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Senator Makes NASA Complete $350 Million Testing Tower That It Will Never Use
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Phillip Swarts reports in the Washington Times that NASA is completing a $350 million rocket-engine testing tower at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi that it doesn't want and will never use. 'Because the Constellation Program was canceled in 2010, the A-3's unique testing capabilities will not be needed and the stand will be mothballed upon completion (PDF),, said NASA's inspector general. The A-3 testing tower will stand 300 feet and be able to withstand 1 million pounds of thrust (PDF). The massive steel structure is designed to test how rocket engines operate at altitudes of up to 100,000 feet by creating a vacuum within the testing chamber to simulate the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Although NASA does not expect to use the tower after construction, it's compelled by legislation from Sen. Roger F. Wicker (R-MS), who says the testing tower will help maintain the research center's place at the forefront of U.S. space exploration. 'Stennis Space Center is the nation's premier rocket engine testing facility,' says Wicker. 'It is a magnet for public and private research investment because of infrastructure projects like the A-3 test stand. In 2010, I authored an amendment to require the completion of that particular project, ensuring the Stennis facility is prepared for ever-changing technologies and demands.' Others disagree, calling the project the 'Tower of Pork' and noting that the unused structure will cost taxpayers $840,000 a year to maintain. 'Current federal spending trends are not sustainable, and if NASA can make a relatively painless contribution to deficit reduction by shutting down an unwanted program, why not let it happen?' says Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union. 'It's not rocket science, at least fiscally.'"
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
Tower of Pork
No, that's in Vegas.
Table-ized A.I.
'Current federal spending trends are not sustainable, and if NASA can make a relatively painless contribution to deficit reduction by shutting down an unwanted program, why not let it happen?' says Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union. 'It's not rocket science, at least fiscally.'" It's B.S. We have a fiat currency and the only limit to spending is inflation.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
a $350 million rocket-engine testing tower at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi
compelled by legislation from Sen. Roger F. Wicker (R-MS)
will cost taxpayers $840,000 a year to maintain.
Hey let's pour money into my home state plzkthx
I'm betting he just wants the kickback, since his 'reason' is completely incorrect. No research facility that wastes time, money, and other resources building or buying equipment they know they won't use is never considered being on the forefront of research, and actually lose funding as nobody wants their grants or donations to be wasted on known boondoggles.
I have several friends that work at General Dynamics here in Metro Detroit and the government spending has them in a quandary: they are forced by politicians to create a bill as high as possible - mandatory junkets and overtime, even when there's nothing to do. "Research" projects are the only thing that they do and they just post youtube videos, cancel the project and start something new. None of them can quit, even though the economy has recovered, because they are being paid so well as a result of the requirement to bill taxpayers so much.
Does anyone know why the Republicans came right to the table on the sequester this time around? Because offense spending (thinly veiled as "defense" spending) was to be rolled back to 2003 levels. That is absolutely evil if you are a member of the Republicans.
I bet this thing comes in useful in the near future... They'll find something to do with it. It might even be useful. I'd rather they build things like this than dole out bank bailouts like they are candy on Halloween.
Didn't they lease or sell one recently to SpaceX or one of the other private companies? Sounds like the money was already allocated as well, so what's the damage?
...meet Bridge to Nowhere
It all comes down to poor planning to begin with. Look at the Superconducting Supercollider ($2Billion to dig a friggin hole), this Tower, the cancelled Constellation program, cost overruns such as the $1.5Trillion F-35, etc. The government needs to do a much better job planning things out, and once planned, bring them to completion on time and on budget. If not, you have to have HUGE FINES or even jail time for bidding on things you know you can never accomplish. Don't blame that Senator for pork. Senators are elected to bring pork to their constituency. Blame the stupid planning by the administration of Sean O'Keefe for the failures of the Constellation program.
I approve this post.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Constellation was killed for political reasons. The difference between Constellation and SLS is the party letter beside the name of the President that authorized it. Stupid shit like this is going to happen when you fuck over politicians, contractors and everyone else for no good reason. Make them finish it just to stick it in their eye.
