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NASA Admin Says Shuttle and ISS are Mistakes
Teancum writes "NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was recently interviewed by the USA Today Editorial Board regarding the current direction of the U.S. Space Program, and in the interview he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources. As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources. Griffin quoted in the interview regarding if the shuttle had been a mistake "My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Regarding the ISS: "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.""
Might the money wasted on the Shuttle and the ISS have been better spent on developing apt-get? It seems like a far more efficient method for delivering packages to the SPARCstation than a shuttle.
the Space ship One team had 250 billion. What they could have accomplished. Bureaucracy and the status quo seem to have limited their functionality. However, building space vehicles is going to require breaking a few eggs. Hindsight is always better than foresight, just ask George Bush (1 & 2)
I'm sure I've heard that the ISS was supposed to have a more equatorial orbit, but when Russia came on board the orbit was tilted to give them easier access to it.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
I think I may have misinterpreted something along the way. =)
Sure, that $250 billion could buy us another year in Iraq!
But seriously, the ISS is not a waste of money. When you think of all the research done there, the international goodwill spread there, it is well worth the cost. I do wish the degree of internationality was a bit larger. Simply having Americans and Russians isn't very diverse -- it would be nice to see China/India/other aspiring space powers to join in the fun (and help with the bills).
Headline doesn't reflect the Michael Griffin quote in the summary :(.
I wonder if he is aware of the recent wars that the US has gotten involved with. Talk about real wastes of money. At least the Shuttle program, and the ISS to a lesser extent, have furthered our knowledge of science and engineering, rather than just our ability to mindlessly destroy.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
$250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources. Griffin
... say... defense companies to make a killing from.
Yes... Other things indeed. A... war... perhaps. Say... a war for oil and
Or . . . welfare...
Or.. even... rebuilding a flooded city that could have been fortified for $20bn ahead of time.
Or hell, even paying off a whole 5% of the debt!
I RTFA and can see what he's saying that the shuttle and ISS were basically mistakes, and I agree. However, I'm not so clear about his proposed alternatives. Is he shilling for Bush's "Man to Mars" mission and saying that should have been our goal since the 1970s? That would certainly be a wise career move (at least for the moment) but what purpose would it serve to send a man to Mars? We can't even get some of our unmanned probes to the Martian surface successfully. Maybe we could try to get a probe there and back to Earch first.
The space program benefits those it was designed to benefit. Thank you for the future we have today, Raytheon, General Dynamics, etc...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
When you consider our prodigious investments in both combat and weaponry, it's hard to see any kind of space exploration as anything other than progress.
Having no space program would be a mistake. Having an inefficient one just reminds us that there is always room for improvement.
Do you like German cars?
Or building hurricane-proof levees near, let's say, New Orleans. That would've generated another $200BN ...
As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources.
"Useful"? I hate it when people use words like that in reference to the sciences. It's like they think every last penny of the national budget that's not being spent on Medicare or disaster recovery should be spent feeding the homeless.
How do you define "useful"? This is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Their entire charter is building giant cans that explode out of one end in order to throw chunks of metal into orbit. They're science, which means $99 out of every $100 they spend goes toward what amounts to research and development of ideas nobody else can implement, and then working with them for a couple of decades to see what comes of them.
How can you gauge the "usefulness" of the Cold War space race in the 1950s and '60s? Yet that race eventually led to the technology and processes which, today, have placed hundreds of communications, weather, and astronomy satellites in orbit. Was any of that "useful" at the time? Heck no. We haven't gained one "useful" bit of knowledge from our trip to the Moon in 1969, but we didn't know that would be the case until we actually went there.
NASA's budget is on a shoestring as it is. Give them credit for doing what they do with as few dollars as it is. You never know when an investment will pay out until it does.
It's fairly well known that the space shuttle was a compromise between NASA and the military. In order to get the budget, they agreed to design requirements that involved weird payloads and the ability to launch them into polar orbit. That in turn drove the design to be what it is today.
In terms of the space station, it seemed to quickly turn into an exercise to divide up the money according to country and state. I'm not even sure what science goes on up there any more. These days the reduced crew seems to spend their time repairing the place. Crazy.
Does anyone have any links to a more verbose explanation of his stance? This USA Today article is almost as bad as reading the comics. In particular I'm curious as to what orbit he would have had in mind.
That's a whole different kettle of fish to the saying the ISS was a mistake. Several NASA officials are on record to the effect that NASA didn't want to build the ISS in such a low orbit, but agreed to do so in order to accomodate the Russians. Some of that might be coloured by the failure of Skylab, but it was also to enable the station to be of use of the ISS as a launch point to the Moon and beyond. It's kind of ironic that with the ISS project starting to show serious signs of floundering that it's NASA that's currently having problems getting to it, despite the lower than desired orbit, and the focus of manned spaceflight has once again returned to visiting the Moon and reaching Mars.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Damn it!
"Only now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule."
No no no no.
Going to the moon is a publicity stunt. The only way that is "back on track" is if the trip itself will be used as a testbed for new technologies and techniques intended to support longer trips, like to Mars.
But even a trip to Mars at this point seems wasteful. I love the notion of traveling the stars and look forward to tea and danish on Alpha Centuri one day.....but not as our country is embroiled in more problems and debt that your average citizen can comprehend.
1) Cheap, reliable, frequent trips to geosnychronous orbit.
2) First generation platform at one of the Lagrange points.
3) Lunar observatory on the dark side.
4) Another Hubble-like telescope at L3.
5) Space elevators, aynone?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
He offers plenty of criticism of the current plan, but the article lacks one important detail:
- Exactly what would Mr Smartypants have had us do with the money?
I mean, he states the shuttle was "deeply flawed". What would he have built? Kept shooting Apollo capsules up forever more? Built an Apollo 2? And if the ISS isn't in a good orbit, what orbit would he prefer? And additionally, how were we supposed to know the Shuttle wasn't a solid idea, until we had actually built a few and tested them operationally?
It seems to me he's just trying to ride the wave of popular opinion that says the shuttle must go and the ISS isn't interesting. It's plenty easy to offer criticism, but it's a bit harder to come up with an viable, alternative solutions. If he's going to be so critical as to call the last 30 years a mistake, than it's only fair he steps up to the plate and specifically outline what he would have done better.
Slashdot could benefit from fark's [Obvious] tag.
What he should have pointed out is that manned exploration of mars and a manned return to the moon is also a giant waste of resources. Why not do these unmanned, as we are having terrific success with our current unmanned missions?
Robots don't have psych problems, waste elimination problems, urinary tract infections, etc.
Both of those were ambitious, much sought after projects that gradually had their budgets reduced. The ISS became the Incredible Shrinking Space Station, and the Shuttle became a big dumb booster with wings.
I think the shuttle could have been a much better investment, if it was designed with the idea that parts would be upgraded and improved over time, and a certain amount of the budget was invested in doing this, we would have ended up with a much more viable long term solution
Bush himself was quoted on TV last week saying he was in Texas to watch an learn about the interaction between state and local government relief efforts after Hurricane Rita. He said he's got "a lot to learn" about those government operations. Bush's credentials include "governor of Texas", prior to being appointed president. I guess he was too busy "working hard" to learn about his job down there.
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make install -not war
When people state that a arguably successful endeavor was "was extremely aggressive and just barely possible", I have to wonder exactly what is behind the statement. The shuttle has been successful on a number of fronts, too many to list here. Yes, exploration is a dangerous business--an not just space exploration. You can always look back in history for dangerous expeditions and high casualty rates. Test pilots, famous historical exploration, modern-day exploration (in space, underwater, and caves), unnamed and unrecorded Viking, Chinese, Phoenician, Portuguese, and Polynesian explorers, etc. I am sure you can find many harrowing tales of death and suffering in the name of exploration. I am sure there are a number of tales of failed Colonial settlements which ended tragically. It makes me wonder if we have lost our tolerance for casualties in the name of science and/or exploration. If it wasn't for seemingly foolhardy or impossible endeavors, would we have really learned anything of value?
I don't understand what you're complaining about. This guy isn't doesn't like frivolous expenditure of money, and somehow he's a bad guy? Would you have preferred more of the do-nothing status quo?
Sounds like you don't like him simply because he's a Bush appointee, which is hardly relevant in this case. Besides, he right. NASA has been horribly mismanaged for the lat three decades, and it's time someone on the inside came out and said that.
I think you need to brush up on your world events. We tried that. And when the goods wern't going to some warlord of the country we were trying to help, we were basically told to stay the fuck out and mind our own business from the rest.
As Richard Feynman's brilliant analysis from 1986 clearly states, the shuttle's main engines were NOT designed properly and are doomed to be both expensive to maintain and markedly dangerous to use.
t ml
A link to his comments is at http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.h
He has a wonderful explanation, in terms that non-engineers as well as engineers can understand, about how to build complex devices. Good engineering, he says, comes from dividing the task in to component parts, creating specifications for those parts, building samples, testing them to their limits, retesting them to various other limits, until you have a complete understanding of all the failure modes of that component, as well as the reliability of your manufacturing process for that component. Then, you assemble multiple components together and test that assembly together in all the modes you can conjure up, to create what I have always heard termed, "A Well-characterized System".
As he points out, the space shuttle main engines (SSME's), though complex and "groundbreaking" in the sense that they were very big and incorporating some (at the time) quite advanced technologies, they were NOT WELL CHARACTERIZED on a component basis. To my knowledge (although I'm not a NASA watcher with as much fervor as some) I don't believe the SSMEs have EVER BEEN analyzed and re-engineered to create characterizations of their failure points, reliability, etc.
The fact that NASA's next plan is to use them in the follow-on vehicles for heavy lift only testifies to NASA's complete lack of focus here. They should put out several contracts for heavy lift engines with well-characterized failure modes, with focuses on reusability, reliability, maintenance cost, and overall operating cost.
We're soon going to be stuck with the next-gen heavy lift using components of unknown reliability, which forces us to replace component parts ("tune-up" or "overhaul") the system too often and with too large an expense.
Feynman was right. Solve the root cause. Engineer these things with good methodologies. And don't tie us down to next-gen-of-schlock-engineering if we don't have to be. I congratulate the able engineers who worked on the SSME's, but I respect Feynman's analysis that correct procedures benefit lowering long-term costs and ensure safety of the admirable crews who pilot our national spacecraft.
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You are a liar and a loser. You criticize Griffin without any grasp of the facts, and in doing so lie and distort his significant record. Griffin was distinguished head of the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Before that he worked at NASA and previously did important work for SDI which led the development of the Delta anti-missle system. When he was appointed to head NASA he had just been elected to be president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a group of scholarly aeronautics engineers. He is also shockingly well educated: BS Engineering from University of Maryland College Park Masters in Aerospace Engineering from Catholic University Masters in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California Masters in Applied Physics from Johns Hopkins Masters in Civil Engineering from George Washington University MBA from Loyola College, MD BS Physics Johns Hopkins He was working on his BS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins when he left for NASA. He plans to return at then of his term. He co-wrote what many believe to be the definitive textbook on space vehicle design used in virtually every graduate aeronautical program. In general, you are an asshole. Griffin is not a hack. He is a shockingly well qualified man. His views expressed here are refined, excellently thought out, and very reasonable. Disagree? Fine. Say why and be prepared to be ripped apart. Assholes like you are the reason qualified people avoid politics and positions of responsbility. You labeled him a hack without even knowing anything about his impressive qualifications.
Yes, war does drive a lot of research and development. But not the sort of war that's going on in Iraq, mind you. The US is so vastly advanced technologically that such research isn't really necessary. They can already destroy entire cities like Fallujah with relative ease. Killing people isn't a challenge for them any more.
Of course, the US, Britain, etc., are still getting their asses kicked daily by the citizenry of Iraq who have had enough of their incompetent and anti-democratic presence there. So perhaps more research and development does have to take place. It wouldn't be in the field of technology, but rather in that of the social sciences (ie. learning how to not alienate the rest of the world).
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
NASA waited too long to move past the shuttle, by now they should have been useing the next genneration of shuttle one that can fly into orbit. This thing that they are doing now is just a waste.
If it was up to me I would cut NASA just to unmanned stuff and set more prizes to private business for achiving goals like orbit and moon orbit etc.
To those to say we could have spent the money to feed the poor and other things, the space program has taught us things we could not have learned on earth and things that help or one day will help all mankind...
NASA Admin Says Shuttle and ISS are Mistakes
is not the same thing as
he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources
which is not the same as
"It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible....we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in"
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
This is not meant to be a troll. I love the space program and everything about it. But I do have a serious question to make sure I'm not overlooking something.
At this stage of the game, what is it that we can do on Mars with a manned mission that we cannot accomplish better, cheaper, and safer, with a robotic mission?
I really don't see a point in a manned mission to Mars until we've been on the Moon long enough to have a permanent station of some kind there.
As much as I loved Apollo, I'm not sure I see that it really accomplished anything with manned missions that a robotic mission couldn't have done. Especially since if I'm not mistaken only one or two real 'scientists' went on any of those missions.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I think most of us SysAdmins new that IIS was a mistake for years now.
we owe a good deal of our peace-time technological progress to NASA. There are thousands upon thousands of everyday things we use that came from NASA research.
