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Obama Backs New Launcher and Bigger NASA Budget
The AAAS's ScienceInsider confidently reports that NASA is in line to receive $1 billion more next year. Reader coop0030 sends this quote: "President Barack Obama will ask Congress next year to fund a new heavy-lift launcher to take humans to the Moon, asteroids, and the moons of Mars... The president chose the new direction for the US human space flight program Wednesday at a White House meeting with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, according to officials familiar with the discussion. NASA would receive an additional $1 billion in 2011 both to get the new launcher on track and to bolster the agency's fleet of robotic Earth-monitoring spacecraft."
Should be plenty of room to fit 'em all. You don't need a lot of payload, they'll provide their own forced-hot-air heating system until the oxygen runs out, and you want to make that mercifully (*) quick.
(*) for us, not them.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
"According to knowledgeable sources, the White House is convinced that scarce NASA funds would be better spent on a simpler heavy-lift vehicle that could be ready to fly as early as 2018."
Nothing in the article says what that HLV would be, or who would build it. The article also talks about the fight in Congress over Constellation districts losing aerospace jobs.
The only thing I am aware of is Elon Musk saying NASA has an option for SpaceX to develop an HLV, and I'm not talking about Falcon 9 or Falcon 9 Heavy. Anything else would be the usual suspects dusting off old blueprints and submitting proposals, or something I'm not aware of, which would be fine too.
McCain may have not been my ideal choice, but at least I knew exactly what he was going to do before he got into office.
Yeah, a heart attack and President Palin ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Hey man, how ya been? I haven't seen you since we were standing together at the rally protesting the huge deficit spending of the Bush administration.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
All this funding is going to come from where?!
I don't know, they could stop the Iraq war for a day and a half. Get your priorities straight. If you're worried about the Federal budget, don't get in the way of progress and science, just stop the senseless war.
Free Martian Whores!
Has Obama supported anything with a smaller budget?
What about the president who promised no earmarks in the stimulus bill, then ensured all the health-care companies and insurers got their pre-socialism hush-money?
Should he also be reserved a seat?
THL phish sticks
Are you kidding? They have more change in the couch cushions over at the Pentagon.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You mean the 40% that has vowed to oppose anything Democrat? Why should they bother trying to work with people who won't work with them?
The other 40% doesn't have any interest in fixing it. If they show any interest they will be shouted down by the likes of Limbaugh and Palin and lynched as heretics.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It was not 1.1 trillion more in spending. It was several annual spending bills. It increased spending by about 9-10% over last year. An increase yes, a 1.1 trillion dollar increase, no.
that last one was from my daughter's Teabagger boyfriend, sry.
Looks like you and your daughter are very open about her sex life.
I can only hope that this heavy-lift launch system will support a public option with early buy-in and that none of this NASA budget will be appropriated to state-supported abortions. Otherwise, it will apparently have a hard time getting through the senate.
You mean the other 40% who are deliberately excluding themselves by vowing to vote it down regardless of the contents?
Those 40%?
The 40% that just so happen to coincidentally be Republicans. Funny that.
Joe Liberman may be a festering, infected boil on Satan's cock, in the vice-like-employment of the insurance industry, but at least he is coming to the table to discuss how to destroy the bill. The Repubs aren't even doing that.
Why shouldn't they oppose it? The Democrats aren't interested in meeting in the middle. They are interested in pushing their own agenda. The fact that they can't even convince the moderates in their own party to go along with some of the stuff they've tried to pass ought to tell you something. Mind you, this is exactly how the GOP operated when they had control, but the silence coming from the man who promised us a new kind of politics is deafening, isn't it?
I had a phone call from a Democratic fundraiser a few days ago asking me if I would contribute money to help them fight the "Republican obstruction". I asked him why they are blaming the Republicans for their difficulties when they have 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House. He didn't have an answer. Then I told him I would be voting GOP in 2010 just to put a check on Obama's power at which point he proceeded to lecture me on how evil the GOP is until I hung up. Wonder if they'll be calling me again anytime soon?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"They are interested in pushing their own agenda." - if you think that somehow Republicans aren't guilty of that as well, you are very, very deluded.
So are they saying a new heavy lift vehicle is replacing the Ares I? My understanding is Ares I is the simple, cheap, manned crew vehicle stack and the Ares V is the bigger, heavier, not man-rated launcher meant for heavy lifting. They were supposed to reuse shuttle parts and know-how to make things work better. So far it isn't. I have a feeling that shuttle reuse was a political decision to make this sound more economical rather than a proposal from the engineers guaranteeing it would be frugal.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The topic is Obama asking for more money for space exploration, and the GGP asked where the money could come from. I suggest the military; compared to what we're spending on war, what we spend on science is chump change.