The article acts as if they are wasting $350 million by completing it. But it does not say how much has been spent already. Maybe there is not that much money to save by cancelling it?
And I can't believe that the NASA will not use it in the future, the article also gives no real reason for that.
Can't they repurpose the tower? They are still developing new rockets, even if it's not the same one when the tower was designed. What makes it so this tower can only be used for a particular project that happens to have been scrubbed? This is NASA we're talking about; they can find a way to work with it.
"It is important that a large emphasis be placed on safety and testing, and we cannot launch any type of vehicle until we test it extensively using NASA's best tools for testing," Cochran said after a 2011 hearing on the agency's budget.
How did the Saturn V ever get off the ground without such a rigorous test infrastructure as this?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
But they only shower federal dollars on business owners in Mississippi. No medicaid expansion for the poor in Mississippi. Fuck the poor!
Have gnu, will travel.
I wouldn't trust them to properly differentiate between a scientific boondoggle and useful scientific research.
Maybe this facility is useless, maybe it's not. But the NTU doesn't share an agenda with those who would fund a program of basic reasearch in this country.
Yes, it's called NASA, and in particular NASA Advisory Council, and a parallel, independent, council from the National Academy of Sciences.
A politician with pork on his mind doesn't give a crap about any of them.
What did they make the public buy?
A big toaster?
hahahhaha
Because, there is no way they can lease it out to all those wonderful commercial space ventures.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
To waste money.
Why did the rest of the senate go along with this? And what about the house?
... I know it's another day, so Slashdot has to find another Republican to bash, but a lone senator can't keep a program funded.
"I already promised my friends they will get the job, so IT HAS TO BE DONE."
He would have been all over this like a fat kid on a box of donuts.
...because then the senator would be accused of being anti-jobs and anti-science. You know, because he's a Republican and that's the way they all are.
Maybe they can rework it into a 300 statue of Jesus?
but it may come in handy for ICBMs.
VACUUM testing rocket engines up to 1 MILLION pounds on the groud? I'm surprised it cost only $350 million.
Seriously, that could test the J-2X, rs-68a, RD-180, rs-25e, merlin 1d, or whatever indigenous engines are out there. India, France, Japan, SpaceX, or South Korea would be happy to borrow it for rocket engine testing. Russia, China, and Iran could use it too if Washington let them.
So what if Constellation isn't going to test a rs-68b there, it could still test the rs-25e for the SLS, or an indigenous kerosene staged combustion engine to replace the RD-180.
Call me old fashioned, I actually watched the first moon landing in 1968 while in first grade, but I sure hope they do end up using it.
NASA used to me about space exploration, manned space exploration.
'The A-3 testing tower will stand 300 feet and be able to withstand 1 million pounds of thrust'
As far as I'm concerned what this article says more than anything else is NASA has lost it's way.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
You tella car company that you're going to pay them a half million dollars for a special custom car. You sign the contract, which requires that you pay them $500000 and that they give you a car when it's completed. Halfway through the process you suddenly decide that you don't want the car after all.
Well, tough. You already signed the contract and they're already building the car. You have no choice but to pay for a car that you aren't going to use.
That's what goes on in vases like this. The government signed the contract saying that they'll pay. They can't renege on the deal just because they decided they didn't want what they were paying for any more, so instead they have to pay for it and let it gather dust once they have it. I can guarantee that if you or I signed a contract that said we'd pay for something we wouldn't be able to get out of it just because we no longer wanted what we were paying for.
This isn't so much about grandstanding politicians that want money for useless programs, but about grandstanding politicians who like to decide the government doesn't want something for which the contract has already been signed.
and the bureaucracy for getting reimbursed for anything is crazy enough that sometimes I just take the loss (getting parts from Digikey, etc). And this is where the money goes?!? I dig doing my little bit to help the space program, but this is frustrating.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
SpaceX just cut a deal with stennis for testing of their new raptor family. The first engine of this family will be 1/3 of an F1. And yes, it is using these towers. So, this is wrong.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
NASA bought it!
