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How President Jimmy Carter Saved The Space Shuttle (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Eric Berger has published an account in Ars Technica about how President Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle program. The article is well worth reading for its detail. In essence, around 1978 the space shuttle program had undergone a crisis with technical challenges surrounding its heat-resistant tiles and its reusable rocket engines and cost overruns. President Carter was not all that enthused about human space flight to begin with, adhering to the since discredited notion that robotic space probes were adequate for exploring the universe. His vice president, Walter Mondale, was a vehement foe of human space flight programs, maintaining that money spent on them were better used for social programs.
low earth orbit does not count as "exploration"
Disagree. With the caveat that it is exploration as long as you learn something. And we've learned a lot from our activities in nearby space. It doesn't have the pretty pictures we get from planetary probes but the technology and economic benefits we get from spaceflight are almost entirely from our activities in low to geosync orbit as is virtually all of what we have learned about biology in space. Those probes we send to Jupiter and Pluto have their technology developed and proven in our low earth orbit activities. What we are doing there is definitely exploration unless you are using a needlessly restricted definition of the word.
It seems the story writer is an idiot.
Saying robotic probes are "discredited" is clearly wrong. They have clear and substantial scientific value and they account for a large portion of our understanding of our solar system and astronomy data.
No, Iran contra was half a dozen years later. Do you idiots even wiki this shit?
Iran-Contra was discovered some years later. Specifically, getting arms to an enemy of the united States and to another group via an end-around in order to circumvent the Boland amendment was started as a way to attempt to get some hostages held by Hezbolla in Lebanon.
Now might such a thing have happened in the goings on in the 1980 election? Who knows? But a group that is wiling to give aid to enemies of the US, it is at least plausible that a very similar thing happened a few years earlier, merely undiscovered.
In the meantime, it was interesting that this whole thing included a metric shitload of illegal actions, like destroying classified evidence to avoid prosecutions, removing classified materials under cloathing, selling arms to an enemy of the US and violating laws passed by congress.
In the end? Acquittals and pre-emptive pardons, and the party of the moral high ground was pleased.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The important thing is that on a fixed price, the launch provider gets more profit if they reduce launch costs and schedules. On cost-plus, the provider is incentivized to have cost overruns and schedule slips.
I have several good friends who work for ATK, maker of the shuttle boosters among lots of other aerospace components. They say the old and new approaches are radically different... so different that ATK is having a hell of a time making the transition. The old organizational structure was enormous, with tremendous amounts of fat and redundancy at every level, because cost management was not a concern, at all. At best they basically ignored costs, at worst they actively worked to increase costs, because that boosted profits. Learning how to operate like a real business has required a complete restructuring of their world, including massive layoffs not just to cut costs but to remove all of the people with decades of "cost plus" methodology ingrained into their thought processes.
Old space and new space are both largely private, but they're dramatically different, even aside from Musk's ambitions.
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Thanks, I didn't mean to imply that but the way I wrote it sure does.
Probably better to say that when Reagan made a deal with terrorists over the hostages held in Lebanon, having said those words with his icy stare previously, the Iranians knew he was a liar.
The Iranian hostages were released in on January 20th, 1981 (the day Reagan was inaugurated) because the US and Iran had negotiated the release and signed the Algiers Accords of January 19th, 1981. Part of the Algiers accords had the Iranian revolutionary government releasing the hostages as part of its terms. It was the Carter administration that secured the release of the hostages as the last act of the Carter administration, bringing and end to the crisis that plagued his term in office. Carter had promised to bring them home, by any means. That would include dealing with the terrorists. The US was first referred to as the great satan, Iblis. Severeal western leaders, including Regan, have been compared to Iblis as well. The Iran Contra affair came to public attention in 1986, Reagan's second term. However, the actual events trade deals and shipments took place over several years during the first and second terms.