It shouldn't be too hard to make aircraft seating configurable for passengers of different weights/heights.
I had that thought too. It shouldn't be hard to put entire columns of seats on rails (adjustable for each flight according to the seat-pitches ordered by customers), without adding significant mass.
However, the seats would then be out of alignment laterally across the aisle, making evacuation much more difficult. That wouldn't be allowed. [Hell, even getting up to piss would be harder, it the seats next to you are out of line with yours.]
I still think bunks are the solution. But evacuation is still an issue. During an emergency evac, everyone is falling over each other as they get out of the top bunks. Plus getting in and out of bunks, particularly for fatties and infirm, would be difficult. But there could be solutions with clever design. And bunks would be a lot more comfortable, IMO.
Fully upright seats are designed with evacuation in mind, not comfort. That's why you are asked to raise them during take off and landing (the two riskiest times for aircraft.) It's the reason airlines haven't just bitten the bullet and installed horizontally stacked bunks.
The semi-reclined position is intended for the bulk of the flight. "Fully" reclined for the bulk of the flight during night flights. Basically, we're all supposed to recline our seats back as soon as the "fasten seatbelt" sign is turned off.
So it seems to me that all seats should raise automatically during take-off/landing/turbulence/emergencies, then lower automatically to a fixed recline during flight. All at the same time, all at the same angle. It wouldn't solve all the problems caused by shrinking seat spacing, but it would at least solve the recline-vs-non-recline disputes. But this would require more hardware per seat, hence more mass, hence won't happen.
Alternatively, accept the added risk and make all seats at 10 or 15 degrees further reclined than the current "full upright". Then lock the seats. By removing the variable recline, you should be able to make seats as a single shell, which should allow you to save mass.
You can know what plane you'll be on and you can compare classes between airlines Seatguru.com has information on both.
Yes, you have to use a third party site to determine basic information like product size. That's a bad thing.
Imagine buying other products like that. Neither the manufacturer and the store tell you the basic size of your TV, won't show you a demo model, instead you have to get that information off of a third party site, and they can arbitrarily change the model they sell you, even after you've paid.
There is a guarantee that if you pay extra for economy plus you'll get exactly that.
But no guarantee what that means. There's a local airline whose "Premium economy" class has seats which vary by several inches in pitch and an inch in width, depending on what aircraft they assign to a route. And what aircraft they assign can change between booking and flying. Oh, and unless you are paying full fare (which is over three times their typical "discount" fares), you can't swap flights. There's no "guarantee" that I'll get what I thought I paid for. Nothing on my ticket that says the minimum size seat I'm guaranteed, even if I paid extra specifically for that size.
That's within one airline. Good luck trying to comparison shop on price and seat-size between airlines.
But there's no guarantee that paying an extra $50 will get me that extra space.
If seats were being sold "per inch", as you've priced them, you'd be right. They aren't, so you're not. Hell, they don't even tell you the model of aircraft you're going to be on.
[Unless I pay to bump up a class. But even then, I still can't compare that class between airlines.]
for a founder of a failed finance company then under investigation
"for a founder of a failed finance firm then facing..." Can't make "investigation" work. Although that "V" might be close enough already. "Official fact-finding"? Doesn't really carry the same meaning.
[Aside: The headline is misleading. It implies that a hack somehow interfered directly with the election mechanism. The hacker revealed corruption, it's the corruption which will disrupt the election chances of one of the major parties. "Hacked revelations threaten NZ National Party re-election bid". It's not like the hacker sabotaged a party's campaign site, or got into the ballot-printing or e-voting system. The difference between someone poisoning your company's products and someone revealing the poison your company puts in their products. In one case, they are the cause of the disruption, in the other they are just the messenger, you are the cause.]
LM's been in a staring contest with the USAF for years, each trying to get the other to pay for the development of a domestic version of the RD-180. The USAF just blinked.
No. If you are using the phrase, "Don't bury the lede", specifically to invoke that journalistic cliché, then only the jargon (retro-neologism) spelling is acceptable. Never respell quotes. If you are just generally discussing the lead paragraph in an article, then it's fine to use whatever spelling is familiar to you, as I just did.
How does Bruno's crime change my point? I don't care if his crime was calling the Pope a paedophile, they burned him alive. You, OTOH, can call climate science a giant hoax (and many deniers do), you can liken individual climate scientists to mass murderers or terrorists (and some deniers have), you can even liken it to religion... and... we still won't burn you alive.
The most and worst thing scientists can do to you is deny you publicity in the journals which they control, and reject your application for grant money from funds they control.