And most beloved people on Earth? Yeah, because all those people here in the US that were on welfare loved the rich. People tend to think so well of the generous rich that give the poor enough to keep being poor. All those places in Africa that we in fact did feed in the last few decades - they loved us so. Built little temples in homage to us, sang our praises...
OR...we could stop treating them like children, and open up markets. Like we're doing now.
If you don't believe me, take a look at the actual charter, aka 'The National Aeronautics and Space Act'.
Items like "research, development, demonstration, and other related activities in ground propulsion technologies as are provided for in sections 4 through 10 of the Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Research, Development, and Demonstration Act of 1976" don't necessarily have anything to do with "giant cans that explode out of one end in order to throw chunks of metal into orbit".
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I could be wrong, but I thought the Bush administration had said we would hit the moon by 2010 and Mars by 2020?
How is it that Kennedy says we'll do the (at the time) completely impossible within 10 years and they do it 9 years later, and today we can't even decide if we'll do the completely possible (and redundant) within 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years - or ever?
Lets go back in time. Back, say as far as the 1970's, to a time when people thought the world was flat and the moon landing was a farse. Oh wait. O.K. Lets not bother because people still beleive those things. How about we just take away the things those people have learned from scientific exploration. O.K. I still have nothing. Well, I guess he is correct. The shuttle and ISS where a complete and total waist of money and time. Everything we needed to know about imaginary things like - What effect does space have on people if they are there for long peroids of time and what is the feasability of a reusable craft - were already known to be the devil's lies. U.S. money is better spent supporting our missionaries and soldiers in those crazy arabic counties.
Good bye Karma I'll miss you.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The ISS is a very different station to the Freedom / Alpha designs that came before it.
Essentially concieved as an international project from the start using design elements of station Freedom, it would always have had an orbit which intersects Baikonur and French Guiana.
As it is, the shuttle only operates (or has been operated) between orbital inclinations of 28.5deg (which is not all that equatorial anyway) and 57deg. (the station orbit being approx 51.6deg).
That 'advantage' of the low 30's / high 20's orbit is the added assist from the earth's rotation which means higher payload lift. However, it also means a limited number of de-orbit opportunities and IIRC a marginally higher initial re-entry velocity (as a factor of the wider orbit due to the shape of the planet?) - For a decidedly shakey platform like the shuttle which may yet need to make an emergency de-orbit, it would seem with hindsight like a poor choice.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
"It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
Yes, man should avoid things that are aggressive and barely possible....things like going to the moon or going to mars...make up your own.
Is anyone else bothered that this guy is in charge of an organization that we consider on the edge of "barely possible" and he considers such things as mistakes?
I wonder what his vision is? I assume from that statement that its either moderately aggressive or not aggressive at all, and very possible. Lets not explore science because at this point...we kind of know whats possible...why look at the barely possible. Those supercolliders....garbage...get rid of them.
I wonder if he also subscribes to the intelligent design hogwash....because I think one of its tenants is that some things are just too aggressive and on the edge of possibility (too complex) that we as humans can't hope to understand them.
It's Michael Brown in Space.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Omg what are you talking about, we got the memory foam bed out of nasa teknol0gy. Definately worth the 250 billion
Feeding half the world, indeed.
Thats roughly 3 billion people.
250 billion can only buy these people $1 worth of rice a day for not even a 100 days.
As for education...forget it.
Sure you can use the money smart, say for some agricultural development and get some more rice out of it in the long term, but we dont do that. We buy rice and drop it from planes.
Compared to that, the space shuttle is developed with great foresight. I mean, it has a landing gear. Bags of rice don't.
Using a disposable fuel tank, like the shuttle, isn't a bad idea. NOT using one you have is.
I recall hearing a critic ask "why didn't you send each fuel tank into orbit? There could have been a huge array of 120+ tanks used as a base for a mega-space-station."
Considering it would only take a small ammount of energy to go that extra step, that thousands of engineers didn't think of it, or worse were not listened to, is a disgrace.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
I'm only basing this on the summary text, but you're telling me that we can get 30 years of space program for about the same price as 3 years of war in the mid-east?
Sounds like a good deal to me.
When I read the submission I said "hell ya!"
As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources.
Yes! What could the individuals that were taxed to pay for this have done with this money? Build 5 million houses? Buy 50 million cars? Each 20 billion meals?
Who knows, because the money didn't enter the economy in an efficient way. It went to cronies with clout who used it in ways that didn't build wealth as it should.
Then I reread the submission and realized the author meant "what would NASA have built if they spent the $250B wisely?"
Answer: they wouldn't use the money wisely. They can't.
I don't like him because he's been part of that mismanagement. I don't like him because he's not taking any responsibility for the problems he's enabled. I don't like him because he doesn't actually have any vision for the future that will keep American leadership in space exploration/science/development. Doesn't that sound like every other Bush appointee? What's to like about that?
Your comment is exactly the kind of defense we always hear about these Bush hacks. They screw up in their standard ways, denying responsibility, offering no actual leadership. Then their critics are accused of just "hating Bush". We hate Bush because he screws up in such familiar ways. He's earned our hatred, along with the cronies he's surrounded by. And that hollow defense that ignores their incompetence is hateful, too.
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make install -not war
Imagine the beowulf cluster you could build with $250 billion!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
Ciao
I agree. The idea of going to mars is quite appealing. I am in favor of furthering our knowledge of the universe and life beyond our small planet. However, with all of the economic challenges that we've got, there's no question that the money could go to some better use than flying to mars. Honestly, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fly a handful of people to mars for what purpose? Just to show that we can? Meanwhile, there are thousands of Americans living in poverty.
In some ways it doesn't seem right that we don't take care of our people better than we do before spending billions on space exploration. The priorities seem mixed up to me.
Actually, I've always quietly agreed with the folks that have questioned why wer're sending
people up there instead of manned probes.
However our leadership, and the leadership of several other countries have a vested interest
in manned space exploration now. From what I understand Japan and Russia
have pieces of the space station that have been waiting for launch for some time.
The EU seems to have an interest..
I think Michael Griffin stuck his foot in his mouth; at the very least he could have
chosen his words more carefully.
I believe in the 60's JFK made a challange of going to the moon by the end of that decade. They did it. So why is it going to take 13 more years to do what has already been done. I mean it took them less then 10 years to do it with more archic technology then we have now, why is it going to take us at least 3 more years then it took them almost 40 years ago?
I'm guessing people with no health insurance living in a squalid flat and attending a screwed up school full of drug addcits, aren't rooting for a boost to NASA's budget.
Maybe they should get off their ass and get a god damned job then. This isn't communist Europe where you're apparently from. People have opportunity here. Someone without a dime to their name can come from your dumb-ass country and become one of the wealthiest people here.
Being poor should be the ultimate motivator to not be poor. Being poor sucks.
He's been a part of those bad decisions he's criticized. He doesn't have a way out.
President George W. Bush is extremely well "qualified" to run the country. He's educated at Yale, Harvard Business School. Former governor of Texas, son of a former 12-year vice/president, brother of a multiterm Florida governor. And he's a colossal moron, a psychopath who's run this country into ruin with every step. Qualifications don't make a man, skills and leadership do. This guy is blaming others for the policies he's been part of.
So fuck you, Bush worshipper. Boil down your post, and all you've got is a long "he's smart, I like him, I don't like you". And a few uncalled-for insults. I bet you've got some kind of impressive credential to back up your worthless bullshit. Because you certainly don't have any actual argument. Stupid cunt.
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make install -not war
The ISS had its start under Reagan, and there were no doubt many political and bureaucratic reasons for it getting started. But by the Clinton Administration, it was _continued_ primarily for one purpose: to allow the US to indirectly subsidize the Russian space industry, and give all those soon-to-be-unemployed Russian rocket scientists a paycheck. Thus giving them less reason to wander off to Iran, Pakistan, China, etc. And that seems to have been fairly successful.
sPh
I know there are thousands of NASA-defending geeks on here, but the amount of money wasted on space travel could do a lot better going back into the thousands of decrepit schools we have in this country.
As soon as the terrorists announce they have inserted suicide bombers into orbit and will soon be able to found a theocracy on the moon you can bet George W will be on the moon so fast you wouldn't believe ( obviously I don't mean George personally will go there )
who have had enough of their incompetent and anti-democratic presence there.
So you think we should just leave and let the warlords turn it into a feudal system or monarchy? What about the citizens unprotected by a brand new government that isn't even populated yet? That...would be mass murder.
They can already destroy entire cities like Fallujah with relative ease. Killing people isn't a challenge for them any more.
It isn't the point of the war either.... There are always innocents and the person pulling the trigger who accidentally takes down a mother in front of her kids has to live with it for the rest of his life. By the same token the soldier who takes out some tyrant who has been holding a village hostage for his own personal gain and power gets a heroes welcome by the people who were oppressed.
but rather in that of the social sciences (ie. learning how to not alienate the rest of the world).
Some cultures cause their own alienation by choice. Some just don't want interaction any more than I would want to have interaction with some unknown mutant human-eating pygmie race.
Don't get me wrong, there is some truth in what you say. It's just a little too close to the liberal view spewed over the airwaves these days that ignores detail in any situation just so they can point fingers. If the tables were turned and the U.S. were in some situation like the cheesey movie "Red Dawn"...I would WANT to be liberated. Some others in the situation would gain power they did not previously had during the new regime and would speak out against an "invasion". World media would probably hear the power hungry guy and say "see? they don't want to be liberated!". It makes me sick. Nobody WANTS to be under a regime that kills it's own people at gunpoint over principal and I guarantee the people who had family murdered by Saddham feel the same.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Not wanting to be a troll but what about:
The National Aerospace Plane ("NASP"), Lots of money, no hardware.
The X-33; several billion with no tangible return except for a few fuel tanks which were larger than the foreseeable technology could reliably build.
I never understood why the X-38 (small spaceplane/ISS Lifeboat) was not persued even though its funding was cut due to ISS overruns. It looked like an excellent concept.
There are also a ton of other programs going back even further (Dyna-Soar, MOL, etc.) in which substantial money was spent that were either impossible to build or didn't have the political will to work through. I daresay that a totalling of these projects would match the $250 Billion spent on the Shuttle and ISS.
The Shuttle and ISS were not the best possible implementations of a reusable spacecraft and orbital outpost, but at least they have flown and are helping advance the sciences of going to and from space as well as living there.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm
As far back as 1970 cost was an issue
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Sigs are like arse-holes, everybody has one
Engineers were criticizing the shuttle as it was being built and pointing out the flaws in it's design before it was built. The problems that the shuttle has have all been predicted. One doesn't need a operational test to know that if I fling my self off a 100 story building I will end up as a crumpled dead smear on the ground.
What would be the point of outlining an entire plan of "What would I have done if I was king of NASA?" I prefer that he outline what he will do NOW. Which if you note the beginnings of this was announced last week.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
"Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in." When the first space station was build, USA had a wooden model of something simular the IIS was build as an international coalition, and USA provided some parts for the IIS and money but still they won't not be able to build it by themselves and the most important parts of the IIS were build by Russian's
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
For good measure, the Iraq catastrophe is Bush's fault, too. Why didn't you mention that? Because that one is obviously undeniably Bush's fault?
What kind of a moron tries to have a serious political debate on Slashdot in an off-topic rant?
...wasn't that about the amount of money that Louisiana was just recently asking, to fix the damage from one hurricane? What, they want their own space station, now?
Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, "My opinion is that it was. ... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in."
I disagree with the article's description here. Griffin's being pretty blunt in those answers, esp. for a government employee. Most would never admit to such huge mistakes.
3) Lunar observatory on the dark side.
Possibly combine these; L2 is off Lunar Farside. Not being down a (2kps?) gravity well, it should be easier to get back and forth from. True, since it's an unstable position (especially under n-body perturbation), you'd need some minor active orbital stabilization, but "that's not a bug, it's a feature" — that would also make it an ideal stepping off point for exploring the rest of the solar system. Just be careful that the station doesn't do that unplanned.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/
Confirming what many people have said since Apollo, he says we've stagnated in the last 30 years. One would never have expected NASA to actually say this though. Government-funded groups need to convince people that this huge investment is actually worth it. We've all seen for ourselves the entirely underwhelming space program in the last thirty years.
On July 20th 1969, man stood immortal.
The single greatest accomplishment of our civilization. Repeat the dose up until 1975 when the last Apollo mission flew. 30 years later: nothing. Well, nothing that holds a candle to Apollo. I believe we hit our peak at this point. Now, the collapse of our epoch is accelerated by the Marx-Mohumed Pact. Make no mistake, political correctness and Islam are going to kill us.
"My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the point of space exploration as a whole? That it's really hard, fraught with danger, and constantly pushes the envelope of what's possible with our technology and ingenuity?
We stunned the world by putting men on the moon, but for chrissakes, that was decades ago. With advancements in technology since then, we should have half the solar system under our belt by now.
Since the primary job of the head of a Federal Agency is to make sure the Agency conforms to Federal Regulations, then, arguably, the best choice is a lawyer. Of course the fundamental problem with any Federal Agency is, by their very nature, they tend to be reactive rather than proactive.
Apollo was able to put a couple of guys on the moon and get them back. In contrast, the shuttle is incapable of going beyond LEO. It's not exactly breaking new ground in terms of space exploration.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
He's been a part of those bad decisions he's criticized. He doesn't have a way out. That's an out and out LIE. He hasn't worked at NASA since. So fuck you, Bush worshipper That's an out and out LIE. You are a LIAR. You called him a HACK. Which is an out and out LIE. He is qualified in the field for which he is responsible, by definition he is not a HACK. Because you certainly don't have any actual argument. Stupid cunt.