If you're a cokehead and about to go bankrupt, you don't fix your budget by skipping that $1 McDonald's biscuit and gravy once a week, you stop snorting coke.
As I said, priorities. You need to eat, you don't need to snort coke. We need research, we don't need the Iraq war. Research is cheap, war is expensive.
Free Martian Whores!
A lot of the blue prints no longer exist. Most of the original engineers have died off. There were a lot of issues that arose during design and construction that were largely undocumented. My stepfathers father as one of the designers of the saturn V's first stage.
I didn't vote for for Obama but your statement is complete bullshit. Period.
That 40% you're talking about has refused to participate leaving Obama no choice but to carry on with the 60% that's interested in doing their job. The 40% you're standing behind has decided they don't want any solution that doesn't allow for massive fraud of the system and forcing people to pay at least 2x-4x as much as they should be paying for a healthy insurance system. And we know for this for a fact because these systems are already working around the world; contrary to the lies by the 40% you're working so hard to defend.
There is absolutely no shortage of things you can bash Obama on but bashing him for Republicans standing in line to abuse and defraud the American people isn't one of them.
Drug re-importation? Why not have the stones to force the corps to sell us the drugs at a fair price in the first place? You only like socialism once removed?
Blar.
The actual cost is significantly more than the "1/15th" of the Federal budget you mention. That amount only includes direct expenditure on the war in Iraq.
It doesn't include the healthcare needed for the tens of thousands of soldiers who are coming back injured, nor does it include the losses in taxes due to many of these people never being able to work again, or even just those uninjured citizens who no longer work at their regular jobs because they've being sent on their fifth or six deployment to Iraq.
Don't forget that there's another, soon to be bigger, war going on in Afghanistan. That alone will likely be another 1/15th, if it escalates, of the budget consumed.
As for the other 14/15ths, a significant amount of that budget goes towards programs that support America's warmaking. Think war technology research, the NSA/CIA/FBI/etc., and so forth.
Much of the rest of the budget has been similarly squandered. Instead of going towards socially-useful purposes like education and healthcare, it goes towards bailing out billionaires and corporations.
And really, he's not off-topic at all. America dedicates far too many of its resources towards destroying tents and mud brick huts in third-world countries. Even a small fraction of the money spent there each year could immensely help American society in a great many ways. Space research (which often has many spin-off technologies) is one of the best ways.
I am glad they are ditching ARES-I. The thing could barely lift the Orion module into orbit, and that's after lopping off all sorts of features (land landing, six person crew, toilet, etc). Then there were the thrust oscillation issues. A solid rocket does not produce a steady thrust. As it burns, chunks of the fuel can come loose and alter the burn characteristics of the engine as a whole. On the Shuttle, there was a flexible beam running through the external tank. The solids were attached to both ends of the flexible beam, and the orbiter was attached to the middle. They had to develop some sort of spring system for ARES-I, which didn't help its already weak lift capabilities.
This makes a lot more sense. Take the basic shuttle launch system, remove the orbiter, stick the engines on the bottom, put the Orion module on the top. There would be no costly engine development, as the rocket uses the same proven engine that has been launching the shuttle into orbit for the past thirty years. The J-130 (as its called) can lift the Orion module into orbit with ease. In fact, it could lift two - and not the stripped down versions, but the full featured Orions. Imagine being able to park one permanently at the ISS, as a lifeboat. The J-130, through the use of a module that mimics the mount points of the shuttle's cargo bay, could lift any payload that the shuttle could lift - including the Canadarm and an airlock for EVAs, something the ARES-I cannot do.
Because it shares so much of the shuttle heritage, the Jupiter system can keep the bulk of the current shuttle workers employed, especially if the current shuttle mission manifest is stretched out, or perhaps a flight or two added. The ARES system would leave a decade-long gap in some areas. Far to long to keep people around "polishing tools".
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Dig out the blueprints, put them into a CAD/CAM program, and modernize it, and they could have a RELIABLE heavy launch vehicle soon.
It's not that simple. Flying a Saturn rocket today would be much harder than building a new vehicle from scratch. Imagine trying to build the Cutty Sark today: we just don't have the people with those skills anymore.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm not a Republican, but since you are trolling allow me to respond in kind:
Good luck with that, you guys don't believe in gun ownership ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Probably the only smart decision this man has made. I offer into evidence a line from "From the Earth to the Moon" series. "Pumping that much cash into the private sector could be very popular"...of course, ironically, that's tempered by that douchebag Al Franken who is supposed to be the science adviser but who has less than zero ability to dream.
