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Cool NASA Tech That Will Never See Space
coondoggie writes to tell us that with the "new and improved" NASA budget on the way it looks like many of the cool projects NASA has in the works will never see the light of day, let alone space. The biggest cut looks to be the Ares heavy lift rocket but other cuts include a new composite spacecraft, deep space network, inflatable lunar habitat, and an electric moon-buggie.
It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget. It's the idiotic short-sighted quick-profit thinking again. We are draining Earth resources and should try to expand to space. If it wasn't for NASA we wouldn't ever have visited or learned so much more about Earth. This way we never get intergalactic flights nor can live on other planets.
reflecting on how this kind of tragedy can happen, and how it relates to our very rational, ends-oriented world, should read Horkheimer and Adorno's (in)famous Dialectic of Enlightenment and its much heralded account of how the very nature of rational Enlightenment thinking carries the danger that we'll fail to enter into "a truly human state" as a world, instead descending into "a new age of barbarism" marked by things like anti-intellectual mass culture, multiplying high-tech wars, short-sighted exploitation, and other modern ills that appear to destroy society and the planet.
It was written back during the Nazi+Emerging Cold War era, but it remains as relevant a warning today as ever.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This article is a small Jumping to Conclusions Mat. Let's postulate that their NASA tech won't see space. That doesn't mean that tech won't see space by being used by different countries, which is most probably the case. Just because the USA doesn't care about space tech doesn't mean other countries aren't chomping at the bit to lead humanity.
Virgin Galactic will save us... I... I know they will. God, I hope they will...
With the cut of Ares and other international status seeking nonsense, NASA can concentrate on their roots of science, exploration, and aeronautics.
An overview "Fact Sheet" on the proposed FY2011 budget for NASA has been published by the OMB at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_nasa/ The Constellation program is cancelled, and this could mean thousands of jobs lost in Florida, Alabama and Texas at the major human space flight centers. The savings from the cuts will be reinvested in new R&D for future exploration.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Was not the first lunar rover electric? Deep Space Network? Sounds like Microsoft. Inflatable habitats? Yeah, I guess it packs well, but damn. In the shape of a clown?
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
So really NASA is just supporting the ISS and launching satellites into orbit? Oh if Sagan was alive today!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan/
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
Anyhing with "Wolowitz" in it's name?
and Texas
That's OK, they're all Republicans anyway.
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The shuttle is retiring. There's no stopping that. No more external fuel tanks are being manufactured, the rest of the parts chain is shutting down. When the shuttle is gone, America loses manned access to space. And it appears we can't even manage to cobble together a bloody capsule to put atop a normal rocket. This leaves only Russia with manned space capabilities. (I don't know if the Chinese really have anything they'd consider flight-worthy right now.) The Indians and Japanese have their own programs but I don't see much happening in the near future.
The Constellation program sounded like a real soup sandwich. Canceling it would be a good thing if it paved the way for something done right. But that's not happening. Every shuttle successor program we've ever looked at has ended in cancellation. Obviously, we have the technology to get into space but it looks like we don't have the organizational ability to make that sort of thing happen.
You don't have to be much of a science fiction fan to appreciate the opportunities created by a serious presence in space. Even if we teleoperated everything from the ground, orbital power is a winner. Asteroid mining to prevent the destruction of our own environment down here is a winner. And human history has proven time and time again that opportunities can be opened up by endeavors and scientific discovery that we couldn't even begin to imagine at the outset.
There's so much more we should be doing up there. The shuttle was just farting around in LEO. We should end it to do something better, not end it to abandon a manned presence in space. If we're not going to move forward up there, other nations will. And we will have ceded the high frontier.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Insensitive clods.
If I made more money, I'd probably have a set of new golf clubs on my wish list for this spring. As it is, I don't have an unlimited budget, and there are other priorities which are higher, such as food, healthcare, and DirecTV. I mention that last one intentionally, by the way.