My argument is that you certainly haven't read the article, or no anything about the actual topic at hand. And then you LIE about it because you are a LIAR.
the space shuttle, which provided cheap reliable frequent trips to a lower orbit
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Thanks, I needed that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I don't see the RutanGang as a model to follow. Sure, there is a lot of bravado and ingenuity but I really don't think you can compare the product against what Nasa has accomplished.
What Nasa is now saying is basically that politics have intervened with science and technology at a great cost. The ISS is in the wrong spot and is not suited to the tasks at hand. However, it does provide a number of usefull lessons and shows us that StarTrek style space exploration should remain in hollywood. Long term habitation in space is a stupid thing to do and now that we have learned that, we should concentrate on the rock we live on, send robots out to space.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
NASA used to be the shining example of a good Federal agency. They lost that status after Challenger and instead of regaining it they sank even further with Columbia. The unmanned programs are still doing well. The unmanned propopents say we get a better return on our investment with robots. From a scientific point of view, the answer is yes, but from a public perspective, the answer is no. Without manned space travel we have no visions of space as a frontier. The lure of the frontier is deeply embedded in the American psyche. We look to the people, the astronauts, who enter it. NASA needs to do a better job with it's manned program. The return on investment with a manned space program isn't the same as those of an unmanned one. We need both.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Yes, just leave... maybe the domestic warlords can provide security and get the lights and sewers working.
I feel for the shuttle program.
But more seriously, I think that the real benefits of the program are probably a lot broader and far-reaching than what was stated in the article. It was inspiring. It got kids interested in space. It helped Reagan beat the communists.
Also, it paved the way for one of the most difficult Estes model rockets ever, as well as one of the best Simpsons episodes of all time. "Look out. They're ruffled!"
I mean, he states the shuttle was "deeply flawed". What would he have built? Kept shooting Apollo capsules up forever more? Built an Apollo 2? And if the ISS isn't in a good orbit, what orbit would he prefer? And additionally, how were we supposed to know the Shuttle wasn't a solid idea, until we had actually built a few and tested them operationally?
After nearly 35 years imagine how the original Apollo design might have evolved? We might be on the 10th iteration! The ISS orbits sucks because it is highly inclined and low altitude. Highly inclined orbits are less accessable from low latitude launch sites (thanks Russia). Throw in the new lighting requirements for the Space Shuttle and you have absurdly few launch opportunities from the Cape. The low altitude of the station results in the need for frequent reboost due to atmospheric drag. It is also of marginal use in earth remote sensing because there is no global coverage.
I do agree that a shuttle-like vehicle has great R&D value. Perhaps a smaller reusable vehicle could have been built that integrated smoothly with Apollo launch capabilities.
It seems to me he's just trying to ride the wave of popular opinion that says the shuttle must go and the ISS isn't interesting.
Better that than ride the wave of mindless groupthink that left the US without a space architecture. Now that there is a negative (and richly deserved) feeding frenzy against shuttle/ISS lets make sure we kill the beast!
an ill wind that blows no good
He has a tiny dick, and is a rabid ideologue, which indicates a tiny brain. He's on metal autopilot, and is really just a zombie. Safe to ignore, like a yapping toy poodle. The old ELIZA programs had more intellect.
Jeeze, lax editorial skills abound. The first shuttle flight was April 12, 1981. Took me all of 2 seconds to research that, can't reporters do the same?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
What a useless nothing you are. You cannot debate. You have zero critical thinking skills. Your reasoning skills are those of a crack addicted toddler. You are NOTHING but a political singularity, and infinitesimal point that emits no light, but plenty of sound and fury signifying nothing.
We're soon going to be stuck with the next-gen heavy lift using components of unknown reliability, which forces us to replace component parts ("tune-up" or "overhaul") the system too often and with too large an expense.
Apparently, the SSME's in the heavy lift vehicle will not be reused.
Many of Feynman's concerns revolve around components which become fatigued after multiple uses. I don't think he expressed any concern about the operation of new SSMEs.
There's no excuse for the wasteful and incompetent management of the Iraq war. If our leaders weren't so arrogant they would have required real support from the international community as a prerequisite to invasion. They would have gotten informed opinions from real experts (manipulators like Chalabi make me sick), they would have let skilled people manage the war (not idiots like Rumsfeld), and they would have been honest with their own people. The WMD issue is extremely humiliating for the United States because, to the objective observer, it looks like we invaded the wrong country - and at a time when we had just raided the piggy bank in tax giveaways and were still running an operation in Afghanistan!
Now, it's true that Saddam was a nasty dictator. It's true that Iraq could possibly have had a better system in place. I realize that the popular conservative view of the day is that the rest of the world is full of children that need our constant monetary and military support. None of that even comes close to excusing the blunders, incompetence, and arrogance of our leaders. I'm sorry if this sounds overly liberal, but sometimes it's good to be critical of the government.
You are EXPOSED, Ruby. Exposed as a mindless, know nothing political HACK.
Mabye Griffin isn't all that and a bag of chips, but he towers over the sack of scum that you are.
Let's paraphrase what happened:
CYRICZ: At least Griffin has job relatyed experience unlike Brown.
DOCRUBY: BUSH IS AN IDIOT!
I mean, do you really expect anyone to treat you like anything but a cranky, mentally challenged child? Seriously, are you posting from a sanatarium?
Come on, give me a break. First off, this guy is a moron. Second, does anyone in here (or in that press meeting for that matter) actually have any clue about the inner workings of NASA or space research?
For starters, the claimed 250-billion was not entirely spent on 1 thing that failed. If they spent 250-billion to make a bolt, there might be a point to this hashing, but they didn't. Of that 250, how much was lost due to setbacks, and how much was used simply because that is what it costs to do the work? Huh?
Even if the end result (the ISS and the Shuttle) could be considered failures (which I think is too blunt a comment), the technology, research, experiences, and developments that came out of this whole ordeal are not to be played-down as worthless. So you think the ISS is a failure, but what about all the parts and work that went into it? It's a literal gold-mine of new technolog and knowledge.
In short, the 250-billion was not a total waste. I'd even venture enough to say that 80-percent of that 250-billion was well spent.
People need to realize that it is not the idea of space exploration that is the problem. The high costs can be attributed (most often) to blunders and idiocies caused by the people managing the projects. What people should really be arguing about is "why things went wrong" not "space is stupid." Anyone who thinks there is no benifit from space exploration, really doesn't know what they're talking about.
I don't like him because he's been part of that mismanagement. Bold face lie. You don't have to like his decisions, but that doesn't make them "mismanagement". He has proven to be an excellent administrator merits of his decisons aside. He has not been a status quo monkey, and has been pro-active in reforming NASA.
..cronies..
I don't like him because he's not taking any responsibility for the problems he's enabled.
Bold faced lie. He hasn't enabled these long term 30 year problems. What an utter lie you just concocted. His work at NASA before went to academia shows without any trace of a doubt he was working towards better science, better exploration technique, and to increase America's leadership in the space field. His academic and private work has also been second-to-none, including his endorsement by the Mars Society and virtually every forward thinking space consortium out there. Why not go try to find some substantive criticism of his space policy. Go ahead. We are waiting.
I don't like him because he doesn't actually have any vision for the future that will keep American leadership in space exploration/science/development.
Well here is the real reason. You are an idiot. The NASA administrator does not set space policy.
You don't like him because he came from Bush. That's it. The only reason. The NASA administrator implements space policy set by the Administration and Congress. If you don't like the implementation, talk to him. If you don't like the policy, talk to Bush.
defense we always hear about these Bush hacks Here is your standard lie. Look up what hack is. This guy is no hack. You are a liar. Lying about the most qualified director NASA has ever had because you don't like Bush or his policies is mentally crippled. And it makes you a liar.
The fact is you've offerend no substantive criticism of the man, except he was appointed by Bush. You've lied by calling him a hack, and lied by associating him with decisions that he actively opposed. The charge of crony applied to his man is beyond laughable. The facts are obvious: you know nothing about him, his management, or the work he has done. You just hate him because he stems from Bush. And now you are going about smearing him.
The main engines have not been the cause of either of the Shuttle's spectacular failures. The solid rocket booster killed Challenger and damage to the tiles on the wing killed Columbia.
To be fair, the main point of Feynman's analysis is that NASA tended to assume that because something was not a problem in the past, it would not be a problem in the future. This is an unwarrented assumption unless you understand all significant aspects of the situation. If there is anything substantial which you have failed to investigate, then you are deluding yourself.
Conditions such as heat, cold, and how often particular equipment is used can vary widely from mission to mission. If you have not exhaustively mapped out the tolerances of the equipment, then you have no basis for saying that success on Mission A gives confidence for success on Mission B.
That being said, Feynman seems to indicate that the tolerances of the SSMEs have been adequately mapped for periods of use on the order of what disposable engines would require. His main concern mostly component fatigue over time.
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100 KHz? Really? I don't know much about power distribution, but wouldn't AC at that frequency cause all sorts of interference? And wouldn't you have to stick transformers everywhere to actually use it?
A bit of googling says yeah, people really do 100 khz power supplies, and higher. But I don't understand the advantage.
No it doesn't coincide with any global event or something. I am reading nowadays Deception Point by Dan Brown based on overspending and mission failiures of NASA. This news adds a new twist to the story :-)
I can understand wanting to finish the Gulf War. The Gulf War wasn't over--we merely had a cease-fire, contingent upon Saddam continuing to abide by what he said he would do (which he notably broke left and right without real repercussion). But none of that is what Bush claimed. He claimed there were still more WMDs and didn't give the inspectors time to check it out (and ignored what they were saying). And that's inexcusable, given how badly things didn't pan out. I was so very sorely disappointed when he kept is job.
Rationally evaluating the facts isn't conservative nor liberal. It's the way things are supposed to work. Unfortunately, people on both sides of the fence seem to get carried up in the politics and hate and forget this.
I'm getting mighty tired of the hate. From both sides.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OR...we could stop treating them like children, and open up markets. Like we're doing now.
The "free markets" are bullshit. The Americans and the EU both preach "free markets" and *require* these reforms in exchange for aid; but they don't do the same themselves, subsidising their own industries, and slapping tariffs on processed goods, so that only the raw materials get imported, and the real "added-value" work has to take place within the EU, etc.
You might say that those giving the money are entitled to dictate stuff in return. In some cases, this might be fair; I wouldn't give money to (e.g.) Zimbabwe if I thought it had any chance of ending up in Mugabe's pockets instead of those it was aimed at. But tying "aid" to reforms pretty much blurs whether it's aid or not.... especially when it's required to go straight back into the pockets of western companies charging grossly inflated rates for work. Oh, and those companies *just happen* to be best friends with the government giving the aid.
And let's not even get onto the fact that a *large* proportion of money that is portrayed as "aid" is in fact *loans* that have to be paid back.
Anyway, that wasn't my point. My point was that those that preach the "free market" don't practise this themselves. Free markets? Yeah, well let's stop being so damn hypocritical about that ourselves, then.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Your reply fails to argue for his (NASA head) mismanagement, and simply goes back to irrelevant criticisms of Bush. I offer no defense for the administration (only the NASA guy), and suddenly I'm a "Bush hack." All I see here is argumentum ad odium, guilt by association, and simple ad hominem.
Present one of this guy's policies that has contributed significatly to the decline of NASA in the last 30 years, and I'll concede that he's an ignorant jackass. Until then, I still don't see any substance to your criticism.
Was the exorbinant prices that we pay for our NASA equipment. Lockhead, Boeing, etc charge rip-off prices and NASA forks the cash over. For the amount of money they pay they could have opened up their own manfucaturing plants, and made more fleets of ships. 250 billion..that could have been slashed if the government didn't allow itself to get robbed.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
So, when is that welcome scheduled for again?
NASA's funding has always been low.. Just because they have spent 250$ Billion up to this point does not mean it was a large waste of money. It took them several decades to rack up a tab like that. How long did it take the newest Bush Administration? Couple years? The only reason people (republicans) complain about it, is because they would rather of had that money for either war, oil exploration, or their pocketbook. If NASA had even 25% the funding of the American Military, we would already been living on, and exploring the surface of Mars.
Newsgroups: sci.space
From: j...@pnet01.cts.com (Jim Bowery)
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 07:16:54 GMT
Local: Tues, Jun 29 1993 12:16 am
Subject: Who I am and why I support Big Science
There have been some questions about who I am and what my positions are. Here are the relevant details for sci.space readers:
As chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce, I have, over the last 5 or so years, been the principle activist promoting the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 and the launch voucher provision of the 1992 NASA authorization.
To preempt some noise:
Allen Sherzer has yet to apologize to me for his repeated slanders in this forum 2 years ago, declaring that my contributions to the passage of the LSPA were insignificant compared to those of Glenn Reynolds, then chairman of the legislative committee of the National Space Society. However, during congressional hearings on space commercialization, the LSPA's sponsor, Congressman Packard, gave me a personal introduction (the only panelist out of over 10 to receive such an introduction) and my organization credit for passage of the LSPA. Congressman Packard did so with Glenn Reynolds sitting next to me on the same panel -- and he did not mention Glenn Reynolds or the NSS. This is in the Congressional Record and on video tape. Allen Sherzer's words are in the sci.space archives of late spring to early summer 1991. I encourage those with access to the sci.space archives to retrieve them and see exactly what Allen Sherzer said and the manner in which he said it.