NASA manages it!
We own it.
So build it and, SHUT THE FUCK UP Generalissimo Bolden Ass Wipe!
Jeeze, these Afro's are so touchy about being Gay and all when they ARE. Go Figure.
Starve the beast end taxes.
It is designed for large 1 million lb VACUUM based thrust (IOW, an upper stage engine(s)). What is nice is that the raptor is a large upper stage engine. I expect that SpaceX will use this for their raptor engine. The E-3 stand will only work for sub-components testing, not the full engine.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Don't get me wrong. I want NASA spending that money on something useful, not a 'tower to nowhere'. I do kind of relate to the senators too. Jobs shouldn't be temporary. I know, a lot of younger people think they are.It can be nice to regularly change things up for a while. Eventually one has to grow out of that. Staying in place is what gets you benefit time, raises, etc... It used to be how one gets a pension too back when they had those. I save a lot in my 401k but I don't see how I am ever going to retire!
This stuff becomes important when one goes to have a family. Even without the family, one day hopefully we all realize that we need to work to live, not live to work. Stay and build up that vacation time!
NASA projects unfortunately aren't stable enough for this kind of life. The problem is every politician has to go and cancel whatever the one before had NASA doing and build their own legacy. Of course they actually have no legacy because the next one will just cancel it anyway but I guess they all expect the next guy to be better than themselves... Meanwhile jobs are created and destroyed. Workers are hired and layed off. At least these porky senators are helping workers have a reason to want to work for NASA. Any organization that wants to do great things like space exploration is going to need to attract the best people. Why would they go to a place that will lay them off every time the whitehouse changes it's curtains?
Of course, a tower to nowhere is still a stupid way to spend taxpayer's money. The real problem isn't the pork, it's the politicians that keep changing the goals!!!
...is the thousands of slashdot readers being torn between their unwavering support for anything related to space exploration and their distaste for Republicans.
This has nothing on the amount of pork and waste in the farm bill that's making its way through Congress.
Call your representatives and ask them to stop it.
that you see in backward countries struggling to be productive. GJ america
I have several friends that work at General Dynamics here in Metro Detroit and the government spending has them in a quandary: they are forced by politicians to create a bill as high as possible - mandatory junkets and overtime, even when there's nothing to do. "Research" projects are the only thing that they do and they just post youtube videos, cancel the project and start something new. None of them can quit, even though the economy has recovered, because they are being paid so well as a result of the requirement to bill taxpayers so much.
Really? And what program are they billing those hours to? I doubt that the Federal government has given them a "do whatever" contract with an endless pot of money to bill against. Sounds like BS to me. Either that or they may defrauding the government by billing inappropriately against a real contract if what you say is actually true.... which I doubt.
You should look into the Democrat's view on the sequester, very few of them like it. It was meant to be a trap for the Republicans, but it backfired on the Democrats. Some Republicans have been unhappy, but few Democrats have been happy.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I don't know why NASA would cancel the project, I need to hold a million pounds of thrust in place 300 feet in the air all the time... What does the IG mean "it won't be needed"?
In all seriousness, though, why do we let people get away with this shit?? Slash NASA's budget, cancel constellation, then force them to build and maintain a testing location so that the "facility is prepared for ever-changing technologies and demands." Demands which will never come because NASA has no money to develop new engines and rockets, because they have idiots like this spending their money for them. If someone at a private company tried to allocate this much money to be wasted, they would be fired as fast as the board could pick up the phone. Wicker should be censured for abusing public funds.
At least any I've come across. Yes, the Gov't has to pay for work already performed, but it's a recognized fact that one Congress can't bind future ones to financial deals, and money to finish a particular contract may never arrive.
So by and large, as someone else pointed out, the Government has a clause in contracts allowing it to terminate the contract for convenience.