You see I could do without DirecTV and save myself enough to get a new set of golf clubs every year. Thing is my wife an daughter really like the programming. They don't begrudge me my greens fees or my high power rocket purchases. Each of us gets something from the family budget, though perhaps not all we want. We simply don't have the unlimited funds for that.
It's interesting what happens when you must have a balanced budget - certain choices have to be made.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The first commercial airline was founded in 1909. The first regular commercial flight in the US was in 1914. KLM was founded in 1920.
Unfortunately it is the whole country that loses in this case. I can remember well the day that Al Gore announced the shuttle replacement. The two finalists were a craft that had already been built and flight tested and another that existed as a powerpoint presentation that relied on technology that is still not feasible. The finalists that actually had built and tested their craft were passed over so that Bill and Al could provide a big fat payday to their wing nut allies in California.
This from the party that always cries about Republicans some how manipulating science for their own nefarious purposes.
it's all speculation until someone reads the budget and the new policy is announced. Now that that's out of the way...
Heavy Lift: There's an understanding that we need heavy lift. It looks like a 200mT launcher is out of the question for now; but, we have plenty of experience, thanks to the ISS, in assembline large structures in space. So, the question becomes what form does an HLV take: A Shuttle Derived (Jupiter) derivative or an amped up Atlas / Delta derivative? Either could ultimately reach the 100-150mT range. The Shuttle Derived gets there faster using existing tooling.
Composite launch vehicle: Let's assume, for argument sake, that ULA is one of the suppliers of the "taxi" service. Lockheed, who is one of the two ULA parent companies, and who supplies the Atlas 5 launch vehicle, is building the Orion CEV for NASA. If ULA does supply the launch vehicle, what crew vehicle do you suppose they'll use? Perhaps the one they already have the tooling for? The one that's already a NASA approved design? I think so.
Inflatable structures: That technology was sold by NASA to Bigelow Aerospace, who then developed it further and did some limited testing in space LEO. NASA was going to incorporate Bigelow's work into their habitats. If NASA drops it, for now, Bigelow appears to have plans to continue the work. They've booked a Falcon 9 flight for 2014.
Lunar descent engine: What made that engine interesting was the use of LNG/LOX as a fuel. It worked. Well. That's likely to find further use down the line; but, I can't speculate where.
The lunar specific stuff is toast.
I read the "electric moon buggie" as an "electric boondoggle". It might as well be :-)
Looks, like the private sector is going to be pickup up the slack, with space ship one and so on. I love NASA and its whole legacy, but I do think that is time for some change with our space program, maybe it should just get absorbed into the airforce, beause that's who is putting most of our sattelites into orbit anyway.
Government development of space is holding back commercial development. The time for initial investment has ended now that we know the basics. This article is full of good examples of this. The robot mower highlighted here is already being provided by the marketplace. Private ventures are preparing more forward thinking launch vehicles than the big rocket talked about in the article. There is always going to be some role or collective action, but government is no longer needed as the primary driver.
It is critically important to keep markets on Earth functioning in order to extend ourselves into space. The idea that we can have our economic activities melt down in chaos while reaching for our future in the stars is questionable. Some of the same people here who want more space development also pushed an ideologically driven view of economic activity which played a big part in this global financial implosion.
Put the moon rover up on Craigslist for $20M, with a 1 month limit on pickup time before the buyer loses their money and NASA re-lists the rover. It will be a win-win: either they raise the needed money to keep all of their programs, or someone will develop a vehicle to get to the moon and back so NASA doesn't have to.
My webcomic
To be sure, I also find the current administration's stance on this subject incomprehensible. It reminds me of the first shuttle disaster (Challenger). I was in Berkeley and a (hyper-)liberal associate of mine was thrilled at the Challenger disaster. He thought this was just the thing to get the US to stop spending money in space and instead spend it on our own homeless and poor. Too bad the poor sap couldn't see that any money which this freed up was almost certainly destined to end up in the military budget, not social services.