I've been involved in several other, as yet unsuccessful, legislative efforts to reform NASA, DoE (primarily fusion), NSF and DARPA. In so doing I've come across gross inefficiencies in technology development -- inefficiencies that some small high technology startups were ready to fill with technical advances of great economic and social import. The government agencies I just mentioned see these high technology startups, not as vital partners, but as deadly political threats to the credibility of those, within the agencies, that picked incorrect technical directions. These government-funded individuals drive funding away from those who would bring us critically needed technical advances -- rather than working with and help them.
The dollars we spend on NASA, DoE, DARPA and NSF to promote technology are actually used to suppress this country's technology in a frighteningly effective manner. But when one looks at the political incentives of these institutions, one wonders how anyone could believe it to be otherwise.
My first and most tragic experience in this area was George Koopman's statement to me, made in person just before his untimely death, that NASA had been relentlessly driving his suppliers and investors away from doing business with his company, AMROC. NASA appeared to reverse its behavior in a tokenistic manner just prior to Koopman's death. The first test of an AMROC booster, shortly thereafter, failed and AMROC was forced into capitulation with established aerospace firms. This pattern of hostile behavior from NASA, combined with the means, motive and opportunity, leave room for reasonable suspicions of murder against individuals within or funded by NASA.
This is only one story and I wasn't even inv
Seastead this.
Don't you ever mention Microsoft in a NASA story! Just the thoughts give me the creeps! :-S
This whole budget waste discussion reminds me of a Spaceballs scene. I think it fits perfectly.
Computer: One minute left for self-destruct. It's now a good time to press the cancelation button.
CANCELATION BUTTON - OUT OF ORDER
There's no reason for one vehicle to fulfill two roles. Too bad that the blokes at NASA are not as smart as they think they are. There's no reason why the launch vehicle for heavy lifting could not be combined with a light one stage reusable vehicle just to ferry astronauts to space in order for them to carry out manned mission such as repair or deployment. So, a mission requiring payload and manned involvement would require two separate launches. One for the payload (disposable rocket) and the reusable manned vehicle.
CZ
Everyone seems to think that world hunger or such could be improved or solved with the money spent on the shuttle and the ISS. Have you seen what happens to a lot of hunger efforts to 3rd wold countries? Donations aren't always recieved where they should due to personel salaries of the organizations doing the "humanitarian efforts". Food shipments get hijacked and aren't recieved by the people they are meant to feed. Not to sounds like a hippy, but there is too much greed selfishness in the world to allow for hunger to be eliminated.
I don't think the shuttle was a mistake in that having the shuttle was a mistake. I think certain elements and designs of the shuttle wa sa mistake, but the concept was not a mistake. Neither is the ISS concept. Execution, maybe. I agree that big budgets makes for wasteful spending. And mankind could learn just as much from probes on Mars as they could with sending a human there.
However, the technology that is created to get man to Mars is where the benefit comes into play. Not so much the destination, but the journey is where it will pay off. We won't learn much on Mars, but getting there is where the adventure and science will pay off.
What about feeding, clothing and educating more than half of the planet?
I do live next door to the farmers who do feed most of the planet.
Have a nice day!
China is starting its manned space program from a clean slate. They plan a week long manned orbited on Oct 13, 2005 and manned moon landing by 2015. They dont have 20-year old legacy technology to slow them down.
On the other hand Russian never tried to drastically change its 40-year-old tried-and-true technology, and dont have the US problems.
The shuttle was originally sold as a cheaper way to get things into space. It's not meaningfully cheaper. They said it would cost $28 million per launch. As of January 1986, (in the same 1980 dollars), it cost over $200 million per launch. They said it would turn around in seventy-two hours. As for reliability, how many fatal failure modes does the shuttle design have? What sort of improvement over the final Apollo design is that?
Which of its original design goals has the shuttle actually met?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I know we're beating this topic to death... but that $250 billion would have gone a long way towards Space Elevator research and construction!
They say the mind is the first thing to
Yes, war does drive a lot of research and development. But not the sort of war that's going on in Iraq, mind you
Do you have any idea the sort of field-testing that remote imaging, remote control, combo intertial/gps/multi-sensor guidance, distributed networking/comms technology is getting in a place like that? How about the huge portion of the Pentagon's budget that's going into building Iraq a this-century telecommunications system, real water treatment, decentralized power distribution/management, and so on?
The only people "mindlessly killing" anyone over there are the hardcore Islamo-fascists that want to reinstate a Sunni-esque pan-Arab caliphate, just like the good old days several hundred years ago. If simply bombing a place like Fallujah was at all helpful, there would be no Fallujah standing (never mind that we're busy there building infrastructure now that the large strongholds of insurgents have been removed from that town).
Of course, the US, Britain, etc., are still getting their asses kicked daily by the citizenry of Iraq
Actually, no. Citizens of Iraq are being murdered by insurgents, mostly made up of, and certainly funded/armed/trained by non-Iraqis (Syrians, Jordanians, Saudis, Iranians) that don't want to see a forward-looking democracy take hold there. The Iraqi police and military are not able, yet, to deal with the fact that their own people are being killed by car bombers and the like, or that Al Queda is killing people who do things like work on the country's new constitution. It's very similar to the years that Britain spent unable to completely stop the IRA from killing people there (though the IRA was at least somewhat less likely to deliberately kill school children, and rarely used suicide bombers - at least, not on purpose).
Some US and British troops get killed while supporting and training the local forces, and while handling that which the local forces are not yet anywhere near taking care of on their own. This is hardly "the Iraqi citizenry" rising up against the troops. Ask those very same citizens if they think more, or less of them would die at the hands of crazies like Bin Laden's head boy in Bagdhad, Zarqawi, with fewer US/British/other troops helping out. There's a reason that the majority of the people in that country realistically understand that they very things they've most recently done (like elect their own representatives - something that Zarqawi is preaching as "un-Islamic" and evil) simply would not be able to happen without the stability provided by armed forces. To the extent that those forces cannot be entirely Iraqi, they have to be from someplace else. To the extent that the US, Britain, and the rest of the civilized world benefit from the spread of democracy in that vital, fragile part of the world - we absolutely should be stepping in and staying in until guys like Saddam, and the murderous mysoginistic punks who would like to fill his shoes, are just a bad memory.
How do we do these things as carefully/surgically as is militarily possible? High tech tools. They're being tested and improved every day, and things that weren't even on the drawing board a few years ago are being prototyped and tested in the field where they can do the most immediate good. That R&D absolutely spills over into other areas - even into relief efforts (as supported by new imaging platforms and mapping integration techniques) in the hurricane-struck Gulf Coast area.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
He has an impressive resume, at least he did something more than run a horse breeder's association.
...who is rumored to be a Scientologist(tm)? Or is that one of the heads of one of the directorates?
Amen, brother, Griffin's "Space Vehicle Design" is a great book. I took a short course based on it, taught by his co-author, this spring.
Can he tell Congress and the Prez the same thing, pretty please?!
***
You are right, killing people with precision is a challenge.
At the same time, I wonder just how much of that technology is deployed in day-to-day combat. It's a lot more expensive to throw cruise missiles around and drop smart bombs from 30k+ feet.
That's why the troops are wandering around in APCs using small arms. Large arms are great for fighting militaries and troops with but they don't work so well on small guerilla forces.
Also, do you really think we're doing everything in our power to prevent civvy casualties? The unofficial tally is in the 10s of thousands. We've supposedly dropped napalm on Fallujah. *shrugs*
I believe that IS the scheduled mars sample return timeline, provided Phoenix, MRO, and MSL go according to plan.
We ARE making steps toward that end, but with the budget allowed, the progress is slow... Re-alocating War funds could get us there in 3 years... The war has cost us 200 billion, not including funds used just to have our military in the first place (a staggering amount, in itself, no less) and has been going on for a scant 2 years... 250 bilion is the entire shuttle program since 1977!
I'll be honest and frank... I'd rather waste money on the frivolous space shuttle program (and it is frivolous, compared to earlier NASA projects) Then this Iraqi welfare program we have going on... More inportantly I'd rather see what $200 bln. would do for solar energy. Its the only power source that will properly scale to meet the world's ever increasing energy needs... http://today.caltech.edu/theater/8424_bb.ram
"How is it that Kennedy says we'll do the (at the time) completely impossible within 10 years and they do it 9 years later, and today we can't even decide if we'll do the completely possible (and redundant) within 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years - or ever?"
You're kidding right?
The obvious answer is that no matter what the current administration proposes, a large part of the electorate will squeal about it. So large, generally, that it kills any momentum a genuinely forward thinking proposal might create.
In short, it's the crybabies, and the cowardly politicians who listen to them too much.
You are so horribly wrong. Going to the Moon is a far more important and immediate concern than going to Mars. We have been getting two orders of magnitude improvement per decade in fusion power generation, and we are just about at break-even now. And while the first generation of commercial grade reactors will likely be D-T, those have obvious limitations due to the neutron issues. But assuming the research is maintained, He-3 fusion (which is more difficult initially due to the narrower cross section) should be viable a decade or two after that, and the only economically easily exploitable source of Helium-3 is on the lunar surface. They are the oil fields of the next 1000 years, and it is stupid to ignore them or call any plan to exploit them a "publicity stunt".
We could preemptively invaded and developed 2 whole countries with $250B. What a waist.
--- Just say no to negativity.
Wasn't skylab a Saturn V tank?
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
How can you say that this war does not demand R&D when we have 50 soldiers getting killed a month?
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For one, we need to have research in ways of detecting IEDs by other means besides having them blow up on us, and the government is working on this:
http://www.hsarpabaa.com/main/BAA0503_solicitatio
http://www.emclab.umr.edu/research/IED_Detection.
http://www.special-operations-technology.com/prin
And we are building a better armored vehicle to replace the HUMMER.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-08-23-hu
And we need to have a means of intercepting RPGs in flight.
http://www.deagel.com/pandora/cicm_de00400001.asp
This is my sig.
I'm sure the 100,000 (at least) dead iraqi's families are pleased to hear that you're getting tired of the hate. Must be a great comfort.
He was referring to the Russians, but it applies to the U.S. now. We are space pussies. We could have already established moon bases and probably already had a trip to Mars if we hadn't gone crazy with this whole shuttle/crappy assed tin-can of a space station. Where is the big freaking space station that I go vacation at? Or the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino at Tranquility Base? Space pussies.
In other words - Kennedy could promote vision and enthusiasm from his fellow politicians and constituents when it came to exploration and scientific accomplishment, whereas Bush can only seem to promote vision and enthusiasm among those politicians and constituents when it comes to blowing up brown people and sticking religious artifacts in court rooms?
Of course, the US, Britain, etc., are still getting their asses kicked daily
I was just wondering what kill ratio qualifies as "getting their asses kicked." Perhaps you can clarify that? Because the news reports I've seen and the couple of Iraq vets I've talked to have indicated that the kill ratio over there is tilted significantly in the direction of the Coalition, and even the Iraqi police and soldiers are keeping their ratio above one.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
It's about time for the adminstrator to criticize the ISS (and the shuttles)! Dr. Griffin, you got my vote.
On the other topic, will the ISS ever be useful? I doubt it at this point. The number of the crew on board the ISS is limited by the capacity of a return vehicle available in case of emergency. At this point, that's 3 with Soyuz capsule. Unless there is a more capable one coming on line, the ISS will NOT function as a laboratory as it is originally intended (note: at this point there are no more than two docking bays in the design -- one docking bay open for a supply vehicle, and another for the escape vehicle). Quite frankly I don't know how ready NASA/Russia would be when European Space Agency (ESA) or JAXA (Japan) put up modules and demand NASA to let them occupy the modules. That simply ain't gonna happen.
So why did we built it in the first place? Well, first, the Russian had it and the U.S. didn't. It must have occurred to the Congress (and NASA talking heads) that the U.S. could build one, too? Second, the space industry needed a handout (federal grant) from the government? The industry was suffering from one budget cut to another. And the R&D in space research is an art; if you don't exercise the skill, you'll lose it. So did the Congress (and the industry lobbists) see the need for some project (on the cheap) to sustain the technological skills in the field? Is it kind of like what the U.S. did with Tennessee Valley Authority program after the Great Depression (in order to boost the economy)?
I'm totally speculating on these. Doesn't mean to speak with authority at all. But the social aspect of this development leading to this day is sort of interesting.
Mm. Inflated statistics. Must be great to not have to inform yourself beyond just what you want to hear so that your beliefs aren't shaken.
And so begins the countdown to the privatization of NASA. Halliburton? Bechtel? Anybody?
How about using the usual measure of science, and counting published peer-reviewed papers coming out of it. Plenty for Hubble, and unamanned planetary probes. ISS and the Shuttle? Not so much.
If it were to end today, about half of a war in Iraq.