Science can't prevent you from publishing your work online. Or creating your own journals (with blackjack and hookers). Science can't prevent corporations and wealthy opponents of a specific science (climate change, evolution, tobacco-cancer, etc) from offering you money to make up faux science to support their industry. Science can't stop those industries and individuals from throwing money at politicians to change laws in their favour, against the recommendations of scientists. Science can't even stop those bought-politicians from fucking around with science funding and government reports to harm science their masters don't like.
Because the Pacific ocean is thousands of kilometres wide, but only a couple of kilometres deep, changes in wind patterns can cover or uncover different layers of ocean waters.
If the pattern uncovers a deep layer (as happens during La Nina), then the atmosphere cools.
If the pattern covers the deep layers (as happens during El Nino), then the atmosphere warms.
This is above and in addition to any underlying warming from rising CO2 levels.
Since 2000 there's been an unusual number of La Nina years. Under normal circumstances, this should have produced a noticeably cool period, similar to the 1940s and 1890s. Instead the decade was still the warmest on record. Weird huh.
Yes, religions have been using that trick for hundreds of years to escape questions.
No, what religions do is torture and murder heretics. Science just doesn't pay attention to them until they meet higher standards of evidence, proportionate to the level of heresy. Tiny bit different.
And further, work done by NASA is public domain, but work done by hired contractors is generally proprietary
Although an outsider, I definitely support your "if the government funds it, the public owns it" open-source efforts.
Re: Games.
Here it's not just proprietary vs open source. Compare KSP and Moonbase Alpha. KSP is an amazingly rich open world simulator that inspires actual "play" and exploration and trial and error. And as you master it, you accidentally learn more about orbital mechanics than by actually studying orbital mechanics. (As former NASA engineer, XKCD cartoonist noted.)
OTOH, Moonbase Alpha is the worst aspects of "grinding" type games, but with no reward. About the most uninspiring game you could possibly create. "Astronaut/Starlite" looks to be cut from the same cloth.
KSP: I built my own rocket and blew it up! Woo! Then I built another one which got to orbit! Now I'm designing a ship for a deep space mission which I'll construct in orbit! Alpha: I am "soldering" fixed points in someone else's "circuits" against an arbitrary clock. I will see how many circuits I can solder in an hour. And then see if I can beat it.
Moonbase Alpha is mindless drudgery (and I say that as a bookkeeper) that missed not only the entire concept of "a game", but also entirely missed what geeks (and geek kids) like about space.
Flying the same expensive equipment for 30 years and more is not unusual if it lasts that long.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. B52s are still flying, for example. 60 years next year.
But if you were a mad-obsessed young aircraft engineer looking for a challenge, would you go work at an airline flying five old 707s and mostly doing paperwork for maintenance contractors, or for a manufacturer building brand new aircraft every day, rapidly upgraded model lines, and with a supersonic passenger plane on the books(*)?
(* Trying to think of an aircraft analogy for FalconXX-BFR/MCT.)
While your general theme is correct, you missed [...] Endeavour
I was going to add a comment about that, but it seemed unnecessarily pedantic. My point was there was no ongoing manufacturing capacity. The same is true of ISS modules, and nearly every other program. Build one unit, stop, disband the team, destroy the manufacturing base, operate the unit for five to ten years and then ask "What next?", start a new system entirely from scratch. Pretend all the while that doing it this way saves money.
For example:
In general, however, I believe we should have started the design and production of a second-generation shuttle during the Bush41 administration
Waiting a decade to begin developing Shuttle Mk II is exactly why NASA sucks so hard. For starters, the first version should have been severely reduced from the ambitions of the actual STS, minimising the number of new technologies for the first generation. Building a 100 tonne space-plane in a single generation was completely nuts. The aim would be whatever you can build in five years, not one day more. Each subsequent generation starts the moment the last first flies. (With early design work starting even sooner.) So the second generation would have started somewhere around 1975, flying by 1980. Third generation flying in '85, fourth generation around '90... But I'm proposing increments that are probably a fraction of the ones you were picturing.
And just to be pedantic, NASA did start work on successors to the Shuttle in that period. So did the USAF. Giant SSTO spaceplanes, like NASP then VentureStar, which repeated every mistake from the STS program. Pushing the state of the art beyond reasonable limits, while insisting that there are "no show stoppers", under-bidding and over-promising, then blowing budgets and under-delivering. Then when you get cancelled, scream for years about funding and a "lack of leadership".
From the other AC:
What about MSL?