--PM
If you want to see not only the actual stats for what inflation has been going on, note that inflation in America has been hovering around about 10% annual on most goods. See also this site:
http://www.shadowstats.com/
It not only shows the real statistics (based upon the formulas that were in use in 1980 and earlier), but explains what sort of manipulation has been going on with the CPI, why it is a bad thing, and why your claimed source with the NY Times is full of the proverbial BS.
This isn't the only site to try and correct the government numbers, but it does use credible metrics for proper comparison as opposed to deliberate understating of inflation. This also impact things like changes in the GDP and other economic health statistics as well.
In other words, you are just flat out wrong about your assumptions that inflation is not happening
That would mean that prices have quadrupled since 2000: are rent, houses, gasoline, food, cell phones, jeans four times as expensive as in 2000? Of course not. Many of those things have actually gotten cheaper.
Inflation and CPI aren't particularly well-defined numbers, so people can legitimately get different answers and use/misuse them for various political purposes. But anybody who claims that they are around ten percent obviously is an economic charlatan.
Sometimes spending is just spending. Suppose the government spends a bunch of money crushing perfectly usable cars. $100 million worth of cars are turned into $1 million of scrap metal. To do so, they spend $1 million on diesel fuel for the equipment that crushes and transports the cars.
Show me where that $100 million ends up in someone's savings account.
You're assuming when the government spends $1 billion, it ALWAYS spends it on something that creates $1 billion in value. If $1 billion leaves the government, it has to go somewhere, right? Sometimes it goes down the toilet. In fact, not only does $1 billion in government spending not ALWAYS produce something worth $1 billion, it RARELY does so. So in ftfy would be changing "always" to "rarely" - net governtment spending is rarely net private saving.
The A3 test stand was designed to test a high-performance upper-stage engine that must start at very high altitudes and run all the way to space (Shuttle engines started at sea level with lots of ground support equipment hooked-up, and while Saturn DID airstart some of its engines, they were lower-performance than the J-2X the Constellation program required, designed, and has built). The US lacked this test capability when we embarked upon the Constellation program (which is why the stand was designed and built in the first place - DUH) and not having a pre-existing stand like this was ONE of the reasons for the delays (the J-2X engine was a "long pole in the tent".) which ultimately killed Constellation. By completing the stand, we will enable any future president to push forward with an ambitious space program if he/she chooses without a multi-year delay to build the testing infrastructure. One of the biggest problems the US has had with manned spaceflight post-Apollo is that, with lower public support, NASA programs get jerked around and changed by every new president (so any new program that cannot be up-and-running within one president's administration gets axed by the next guy... this is why we never developed a follow-on to the shuttles - many alternate programs were started then halted)
Had this stand existed when Constellation began, the program might have been far enough along to survive the new President (Obama) but it was the delays in that program that enabled him to order an end to all US manned spaceflight in early 2010 (other than as passengers on Russian rockets). Congressional outrage over Obama's 2010 NASA budget and plan led the to the bi-partisan Senate science comittee ORDERING Obama to build the SLS rocket currently being built (they REQUIRED it by law) and while he has been slow-walking it and has repeatedly tried to re-direct the funds to other programs, the likelihood is that the next president will inherit the SLS and be able to build a program around it. If you study the SLS, you'll see that the most-capable versions projected will require the J-2X upper-stage engine (which the A-3 stand was developed to test ... and which, happily, will exist)
Don't get fooled by people who hate a project (and are grinding and ideological axe) into thinking it is a "boondoggle"; that's a political tactic. There are three groups who HATE the A-3 test stand: [1] People in the federal government who want to end NASA's manned spaceflight and re-direct the cash to other things (some in congress, and the budget people at OMB have been on this for DECADES), [2] People who oppose American huma deep-space exploration missions (SOME of these people have careers designing, building,operating robotic probes and they see manned programs as taking their money, and [3] People who either love Elon Musk and his Space-X (which they deify) or love the Boeing/Lockmart EELV rockets and argue that their fave medium rockets are sufficient for the manned missions they prefer. The tactics some of these critics deploy include declaring that a piece of infrastructure that's critical to any future large-scale deep-space exploration is not needed and demand no money be spent finishing it (after the taxpayers have already spent all the time and 90% of the money and it's nearly complete) and THEN they'll use the lack of infrastructure to justify attacks on future big American space activity as unworkable/expensive due to lack of existing infrastructure...