Nevermind, it said "useful".
most of those loans get forgiven. If you aren't aware of that, you should do a bit more research.
some of the largest cities in the world right now were tiny fishing villages in Africa just 30 years ago, and it isn't from selling fish that they got to be so huge in one generation as to make NYC seem small. Any particular reason Zimbabwe can't do the same thing? Any particular reason why Zimbabwe, or anywhere else for that matter, should need money from the US to do anything at all?
crap, "tiny fishing villages in Africa just 30 years ago" should read "tiny fishing villages in China just 30 years ago..."
It will very much be a testbed of new technologies, just not so much cutting-edge tech.
The CEV will be new, though using much OTS technology. The lunar lander will bear little resemblance to the original landers, capable of supporting four crew for a week at a time. The service module will be capable of keeping an additional 25 tons of cargo in lunar orbit.
As for possible conclusions, the construction of a base is a real possibility, especially with the heavy lift booster under development for the CEV. Refining in place of raw materials such as titanium is a reasonable possibility for the mid-term outlook. Maybe at some point it can even be sent to Earth, if it can scale up effectively.
No, it's not a major leap like Apollo was. But it's a good step.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I think NASA is back on doing politics instead of science.
.... that stinks like politics again for me.
Quote: "It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," Griffin said. "We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can."
So, Griffin thinks the path was wrong? Couldn't it be that the path was right but the conduction was wrong, or some minor planning?
For me that sounds like big games of politics again.
The original purpose of the Shuttle Fleet was not only small lifts and minor exploration. As everybody knows the shuttles carry a hughe main tank, which is dropped after burn out.
The original plan was: take the main tank into orbit, move them into parking orbits, use them later for space stations and interplanetary vehicles.
This was first reduced to: drop them on a parachute for refuling and reuse. And later it was reduced to: just drop them.
If NASA did not had stepped back from the original path we now had about 111 empty main fuel tanks in orbit around earth. If you use 6 main tanks to produce one ISS like space station the shuttle starts would translate to 5 space stations with together 30 fuel tanks used. There would still be 80 fuel tanks left for building manned Lunar vehicles or a lunar orbiting station, or 2 Earth/Lunar L4/L5 stations, probably several manned Mars vehicles and unmanned Mars supplies vehicles.
Landing some on the moon for having a starting base for a manned Lunar base would also be an option. Selling them to other nations with a space program, but not the resources to place "containers" in orbit would have been an option also.
The Shuttle path was completely right, but it got stripped down more and more until only the shuttles itself where left. The reason behind that mainly are political, the cold war was over, no need anymore to to show presence or impress the enemy or to fund the "military industrial complex". In fact budget cuts where needed to use the resources elsewhere (but they did not get used wisely anyway, look at the education system e.g.).
And now, we hear a NASA politician/bureaucrat making big words
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Rutan's technology represents roughly where NASA was in the late '50s and early '60s. Better materials and avionics, sure. But still suborbital stuff on a par with the X-planes or the very early Mercury flights.
NASA's Been there, Done that, and wore the T-shirt on the moon....
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
The main problem of the ISS was that it is essentially a low-orbit station. Good for a few "lighter gravity" and "pigs in space" experiments. It is a venture doomed to failure.
What should have been built was a launching point. Situated between the earth and the moons gravity wells. It should be much larger. It should designed as a stop point between the earth, the moon, and a venture point for missions to Mars.
Continually expanded while at the same times endeavorings to mine the moon for radioactive propulsion supplies. These could be safely launch from the moon without fear of mass human hazard (main opposition to nuclear launches being done from earth). Nuclear propulsion rockets could cut the time of transit to Mars by several months.
This is what should have been done. You can read this essential concept in numerous science fiction novels. And you might wonder "how we'd build such units". Well space is a vacuum. We often simply let the "external" fuel container shells drift. When in fact these might provide external shells for non-pressurized storage modules.
"How is it that Kennedy says we'll do the (at the time) completely impossible within 10 years and they do it 9 years later, and today we can't even decide if we'll do the completely possible (and redundant) within 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years - or ever?"
Maybe because for the moon race with the Soviets, NASA was given a practically unlimited budget, and enjoyed overwhelming public support (partially because of all those NASA contracts going to just about every town big enough to have a machine shop)?
Nowadays, the budget is much smaller, the contracts will go to a select handful of aerospace giants, and the populace is so dumbed-down and complacent that scientific exploration takes a back seat to the latest reality show.
Hardly the proper context for huge advances in a few year's time....
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Honestly, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fly a handful of people to mars for what purpose? Just to show that we can? Meanwhile, there are thousands of Americans living in poverty.
In some ways it doesn't seem right that we don't take care of our people better than we do before spending billions on space exploration. The priorities seem mixed up to me.
With that sort of attitude, you'll never get to space exploration. There will always be people needing assistance no matter how much money you throw at it. If you ever reached the point at which you've thrown enough money at taking care of the people in poverty, more people will join the ranks of poverty (those on the borderline of needing assistance) because at that point, it will be easier than working.
Sure, we should help the poorest of the poor, but at some point you've got to say "Hey, you're just going to have to start looking out for yourself, we can't take care of you from cradle to grave."
People's wants will always surpass your ability to provide.
Live forever, or die trying.
Why not just link to Wikipedia about it? They have a good article up about it. That way you don't have to wait for me to come along and post it!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Umm . . . yeah.
"Kennedy could promote vision and enthusiasm from his fellow politicians and constituents when it came to exploration... whereas Bush can only seem to promote vision and enthusiasm among those politicians and constituents when it comes to blowing up brown people"
Do Vietnamese count as brown people?
I'm sure that was a great comfort to the family, friends, and co-workers of the crews that died on the two shuttle disasters.
Huh? That's exactly the argument that was made. Go back and read all the speeches made before the war. 90% of it was about Saddam not complying with U.N. resolutions.
Er, no. There were claims about continued interest in developing weapons which are still reliable. There were claims about a desire to boost his image in the Arab world by supporting terror, which is still valid. There was evidence presented about Saddam's dodgy behavior which is still valid. But at no point did the President jump up and down and scream "He's got millions of ICBMs! Let's go get 'em!" This is what everybody seems to think he said, however.
As for the inspectors, their phones were bugged, they were followed around, and they worked for the U.N. Combined, that makes them about as trustworthy as a carnival barker. Quite frankly, if you don't trust a regime to control dangerous weapons, why would you trust them to be honest with weapons "inspectors"?
Huh? What color is the sky on your world? Because we don't live on the same planet. What is this "liberal view" that is "spewed over the airwaves these days" that "ignores detail" so the liberals can "point fingers"?
I don't know about the US but here in the UK our prime minister's main speech before the declaration of war went "We know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, we know he can launch them in 45 minutes, [and we need to invade to stop him doing this]" (my emphasis)
I am trolling
He has SEVEN DEGREES. HE EARNED ALL OF THEM. You're a brainless ass-raping fecal parasite. And that's from a Bush-hater. Get a fractionalized clue, cheesedick.
and at a time when we had just raided the piggy bank in tax giveaways and were still running an operation in Afghanistan!
You are still running an operation in Afghanistan. And so are several allied countries.
But is it a step worth the pricetag? What else could NASA use that money for? I am guessing a great many things that would be far more beneficial. Or, for that matter, why give that kind of money to NASA? What about the many other issues we're currently facing?
Now that is quite incorrect. But Bush never said anything that urgent. His main concern seemed to be Saddam's violations of cease-fire regulations. Which is not to say that there wasn't a hidden agenda. But the hidden agenda was an attempt to alter the cultural and economic make-up of the Middle East and check the power of Islamic extremist appeals for pan-Arab unity.
Don't change history. Please. We have an administration hard at work trying already...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/2
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. "
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/2
"Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
In both of those speeches, there was little cushioning "weapons of mass destruction" with could produce some day in the future. The language and intent was to make the threat seem imminent.
With that sort of attitude, you'll never get to space exploration
I'm not saying that we shouldn't do space exploration until everyone on the planet is well fed. There are other places where even a tiny bit of that $250 billion dollars could have done a world of good. Public education, for example. Why do most states have lousy teachers? Because anyone smart enough to understand calculus wants to get a job where they can get paid enough to make a living. Throw a bit of space shuttle money into education to bring teacher salaries up to where they should be and I guarantee you'd get more great high school teachers. By the way, in many countries high school teachers make as much as doctors.
You're right. If we say we're going to solve all other problems before doing space exploration it will never get done. I'm just saying that there are a few places that could use some serious attention that aren't getting it because of frivolous government spending.
I don't know about the US but here in the UK our prime minister's main speech before the declaration of war went "We know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, we know he can launch them in 45 minutes, [and we need to invade to stop him doing this]" (my emphasis)
Yet you guys re-elected him. IMO brits are about as lame as yanks
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
About all I can say is I didn't vote for him, and under a representative voting system he wouldn't have an absolute majority and would need one of the other two parties to agree with a law before it got passed.
I am trolling
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/ki ss_nssm_jb_1995.html
... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?"
"There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion."
"Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now," the document continued, adding, "Would food be considered an instrument of national power?
Kissinger also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. "Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond," he reported.
The cause of that coming food deficit was not natural, however, but was a result of western financial policy: "Capital investments for irrigation and infrastucture and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food."
"It is questionable," Kissinger gloated, "whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis." Consequently, "large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades--a kind the world thought had been permanently banished," was foreseeable--famine, which has indeed come to pass.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
We didn't know if we were going to win the cold war in 1972. We had to prove that USSR could never defeat u.s. by showing a complete dominance of technology. The space station, on the other hand, represents today's political reality.
Political motivations like this are the reason India and China are so important. India and China aren't bound to political constraints. They have the financial independance to do what needs to be done without regard for involving the right people.
Here's the thinking:
You have Arabic, Muslim regions that hate Americans, want to kill Americans, hate the American way of life, matter of fact, hate any way of life other than their own, but the American one is just particularly obvious.*
I'm reminded of America at the time of desegregation. Iraq is like what would of happened if a black family moved into a white neighborhood. All the KKK members in the area, faced with this affront, this intrusion into their domain, are forced to attack the intrusion, instead of driving down to the black side of town to light their crosses, etc... Except in this case, the black family is armed, and picking off KKK members. KKK membership(besides being more dangerous) is seen in a more and more negative light, because when they become more enthused, they accidentally(or deliberatly) set fire to white homes as well, thus eroding what support they might have.
Another term is a "honey-pot". It's a lure for the undesired element**, drawing it in to a place where it can be eliminated at lower expense, and not damage your important assets.
And that's how we're rendered safer.
*Note: Reasons for said hatred are varied and already fill whole books, and thus are beyond this discussion. If you bring it up, I'll quote Honore at you.
** bugs, internet attacks, spam mail, terrorists, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Didn't a project/goal like space and IIS cause innovation? Humans do not innovate without a goal/cause/need. I'm sure tons of patents and inventions have come out of this project. Even if just 1% of these innovations has a direct impact on the common man, if that 1% innovation was something along the lines of a microwave oven I think society would see the benefit and it not be a waste. Was it a wise use of the money; too subjective of a question. Opportunity costs always exist and is only a black and white question if the project operates in a complete box totally issolated from any inputs or outputs.
I'm looking at the far reaches of this. I get an emotional thrill from seeing people launched into space, but that's short term. Within a few days, all that's left is the glow of pride I have in our space program. From a more fundamental structure, I look at things like:
I understand that the first two are possible with robotics, but the flexibility of having someone to handle this over a longer run is important to consider. The ability to upgrade in place such equipment without always having to do a special launch for it is something that I also consider to be a positive.
The latter three all go hand-in-hand. It may be more efficient to construct major structural pieces on the moon and send them on some sort of lunar-LEO ferry, and then send equipment from Earth to populate those structures in a technical (and eventually human) sense. The timeline I have pictured for this is over 25-30 years, but I think it's a path worth investigating.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Sorry, you're now modded -1 Offtopic. Have a nice day, thank you for playing.
(I am making a joke!)
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Kennedy said that we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
The point of NASA is to take on stuff private companies could or would not do. This would set the stage for the eventual trickle down of the technology to private industry. We are starting to see this happen now.
To say we shouldn't have built the shuttle because it barely works now is engaging in a lot of armchair quarterbacking well after the fact. At the time we wanted to push the limit and engage our imagination. Maybe it didn't work so well, but personally I think that amount of money quoted, which is less then will we spend on the military budget for only one year, is not unreasonable.
You shouldn't say that money could have been spent on better stuff. If that money had not been spent it would have gone into more military spending or more tax cuts for the weathly elite.
It's common knowledge that the republican party doesn't like the word "International" so much and so they don't like the ISS project. So I am not too surprised to see this new Admin choosen by Bush to be towing the party line. This administration has been expert in putting such people into power all over the gov't. Personally I don't see any other way to test human ability to endure long term space travel. Maybe the ISS goals could be more focused and simplied in order to bring the costs in line with what is more reasonable and achievable during the expected life of the craft.
If anything we did not go far enough. The original design for the Space Shuttle did not include two things which caused our accidents. In the original plan the external tank was supposed to be a rocket in it's own right that was supposed to be manned and returned for reuse. The booster rockets were added afterward (cause of Challenger accident was faulty O-ring in the booster)
Peace, or Not?
The cost of the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station over the last 20+ years is roughly equivalent to what we've spent on the Iraq war (another mistake in many people's opinions) in the last 2 years.
So the space program was rougly one tenth the cost (and less one one-hudredth the cost in American lives) over-all, of the Iraq war. So far, anyway.
That's a half trillion dollars that could have been better spent.