That said, the current administration has tried to make good on some of its promises, abandoned others. Nothing new here. Best we get used to the idea that for the forseeable future, the United States of America has given up on manned spaceflight. When we get good and embarassed by no longer being a spacefaring people, we'll vote in a new administration which will (hopefully) listen to the well thougtht-out and carefully phrased arguments in favor of continuing to explore more than just our little planet.
...is really gutting useful projects.
Maybe the Air Force and/or Navy will pick up the Ares V as they'll be needing heavy lift capacity outside of commercial corporations(and Deltas), along with some of those other projects.
That NASA screwed up the engineering of some of new hardware didn't help. That NASA could only look at and award to the normal fat-cat defense contractors didn't help either.
The combination of the two and NASA's own problems are all quite deadly when it comes to this administration.
Amazingly hope for American humans in space will now rely on Republicans and the US private sector, assuming we just don't try to contract it out to other countries (and lose yet another technology base).
Just as amazing is a lack of understanding by the liberals and environmentalists that the destruction of human space flight dooms the long term prospects for robotic exploration; which is a key tool to understanding the environment and natural resources on Earth. When the over all size of NASA is reduced, it's ability to innovate across programs is gone and the technology stales over time.
Finally, you could assume that even the environmentalists could start to see the only viable long term solution to maintaining Earth's ecosystem is expansion to other worlds, but clearly they don't have that kind of vision.
Doesn't really bother me too much, but it has these stupid link underlines on Opera. While a tiny thing, it's incredibly annoying looking.
Look up the altitude of some A-4 flights, a very German rocket. "Space" doesn't mean orbit, it simply means, well, space.
Also, look up Luna 9, the first moon landing. And Lunokhods (yeah, I somehow subssribe to "rover = unmanned", as you said yourself US ones were moon buggies)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Having read that engineers inside NASA have criticised Ares and would prefer other alternatives, I'm not crying about this one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who owns the coffeepots at NASA? Dimes to tiddlywinks, the job is contracted out.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
"there are other fishes in the sea"
is that the list of 'Soviet firsts' should really be 'captured German engineers working for the Soviets firsts'.
And the later 'American firsts' ought to be 'captured German engineers working for the Americans firsts'.
I can't think of any early space-flight that did not depend on lots of German know-how and support. Perhaps the British 'Black Knight' and 'Blue Streak' programs, which were pretty well entirely home-grown. But even they only did this because the Germans had shown that it could be done first....
Electric moon buggies and inflatable habitats are nothing new. Both were developed in the 1960s. (The inflatable habitat wasn't used, of course, although a version of it featured in the film "Moontrap".)
Re-inventing the wheel over and over again -- without actually doing anything with it -- is one big reason why NASA's projects are being cut.
Don't really see what the problem is. The U.S. is not going to pay off the debt. It's like worrying about the fact that you don't have a parachute AFTER you have jumped out of the plane; it just ruins the enjoyment of the ride down.
The amount of money NASA is asking about is trivial compared to the whole Federal Budget. Heck, the the U.S. government prints (via the proxy Federal Reserve) and borrows to pay the interest on what they have already borrowed. Worrying about the debt/deficit at this point is tilting at windmills.
If the U.S. is going to default (and the U.S. will, I guarantee) then its things of REAL physical value that should be bought. The Chinese are not going to repo a concrete road or a fleet of spaceships. So I say spend, spend, spend. Buy all the stuff that will improve infrastructure and long term growth so that when the U.S. does default at the very least there will be decent roads.
What gets me is not so much the fact that we'll be using commercial rockets to get to the ISS, but that we now have no strategy for getting back to the Moon and/or going to Mars.
When I told my 10-year-old daughter that Obama had killed the program that was her best chance to travel to the Moon or Mars, she literally started crying. How am I supposed to keep her interested in math and science in school when the only thing she's ever wanted to do has been taken away from her?
