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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.
I would also like a pony.
"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
Part of the point of this is that it takes an incredible amount of time and money to send something into space. Adding one more flight will not be a huge issue, because there is a rescue flight scheduled for the last current shuttle flight. But after that to add a flight would be a ton of work. With the knowledge that the shuttle program was coming to an end the ability to make the antique parts that the shuttle flies on is diminished, as no one makes them anymore. (To give an idea of how old the hardware is, the navigation system runs on something like 512 K) It would cost in the order of $400 million dollars per additional flight. Also, to speed up Constellation it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars per month, and even with expanded funding there is a limit to how fast it can be realized. In short, everyone is asking for money, NASA included, and lots of people question how important manned space flight actually is.
"Why do it now? Why not let the next administration decide?"
Because the problem is so large, and such an emergency, that it /must/ be dealt with right now. Word is that that without the bailout, we had two weeks before the shit hit the fan.
It's true what's been said, that Fannie and Freddie were "too big to fail." Failure without a buyout would have caused...utter chaos - literally runs on the banks not seen since 1929.
And I'm not kidding about criminal lack of oversight. We already know the books were cooked over there to make things look rosier than they were.
The CEOs of Fannie and Freddie lost their jobs because of that. BFD. They probably deserve jail time, but I won't hold my breath.
I lived through the RISDIC crisis, and this is the same stuff, just writ REALLY LARGE. 9 percent of all home loans, nationally, in arrears or in default? What? Here in Rhode Island, it's 32 percent. Apparently that's for real, and this stuff has just started. Trust me, this has just started.
And we still want to go to Mars. Har. Unlikely.
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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!
"Somehow, I suppose the occupation of Iraq must be profitable after all, otherwise it would only be logical to withdraw troops from there. Same for Afghanistan."
We need a -1 Naive tag.
You need to read up on the Project for a New American Century.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm
Please note the date.
Please note who the members of PNAC are and who signed the Mission Statement.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
Let me know when you finish screaming.
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BMO
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.
You heard wrong. First of all, a 12 megapixel camera has trouble picking up fingerprints here on earth, unless the surface and lighting are conducive. Second, with a 1-meter aperture, the THEORETICAL limit for resolution would be picking up something 6 inches in diameter. With a 2.4 meter aperture (about the limit for optics going into space. It's the size of the Hubble, in case you were wondering), the (again, theoretical) limit of resolution that could be achieved is 3 inches in diameter.
Both of those numbers are, again, entirely theoretical. That's assuming you weren't looking through ~70 miles of turbulent, dusty atmosphere.
So unless the US Government beat the laws of electromagnetic diffraction and didn't tell anybody...
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.
I hate apple pie and will do my best to censor any talk 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.
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.
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)
You know, I keep hearing that Republicans make up the party of hatred, and then I see all the hate being spewed toward Bush, McCain, and now especially Palin. I think a look into the mirror is needed here.
On the other off-topic topic of free speech, no one seemed bothered that a bunch of "women" in pink tried to prevent McCain from using his free speech rights. I'm reminded of the Code Pink groups of the 1930's. Only instead of Pink, they wore BROWNSHIRTS.
Forgive the OT-ness.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.