The money would be put to much better use in somehow keeping Mississippians in Mississippi. I get tired of them moving up here to Michigan and spreading sprawl, crime, racism and ghetto trash culture.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
How did you nitwits ever graduate college or high school? 10% inflation and you equate that to Quadrupling? Quadrupling is a 400% increase that would take 40 years at 10% via simple math, and even then it would be right.
40 years ago compared to today, yes prices have more than quadrupled. Or are you going to trot out 1970 dollars to 2013 dollars bullshit to try and HIDE inflation.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Most reps I see speaking on blog, tv, newspaper, and so forth spout so much nonsense about women, minorities, that I would rather have dems. Not even counting there are far more reps that are creationist and what to push their religion down the throat of others than there are creationist dems. Sure both are bad, but creationism ? Tea party ? No thanks.
A quadrupling of price is not a 400% increase. It's the original price, plus 300%. Also, it would take much less than 40 years. "Simple math" doesn't include compounding. Someone please correct this if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual answer would be a bit over 14 years via the Rule of 72.
Just another day in Paradise
No. Much shorter.
.
Simple math says:
(1+10/100)^y = 4 =>
log (1.10^y) = log(4) =>
y * log(1.10) = log(4) =>
y = log(4) / log(1.10) = 14.54
After 14.54 years you quadruple; after 15 years you would have a 418% increase.
Didn't they teach you exponentials and logarithmics in high school?
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
You obviously need to learn some comprehension, as well as math.
The poster above was disputing the fact that inflation has been hovering around 10% because of what that would imply about the price level since 2000.
1.1^13 = 3.45. So not quite quadrupling, but that would be pretty close.
And a 300% increase does in fact correspond to a quadrupling (a 100% increase is a doubling etc.)
QED
The Ghosts of Jamie Whitten and John Stennis live on in Mississippi. Bringing federal dollars to pork barrel projects.
Jamie Whitten was the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee and any appropriations bill that passed by had to have something for Mississippi. Stennis was the same way in the Senate and together they always got something for Mississippi it seems in every appropriations bill.
That was true when the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor was mandated by Congress after the Challenger incident. NASA didn't want it but if they wanted to fund the shuttle and other programs, they had to take the ASRM too. Things like having to deliver the ASRM rockets on barges were put into bid contracts to prevent Thiokol (the supplier of RSRM engines for the shuttle) from bidding on the contract. Oh, they just happened to have the site at Iuka MS, which among being the site of a defunct Nuclear Reactor project by the TVA and was also a former weapons depot.
You see that's the problem with the seniority system in Congress, you can get politicians re-elected by people and they just move up the ladder on all these committees and it's the committees where all the power is in Congress. You can't just put legislation on the floor of either the House or Senate, it has to go through Committee first and if you have ranking congressmen and senators blocking projects until they get what they want, then important legislation can be held up indefinitely. It's been that way since our Federal Government was formed and handcuffs well meaning legislation with bad things that garner support from fringe members of Congress to get the votes necessary to pass the whole package.
Even though everybody thinks that Earmarks are supposedly a thing of the past, they're still around. The testing facility in MS shows again that port barrel spending is alive and well and a lot of things still get through, for example with the recent budget deal. Did you also know we have a STARBASE program as well? Well in 2012 it received $5m in funding and while most won't consider it a lot, it's really a glorified recruiting program.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It always cracks me up when the Republicans are whining about how much the Federal government spends on social welfare completely ignoring the "welfare states" like this one. Just take a look at this list
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2...