Maybe you can elaborate. Was this the bill in which Republicans called funding for the 2010 Census, airport security, public transportation and new fire stations "earmarks"? Sounds to me like exactly the kind of spending you want a stimulus bill to do. There were also $237 billion in tax cuts to individuals and $51 billion in tax cuts to companies, so I can't think of a legitimate reason why Republicans would be opposed to this, except that they're attempting to build party unity by being contrarian. Sadly, it works with people, but talk about sour grapes, man.
Dude, in case you hadn't have noticed, more than 1/2 of the current national debt was from our President Bush and our Republican Party. That any Republican or so-called conservative can complain about a Democratic deficit with a straight face is beyond me, when our party has not produced a single balanced budget in 40 years and ushered in the mega-deficits under Reagan.
Republicans fail when it comes to budget cutting. Here's a hint. If you want to jack up federal spending to support two wars and doubling the defense budget, then taxes have to go up to pay for it. Choke on that with our 500B annual interest payment current administrations have to pay now.
This is my sig.
The Iraq war is only 1/15th as expensive as everything else the government does. Someone who only spends 1/15th of their budget on an activity has a hobby, not an addiction.
It's not the cause of the bankruptcy.
Anyway, you can relax. We won the war and the combat troops are coming home. We may keep a (relatively inexpensive) forward force there like we have in Korea and Germany, but the combat is essentially over.
I believe he was on topic as he was explaining that it's a matter of priorities to find 1 billion dollars in the federal budget for NASA.
His priorities obviously differ from yours but he clearly identified a big source of spending (6%) and noted that the amount considered was small compared to that big source of spending.
Really, it's like profiling code, if nobody has ever profiled some code you are going to see big misuses of resource (like 70% of time spent recomputing the same value etc.). But after some people have looked at profiles, you get down to a point where a 6% figure is a big target. I am pretty sure you are not the first one to look at the federal budget so it's likely that 6% is a big juicy target when trying to optimize the federal budget.
So your rhetoric does not really help as the other 14/15ths are composed of hundreds of items that are probably just as hard to assess, prioritize and possibly remove from the budget. the Parent was really just putting the 1 billion in perspective.
Personally I think that spending a billion on NASA is a rather good use of the money as they spend the money on cool stuff (electronics, getting bright people to work together, Linux etc.) and produce cool images, discoveries, stories that really make my days brighter.
McCain may have not been my ideal choice, but at least I knew exactly what he was going to do before he got into office.
Bush signed off on the initial Constellation Plan. Bush made space exploration a pro-Republican issue. I don't know McCain's specific position, but the Republican Party line would have been in favor of the $3 Billion plan that the Augustine Commission recommended would be necessary to push human exploration of space ahead at the levels Bush was targeting.
Remember, just because you are arguing your own fiscal conservatism doesn't mean you can pigeon-hole political parties who have historically been associated with that trait.
If anything, Obama is cutting back on the plans presented by the last president. The Democrat is tightening the government purse strings.
SpaceX's technology is ITAR controlled, they cannot sell it to the Chinese or anyone else without going through an approval process that they would not be able to navigate given the nature of their technology.
And I love the attitude: congress cuts NASA funding; therefore *Obama* is trying to kill science. Congress (with Obama's backing) increases NASA funding, Obama is handing out money to his cronies. Not saying the same thing didn't happen during the Bush years, I just wish there was some consistency in people's complaints.
There's also the fact that a lot of parts used back then are long-EOL.
As I understand it, Constellation recycled many of the key mechanical aspects of the old Apollo-era designs, because they Just Plain Worked.
However, the avionics have to be pretty much designed from scratch, for two reasons:
1) Nearly all components used in the past are no longer available
2) Modern electronics can achieve far greater performance at a fraction of the power/weight
3) Modern space missions have significantly more requirements in terms of communications capability and such
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Was this the bill in which Republicans called funding for the 2010 Census, airport security, public transportation and new fire stations "earmarks"?
If the money is directed to specific projects like this stuff is, then yes, by definition the spending is earmarks. I'd go further and call it "pork" since none of those with the possible exception of the Census spending (it is a federal obligation, but depends on who it's spent on) warrant federal money and are just attempts to bring home the bacon.