MSL went significantly overbudget and overschedule. (Only the gob-smacking failures of JWST makes MSL's budget look reasonable.) But nonetheless, when it landed, people were excited... because NASA had "actually done something". Which suggests that not only are people excited about space, but they are starved for something to be excited about. It's worth noting that, unlike MER, Viking, etc, they built a single version of MSL with no possibility of a backup. Mars 2020 will be based on the same design, but again, will be a single unit. This is a trend at NASA. Like the 8 years between MSL and Mars 2020. Just long enough to lose most of the team, forget most of the lessons learned.
Similarly, not only did MER and MSL not carry any follow-ups to the Viking life experiments, neither will Mars 2020 even though "search for signs of (fossil) life on Mars!" is the centre of the NASA PR for Mars 2020.
It's no longer "news" to find that a private sector company has a leaner, less bureaucratic environment and workflow than a Federal government agency.
Except almost all work at NASA is done by private contractors. Likewise the development of military technology. The cultural failure extends through the whole aerospace industry except for a few small innovators, of whom SpaceX is the largest.
This isn't just mindless "private sector good, government bad". Most of the harm done to NASA is due to that mindless, unquestioning political belief that the private sector is more efficient... even at government funded programs.
The poster said "1961". There was a market for commercial satellite launches, there was clearly a value in weather satellites and Landsat type imaging. The military uses for space don't need explaining. So the NASA and Army development in the '50s and very early '60s did indeed create the technology that spawned a commercial space industry.
But during the '60s, the focus shifted from incremental, step-wise development of space technology to the all-in balls-to-the-wall development of Apollo. However, it's important to note that the purpose of Apollo was to develop a heavy lift launcher larger than the Soviets were capable of building and demonstrate it in a way the Soviets weren't capable of matching. It succeeded, and the Soviets pulled their heads in, and everyone signed the Outer Space Treaty. Job done. Last one to the bar buys the first round.
But Apollo wasn't about the myth of Apollo. "We chose to go to the moon in this decade..." blah blah. It was never an exploration program. (For example, only one astronaut amongst the dozen to walk on the moon, just one in the entire Apollo astronaut corps, was an actual geologist. And he only flew on the last ever mission.) Therefore Apollo can't be used to rebut Eepok's explore/commercialise/explore premise.
Then the military with their 'we-want-it-don't-much-care-how' attitude that brought you the Shuttle Kludge pushed in and pretty much trashed the Shuttle
It's a standard part of the myth, but it's not true. The involvement of the USAF in the Shuttle design came at the request of (and lobbying by) NASA management in order to try to get defence funding for the Shuttle (and when that failed, to just make the Shuttle uncancellable. "National security!" It's part of the reason why the Shuttle (and now SLS) used SRBs, to keep ATK profitable, to preserve ICBM production knowledge.) The USAF initially bought into the bullshit being spread by NASA about the Shuttle's proposed capabilities ("launch once a week, cost under $100m per launch!"), but never enough to contribute funding. And then when the true limits and costs of the Shuttle became apparent, they pulled all involvement and funded the EELV upgrades.
The problems of the Shuttle were entirely of NASA's own making. Likewise "Freedom", now ISS. Likewise JWST. Likewise Constellation/SLS/Orion. Likewise their other failed programs. They, and their strongest supporters in Congress, keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and expecting a different result.
Adding procedures is easy, removing procedures is hard.
Adding procedures is usually like a bug-fix in a program, correcting for unintended behaviour or interaction in the other procedures. But reducing procedures is more like scrapping an entire code-base and starting with a blank sheet. Exciting, but much bigger and much riskier. (And more likely to go wrong and piss people off. See Slashdot Beta.)
So, who funded the Native Americans who found the "New World" thousands of years before he did?
Their community.
Each explorer of the next-valley-over was reared and fed and protected and trained by the rest of the tribe through mostly communal ownership of major resources. The explorer then returned with news of bounteous herds of Caribou (or clams or whatever) and gave that knowledge to the entire tribe to replay their tolerance for his youthful indulgence. They, in turn, shared the new wealth amongst the whole tribe. The idea that the explorer alone would claim rights to the new land/resource for himself and "sell" access to the others would be so foreign to the tribe they wouldn't understand what the words mean.
[Occasionally, one presumes, groups might break off from the main tribe and forge ahead into the new land, due to politics or ambition. But even then, the ownership of the new resource was shared amongst the break-away tribe.]
NASA isn't hot because it hasn't done anythingsince they retired the Space Shuttle in 2011.
I would suggest that the current malaise at NASA extends through the Shuttle program. Operating a first generation prototype for over a quarter of a century? Hell, just flying the same five vehicles for a quarter of a century (not even replacing those that crashed) is hardly a sign of a place that will thrill an innovative young engineer. It's more like a railway museum than a space agency.