Even then, some things may be 4x more expensive, but I may be getting paid 5x more and other things may be 10,000x less expensive, like computers.
He is costing us a million dollars per year - awesome! Maybe have him pay for it himself? Nooo... use the taxpayers' money.
Show me where that $100 million ends up in someone's savings account.
Show me where the government got the "$100 million worth of cars". Chances are that's who has the $100m.
(In the case of the actual cash-for-clunkers program, the money was paid to the car owners who turned in their cars. Which, in practice, meant it actually went to the auto and dealer industry. And it was $3 billion, not $100m.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Turn it into a some kind of combo quad-track bungee jump--they love all that g-force yahoo stuff down there.
After 300 million customers, it pays off...
Name the tower after the Senator. Boy, will he look foolish.
Computers are a horrible example, but things which don't change too much in terms of the amount of labor which has been put into them such as a loaf of bread has gone up perhaps 4x as much. Some companies have been trying to keep those prices down, but the costs to provide that product has gone up, hence why companies such as Hostess have gone bankrupt from the squeeze trying to keep prices reasonable, paying labor costs that have gone up with inflation, and paying for higher grain and raw prices.
You do tend to earn more money as you get older, gain more experience, and hopefully move up the chain of command and perhaps are put in charge of others. That isn't a fair comparison for inflation either but rather a comparison of wages and benefits of entry level workers just starting out.
NASA should rename the tower after Wicker, and hold a big press conference combining the naming ceremony and the commencement of mothballing, just to make it really clear.
In the actual cash for clunkers, they spent $100 million administrative costs to destroy $140 million worth of cars, for which they paid $2.8 billion.
The $2.8 billion can be seen as a transfer to the car manufactures and dealers. The $140 million of cars that were destroyed went to no-one - they were destroyed. They COULD have been given to the less fortunate, or perhaps assign them to the parole office where people working to get a fresh start could use them to get to a job. Lots of things COULD have been done with that value, 700,000 could have received cars, but instead they were destroyed.
Had those 700,000 cars went to under privileged college freshmen as a bonus to the scholarship program, the program would benefit someone. Noone benefits from the destruction of perfectly usable transportation.
Additionally, with the actual program, the way the actual government does things, to qualify you had to be a) driving and old, cheap car and b) buy a brand new car. Do you know what happens when people who can afford an old car sign a $15,000 loan for a new car, in the middle of a recession? Reposession, ruined credit, and no way to get to work. That's what happens. Take a guess what percentage of cash for clunkers cars got repoed. On top of the billions of wasted money reported as the direct cost of the program, it also saddled those who could least afford it with debt they'd been avoiding, costing the economy another billion dollars.
If you and I choose to make a trade, you give me $X and I give you Y item, we make that deal because it works for both of us. It's a win-win, unless one of us is being stupid. When the government mandates that they are going to take your money and use it to destroy things, that's not a win for anybody.
When I was young, my Mom printed coupons for me in exchange for doing chores, which I could redeem for cookies from the cookie jar; my Mom never worried about running out of coupons.
Funny thing about those coupons, my family and I started trading them with each other. Like, I'd say, hey bro, I'll do the dishes tonight if you give me two of your coupons. Occasionally, we'd get too many coupons, and there wouldn't be enough cookies, and so we'd have all these coupons and no cookies to eat, except that my sister would have hoarded them all, and she'd tell us that she'd sell those cookies back to use for three coupons per cookie, three times the face value! So Mom would intervene and take the coupons back, or confiscate the cookies we couldn't stuff in our mouths first. Anyway, one time, Mom cut a deal. Instead of taking those coupons away from us, she'd borrow them from us for a week or two, and then give them back, except we'd get more. We thought it was a pretty good deal. We'd be like, hey where's the coupons you owe us, heh? Yeah, we turned Mom into a chronic debtor.
Still, we never did run out of coupons....