Depends whether the Ares I sticks around or not. Given the administration's well known allergy to uttering the word "Ares" and given the recent outburst by a distraught senator from Alabama (his name rhymes with "Shelby") who happens to be a huge Ares booster, I'd say that Ares I is going out the door never to return. That's not part of the Bush plan.
Also keep in mind that while I don't think they've yet slid the schedule back for the Ares V, it's unlikely, with the delays to the Ares I, to fly in 2018.
Is this guy part of the 60% interested in doing their job or is he part of the 40%?
The thought of Palin as President turned a lot of people off.
It made me wonder about McCain's decision making abilities.
Free Martian Whores!
"we passed the recovery plan free of earmarks" - B. Obama, Feb 24. speech to congress.
"new higher standard of accountability, transparency and oversight. We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert projects without review." - B. Obama, Jan 6. statement at transition office.
Being against earmarks and pork is sort of Obama's trademark, and you can find dozens of instances where he mentioned something about ending earmarks.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Your pejorative, and erroneous use of the word "socialism" betrays your bias.
A lot of folks were uncomfortable with the deficit spending under Bush. Even leaving that aside, and leaving aside the bank bailouts, stimulus, and auto maker bailouts of the past year, the Obama budget deficits will be significantly greater than the largest Bush deficits:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/03/21/GR2009032100104.html
Note how *none* of Obama's deficits will be less than Bush's deficit of '08, by the White House's own admission, and how the Congressional Budget Office thinks their numbers are too optimistic.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but 1 billion isn't going to give you sharks. It's not going to give you mutant sea bass.
I'd be pleasantly surprised if you get a goldfish with a laser pointer duct taped to it's head.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you look at the US discretionary budget the military accounts for over 60%, over 70% in shitty years. As for total budget war makes up about 25%, non-military defense programs an additional 14%. Veteran's pay an amazing 1.6%. Comparatively, NASA gets around .5% of the total expenses. http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ (discretionary is in the middle, total in the bottom right).
1/15th is 6.6%, parent is outright lying.
And as mcgrew says, war is easier to not have than... Old people? Sick people....?
Sorry to rain on your parade, but 1 billion isn't going to give you sharks. It's not going to give you mutant sea bass.
I'd be pleasantly surprised if you get a goldfish with a laser pointer duct taped to it's head.
You have no idea how low my expectations are right now... I'm totally on board with the gold-fish laser pointer. This will rock so hard!
[signature]
Deficit spending in and of itself is not bad. I'm sure most of use will do it at one time or another to buy a car or a house. The crux of any issue regarding deficit spending is whether or not the expenditure will show expected returns. And I'm not talking about dollar-per-dollar returns.
Is spending money on science, discovery, and development worth the expenditure worth it? I'd say yes.
Is universal healthcare worth it? I'd say yes.
Is protecting ourselves from people who want to harm us worth it? I'd say yes.
Now, consider the balance of cost-per-return for each of those and the viability of each implementation of each endeavor. Which is most likely to actually succeed?
I disagree for a vast majority of Airtravel the start and end will be in different states, making it interstate commerce. I don't actually care whose in charge of the security as long as it isn't security theater.
It was a good decision Palin was well loved by the Republican a lot more than McCain was; the problem was she couldn't handle the media and was eaten alive.
Keep in mind that there are two rockets much further along than Ares I, Delta IV Heavy and Atlas V. And they're built by people who have experiment designing, building, and flying expendable launch vehicles. If we're going to do things that we "might as well do", then we might as well drop Ares I for these two vehicles.
Are you serious?
The Democrats have made concession after concession to the Republicans on every major bill they've tried to get through Congress, and the Republicans just move the goalposts. This is why we ended up with a watered-down, crap stimulus bill. This is why we're ending up with a watered-down, crap health reform bill. The Republicans are taking obstructionist tactics to new extremes, like "accidentally" losing their voting cards, and filibustering a defense slash war-funding bill in the hopes that the Senate won't even be able to debate the health insurance reform bill. Meanwhile, the Democrats refuse to use the options at their disposal, like reconciliation, to pass the health care bill without bipartisan support or a supermajority. Senator Baucus worked with Republicans for ages on his version of the health care bill, only for them to oppose it anyway. Republican Senators gleefully announce that they intend to break Obama and make health care his waterloo. Republicans previously for health care reform suddenly oppose it for nebulous reasons.
