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In Leaked Email, NASA Chief Vents On Shuttle Program's End
jerryasher writes "In a leaked memo, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin discusses 'the jihad' to prematurely terminate the Shuttle and what that means for the International Space Station. One implication: there may come a long interval when only our Russian Allies are aboard the Space Station. Add that bit of irony to your new cold war kit and then wonder why Griffin discusses why we wouldn't sabotage the Space Station, and how and why the memo got leaked in the first place."
In a statement issued after the Orlando Sentinel posted Griffin's e-mail, the space agency administrator stressed that the memo alone lacked the appropriate context.
"The leaked internal email fails to provide the contextual framework for my remarks, and my support for the Administration's policies," Griffin said the NASA statement. "Administration policy is to retire the shuttle in 2010 and purchase crew transport from Russia until Ares and Orion are available."
This basically validates the accuracy of the article's source material (the email), although it does insist that relying on the information in the email alone would not respect the context it was written in. In short, you should have RTFA (which contains a lot more information than the original email), and your comment is idiotic and baseless.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
With Putin doing his best Stalin imitation lately, it's moronic to trust the Russians to be a reliable stopgap until our new rockets and spacecraft are ready. We need to simply accept the fact that we'll be needing the Shuttle for a little while longer, and budget appropriately.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"And get something new and awesomer in the skies to replace it.
Something that could get people going wow again would be nice."
Not going to happen. Not now. Not for another 30 years or more.
Afghanistan
Iraq.
Do I dare look at the expenses incurred for the latter? No. There is nothing I can do about it, and all it will do is fill me with rage.
And now, due to criminal lack of oversight (because regulation is BAD, Right?!),
THIS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7602992.stm
This administration has fucked us all for sure. Forget the Shuttle. Forget the ISS. Forget the Moon. Forget Mars. Forget space exploration. Forget inspiring kids to become engineers and scientists.
Forget dreaming at all, for we can no longer afford it. Our future has been pissed away in 8 years.
Welcome to total, complete, utter incompetent management by the Shrub and his apparatchiks.
The first words spoken by the next President after being sworn in this January and looking at the real numbers: "What the fuck is this shit?"
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BMO
"It is to try to help avoid a financial market crash and the economy from plunging farther and more quickly into the shitter."
Oh, I know. I know too well. We had no choice.
Read my previous message.
This is the result of out-and-out fraud. However, while I live in a country where we have the highest per capita rate of imprisonment, the people responsible will never see the inside of a cell. Not even for a second. Trust me on this. We jail potsmokers instead.
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BMO
"Premature"? The shuttle program should have been terminated decades ago when it was clear it wouldn't meet stated design goals, i.e. low cost transportation to orbit. The termination of the shuttle program is very, very post-mature. The only reason it survived is the number of jobs it provided in the right congressional districts.
Only if the parties maligned actually deny the claims made by those sources.
This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, anonymous sources can help uncover serious abuses, i.e. Watergate. On the other, journalists can and do simply make stuff up and attribute it to these "sources". I recall the case of one American journalist, whose name(ironically) escapes me at the moment, who was caught extorting his victim. He was essentially threatening to publish stories that while they would be damaging to the victim, would not create any legal "liability" for his publication. I'm sure anonymous sources are abused in this way.
Personally, I think that given the low standing of journalism as a profession, anonymous sources are at this time completely without credibility. Nowadays, the default assumption that must be made about any journalist and news story is that they are a spin doctor spinning a story the way their employer pays them to. Under such high G-forces, the delicate anonymous sources collapse under their own weight.
May the Maths Be with you!
When the banks wrote the mortgages and held them, they were less likely to give money to unqualified buyers. When they were allowed to repackage the debt and sell it to other corporations, to no one's surprise, everyone got greedy and started trading the debt.
I like certain libertarians ideals, but the fact is that regulation is to industry what police are to neighborhoods. If you take a cop off a beat, crime will go up. If you take your eyes off corporate shenanigans, they will go up. This has been obvious from the days of Enron. What we need is reasonable regulation with national standards, state enforcement, and some new laws against the revolving door between business and government. There should be a separation of business and state, for the sake of both.
Of course, you can always argue that the fact that there was regulation that was removed led to the crisis. But you'd be wrong.
Yeah, it's like defending free speech and having to stick up for Nazis and pedophiles. It's still a worthy cause in the abstract, but the specifics can take some of the wind out of your sails.
... then Richard Nixon would not have been caught at all his bullshit.
Anonymous sources must not only be paid attention to, they must be protected in a Democratic society. Thus the laws protecting whistle blowers, and so on.
The shuttle failed to meet design specifications as you state (cost is only one area in which it failed). But unfortunately, all our eggs are in one basket. Nobody did sufficient forward planning to replace the space shuttle... planning that should have begun no later than the day it first launched.
Nevertheless, you don't throw away the only tool you have, even if it is expensive and unwieldly. Granted, we should have had a replacement for the shuttle a long time ago. But we don't, so that means we fly the shuttle until we do!!!
Yeah, it's like defending free speech and having to stick up for Nazis and pedophiles. It's still a worthy cause in the abstract, but the specifics can take some of the wind out of your sails.