The A3 stand is designed to simulate very low ambient pressues at very high altitudes; that's why it's so big. The A3 hosts the structure and systems required to pull a near vacuum WITH a running rocket engine inside.
Most of the existing stands in the US are sea-level test stands for testing 1st stage engines that are ignited on the ground.... the new J-2X engines have already been tested on some of those stands in early testing (characterizing operation at low altitude).
An additional problem with the non-Stennis stands is that most other facilities in the US have had encroachment by civilian housing to such an extent that it's becoming too difficult to test at them without upset taxpayers/voters. The only US Govt facilities for rocket testing that have not suffered from this are Stennis (in the middle of a huge government land reserve) and Edwards (huge USAF facility in the high desert). It's doubtful that any large rocket engine will ever again be tested at MSFC
NOT a rocket ENGINE test stand; it's a STRUCTURAL test stand (you build a big thing like a rocket, heavily instrument it for stresses, strains, vibrations, etc and then place it in the structural stand and it gets shaken by computers using hydraulic rams - and you learn if the structure will fly, or fly apart)
The former shuttle engine stand at JSSC (Stennis) is a stand at the same facility as the new stand being mothballed and discussed, BUT the old stand and the new stand are fundamentally different; The old one tests at a fixed, low altitude (something like 100 ft above sea level) and the new one can be set to simulate very high altitudes so you can test the ignition and operation of an upper-stage engine.
There's a big difference between spending money on big science and tech projects that are to benefit the nation as a whole (only benefitting specific individuals as a side-effect) and projects designed to do NOTHING productive at all for the nation but simply used to transfer money by force from hard-working productive people to lazy drunks and pot-heads who care so little about their lives that they make no effort to improve them and will never contribute to making society better.
EVERY rocket engine test stand gets "designed for" the engine it will initially test (if you do otherwise, some "pork-fighting" politician or reporter will accuse you of wasting taxpayer money on boondoggle capabilities that will never be used). It's also true that we develop new rocket engines so infrequently that technology marches-on between each design, so there's no easy way to predict what a design you might want to test 30 years from now will even need. As a result, stands which are generally VERY durable (to handle the testing) and designed to last a very long time are simply re-fitted and custom adapted to any future generation of engine which is designed for the same operating conditions (some stands are for a single engine at sea level, some for multiple engines in close proximity at sea level, or this new one for a single air-started engine at extremely high altitude) - this is actually cheaper and more-efficient over the long term.
I guess the project is kept in business is because a lot of friends of Sen. Roger F. Wicker are making a lot of money if the tower is completed.. I don't mind if the tower is completed if they already have companies in line who are willing to use it, if not, the project should stop immediatly and IMHO the senator should be kicked out of office if he wants it to complete even though it is already known it will only costs money and doesn't do anything for research, because people like that shouldn't be in office in the first place...
1.1 ^ 14 = 3.79, so approximately a quadrupling.
It's no wonder that with those kinds of stupid beliefs you come up with policies "We need a 30% flat tax on all assholes that makes $500K or more a year, and tax at 50% any stock or trading incomes." The reason other people are doing economically better than you is because you are stupid and uneducated.
The discussion was simply about inflation: did prices increase 10% per year as claimed by the original web site. Obviously not, because prices on almost everything have not quadrupled in the last 14 years.
I've got to ask, though: did you actually ever graduate high school? Compound interest is 7th grade high school, even part of Common Core.
http://www.ixl.com/standards/c...
I'm flabbergasted that anybody capable of even turning on a computer fails such basic math.
The Administration is trying to defund planetary science for pork like this?
I think we're missing the point here.
Tell me more about this "Tower of Pork" of which you speak . . .
So what percentage did get repo'd? I'd guess it was around half of the private-party purchases. Tho from the list of vehicle makes turned in (which someone posted in a prior discussion), it looked to me like it mostly benefited small business (contractors' trucks and the like).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
In China, this is called corruption. It wouldn't happen in China either. Even if it does, it'll be all on the front-page news and the top level management is prosecuted.
thank you