100% party unity is unrealistic for the Democrats on any issue, and the Democrats have 60 members in their caucus in the Senate, not 60 Democrats. Senator Lieberman lost his Democratic primary and garnered more Republican votes than his Democratic opponent, and also more than his Republican opponent. He opposes pretty much every big-ticket Democratic agenda item. That's hardly a party-line Democrat to begin with. Other Democrats are suggesting they will vote against the bill because of a lack of cost-control options like the public option (removed to appease Republicans, despite it's 60%+ support among the public), or because of compromises made to the Republicans, which have garnered no Republican votes and only weakened the bill.
The Republicans don't want to meet in the middle, and the Democrats are fools for trying to act bipartisan. All they get for it is Republicans shrilly insisting that the Democrats are bullying them around any time they want to pass any of the legislation they were elected to pass. The Republicans don't oppose the health care bill on ideological grounds. Plenty of Republicans have supported health care legislation more liberal than what's in the Senate today, such as, say, Richard Nixon. Mitt Romney imposed a very similar plan to the one in the Senate now while he was governor. And so on and so on and so on. It wasn't until the current cycle that Republicans became opposed to plans such as the one now before the Senate. The ideology behind conservatism didn't suddenly change. No, the Republicans made a political decision that it was in their best interest to do their best to attack and bring down any initiatives Obama came up with.
The Republicans aren't opposed to the health care reform bill for any other reason than they were determined to make the Democrats failures. And they're doing an excellent job of it.
So what isn't an earmark, then?
Exactly. But that's the plan. They are pretending like this is a good idea. It pretty much sucks all the way around. It locks the US into an architecture where per-flight costs for people in orbit are much higher than Ares I. It reduces per-flight lift capacity substantially, which will lead to much larger numbers of flights required to do anything interesting, such a a flight to Mars. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except for the high per-flight cost. This plan is a desperate attempt to solve a short term budget problem, by locking us into long term budget constraints. It's worse than doing nothing (e.g. worse than canceling manned spaceflight) because we won't be able to fix the architecture for another 25 years. It's really, really bad news for manned spaceflight.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I looked at your news posts. No battles. No combat. No troops wounded.
A perfect utopia is not needed for "combat" to be "essentially" over.
I hear there are still Nazi sympathizers in some places. And we still have troops in Germany. I guess WWII is still going on ... ?
However IF the Jobs program does actually create a new Heavy Lift Vehicle, launch costs should go down.
Absolutely no way is that a given. Launch frequency is a stronger economy of scale than payload size. If they're launching the same total mass in fewer launches, then they're probably increasing costs. For example, suppose I want 1,000 tons in orbit. Launching it all into orbit at once on a massive 1,000 ton launcher is probably the most expensive choice I could make. Well aside from going to the other extreme. For example launching a million 1 kg payloads doesn't make sense. How could you get people up there or any other component larger than 1 kg in mass? But 40-50 launches of a 20-25 ton launch vehicle make a lot of sense (there's even multiple vehicles of that category currently in existence, Delta IV Heavy, Ariane 5, and Proton, you don't have to waste a lot of money on designing a new vehicle). That's a launch frequency that can even encourage reuse of vehicle components.
The only part of what you said that bears resemblance to reality was "I don't know". Bush provided to NASA what's known as an un-funded mandate, which led NASA to decide to shut down the ISS immediately after its construction was completed. McCain and Obama, like Bush, don't have much understanding of, nor interest in, spaceflight, as far as can be told from examining their public statements and actions.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You've fallen for one of the classic Washington Beltway tricks. This chart is for "Discretionary Spending," in other words, the spending the Congress gets to decide on every year. The military budget is required, under the Constitution, to fall into this category. On the other hand, it represents less than 1/4 of the overall 2009 budget, which includes all the programs that are required, by law, to be automatically funded each year, including all of the social programs in the United States. If we take into account that the budget for 2008 was about $3.2T, and for 2009, will approach $4.5T, then we have an estimate that the entire discretionary spending (about $1T) is only going to represent about 22% of the total budget. If the Military is 60% of that, then it represents about 13.2% of the total budget.
So, maybe the 6.6% is wrong (although it's correct for direct Military spending, not including the items you added) but it's still not 60% like you claimed either.
Be careful when you read budgeting numbers from Washington, because they like to hide behind the discretionary term, while bemoaning the fact that they can't do anything about the "non-discretionary" budget items. Which is utterly untrue, of course.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Frankly, I am more scared with Biden being next in line to become President.