Now it looks like Hurricane Katrina is going to cost potentially another $250 million.
It does no good, really, to play "woulda, shoulda, coulda" games with this information. We need to make sure we learn the lessons here, and not make similar mistakes in the future. Personally, I think a manned mission to the Moon and/or Mars is wasteful at this point in time. We're running massive budget deficits, and I don't think it's right to ask China and Japan and Saudi Arabia to subsidize our moon mission, given we've been there and done that, and there isn't a horribly compelling reason to send men back there right now. I'm a big space booster, personally, but we have more pressing priorities down here on earth at the moment, dealing with very expensive messes in our own country and elsewhere. Instead I think we should continue to focus on probes and robotic missions that can get us a lot more scientific bang for the buck, and only consider sending people back up once we have our financial house in order back down here on earth.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I'm not saying that we shouldn't do space exploration until everyone on the planet is well fed. There are other places where even a tiny bit of that $250 billion dollars could have done a world of good. Public education, for example. Why do most states have lousy teachers? Because anyone smart enough to understand calculus wants to get a job where they can get paid enough to make a living. Throw a bit of space shuttle money into education to bring teacher salaries up to where they should be and I guarantee you'd get more great high school teachers. By the way, in many countries high school teachers make as much as doctors.
Or, instead of taking out of space R&D funding, they could fire a few less cruise missiles (valued at $1M a piece). I think trimming the defence budget for research and keeping our nose in our own business would probably do more good.
most of those loans get forgiven. If you aren't aware of that, you should do a bit more research.
Most? Can you provide some good references?
Politicians say stuff like that all the time then have a nasty tendency to forget about it when the spotlight has moved somewhere else. The perception remains, though...
some of the largest cities in the world right now were tiny fishing villages in Africa [you corrected this to China] just 30 years ago and it isn't from selling fish that they got to be so huge in one generation as to make NYC seem small. Any particular reason Zimbabwe can't do the same thing?
Yep!
It's because Zimbabwe has been systematically driven into the ground in well under five years by Robert Mugabe, and can't feed its own people now. Actually, they're being systematically starved.
But that's beside the point; I never said we should give money to Zimbabwe simply because they were in a mess. That was the whole point. Sheesh.....
Anyhow, that aside, China and most African countries aren't comparable. China wanted to turn into a capitalist society (or their leadership did), and western governments (in particular the US) believed that in doing so they would become less of a threat to the west (though they probably misjudged this in retrospect). So, unlike African countries who are subject to tariffs on their goods, and so on, China is basically given carte blanche to export as much as it likes.
No struggling African country is ever going to be a serious threat to the US, or as potentially strong an ally (if only because they're nowhere near as big). So they're never going to get "most favored nation" red-carpet treatment; but a level playing field might be a start.
Any particular reason why Zimbabwe, or anywhere else for that matter, should need money from the US to do anything at all?
Good question; Zimbabwe shouldn't be getting any direct aid at all, as the problem is man-made. As for some of the others; that's a complex question. I think it comes down to your philosophy; if you think that no aid should be given out with something in return, it depends on what you want.
Certainly, giving loans (not aid) to certain countries under the control of corrupt governments, with the knowledge that the money was likely to be funnelled into the pockets of government officials hasn't done much to make Africa part of the world economy in the past 50 years.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
Darn right! At least to me, that's the point! Agressive and just barely possible, like finding a western route to the East Indies, or sailing around a flat world, finding something smaller than an atom, replacing a human heart, PUTTING A MAN ON THE MOON.....
Being agressive and pushing the envelope of what is possible is supposed to be what science and exploration is all about. NASA is now driven by what is "safe" and easily done. They and government bureaucrats have fostered a society of never challenging or taking risks, because of course risks could conceivably fail, and no one can accept failure anymore.
The one-trick pony that NASA has become is nothing more than a comprising of the human spirit.
You're hardly one to talk about obsessions. I'm amazed you didn't blame Bush for my post.
You're still a useless nothing, Doc. Trapped in a mental dementia of your own making.
FTFA:
"Earlier in his career, Griffin served as Chief Engineer and as Associate Administrator for Exploration at NASA, and as Deputy for Technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization"
For years, Griffin has been part of that establishment he's criticizing. Now suddenly all those policies were bad. You show me his record of fixing NASA while he's been in a position to do it. I'll show you a guy positioned to remake NASA as the "Space Force", turning America's space R&D into just another military contractor porkbarrel, just like he's been doing with his Star Wars gig. STAR WARS.
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So he's smart - maybe. He's credentialed, for sure. His boss, Bush, has degrees from Yale, Harvard biz school, Texas governor, but couldn't find his ass in a hurricane. So go fuck yourself - you might hate Bush, but you do worship other idols.
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make install -not war
1) Aero-braking. You can use Mar's atmosphere to slow down your approach, whereas on the Moon it has to be done entirely with rockets. So it's a lot easier to land and take off from Mars than it is from the Moon.
2) Water. Water can be broken down into its base elements and used as fuel, or just used for drinking, plants etc.
3) Gravity much closter to Earths.
So in the long term, a permanent Mars base makes more sense than one for the Moon.
What is it with you? The guy has been NASA's chief engineer and exploration administrator, as well as running the Star Wars program. He's totally status quo. He's another Bush insider, now running against his organization's own record, which he helped produce.
It is you who is the liar, making up nonsense to excuse this guy. Because you love Bush. It's so easy to call out you Republican bullshit artists: just watch your own words betray your own worst fears about your own guilt. You're a liar.
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I was thinking more of "cheap" or "reusable", which it failed miserably. Y'know, things that the Apollo system didn't already do (with the exception of landing at an AFB). And I don't know if "not monstrously more complex than it absolutely needs to be" was a design goal, but it should have been.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The era when universities tried to build an individual rather than priting diplomas will be missed.
I was thinking, "what a great movie title!" but, as they say, it's all been done before.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
You are a liar. And a retard. He was on the "good side" of the SDI program - working on anti-missle and space programs that actually WORK. As exploration assistant head he pushed for MORE resuable vehicles, MORE space leadership, and MORE advanced science, not the 1970's rehashed shuttle. In the SDI program he personally worked on an anti-missle technology that is in use today in the Aegis cruiser line. He's a scientist you fucking bozo. You are an idiot. He is by far the MOST QUALIFIED NASA administrator in the history of the agency. Calling him a hack is a fucking joke. Name two things he done that are hackish. Name one aeronautical or science organization that opposes. Name two Democratic senators who opposed him. Give us anything of substance. I hate Bush, but I hate MORONS LIKE YOU more than anyone. You just now made up the bit about him re-engineering NASA into SDI. You goddamn LIAR. LIES. LIAR. LYING FABRICATOR. You are blinded by anti-Bush rage.
Because kill ratios mean jack shit when your enemy is infinitely more prepared to die for his cause than you are. This is why we lost in Vietnam, not because we were defeated militarily or because of war protestors, but because the enemy didn't care if they lost 20 men for every one of us they killed, and because the people we were trying to protect were frequently the same people who wanted to kill us.
All that stuff you just linked to is insignificant next to WWI or WWII, or even the Cold War. At the start of WWI, many armies were still made up of calvary. At the end of WWII, you had jet fighters, artillery capable of hitting targets 50 miles away, submarines that did not have to surface for air and of course the atomic bomb.
Let's hear some more about how his experience as Assoc Admin of Exploration and Chief Engineer at NASA doesn't make him complicit in the programs he now calls "a waste of money".
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The shuttle is not the shuttle that the engineers designed. It was designed by politicians. The original design called, e.g., for a titanium skin, but we were having trouble with Rhodesia and Russia at the time, so that wasn't politically acceptable. (Uncertain supplies could have been dealt with by stockpiling...but that would still have given money where the politicos didn't want money to go.) Other compormises were made to make the design cheaper. What we ended up with was sort of a cheap (not inexpensive!) version of the shuttle that was originally designed.
Don't say that it was impossible to make a decent shuttle. Say we were never given a chance to find out whether we could or not, because the plans were sabatoged.
Another problem was running the funding on election cycles. There were others.
I'm not speaking about the ISS, because I don't know. I suspect, however, that it had the same kind of interference, or worse.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I've wondered why they don't just stick a big ion drive on the space station and fly it someplace interesting, like lunar orbit. Use it as a pit stop for lunar landings/takeoffs. There are practical uses for a giant orbiting vessel.
The problem with the space shuttle can be summed up in two questions:
1. How much does the shuttle weighs empty ($10,000 per pound to get into space)?
2. Which is more important, get things up into space, or get things from space and bring it to earth?
The first question reveals the hidden cost of the shuttle and the poor design.
The second question goes with the first in that if the purpose is to put things into space than disposable is the way to go. More weight the spacecraft weighs, the less you can put up there.
My questions about the new Moon Rocket are two fold:
1. If you need two rockets (One being larger than the Saturn V) just to bring four humans to the moon, what do you need to take the same size crew to Mars and land on Mars and then return?
2. Why don't Nasa use a ferry system? Store the Command Modulbe (Apollo Speak) on the Space Station and supply it with fuel and just send up replacement parts for the LEM (i.e. the part that was left on the moon) as well. Assemble them at the space station then take it to the Moon. The vehicle that brings the people to the station can be smaller and can be use to land back on earth? A lot more complicated, but a whole lot cheaper reusing these systems this way?
| China is starting its manned space program from a clean slate
Yeah, a clean slate and several decades worth of stolen research. It's easy to start a new venture if all you have to do is follow a checklist of some else's hard-won lessens.
Are you sure you can afford it? I hear it costs $100 billion a year.
Lies about crimes
We lost because we couldn't hit strategic targets, which hamstrung the effort. Had we been able to do so, supplies from North Vietnam to the Vietcong may well have slowed or ceased, with negotiators operating in good faith at the Paris peace talks to avoid having their society -- which still needed electricity, sanitation, clean water, and usable transportation facilities and lines -- completely crushed into the ground.
Iraq and Vietnam are two completely different kinds of war. They both have urban settings and involve irregulars to a high degree, but equipment sourcing, political support, and rules of engagement have little in common.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The internet, i.e. the TCP/IP protocol might have come from military research, but the www came from Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which has no military usefulness, and both the www and mobile phones, which also came after the cold war, boomed in the 90's in a time when people were less worried about international war for a change and even the Israelis and the Palestinians were getting on for a change.
A good, fear-free market is a better driver of innovation than a paranoid military driven one if you ask me.
I covered this all already.
We lost because we couldn't hit strategic targets, which hamstrung the effort.
We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by all sides during WWII. Fireboming every last supply trail would be like fireboming every last cocaine field in Columbia - it's not going to make any difference because in the end because they'll just make new ones. No, once again, the reason we lost is because they maintained moral and motivation no matter how many casualties they suffered. The Vientnamese beat us in a war of attrition, the same as they did to the French before us.
to avoid having their society -- which still needed electricity, sanitation, clean water, and usable transportation facilities and lines -- completely crushed into the ground.
Their society was pretty much crushed. And considering that much of the population lived in self-sufficient agrarian villages, the carrot of electricity and running lines was a bit underwhelming.
Iraq and Vietnam are two completely different kinds of war.
There are obvious differences and there are obvious similiarities. One obvious similarity is that the same people we are supposed to protect are the same ones trying to kill us. That tends to be a bit of a downer on the old morale.
1. In 1993, during the design of ISS he wrote a highly public and highly critical letter about how ISS was designed and executed. There were three options presented - A, B, and C. Griffin complained that the review process was designed to emphasize A and C, which HAPPENED to be more friendly towards pork and big NASA spending than the technical merits of space exploration. The selection of many scientists - B- was ignorned and the selection of politicans - A - was the final decision.
2. After the Challenger explosion Griffin wrote that the shuttle fleet should be grounded, and that manned space flight was both two dangerous and two expensive. He stated that a continued expensive shuttle program was bound to end in more disaster and that the goals of science could be met without manned flight while a more robust, cost effective, and reliable vehicle was developed.
3. During his tenure in the Exploration and Engineering fields he spearheaded efforts to increase the amount of science able to be done by probes and satellites, dedicated small research grants to universities - instead of private business - to develop and refine "multi-camera" devices, like the ones used routinely today in all space flights and programs.
4. He selected approved the Mars Pathfinder for initial funding, and protected it against two rounds of funding cuts. His initial foresight by budgeting just $10M over 3 years lead to the best bang for its buck NASA has had in many, many years. $230M for the entire program which more than tripled the quantity of data we had on file about mars, space exploration, and autononmous robotic exploration.
exploration administrator Assistant. This was a "lateral" move, given to him by Dan Goldin for dispariging the ISS program. Punishment. NASA's chief engineer Forced out. During this time he selected, funded, and protected the Pathfinder program. $230M for NASA's greatest technical and PR success in two decades. Fought against the shuttle. Fought to keep the next gen shuttle project alive. Fought against the ISS. Total lies. He's been academia since Bush has been in office. He has opposed the most poignant failures of NASA at the time, hurting his own career on two occassions. In this interview he acknowledges things that are already in the public domain - ie, that the shuttle he fought against is a bad program. Big surprise. You continue to make up lies about the guy. You have provided not one shred of any evidence to backup your hate for the man. You called him a hack. He is not a hack. He is qualified beyond any doubt. Don't like his policies? Fine. Bring them up, and I'll look over your points. But you have failed to that, because you are a hate filled liar who doesn't like the man simply becaues he's connected in some way with Bush. You are a liar and a loser. If you spend a few minutes poking around my comment history and on other sites (dkos?) you'll find that my opinion on Bush is pretty clear.