Yes, I know her actual chance of going was pretty slim, but at least there was a chance. And that was enough to encourage her to work hard in school. Now what? Now she doesn't know what she wants to do and that means a higher chance of her ending up flipping burgers instead of pursuing her dreams.
Fuck you, Obama, and your nearsightedness.
I void warranties.
So what will NASA do with the results so far for all these plans and ideas? My hope, as a taxpayer, is that they will make it available to all and sundry (or at least American all and sundry, if they want to be parochial about it). It would be a disservice to the scientists and engineers who have labored on these projects for their work to be put away on some shelf or to have it all dribbled into the bit bucket.
The US military is something like ten times larger than the next country's military spend for goodness sake. How about easing off on the military spend and using the money for peaceful exploration of space.
Do you really need a military budget that big?
His vision is to build slums in space. The guy is a swine.
Check out my novel.
That'll be the missing > on the IMG tags. Sloppy html coding there.
-Jar
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Through all the brouhaha, the doubletalk about missing blueprints and the expense of reviving older tech, it would have been far inexpensive to bring back a tried and trusted heavy lifter: The Saturn V. The Block 90 series was all set to loft the heaviest payloads to date, even the Ariane V would be hard pressed to match it.
I would have loved to see the V fly with upgraded hardware and avionics. The instrument ring would have been deleted in place for a more compact INS module. The inner structure rebuilt with improved metals and engineering. The engines... Well, hell, how can you improve on a already perfect set of man-made earthquake makers? I can see a V lofting not one, but TWO full sized ISS modules with them stuffed to the gills with parts and supplies.
Now we're stuck with a kiwi, not even classed a hangar queen.
Talk about an embarrassment.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
The promise I fell for with Obama was that he'd work to open up government, and there wouldn't be any more, or at least less of, these closed-door decision-making policies. ACTA rambles on, human spaceflight gets the axe, and federal agents lying and breaking the law can't be prosecuted because they did it "with good intent".
We're losing a battle here, but I can't see the battlefield anymore. :(
Your generalizations are showing, wiredog.
Austin is as progressive, and Democratic as they come. Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio aren't far behind either. Houston just elected its first openly gay female mayor. There is a huge gap between urban and rural political affiliations here. Sadly, most of our state elected officials are lunatics, but that has more to do with tradition. Try not to let your lack of travel, or intelligence for that matter, hinder your commenting here.
Did any of those other countries ever make a movie like this?
Do you have any details? Or is this just something you overheard?
Like, I've pretty much had it up to here with this myth of "private industry" as the salvation of everything. Banks were private industry, and they screwed the pooch not once, but three times in the last 30 years, to the tune of multiple national, no, worldwide economic meltdowns, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and for what? So we can have the pleasure of driving ourselves into the ground with more debt?
By contrast, NASA put a man on the moon.
I'm going NASA over private industry, any day of the week.
This is my sig.
1st rendevous in space, USA
1st multiple rendevous in space, USA
1st practical spacewalk, USA
Most landings on the moon, USA
1st man to orbit the moon, USA
1st man on the moon, USA
1st probe to Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and soon Pluto, USA
This is my sig.
How come Bush's promises of massive explorations with no funding backing isnt stupid, but when Obama has to clean up Bush's mistakes and bring Bush's BS promises to a real budget, then suddenly he's the bad guy?
Blah blah blah... Obama isn't cleaning up anything. The guy is a stiff.
Seriously... all this talk about Obama "cleaning up", and what has he really done? It's just a talking point, utterly meaningless.
This is my sig.
Here's to another 30 years in orbit.
and Texas
That's OK, they're all Republicans anyway.
And you wonder why we think all of your science based policy is a joke. First you X NASA to screw with Republicans, and now what, you are going to do global warming legislation to torture us some more? Really, is any science offered by the Left Wing actually true?
The way you talk, is there any reason that I should believe you?
This is my sig.
A little googling around popped this up as the likely culprit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-33
So Lockheed Martin had plans for a ship that reflected what NASA wanted while McDonnell Douglas had a different idea and had a scale model of their idea.
Hell I could mock up a model rocket, but that doesn't mean that I can make a larger version that is space capable. That would require good design.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
When the Chinese get to the moon, we'll want to get to the moon again. The only reason we got to the moon in the first place is because sputnik scared the crap out of Americans and Kennedy started the lunar program in the spirit of national brinkmanship to one-up the U.S.S.R.
So nothing changes.
Short version: NASA wanted a project they could milk instead of something that worked with off the shelf parts. Bill and Al wanted to reward a blue state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_Graham
The sad thing is that if the US would just finish projects and hold contractors accountable we wouldn't be in the situation we are in with virtually no launch capacity and nothing in the works to build a space program around. The shuttle replacement programs is the poster child for what is wrong with NASA. Billions and years spent with no tangible results, poorly planned, poorly managed and killed with the wave of a pen.
We should replace NASA with multi-year X-Prizes. Take whatever money is supposed to go to the bureaucrats and careerists and give it to the people who have an actual passion for the work involved.
... this is your chance to shine.
Quite a few people out there have loudly, and at every opportunity, claimed that if only the government were to get off everybody's backs, and stopped holding the John Galts of the world back, then Americans would be walking on Mars by now.
Well, here's your big chance. Obama's just given you an unprecedented chance to show the world how free markets can solve the problems that the evil dead hand of Big Government can't.
We'll all be rooting for you to succeed, of course. But if, of course, reality fails to live up to the rhetoric -- and the libertarians are made to eat crow -- we all look forward to some peace and quiet.
Why are they canceling the Aries V and then investigating new heavy lift rockets?! It makes no sense at all to cancel one program and then start another one to do exactly the same thing. Who made this decision? Are they retarded, or do they just hate the US Taxpayer / love throwing away $$$?
It looks to me like the biggest, underlying source of mess is that NASA is financed from federal budget, but with funding of particular projects bringing great benefits to specific areas / contractors. So of course their representatives will fight for what's good primarily to them, not to space programme as a whole...
ESA seems to be set up more sensibly in this regard. Each memberstate decides how much it wants to pay, so that is the way in which they can have a say when it comes to assigning projects.
One that hath name thou can not otter
The history of the effort to develop a successor to the Shuttle is littered with cancelled projects, and test programs that were never part of a coherent technology development program. You appear to be referring to the DC-X, but in fact, the other finalist candidate for the X-33 test demonstrator program was not the DC-X, it was a winged-flyback rocket design from Rockwell, which hadn't been flown, either.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The Mars Mission is only "on" in the sense that it has always been "on" since Reagan. It's not "on". It' never been "on". Canceling the first R&D program in thirty years that actually had the goal of building a heavy lift launcher suitable for Mars scale trips, and replacing it with a nebulous plan to purchase launch services from a private launch market which doesn't have an incentive to put the kind of R&D required to develop a Mars trip scale launch system is not "on" in any sense other than "on crack".
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The new not-quite-as-heavy lift approach is problematic. First of all, it's naive to assume that an 100-150mT HLV derived from Shuttle technologies is going to be much quicker to develop (or better by any other metric) than the Ares V plan, which was also based on Shuttle technologies, but which had already been through a process of design which helped produce a reasonable vehicle, within reach, almost certainly to be more reliable, and appropriate to Mars class missions. Furthermore, the constraint that isn't being considered (even under the Constellation program) is the flight rate that can be sustained by the Shuttle-dervied infrastructure (pads, crawlers, vertical assembly building, etc.) Doing anything interesting in space requires getting more stuff into space more often. If it takes a half dozen frightfully expensive launches to assemble a Mars flight, how often do you think we'll go there?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I prefer the hot NASA techs anyway... you know... exploring deep spaces... presenting big rockets, full of high explosive material.............. shooting big rockets into deep spaces
We need a way to fund a program - reliably - past one administration. What about the billions already spent on Constellation? Or the VentureStar, or heaven knows how many programs cancelled before they were even tried? No program is perfect, and some of them might even have failed. But if we kill them in progress, we guarantee they're expensive failures.
... would take longer than I have, but for starters:
Dude, seriously. Just because the Constitution gives the government the responsibility to do national defense doesn't mean that we have to spend more than the combined defense budgets of the entire rest of the world on it. We're spending way, way more than we need to on national security.
Oh, and the "make my day" sign? Great idea. Thanks for your thoughtful contribution to these weighty matters.
They are cutting old programs and replacing them with new technologies. Our NASA program has been running off of conventions set in the 50s to get us into space fast. That is not the right way. The ticket to space is now being held by private companies who are being brought in to explore the possibility of commercial "space taxis".
NASA is getting a facelift and a boob-job with this one. It's a good thing.
NASA will increase its support for transformative research that can enable a broad range of NASA missions. NASA missions
...of the V2, vertically launched. Dork.
Fuck Obama
NASA has *always* started up more programs than it could ever finish, so there'd be a good chance of what would eventually be needed already coming down the pipe. Add to the NASA developments all those designs put together by aero-corps most of which didn't get used. It ends up looking like a set up when something tests out well and then gets canceled. Being successful and being able to fit future requirements are not the same thing, and until a good test, they can't tell what the operating parmeters are for the vehicle. Also in this category are most of the best designs, those done around the edges of the aerospace industries. An example of these is the entire line of a multi-project program's worth of vehicles designed by Robert Truax http://www.astronautix.com/astros/truax.htm and http://neverworld.net/truax/
But the biggest culprit is of course programs developed to fulfill the goals of one administration, which get cut by the next or subsequent administrations. If NASA developed programs based on 'stair-step' continual expansion (making each step a requirement for the next) rather than political grandstanding, progress might be slower in gross effect but with far less net cost and effort.
As to 'why cancel the Ares and then start investigating a new heavy-lifter', first, Ares is not a new anything -- it's a hack built from shuttle components, meaning most of the technology is quite old (not to say that's bad, but it could be better). Second, the same could be said every few years for the last half century. Third, NASA and all the companies it feeds through its technology transfer program require constant renewal of R&D program direction in order to invent a whole new pile of golly-gee-whiz tech, and this is what NASA does best.
Take a look at the line of canceled and never-started projects derived from, and intended to expand, the Apollo lunar program. This is the best example of cancels soon after if not before development began. Follow the links below from the index page at http://www.astronautix.com/
Pre- and post-lunar Apollo (and other vehicle) variants:
Apollo Odds and Mods
Project Horizon
Project Lunex
Lunar Gemini
Saturn developement beyond initial lunar landings:
Saturn V
Lunar exploration and expansion :
Manned Lunar Bases
Manned Circumlunar
Manned Lunar Landers
Manned Lunar Flyers
Manned Lunar Rovers
Manned Lunar Orbiters
And a complete program already well into development, with success fairly assured. Had this not been canceled, Armstrong might still have been first one the moon, but definitely would have been the first to fly (not just ride) an orbital space plane. An extremely well documented example of cancelmania:
X-20/23/24 Dynasoar
One project NASA may presently be regretting not following up on was an improved suspension and steering design for the Mars rovers. I'm not fully up on the details, but it would almost certainly have allowed Spirit to dig itself out of the sand. Apparently the story of its development and rejection was covered by some science-based talk show around 10 years ago. Some of the reasons they didn't pick up on it at the time made sense; the design they used was so far along that changing it would have cost much more, and being developed by an individual rather than the design team, training to bring them up to speed just to evaluate it would have taken too long. However, since the alternative design was produced by a college sophomore and was clearly better than that which was produced by an entire team, the fact that they resented being shown up by a kid is a distinct possibility. That's supported by the fact that his performance report was glowing, yet when he went to check out his supervisor told him "Don't bother to ask for a letter of reommendation". Turned out he didn't need one for his next summer job, at the National Ignition Facility. We're waiting to see whether they're using his design on Curiosity.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
You've turned me into a Republican apologist!
I can't tell you how much I detest that.
But the applicable regulatory provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 (the Glass-Steagal Act) , enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt (D): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act were repealed in two parts under the democratic administrations of Jimmy Carter (via the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980) and the Bill Clinton administration (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999).
However, you can lay the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA), which converted the outstanding non-collateralized credit card lending debt into collateralized debt square on George W. Bush's administration.
Of all of these, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (under Carter) was by far the worst, by allowing bank holding companies to get into speculative financial instruments, which in turned allowed them to create the current crisis.
So if you want to blame a particular political party, you'll have to blame democrats, but the president to blame is Bill Clinton.
-- Terry
Another spectacularly bad policy decision by Obama. But like his policy to coddle war criminals, this one won't stand.
an ill wind that blows no good
This is a bit off topic, but it's something that always strikes me when reading these sorts of discussions: is the political arena in America really this polarised?
No, they really aren't. Political arguments on Slashdot are a sport, where people take their worries about an uncertain future and an economy and bitch. Are there radicals on both sides? Sure there are, but, I would say that most people who get into "left vs right" arguments on Slashdot or any other internet place are really doing it more to blow off steam than anything else.
I actually wrote like, most of the most bitterly right wing quotes that you cited, and on slashdot in general, but even I would:
a) Gave Obama a fair shake about a tax increase coupled with entitlement caps to balance the budget. Perhaps we could hide it all in "tax reform" that did something like got rid of income taxes but added an energy tax and a tax on financial transactions.
b) Hear out arguments on single payer health care.
But I would think it nice to actually hear some people on the left admit that it wasn't just that things were all rosy until Bush got elected.
Despite some good things, the writing for our current problems was on the wall even during the Clinton administration - the trade imbalance, particularly with Asia, exploded under his watch and the gutting of the manufacturing sector has been ongoing since the Lyndon Johnson administration. Reagan's promised revitalization of American industrial capacity was essentially masked by the emergence of the computer, and, similarly, the general failure of free trade to really deliver on all the promises it was supposed to deliver on.
To top it all off, for all of the talk about the war causing our fiscal calamity, the truth is, entitlements spending is just killing the balance sheet. Democrats made a huge promise that the country can keep - its like, you can have entitlements, or you can have birth control, but not both, because all of our entitlements systems are essentially ponzi scams based on population growth.
So, Republican free trade and investment driven policies haven't really worked. Democratic entitlements have broken the budget, and, what you have hear, is 40 years of bipartisan stupidity, and now the country is completely fucked up. It's not Democrats, or Republicans, its Democrats, and Republicans, and me, and you, and every policy that we thought was a good idea at the time, pretty much didn't work. Democratic entitlements didn't work. Bipartisan free trade didn't work, none of our rosey ideas actually worked, and so now, its back to the basics, if we are willing to stand up and admit that we've all been wrong.
This is my sig.
Hmm, my furry sense went off.
Furries make the internet go.
Here's the basic problem: NASA can't afford to build a rocket that can safely take 3 to 5 people to LEO several times a year, because they were not appropriately funded for the task when it was assigned. The extended COTS fantasy, wherein NASA decided, arbitrarily, some date and price for "trips to the ISS!" that private industry would gleefully make happen, in return for NASA agreeing to purchase about one or two flights, from each of 2 or 3 vendors, for a period of four or five years, until Ares I was ready. Never mind that private industry was building Ares I . COTS wasn't even a plan to fail, that was Ares I. COTS was a backup plan to fail.
One thing changed. Now, private industry can reasonably expect NASA to purchase two or three flights per year, for about eight years, given the ISS extension. That means private industry can spread their R&D cost out over maybe a dozen flights, instead of maybe 4 flights. I guess that's a start.
However, it does't fix the biggest problem. NASA isn't buying enough flights to convince a single vendor to build a competent system, let alone more than one vendor. Would you want to fly in either of the cost-cutting tin cans that are going to result from this amateur space race? Assuming anything actually flies before the "vendors" either pull the plug or go bankrupt.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Maybe instead of trying to escape Earth, we should first focus on solving the issues we already have on Earth? It's not like we won't end up dragging said issues with us if/when we expand further..
Killing Constellation might actually be the best thing for increasing the chances that a kid gets to fly in space. Constellation was going to lock us into a flight architecture that was not suitable for anything other than occasional grandstanding flights to the Moon or Mars. It was not suitable for the basis of a space economy or a scalable transportation system that could support a lunar mining base and orbital facilities to build solar power satellites, for example. NASA clearly doesn't have a direction to get people into space, but now that it's out of the way, maybe other efforts can get a toe hold. (NASA hasn't yet arrived at a formula for stimulating this, the COTS model was fundamentally flawed, but I suspect that perhaps as few as five more years of floundering, and buying rides from Russia, along with watching China and India get into space, will focus America on this problem.) Here are a few potential contenders:
Skylon
Mystery Lockheed Martin Test Program
Vulcan (DARPA)
SpaceX Falcon
Right now, there are too many disposable rockets, chasing too small a launch market. Most of the private efforts are not able to get sufficient funding for the sort of technology advancement which will be required to get the cost per pound in orbit down by much, which in turn is required if anything useful is gonna happen up there. A seldom-recanted but critical part of the X-33 story was that the business model for VentureStar fell apart. There were at least one, if not two satellite phone companies planning to orbit hundreds of telecom sats. They were looking for large buys, on the order of a flight per week, for years on end, of Shuttle-class payloads (50,000 lbs), and wanted lower cost per pound. When those companies looked like they were going to fail, the primary contractor concluded that the remaining launch market (NASA plus industry at roughly the level we see today) wasn't big enough to justify private funding for the VentureStar, even after they X-33 notorious technical issues were studied and believed to be resolvable.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
doesn't rain down on us and Change our ability to live.
Ok, a couple of rejoinders:
First of all, the "$900B Obama is allocating for HCR" is not, for the most part, taxpayer dollars. Yes, that's the total cost of the program... but much of it actually comes in the form of premiums, excise taxes on insurance products (which would be hard to divert to space exploration), etc. But more importantly:
And to what end? There's simply no reason to build factories, farms, or solar power stations in space, when we can do all of that on earth WITHOUT having to build giant, $130 billion, nuclear-bomb powered rockets. I'm not really sure what you mean by "high energy risk free research stations", but I'm here to tell you... there ain't nothing in life that's risk free. Cities on the moon and Mars? Why? What would people do there? Also, there's nothing in the asteroid belt that we can't get much, much more cheaply on earth, and again, without having to build the aforementioned $130B rockets (not to mention the expense of building freaking FACTORIES in space). If you don't agree, specify what you might mine that would justify the expense. Bear in mind that the asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates. So is earth.
A number he pulled out of his ass. Freeman Dyson is not a health professional.
Yeah, and we still don't have the mission requirement. Sure, sending multi-million ton ships into space would be cool. But we can't spend $130B just to do cool things. Finally, bear in mind that Project Orion really never got off the drawing board - there were numerous unsolved engineering problems (ablation of the pusher plate caused by turbulence in the plasma impinging on it, spalling of the pusher plate, etc, etc). Insoluble problems? Probably not (with the exception of that nuclear fallout thing). But you need a reason to do something like this, and frankly, we don't have one. Not at what it would cost.
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It's more likely a CSS issue.