Slashdot Mirror
It shouldn't be too hard to make aircraft seating configurable for passengers of different weights/heights.
I had that thought too. It shouldn't be hard to put entire columns of seats on rails (adjustable for each flight according to the seat-pitches ordered by customers), without adding significant mass.
However, the seats would then be out of alignment laterally across the aisle, making evacuation much more difficult. That wouldn't be allowed. [Hell, even getting up to piss would be harder, it the seats next to you are out of line with yours.]
I still think bunks are the solution. But evacuation is still an issue. During an emergency evac, everyone is falling over each other as they get out of the top bunks. Plus getting in and out of bunks, particularly for fatties and infirm, would be difficult. But there could be solutions with clever design. And bunks would be a lot more comfortable, IMO.
Fully upright seats are designed with evacuation in mind, not comfort. That's why you are asked to raise them during take off and landing (the two riskiest times for aircraft.) It's the reason airlines haven't just bitten the bullet and installed horizontally stacked bunks.
The semi-reclined position is intended for the bulk of the flight. "Fully" reclined for the bulk of the flight during night flights. Basically, we're all supposed to recline our seats back as soon as the "fasten seatbelt" sign is turned off.
So it seems to me that all seats should raise automatically during take-off/landing/turbulence/emergencies, then lower automatically to a fixed recline during flight. All at the same time, all at the same angle. It wouldn't solve all the problems caused by shrinking seat spacing, but it would at least solve the recline-vs-non-recline disputes. But this would require more hardware per seat, hence more mass, hence won't happen.
Alternatively, accept the added risk and make all seats at 10 or 15 degrees further reclined than the current "full upright". Then lock the seats. By removing the variable recline, you should be able to make seats as a single shell, which should allow you to save mass.
You can know what plane you'll be on and you can compare classes between airlines Seatguru.com has information on both.
Yes, you have to use a third party site to determine basic information like product size. That's a bad thing.
Imagine buying other products like that. Neither the manufacturer and the store tell you the basic size of your TV, won't show you a demo model, instead you have to get that information off of a third party site, and they can arbitrarily change the model they sell you, even after you've paid.
There is a guarantee that if you pay extra for economy plus you'll get exactly that.
But no guarantee what that means. There's a local airline whose "Premium economy" class has seats which vary by several inches in pitch and an inch in width, depending on what aircraft they assign to a route. And what aircraft they assign can change between booking and flying. Oh, and unless you are paying full fare (which is over three times their typical "discount" fares), you can't swap flights. There's no "guarantee" that I'll get what I thought I paid for. Nothing on my ticket that says the minimum size seat I'm guaranteed, even if I paid extra specifically for that size.
That's within one airline. Good luck trying to comparison shop on price and seat-size between airlines.
When you have to use a third-party service to find a basic description of the product you are buying, the market has failed.
But there's no guarantee that paying an extra $50 will get me that extra space.
If seats were being sold "per inch", as you've priced them, you'd be right. They aren't, so you're not. Hell, they don't even tell you the model of aircraft you're going to be on.
[Unless I pay to bump up a class. But even then, I still can't compare that class between airlines.]
Actually a driverless class would probably be more interesting than Formula E.
What does Yahoo! do?
In Soviet Russia, Yahoo does YUI.
for a founder of a failed finance company then under investigation
"for a founder of a failed finance firm then facing..." Can't make "investigation" work. Although that "V" might be close enough already. "Official fact-finding"? Doesn't really carry the same meaning.
[Aside: The headline is misleading. It implies that a hack somehow interfered directly with the election mechanism. The hacker revealed corruption, it's the corruption which will disrupt the election chances of one of the major parties. "Hacked revelations threaten NZ National Party re-election bid". It's not like the hacker sabotaged a party's campaign site, or got into the ballot-printing or e-voting system. The difference between someone poisoning your company's products and someone revealing the poison your company puts in their products. In one case, they are the cause of the disruption, in the other they are just the messenger, you are the cause.]
LM's been in a staring contest with the USAF for years, each trying to get the other to pay for the development of a domestic version of the RD-180. The USAF just blinked.
No. If you are using the phrase, "Don't bury the lede", specifically to invoke that journalistic cliché, then only the jargon (retro-neologism) spelling is acceptable. Never respell quotes. If you are just generally discussing the lead paragraph in an article, then it's fine to use whatever spelling is familiar to you, as I just did.
Beta ruins everything.