So he's smart - maybe Yeah, you are right. He's been in academia for 30 years, but he's a total tard. He's obviously an unqualified hack. No business being at NASA. He's the Mike Brown of NASA. What a tool you are. His boss, Bush, has degrees from Yale, Harvard biz school Gentlemen's degrees and grades. He did the minimum. And MBA is worthless and you know it. What we are talking about are engineering degrees, inventive work, and peer reconigition. Can't fake that moron. Not for 30 years. you might hate Bush, but you do worship other idols. Yeah, competetance.
Shuttle was useful until ~1991. At least it helped US to win Cold War.
But ISS is huge waste of money.
Russians "loved" their space stations because they did not have good reconnaissance satellites.
Do not believe in crap like "it was for experiments etc". All those cosmonuts had been doing was equipment repairs.
Do you have any idea the sort of field-testing that remote imaging, remote control, combo intertial/gps/multi-sensor guidance, distributed networking/comms technology is getting in a place like that?
BFD. Of the many problems we have in Iraq, technical superiority is not one of them. Are there advancements being made? Of course. Are they insignifigant next to advances made when you are facing equal opponents? Of course. Look at all the leaps that were made in either of the World Wars or the Cold War. The Iraq war is small potatos.
How about the huge portion of the Pentagon's budget that's going into building Iraq a this-century telecommunications system, real water treatment, decentralized power distribution/management, and so on?
Huh, I wonder how much of that wouldn't have been neccesary if the U.S. hadn't spent 12 years bombing that stuff in the first place. In any case, the Iraqis are vastly less impressed by this than you are.
The only people "mindlessly killing" anyone over there are the hardcore Islamo-fascists that want to reinstate a Sunni-esque pan-Arab caliphate, just like the good old days several hundred years ago.
A gross oversimplification, but yes the Sunnis are considerably more pissed off than the Kurds or the Shiites. That could all change if the country dissolves into civil war, or Turkey decides to invade an independant Kurdistan.
Citizens of Iraq are being murdered by insurgents, mostly made up of, and certainly funded/armed/trained by non-Iraqis
A Republican fantasy. Foriengers are comming, yes, but it's to help out the home grown insurgency by Sunnis, they did not create it in the first place nor are they the primary force behind it.
that don't want to see a forward-looking democracy take hold there
Bullshit. You really drink the Fox Kool-Aid, don't you? They hear all this talk of democracy and they just look next door at Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Pakistan to see just how seriously we really push democracy. They just want the U.S. to get the hell out of threre.
That has been pretty thoroughly debunked. They came up with a range of 12,000-188,000 or something crazy like that, and picked the middle number.
Most reputable estimates put the number at 20,000-25,000, and that includes those fighting for the insurgency and those that were killed by the terrorists, which outnumbers those killed by US forces.
First of all, Bush NEVER said that the threat was imminent. He said very, very, very clearly to anyone who felt compelled to actually pay attention at the time that we had to act before the threat was imminent. He then tacked on "Since when do mass murderers announce their intentions to their victims?" or some such rhetorical question. I'm sure you didn't miss it... it was in the 2003 State of the Union Address.
m v
Also, you seem to under the impression that Bush was just making things up out of thin air, when in fact the entire planet believed that Hussein possessed the WMDs, including Saddam's own cabinet and perhaps Saddam himself. The intelligence used came from intelligence agencies around the planet, including the French, Germans, and Italians. And don't forget that Vladimir Putin has said that he told Bush prior to the invasion that he had reliable intelligence that Iraq was planning to attack the US on US soil.
This stuff has been rehashed a million times, and noone who has a clue what they are really talking about would even try the "Bush lied" insinuation around people who pay attention.
You may find this video to be a bit fascinating... actually, you will probably be shocked, as insulated as you seem to be from the actual state of affairs prior to the invasion.
http://www.humanracewatch.com/video/therealdeal.w
It goes on for quite a long time, but you'll get the point after one or two or three or ten minutes.
In Vietnam, a common complaint was that the list of prohibited targets outweight allowed targets because of the desire by the White House to avoid civilian casualties and anything that might suggest that the US was trying to harm North Vietnam.
Dams? Prohibited.
Bridges near major cities? Often prohibited.
Ports? Prohibited.
Rail stations and switches? Prohibited.
Power stations? Prohibited.
Sanitation systems? Prohibited.
Government buildings? Prohibited.
SAM sites if they were next to a school or hospital? Prohibited.
Going into Iraq, bridges, ports, rail stations, power stations, warehouses, government buildings, and a wide variety of others were targeted. Granted, the weapons were far more precise and so a single shot kill on a target was more likely, but even after laser-guided bombs became used in Vietnam, targeting strategic resources was often prevented. North Vietnam had far less rebuilding to do than did North Korea, Japan, or Germany after the respective wars with them were through.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Using intense magnetic fields, it seems that it is possible to counteract the effects of gravity here on Earth. This is much less expensive than going to outerspace. How come NASA hasn't dumped billions into this technology?
2 0000040.htmT P/News_91/dateline.html Scroll down to the part on Frog Physics.
http://www.ugeek.com/news/geeknews/sept99/gn19999
http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~sci_info/News_from_IC
http://www.esf.org/generic/224/100T.pdf See section 6.5
90% of it was about Saddam not complying with U.N. resolutions.
And wtf do you think most of those resolutions were about? Over 90% of the resolutions that were still relevant dealt with weapons of mass distruction.
Spank spank, neocon beyach.
But at no point did the President jump up and down and scream "He's got millions of ICBMs! Let's go get 'em!" This is what everybody seems to think he said, however.
No, he jumped up and down and talked about mushroom clouds and how we had to invade right now to stop Saddam from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Bush was wrong and so are you. Deal with it.
Why don't you go there and tell those Iraqi families that those figures are inflated. Take up a collection, you might raise enough money to buy you a ticket.
I know this is dreadfully OFF TOPIC but I think it's something many of you are highly interested in. I've come up today with a new design for a PC case that DOES NOT NEED COOLING FANS. It gets better than that too. I'm not in a position to apply for a Design Patent and all so what I want to do is put it all here on SlashDot, for all+any of you who wants to can try and make it happen. Any PC case manufacturer too. I want to make a suggestion first tho that, since a fanless case saves money on the fans and saves some space, saves some on the motherboards not needing fan plugs, that we all make a gentleman's agreement to take some of the Savings -and some of the increased Sales- to contribute toward something. Maybe even start a SlashDot engineering scholarship or something. Here I go > The "Design": This idea is for a two-motherboard case having a vertical divider; opposed motherboards on the left, hard drives, burners, power supplies for each over to the right of the divider. All of the hotter stuff goes on the right, with the hdd's closer to the bottom, then the burners, then the power supplies at the top. At the bottom of the divider there's a space of an inch or 2. The power supplies are set so an upward air flow will go thru the PS cases. When the PS are fired up, they begin to heat first, followed by the drives. As the heat begins to rise toward an opening for heat exhaust, air is pulled downward on the motherboard side, cooling all the chips silently, under & through the divider space, upward past the hdd's, burners, power supplies, and exiting from the top or side of the top. And THAT'S IT. Now for the REST > I believe all this could be placed on hinged pieces so that the entire PC could be folded up - ORIGAMI-STYLE - so that the sides, top, & divider would form the PC case. So whenever someone needs to change a cpu, swap out a drive, whatever, all the technician need do is UNFOLD THE UNIT. Everybody remember the old magician's trick of the girl assistant being locked in the case and the divider slid down "through her"? That's the final piece of the puzzle! The divider could be the piece that slides down into the Unit, locking the Unit together. To work on it, you would just pull the divider out & unfold the Unit. As far as I'm concerned, the SlashDot website can supervise this construction if they want, but if they don't care to do that then I hope anyone who wants to will donate a dollar or 2 to Charity, Red Cross, or the Cancer Society Research, for each Unit you sell. Just, when you design the case be sure to leave a space down toward the bottom, possibly a 4.5-6 inch cube, for either an APC Mini Back-Up or a little device I'm working on that generates an electrical current to run the Unit. I'm planning to release the theory soon in Roanoke Virginia, possibly at the Roanoke Civic Center, but nothing is finalized yet. It's for a regenerative power supply and frees all devices from wall plug electric. Not just computers; refrigerators, hot water heaters, & the entire home, to be free of the Main Power Grid. I hope my previous postings on SlashDot, my Design for a fanless PC that folds & unfolds in a minute or less, will serve as my introduction that I do have what I say... a home-size generator that does not use fuel of any kind. I plan to release it for free also because it will raise everyone's Quality of Life. Being freed from a monthly electric bill, we'll have plenty of money to buy stuff, cars, homes, and these new PC cases. I think it will do for America what plastics did for Japan... {{ Main webpages: 99% newpath4 links on this page > http://tinyurl.com/8p7r3 & Multiple Search Engine Access > http://tinyurl.com/4txmk }}
On the radio he was quoted as saying we would have reached Mars and maybe had a moonbase by now if we didn't spend it on the shuttle and ISS.
I initially disagreed that a moonbase would significantly help the Mars issue, but now agree that it would serve two purposes:
1. Practice living on a desolate body for long periods, including renewable/recycled resource harvesting.
2. Provide an isolated lab in which to test Mars return samples without risking infecting Earthlings (unless moonnauts become latent carriers).
Table-ized A.I.
Perhaps they were mistakes, but the problem is that space exploration is not a known quantity. We are pioneers and pioneers encounter problems. We are often not going to get it right the first time. Nobody does. It was perfectly reasonable to believe that gravity-free manufacturing would allow all kinds of new, unseen technologies. However, because it hadn't yet been tried heavily, nobody knew. You cannot explore the unknown via a Gaant chart and flowchart. In real exploration you don't know where the arrows lead until you get there.
Table-ized A.I.
I pretty much agree with Griffin.
We didn't get what we wanted with either the shuttle or ISS. I think it's time to say, "Well, that didn't work. Let's try something different." However, we've learned quite a
bit and can apply the lessons on the next generation. I don't expect that we can apply all the lessons. We can't even agree on what they are. We can try to address some of the big problems.
Here are a couple things I think we may(?) have learned:
1) projects over $1 Billion or so are difficult to manage efficiently,
2) budgets need to be more reliable for long term projects,
3) space exploration and space development are not the same.
I think that the manned space program is really more about space development than exploration. As such, I think it should be split off of NASA and given its own agency with a budget that is separate and managed as a long term investment. NASA has done very well in more science oriented ventures, such as the Mars rovers, Deep Impact and Cassini.
Apollo was successful, but the time from inception to a man on the Moon was still less than ten years. The shuttle project is over thirty years old! The management techniques used for the science missions does not work for building a space infrastructure. The shuttle was meant to be the foundation of a space transportation system and ISS was to be a colonial foothold.
Think of this, thirty years after Apollo, we haven't gone back. Thirty years after Columbus, there were cities in the Spanish colonies with paved roads and a university!
Alcanazar
Here
and here
explain why it hasn't been debunked (apart from by unqualified journalists).
The SSME is . . . a race car engine! I guess there is not much wrong with the design apart from the fact that the engines are required to be very light weight for their thrust, operate at very high chamber pressure so they are efficient at both low and high altitudes with a fixed nozzle. These engines are operated on the edge of what the materials can handle, much like race car engines or the R-3350's on the WW-2 B-29's. After seeing video of maintenance being done on the SSME's, these very high tech engines being serviced by techs with those ubiquitous red multi drawer tool cabinets, it dawned on me that we should contract the whole thing out to Roger Penske. He and his race car mechanics have a lot of experience doing tear downs and reassemblies of such motors. By the way, if the SSMEs get used in heavy lift boosters, do these engines get thrown away? Do they even have production lines to make any more SSMEs?
Exactly. Which was and still is a completely valid reason for invading since Iraq was attempting to purchase materials for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. And they already had quite a bit. They just didn't have massive stockpiles of ICBMs that the Left suddenly thinks we went there to get.
Did you even read those press releases? They make my point precisely. Constantly, the President stresses the duplicity of the Hussein regime. This is the casus belli. And in reference to WMDs, he makes those very clear statements that Saddam possessed WMDs and was actively working to obtain more. After the invasion, we found plenty of evidence that this was true. Hussein didn't have enormous stockpiles of long-range MIRV-tipped ICBMs ready to obliterate all of America, but that was never the threat in the first place. This isn't the cold war.
Just as an example, immediately following your first quote, Bush said this:
As we see, the threat was that of an easily transportable and small to medium quantity of an agent being passed to Hamas or another terror organization and moved to our nation or an ally like Israel, where it would be used to kill. Saddam supported terror organizations because he wanted to be seen as a pan-Arab hero. The likelihood of this scenario is so astonishingly great that to take any other action than regime change is little short of idiotic.
From the 2003 State of the Union address:
This, to me, was the clincher. It quite frankly doesn't matter to me what Saddam Hussein, or Kim Jong Il, or the Ayatollah are or are not doing. Their behavior itself is indicitive of a threatening posture and is worthy of action. The fact that Saddam kept playing shell games with the United States and the United Nations was evidence enough that he needed to be removed. If you let somebody like Hussein go on and on with that kind of behavior, sooner or later you will regret it. When 300 million people are relying on you to protect them, hoping things won't go wrong isn't reasonable.
Of course, there were other useful objectives in the war too. The goal of social, political, and economic changes in the Middle East is worthy, in my opinion. The strategic position between Iran, Turkey, and Syria is also helpful.
You bet. Many times. I also read your reply to the GP post at the time many times before replying. GP said:
You then said:
(emphasis mine)
No, everyone did not think he said there are millions of ICBM's. I'm sorry if I assumed you were just exaggerating to make your point. Obviously you were being serious. Everyone thought he said exactly the quotes I posted, which were from public speeches made before the war. They clearly state that he thought they had such weapons in their possession. Whether they were on ICBMs or not is irrelevant since the second clearly stated thread in those speeches was that Sadam had links to terrorists and therefore those weapons would be available for them to use.
The fact remains that there have been no WMDs found since our second invasion. And credible reports of sites able to produce such things on reasonable timescales are few to none. His explicit link to terrorists has also proved extremely tenuous. History will eventually tells us (hopefully) if this was purely misinformation or organized deceit. What's appalling to me at this point is that there has been little credit taken, apologies made, or change in course based on the fact that this critical "evidence" used as a major part of the justification for the invasion was not true.
This attitude:
Is what saddens me most about the country today. Our global dominance has reduced the lives of many in the world to an expendable commodity for our prosperity and "security".
Dams? Prohibited.
Sure, and those are all critical targets in a war such as WWII, where the German army was dependant on oil refined in Austria and was occuping land with hostile locals that were happy to out them. That doesn't cut the mustard when you're "defending" a country from large segments of its own population in a war of attrition. The Viet Cong didn't need railroads, bridges or dams to wage its war when all they needed was to backpack some mines and sniper rifles through the jungle. Same goes for the Iraqi insurgency - they don't need tanks or supply lines when their weapons are IED's and assault rifles. And last time I checked, every household was allowed to have one AK-47.
Going into Iraq, bridges, ports, rail stations, power stations, warehouses, government buildings, and a wide variety of others were targeted.
Yup, and if we hadn't gone all out in bombing civilian infrastructure, we wouldn't have as much of a problem with reconstruction or winning over the Iraqis.
Which was and still is a completely valid reason for invading since Iraq was attempting to purchase materials for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
No, they weren't.
And they already had quite a bit.
No, they didn't. I suppose you are one of those polled who think that Saddam had WMD's and that we found them already. This crap was all debunked years ago.
They just didn't have massive stockpiles of ICBMs that the Left suddenly thinks we went there to get.
Nice revisionist history. Here, lets review: three years ago Bush said that Saddam had signifigant stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and was actively trying to aquire nuclear weapons. Bush said this wasn't a war of choice, it was a war of necessity, and that Saddam was such a threat that we had to take him out right now. Of course, this all turned out to be false.
Try playing a game with yourself. It's called, "what if Clinton did it". What if Clinton had convinced the nation to spend hundereds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives on what turned out to be false pretenses. What if Clinton had sat on his ass for half an hour while he knew an American city was under attack. What would your reaction be if Clinton gave multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to a company formerly headed by his Vice President. And so on.
In Vietnam, we weren't defending all of Vietnam. We were defending South Vietnam. Go find a map from the era, or read a history book, and you'll see that they were two countries with two different governments. We were prevented from targeting much of the infrastructure in North Vietnam which might have forced Hanoi to the bargaining table to address peace earnestly. Hanoi is where the Vietcong got their equipment and much of their training. Get Hanoi to agree to stop that, and the Vietcong would have been much less of a threat.
As for Iraq's infrastructure damage, go grab a copy of Google Earth and start looking over the dams, bridges, and various other locations, and tell me just how much of the infrastructure actually was taken out. I spent part of yesterday marveling at the traffic jams that appear to be common at major intersections in Baghdad, and all the parking lots full of cars. You don't have to destroy every bridge or rail station if you can take out a key chokepoint. What was taken out would be almost completely back in place if it wasn't being blown up periodically by the insurgency.
I've talked to people who have done at least one tour over there, and they say that while things were bad in some ways, they never were even close to the descriptions that were used by the anti-war protesters that suggested we'd carpet-bombed entire cities into the ground. The situation is miles ahead of where they were even a year ago. The problem is that no one has reported clearly on what has changed, what has not, and what has yet to be done.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
This was recently sent out to NASA employees and I have copied it directly. The only thing changed is the name and contact info for "Point of Contact" have been removed. I tend to believe that he is the kind of guy that doesn't really think the two huge centerpeices of NASA tech are blunders or mistakes.
Point of Contact: D*** A*****, Public Affairs, 202/***-***
Message from the Administrator
I'm sure you've seen the press coverage concerning my supposed comments on
the space shuttle and International Space Station, beginning last Wednesday.
I've been in Russia since the day the article came out, and have therefore
missed most of the reaction to it, but I've received enough e-mail to
realize that I didn't handle the situation well and have left some hurt
feelings behind. So, I thought I should make the effort to clarify the
situation, and this e-mail to all of you is the best way I know to do it.
The attention-getting parts of the story were, of course, associated with
the use of words such as "mistake" and "blunder" in connection with the
shuttle and station programs. The press coverage has been such as to make it
appear that I used those words to characterize the programs. In fact -- and
I would hope that this goes without saying -- I did no such thing. I was
asked by an interviewer if shuttle had been "a mistake," and I provided my
answer, which addressed the difficulty of the design challenge and the
paucity of funds with which it was undertaken. This answer was given in the
article, and was quoted correctly. But the use of words such as "mistake"
and "blunder," as well as the overall pejorative tone of the article, was
not reflective of my remarks nor of the general context of the discussion.
At the strategic level, I think all of you know that I believe we have been
restricted to low Earth orbit for far too long and that the proper focus of
our nation's space program should be the exploration of our solar system. I
do understand that others will disagree. In that context, it is useful to
recall Norm Augustine's observation that most people believe we should have
a robust space program; it is just that no two people agree as to what that
program should be! But it is my sense that this debate has been had and has
been resolved for the time being. The Vision for Space Exploration is the
right path, and it is the path that we are re-engaging our agency to follow.
I am committed to it.
With that said, I do hope you know that I would never speak of our efforts,
past or present, in a way that would be intended to denigrate the efforts of
the engineers, technicians, managers, scientists, and administrative
personnel who "make it happen" at NASA and at our contractors.
As I have often said publicly, the shuttle is the most amazing machine
humans have ever built, and it has been the recipient of the most brilliant
engineering that America can provide. The station is a more difficult
engineering project, by far, than was Apollo. It is true that we have not
met our original goals for these programs, for myriad reasons dating back 35
years or more, involving strategic and budgetary decisions made, properly or
otherwise, above NASA. Although this is not the fault of the dedicated
people, past and present, who have worked in these programs, I think we all
know that we can do better, and that we will. But even if everything were
in our favor -- and it is not -- it would be several years before we could
have available a successor to the shuttle. In the interim, we must complete
the station and the only tool with which we can accomplish that is the
shuttle. At this point, an expeditious but orderly phase-out of the shuttle
program, using it to complete the assembly of the station while we develop a
new system, is the best thing we can do for our agency and for the nation.
These are the messages I have tried to convey. It is not my intention
Thought people might find this interesting. We received the following email today: Message from the Administrator I'm sure you've seen the press coverage concerning my supposed comments on the space shuttle and International Space Station, beginning last Wednesday. I've been in Russia since the day the article came out, and have therefore missed most of the reaction to it, but I've received enough e-mail to realize that I didn't handle the situation well and have left some hurt feelings behind. So, I thought I should make the effort to clarify the situation, and this e-mail to all of you is the best way I know to do it. The attention-getting parts of the story were, of course, associated with the use of words such as "mistake" and "blunder" in connection with the shuttle and station programs. The press coverage has been such as to make it appear that I used those words to characterize the programs. In fact -- and I would hope that this goes without saying -- I did no such thing. I was asked by an interviewer if shuttle had been "a mistake," and I provided my answer, which addressed the difficulty of the design challenge and the paucity of funds with which it was undertaken. This answer was given in the article, and was quoted correctly. But the use of words such as "mistake" and "blunder," as well as the overall pejorative tone of the article, was not reflective of my remarks nor of the general context of the discussion. At the strategic level, I think all of you know that I believe we have been restricted to low Earth orbit for far too long and that the proper focus of our nation's space program should be the exploration of our solar system. I do understand that others will disagree. In that context, it is useful to recall Norm Augustine's observation that most people believe we should have a robust space program; it is just that no two people agree as to what that program should be! But it is my sense that this debate has been had and has been resolved for the time being. The Vision for Space Exploration is the right path, and it is the path that we are re-engaging our agency to follow. I am committed to it. With that said, I do hope you know that I would never speak of our efforts, past or present, in a way that would be intended to denigrate the efforts of the engineers, technicians, managers, scientists, and administrative personnel who "make it happen" at NASA and at our contractors. As I have often said publicly, the shuttle is the most amazing machine humans have ever built, and it has been the recipient of the most brilliant engineering that America can provide. The station is a more difficult engineering project, by far, than was Apollo. It is true that we have not met our original goals for these programs, for myriad reasons dating back 35 years or more, involving strategic and budgetary decisions made, properly or otherwise, above NASA. Although this is not the fault of the dedicated people, past and present, who have worked in these programs, I think we all know that we can do better, and that we will. But even if everything were in our favor -- and it is not -- it would be several years before we could have available a successor to the shuttle. In the interim, we must complete the station and the only tool with which we can accomplish that is the shuttle. At this point, an expeditious but orderly phase-out of the shuttle program, using it to complete the assembly of the station while we develop a new system, is the best thing we can do for our agency and for the nation. These are the messages I have tried to convey. It is not my intention that they should be used to criticize or diminish the efforts of those who have devoted their lives -- and in some cases given their lives -- to the space program. Space technology is still in its infancy. To criticize the shuttle and station because our best efforts have fallen short of the goals we have set would be like criticizing the early aviation pioneers because they did not understand, then, how to build transcontinental aircraft. In this business, our goal is to push the frontiers of technology, to learn what we can by doing so, and then move on. And that is what we will do. Thank you all for your time and attention. Michael Griffin NASA Administrator
Message from the Administrator
I'm sure you've seen the press coverage concerning my supposed comments on the space shuttle and International Space Station, beginning last Wednesday.
I've been in Russia since the day the article came out, and have therefore missed most of the reaction to it, but I've received enough e-mail to realize that I didn't handle the situation well and have left some hurt feelings behind. So, I thought I should make the effort to clarify the situation, and this e-mail to all of you is the best way I know to do it.
The attention-getting parts of the story were, of course, associated with the use of words such as "mistake" and "blunder" in connection with the shuttle and station programs. The press coverage has been such as to make it appear that I used those words to characterize the programs. In fact -- and I would hope that this goes without saying -- I did no such thing. I was asked by an interviewer if shuttle had been "a mistake," and I provided my answer, which addressed the difficulty of the design challenge and the paucity of funds with which it was undertaken. This answer was given in the article, and was quoted correctly. But the use of words such as "mistake"
and "blunder," as well as the overall pejorative tone of the article, was not reflective of my remarks nor of the general context of the discussion.
At the strategic level, I think all of you know that I believe we have been restricted to low Earth orbit for far too long and that the proper focus of our nation's space program should be the exploration of our solar system. I do understand that others will disagree. In that context, it is useful to recall Norm Augustine's observation that most people believe we should have a robust space program; it is just that no two people agree as to what that program should be! But it is my sense that this debate has been had and has been resolved for the time being. The Vision for Space Exploration is the right path, and it is the path that we are re-engaging our agency to follow.
I am committed to it.
With that said, I do hope you know that I would never speak of our efforts, past or present, in a way that would be intended to denigrate the efforts of the engineers, technicians, managers, scientists, and administrative personnel who "make it happen" at NASA and at our contractors.
As I have often said publicly, the shuttle is the most amazing machine humans have ever built, and it has been the recipient of the most brilliant engineering that America can provide. The station is a more difficult engineering project, by far, than was Apollo. It is true that we have not met our original goals for these programs, for myriad reasons dating back 35 years or more, involving strategic and budgetary decisions made, properly or otherwise, above NASA. Although this is not the fault of the dedicated people, past and present, who have worked in these programs, I think we all know that we can do better, and that we will. But even if everything were in our favor -- and it is not -- it would be several years before we could have available a successor to the shuttle. In the interim, we must complete the station and the only tool with which we can accomplish that is the shuttle. At this point, an expeditious but orderly phase-out of the shuttle program, using it to complete the assembly of the station while we develop a new system, is the best thing we can do for our agency and for the nation.
These are the messages I have tried to convey. It is not my intention that they should be used to criticize or diminish the efforts of those who have devoted their lives -- and in some cases given their lives -- to the space program. Space technology is still in its infancy. To criticize the shuttle and station because our best efforts have fallen short of the goals we have set would be like criticizing the early aviation pioneers because they did not understand, then, how to build transcontinental aircraft. In this business, our goal is to push the frontiers of technology, to learn what we can by doing so, and then move on. And that is what we will do.
Thank you all for your time and attention.
Michael Griffin
NASA Administrator