He makes Palin look like an Oxford Scholar.
um... most of the money spend on Ares I already has gone a long way to get Ares V ready. The 5 Segment SRB has already been tested, twice, and is only a modified 4 seg that's been flying for years. What moron would take all of that 30+ years of engineering data and information and then go to a private company who has only tested a few rockets, none of which are ready for manned flight up to the safety standards that are required?
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Hello, I do know most people seem to forget about this, but one thing the ARES/Orion programs make no plans for is to have REPAIR abilities available for space. While the Shuttle was far from perfect, it has been the best space repair vehicle created, and when it is retired, there will be nothing else out there to fix extraordinarily expensive satellites. I know people talk about "saving money", but do you know how expensive it would be to have launched four replacement Hubble Telescopes? Or, countless other devices they've spent days and months repairing in space? Someone SERIOUSLY has to make this an issue for NASA...
I would if he presented any facts - where are the citations, where are the figures?
All I can see is a baseless jab at Obama.
Though I'd also like to point out that this conversation is mostly about discretionary budget. We are talking about things that can be cut relatively easily. So that refers to the discretionary budget.... of which the military makes over 60%.
Your side of the conversion, but not his side. My view is that if you're not talking about the whole budget which is a lot bigger than discretionary spending, then you aren't serious. Having said that, current military spending is a big piece of the current overall budget and hence contributes to the budget problems.
OK, true enough. However, the conclusion (it's only 3%, obviously that's not enough to do anything) is not only wrong, it has no scientific basis. Since when is it scientific to just say "oh that's a small number, can't be significant?" Seems to me a good starting point for "significant" would be "exceeds the ability of the ecosystem to absorb the increased emissions."
Feel free to dance around your Kool-Aid jug if it makes you feel better.
Not to mention that we could do much better using modern materials, computers, and manufacturing. If you sifted through the blueprints, updating everything with modern techniques, you'd end up with an entirely new spacecraft that only superficially resembled the original.
Another reason we don't build another cutty sark today is that we can fill the Cutty Sark's intended role with much better replacements.
I don't see the problem with viewing lift vehicles as commodities. We can purchase a range of lift capacity vehicles from the russians, french, japanese, etc.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
There is nothing that can be done with an HLV that can't be done cheaper with multiple smaller (and already/soon existing) rockets. On orbit assembly and refueling are the technologies we should be developing expertise in.
On a brighter note, I've read some more analysis today that says this announcement may in fact be the stake through the heart of the boondoggle that is Ares-1. Hopefully, by the time this hypothetical HLV is designed, the commercial sector will have proven that it isn't even needed.
Necron69
Biden puts his foot in his mouth from time to time, but he was also the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee and was widely considered the Senate's foremost expert on foreign relations. I'm legitimately curious: what statements did he make that made him appear ignorant to you?
I'm not sure how "[Biden] makes Palin look like an Oxford Scholar" can be modded insightful. I will agree that Biden makes the odd gaffe but he is unquestionably better informed. He has chaired senate committees on the judiciary and foreign relations which will have exposed him to a whole gamut of issues that Sarah Palin may not even have conceived of. Let's not confuse willful ignorance with an otherwise intelligent person getting caught with their foot in their mouth from time to time!
Disclosure: Note that I'm not American and don't have a particular interest in either the Republicans or the Democrats. From where I sit both parties do little to effect any real improvement over the status quo. And I think Obama has done little to back up his rhetoric of hope and change from the election campaign
I am not one to typically decry Slashdot antics in general, but I have to say that I am, frankly, appalled at what has come to pass in this thread. This news release, available on very few space news outlets currently, is in regards to the future of a government funded piece of space hardware that Slashdotters have been both decrying and joyously praising since I first started posting on this website more than a year ago. We have discussed every major development of the Ares line of launch vehicles since its inception. We have argued, passionately at times, about how stupid or how great NASA and Congress both are for deciding upon this launch system in the first place. We have followed almost every single news update regarding the Augustine Commission since it was first assigned its task. It seems, to me, that we had quite a bit of interest and excitement for news regarding this particular topic as an online community.
Nonetheless, in the short time since this story has been posted, the number of comments modded up that were completely and 100% offtopic is absolutely atrocious. This story was, by far, the most interesting headline I saw on slashdot today. Rather than getting an interesting look into a group of Nerd's thoughts and ideas regarding this new development, I have watched this thread turn into an absolutely childish monstrosity of political bullshitting regarding everything from healtcare to the fiscal habits of Republicrats and blah blah blah blah blah. If I wanted to know about all that crap I would have turned on CSPAN.
For shame slashdotters. For. Fucking. Shame.
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