It shouldn't. Nobody wants to censor talk about mom and apple pie. The right of free speech only matters when it comes down to speech that somebody finds offensive. If you aren't willing to defend the freedom to speak about stuff you find offensive, then you didn't ever really believe in free speech to begin with.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Well, some American companies are certainly making money off of the whole thing. It's just that the money isn't coming from where you think it is. Let me clarify. This isn't a war where the USA is looting Iraq (they've done a lot to that country, but looting isn't part of it). This is a war where one segment of the USA (the military industrial complex) is effectively looting the rest of the USA. And their government seems to take turns being too oblivious, evil, or simply too incompetent to do anything about it.
It shouldn't.
Why shouldn't it?
Nobody wants to censor talk about mom and apple pie. The right of free speech only matters when it comes down to speech that somebody finds offensive.
Right.
If you aren't willing to defend the freedom to speak about stuff you find offensive, then you didn't ever really believe in free speech to begin with.
Bullshit. Freedom of expression is just one universal human right, and like anything, when it its in competition with other universal rights a balance is struck that effectively curtails it.
The right to free expression conflicts with the right to be free from harm. If your expression is causing harm then perhaps your expression should be curtailed.
The fact that most people accept a limit to free speech doesn't mean they "don't really believe in it", rather it means that they aren't single minded idiots that can't hold two thoughts inside their head at the same time. It means they can see the conflict between the ideal of free expression and the ideal of avoiding harm and have struck a personal balance, such that the imperative of protecting free speech becomes progressively weaker as we become increasingly in conflict with the principle of avoiding harm.
In other words, at some stage up around advocating the raping of children most normal people find that DESPITE believing in free speech, they are uncomfortable with the harm they perceive it to be causing, particularly when they perceive that its PURPOSE is to cause harm and has no value beyond that, and perhaps they even perceive that they are being MANIPULATED into providing protection for that harm by the perpetrator... why should we be critical that their resolve to protect that instance of speech has significantly been diminished, perhaps even to the point that they elect to curtail it?
This is the action of a sane and rational person.
The primary problem is that it's a lot harder to convince people to allow speech than it is to convince people to ban speech. Give people an inch and they'll ban everything that they don't like.
Myself, I always default to believing that speech should be free unless it's completely clear that the damage caused by the speech cannot be counteracted with more free speech.
On a related note, I wish that no one was allowed to say anything on TV without first taking a legal oath that what they say is true under penalty of perjury. (And they would further be prevented from adding "I think" or any other prevarications to their talk.) The Republican party would essentially be barred from advertising in any way.
Nevertheless, would I ever want to disallow their hateful damaging lies by actually passing a law that made it illegal for them to spew their economy and world damaging nonsense?
No. And honestly, it's a LOT harder for me to say that than it is for me to stick up for neo nazis or other hate groups. That's because, unlike neo nazis, the Republicans are actually successful with their hate speech. Seriously, they actually have people convinced they are a party of small government. (biggest lie ever)
But, I still want it all protected.
Cow Cube
If your expression is causing harm then perhaps your expression should be curtailed.
But who gets to choose this? I think Madonna should be able to screw around with a crucifix on stage. If you are offended by this, join the club. If you think it "interferes with your natural rights", then you are way, way, too delicate.
Sorry, but unless someone is put in some kind of actual and direct danger, I don't support other people deciding what is and isn't acceptable speech... "Fire in a crowded theater" being the classic example.
In the example of advocating the raping of children... does anyone actually advocate this? I think you chose an example with a "think of the children" element so that people wouldn't disagree. That aside, what about a website advocating lowering the legal age of consent to, say, 17? How about 14? How about 9? Too young? Too old? Are you going to throw the book at the guy running the 9-year-old site but not the 14-year-old site? Why? Because you think one is "rape" but not the other? Who gets to decide? What about other cultures with different ages of consent? Are they rapists?
Conversely, let's say I put up a website advocating raising the age of consent to 21. Here I have a website intent on stripping millions of their legal rights... Isn't that harmful?
See the slippery slope?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The right to free expression conflicts with the right to be free from harm. If your expression is causing harm then perhaps your expression should be curtailed.
No it does not, and to claim otherwise is to make a false analogy, just watch as you do it:
In other words, at some stage up around advocating the raping of children
You should rape children. GO! Do it now! You will really like it!
Harm is not caused by speech. Harm is caused by physical action. People like you who falsely claim to believe in freedom of expression are just conflating the two because, like all censorship, it is easier to identify and squelch speech about harmful actions than it is to identify and stop individuals who actually commit those actions and cause actual harm. You get the warm fuzzy of appearing to do something about a problem with high emotional content without all the cost of actually making a real difference.
By the way, bonus points for using "But think of the children!" as your example. I can't think of another meme that has been so widely abused to justify censorship with such little actual reduction in harm.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Err... Are you completely ignoring emotional harm
"Emotional harm" is not a sufficient justification to infringe on free speech. Grow a spine and realize that your "right" not to be offended doesn't trump my right to speak my mind. If you don't like what I'm saying then start shouting an opposing point of view or walk away. Don't whine about "emotional harm" and try to censor me.
and mental health
If your mental health is so unstable that you can't handle listening to free speech then you probably shouldn't be leaving your house. What was that old adage about sticks and stones?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'd suggest that you spend a few days walking around calling every woman you see "cum dumpster" (to her face) including your time at work
If I did that at work I'd be fired. Free speech != freedom from the consequences of that speech. Saying it elsewhere would probably get me slapped -- which I suppose would technically be assault but I'd deserve it (again, free speech != freedom from the consequences)
Do you actually think it should be illegal to walk up to a woman and call her a cum dumpster?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.