify the shuttle so it can be flown unmanned.
It's a pure safety argument that includes pouring more 'billions' into the existing Space Shuttles. Ironic for a Congressman from a state that has no problem with liquor and firearms in moving vehicles.
Of the major industrialized countries, we give the lowest percent of our GDP as foreign aid.
As I recall, Sweden and Norway give some of the highest.
Urm, well, yes. Halliburton, the company VP Cheney worked for. Did business with Iraq before the first war, between the wars (even if Cheney denied it) and now got government contracts after this war.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck