Slashdot Mirror
State of Alabama Fighting NASA's New Plan
FleaPlus writes "Alabama politicians have formed a 'task force' dedicated to fighting NASA's new plans to cancel the costly Constellation/Ares program, which is largely based in Alabama. The chronically mismanaged Constellation project attempted to build new rockets in-house and replicate an Apollo-style lunar program with minimal investment in new technologies. NASA's new boosted budget revives formerly suppressed R&D efforts into critical technologies needed for a sustainable push towards Mars and intermediate waypoint destinations, works with (instead of trying to compete with) existing commercial rockets to transport cargo/crew to orbit, and funds a stream of robotic precursor missions to scout other worlds and demonstrate new technologies. The Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook."
The Alabamans want to save their pork, plain and simple.
Their efforts should be attacked as being pure pork-barrel politics and characterized as a deliberate attempt to save a bad program purely for the money.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Ah, yes - the only remaining societally-sanctioned bigotry allowed. Applause all 'round, sir.
Typical, people complain about taxes and wasteful spending, then shit themselves when the government stops spending wastefully ON THEM.
I guess I understand it. People don't really care about whether taxes are high or being spent wisely. They only care about how much of it goes to them. To most, the government is nothing more than a big ciculating fan that sucks money from somewhere and blows it to somewhere else. You jockey for position to stand where the biggest cash dunes collect, and from there use the money to shape the future direction of the wind.
That's all this is. It's got nothing to do with actual space exploration or engineering or research.
It will be ugly, as pork barrel politics often get, but I believe, in the end, reason will prevail.
Ares should be axed. What we need is cheaper ways to haul large loads to space. The shuttle more or less taught us how not to do it, but the Ares I first stage has proven to be too problematic. A shuttle-derived vehicle, such as suggested by the DIRECT folks, would be a better choice and would use the Orion, which is more salvageable part of this project.
It would make a lot of sense to develop a series of modular vehicles, with modular engines and structures. That way you protect the money invested in developing each component.
What frightens me is the possibility this new plan also fails to deliver viable vehicles.
In that case, maybe we shoud give up the idea of being a spacefaring civilization.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
So, to recap:
Alabama congresscritters vote to cut taxes and argue that we should reduce government. The citizens call Obama everything from a socialist to a fascist, and argue that they are Taxed Enough Already (that's the TEA in teabagger) and that government is full of waste. Yet when the Democrats want to cut a program that hasn't produced in an effort to save money, the Alabamanites are upset?
Pure hypocracy.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
In that case, I've got a few nigger jokes I've been itching to tell someone...
Hey, it's just humor right?
Making fun of ignorance is always accepted.
How many weasel words and how much blatant bias is there in this summary ? We would not even dare to speak of Microsoft like this - and we are on slashdot.
States rights seem to be popular on this board. I'm not sure why-- I'm not particularly inclined to trust "those idiots down in Richmond" over "those idiots down in Washington." But perhaps the states could fill a void and start up space exploration programs of their own.
This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. He believed that if we replace federal workers as much as possible with private contractors, we could shift the size of government at will - increasing or decreasing the labor force in tune with the changing priorities and budgets.
The fallacy is that when you have federal tax dollars flowing into a locale, that locale becomes dependent on the influx. To cut that flow off - whether through salaries or contracts - means killing growth in a district. A district which will look to its congressman as their champion to right that "wrong." In effect, all we've done is add more overhead (contract administration on both sides, procurement processes, and profit for the contractors). Well, that and forced the core engineers and scientists out of NASA, so that when we really need continuity we can't get it.
There are things that can be outsourced efficiently. I outsource cleaning my office, office supplies, and telecommunications. If I chose a different vendor for any of those, it's no big deal. But when you're dealing with a $4T budget, it means that switching vendors or stopping a project has a major impact on whatever area your vendor was set up in. Sadly, we don't really have the money to pay everyone - no matter what your congressman promised two years ago.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Not so. Making fun of ignorant WHITES is always accepted. But attempt to make the same type of humorous blanket commentary about the ignorance of any other ethnic group, and you'll immediately be branded a brown people-hating racist.
This is a lot like how communities fought military base closures. We don't need an air base in the Dakotas to defend ourselves from Canadians. They want it because the base contributes to the local economies. A lot of times, the Pentagon gets hardware forced on them because a contractor in key district makes them, it had nothing to do with whether it was needed or wanted. The bigger projects made with components from many different districts are even harder to kill.
Making fun of ignorance is always accepted.
Indeed. We should make fun of all ignorant people. Including the dumbfucks here who think that anybody from "down south" or "out west" who doesn't live on a coast is somehow mentally retarded or at a very minimum one variety of bible-thumping, goat raping, redneck or another. Why, I believe that kind of ignorance -- which leads to the bigotry previously mentioned here -- far outshines the alleged ignorance that you allude to. So lets have at it shall we? Let's make some serious god-damned fun of those ignoramuses. I'll let you start.
In the meantime, let me point out that Constellation's crew launch vehicle would not be "competing" with any "existing commercial rockets" as claimed in the summary. There's not a single commercial rocket certified for human transport and it will likely be some time (if ever) before any of the existing ones achieve that goal. Until then, they are talking about the spaceflight equivalent of vaporware.
Yours truly,
An allegedly ignorant redneck hillbilly from "the middle of fucking nowhere", Utah, who spends his spare time (between good goat fucks, of course) doing engineering work for MIT and their clients. And I like shooting guns too. How's that for stereoptypes?
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
What about neophyte startups like ULA, a joint venture by Boeing and Lockheed, and of course Boeing proper. Much of the new 'commercial' sector is going to be the same people as before, just acting through fixed-price rather than cost-plus contracts.
Comparing Ares 1X to Falcon 9 is foolish. Falcon 9 is the potentially final vehicle, with a first and second stage. Ares 1X was a 4-segment SRB (as opposed to the required 5-segment), a second stage mass simulator, and a Titan control system. It was intended only as an aerodynamic test, and yet managed to cost as much as all of Space X's development combined. A better analogy would be Ares 1X:Ares 1 as Falcon 1:Falcon 9, in terms of progression of technology. And to answer your question, F9 is coming along quite well. Should see the first test flight in the next few months -- if it doesn't go off, we're fortunate because F9 isn't a single point of failure in this new plan, unlike Ares 1, and there are still other, completely separate vehicles in development that will be able to take up the slack.
Finally, Bolsheviks in the Augustine Commission??? Its socialist to want to privatize something??? Clearly I'm confused in my understanding of these words.
This plan is no less vacuous than the program of record, and has the advantage of having results that can be built off of within an administration -- if CxP were continued, it would just be at risk of being cancelled by the next administration change, and the one after that, and the one after that (no landing till the 2030s). A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. NASA hasn't managed to build a new vehicle using traditional contracting methods since the 1970s, it would be insanity to keep doing it this way.
Oh I see. Just because Obama does it its wrong. Now I get it!
why yes, it is just humour, a nigger joke is no more racist than one that starts "there's an englishman, an irishman and a scotsman" Racism doesn't lie in the words you use but in the actions you take. Calling someone a nigger, kike, wop, etc etc doesn't make you racist. Not hiring someone because they happen to be black, refusing to allow your jewish daughter to marry a muslim, putting a sign on your hotel that says "no irish" those sort of things are racist. If the word itself is racist then most hip hop should be labeled hate speech, instead we use these words as a crude marker: "if you say x you believe y" isn't a good enough way to deal with whats a very contentious issue.
a man of infinite shallows
Obviously you have never watched a comedian that isn't white, or watched any tv comedies that have non-whites as their main character.
My ethnic group/race is Homo sapiens.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Aries was supposed to be that "modular" concept. It tries to be too many things and does none of them well. The low to mid range Aires capability exists now so why not focus on the heavy lift version? Not to metion the vibration problems Aires has that would shake a crew to death and might even be worse than first thought. Any Shuttle derived concept would have to be massively beefed up to handle a capsule and would also have to be certified as man-rated which is not an easy thing.
Yep, and It's my freedom to say I don't like it.
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
Mean spirited and unnecessary aggravation of situations passes for "insightful" at this place?
You get to be the Master Race, so suck it up.
Who's it more sporting to kick,the boss up on his high horse or some poor bastard trying to pick himself out of the gutter?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Making fun of ignorance is always accepted.
From TFS: The Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook.
What's your point? Where is the display of ignorance that is being ridiculed? This is bigotry, unless you'll accept a "stupid black" joke in response to an article that mentions Obama. Not that I would make such a joke, but it's the same principle, since the men being ridiculed are in fact educated men with experience in the aerospace industry.
These taxes on small businesses ARE unfair, because they dramatically raise the bar for starting or operating a small business. You might argue that even if that tax were placed square on the employee, then businesses would have to raise their wages so that employees could afford to pay. And that's valid. But at least then it wouldn't be a half-hidden cost. It would be direct, and people would have a much better idea of where the money is coming from, and where it is going. Which is ALWAYS better.
So let me reiterate, for the record, that I am a small business owner, bringing several years experience to the discussion. I'm also the one who's absorbing all of this alleged unfairness.
In fact I do agree with you that it's ridiculous to assign half of each employee's FICA to the business rather than the employee. Unlike you I don't think it's ridiculous because it's unfair to the business, rather I think it's ridiculous because it's transparently just a tax on the employee that's being "hidden" by stashing it on the employer's books rather than on the employee's tax statement. Anyone who pays self-employment tax knows that the government will gladly take both halves from the worker when there's no business to hide it behind. And furthermore, any competent business owner makes hiring decisions based on loaded employee cost (including taxes, benefits, etc.) anyway, so they're already folding those cost into the employee's take-home wage. (Like I already said, the exception here is minimum-wage employees.)
You might argue that even if that tax were placed square on the employee, then businesses would have to raise their wages so that employees could afford to pay. And that's valid.
This is the entire point. I wish that the tax were placed transparently on the employee. But the existence of these taxes is hardly a secret and I'm confident that the market is pricing them in quite effectively. Moving them over to the employee's side of the ledger wouldn't magically make it easier to start or run a small business. It sounds great in a Slashdot post, but it's almost meaningless as public policy.
The only tangible exception to this rule is the case of minimum-wage employees. If you moved the employer's share of the tax onto the employee then thousands of fast food franchises would benefit, but they'd do it at the expense of their worst-paid employees. If you want to help small businesses, don't do it on the backs of people who are making sub-poverty-level wages.
All that said, let me say that on a personal level I really, really hate payroll taxes. Not because it hurts my business, but because it's a transparent ripoff. You see, payroll taxes only apply to the first $100k or so of income, so they're essentially a tax on the working class. Anyone with a really high income is paying a much lower tax rate. That would be ok if these taxes were actually being used to finance retirement benefits, but back in the 1980s a Republican President and a Republican Fed Chairman hiked them way above the level needed to fund benefits. That excess money was (and still is) being used to finance huge tax cuts which primarily benefit the wealthy. I see this as a crime against the American people and it absolutely disgusts me. So while I'd like to see these taxes reformed, I absolutely do not trust the Republican party to fix it. Just my two cents.