How does Bruno's crime change my point? I don't care if his crime was calling the Pope a paedophile, they burned him alive. You, OTOH, can call climate science a giant hoax (and many deniers do), you can liken individual climate scientists to mass murderers or terrorists (and some deniers have), you can even liken it to religion... and... we still won't burn you alive.
The most and worst thing scientists can do to you is deny you publicity in the journals which they control, and reject your application for grant money from funds they control.
Science can't prevent you from publishing your work online. Or creating your own journals (with blackjack and hookers). Science can't prevent corporations and wealthy opponents of a specific science (climate change, evolution, tobacco-cancer, etc) from offering you money to make up faux science to support their industry. Science can't stop those industries and individuals from throwing money at politicians to change laws in their favour, against the recommendations of scientists. Science can't even stop those bought-politicians from fucking around with science funding and government reports to harm science their masters don't like.
But OMG science is totally like the Inquisition!
Bruno must have chafed at not being allowed to publish his theories in Church journals, much worse than that whole being burnt alive thing.
Deep ocean water is cold.
Because the Pacific ocean is thousands of kilometres wide, but only a couple of kilometres deep, changes in wind patterns can cover or uncover different layers of ocean waters.
If the pattern uncovers a deep layer (as happens during La Nina), then the atmosphere cools.
If the pattern covers the deep layers (as happens during El Nino), then the atmosphere warms.
This is above and in addition to any underlying warming from rising CO2 levels.
Since 2000 there's been an unusual number of La Nina years. Under normal circumstances, this should have produced a noticeably cool period, similar to the 1940s and 1890s. Instead the decade was still the warmest on record. Weird huh.
Yes, religions have been using that trick for hundreds of years to escape questions.
No, what religions do is torture and murder heretics. Science just doesn't pay attention to them until they meet higher standards of evidence, proportionate to the level of heresy. Tiny bit different.
Couldn't they just put a label on the sort of people who not only believe satirical news, but, outraged, spread that "news" to everyone they know.
[Idiot] MagicBob97 shared [link].
[Idiot] catpiss wrote "typical fukink obamu!!!!!! [link]".
[non-idiot] sumdude wrote "uh, guys, teh onion is a satire site".
[Idiot] imtoorealforu shared [link].
And further, work done by NASA is public domain, but work done by hired contractors is generally proprietary
Although an outsider, I definitely support your "if the government funds it, the public owns it" open-source efforts.
Re: Games.
Here it's not just proprietary vs open source. Compare KSP and Moonbase Alpha. KSP is an amazingly rich open world simulator that inspires actual "play" and exploration and trial and error. And as you master it, you accidentally learn more about orbital mechanics than by actually studying orbital mechanics. (As former NASA engineer, XKCD cartoonist noted.)
OTOH, Moonbase Alpha is the worst aspects of "grinding" type games, but with no reward. About the most uninspiring game you could possibly create. "Astronaut/Starlite" looks to be cut from the same cloth.
KSP: I built my own rocket and blew it up! Woo! Then I built another one which got to orbit! Now I'm designing a ship for a deep space mission which I'll construct in orbit!
Alpha: I am "soldering" fixed points in someone else's "circuits" against an arbitrary clock. I will see how many circuits I can solder in an hour. And then see if I can beat it.
Moonbase Alpha is mindless drudgery (and I say that as a bookkeeper) that missed not only the entire concept of "a game", but also entirely missed what geeks (and geek kids) like about space.
Flying the same expensive equipment for 30 years and more is not unusual if it lasts that long.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. B52s are still flying, for example. 60 years next year.
But if you were a mad-obsessed young aircraft engineer looking for a challenge, would you go work at an airline flying five old 707s and mostly doing paperwork for maintenance contractors, or for a manufacturer building brand new aircraft every day, rapidly upgraded model lines, and with a supersonic passenger plane on the books(*)?
(* Trying to think of an aircraft analogy for FalconXX-BFR/MCT.)
While your general theme is correct, you missed [...] Endeavour
I was going to add a comment about that, but it seemed unnecessarily pedantic. My point was there was no ongoing manufacturing capacity. The same is true of ISS modules, and nearly every other program. Build one unit, stop, disband the team, destroy the manufacturing base, operate the unit for five to ten years and then ask "What next?", start a new system entirely from scratch. Pretend all the while that doing it this way saves money.
For example:
In general, however, I believe we should have started the design and production of a second-generation shuttle during the Bush41 administration
Waiting a decade to begin developing Shuttle Mk II is exactly why NASA sucks so hard. For starters, the first version should have been severely reduced from the ambitions of the actual STS, minimising the number of new technologies for the first generation. Building a 100 tonne space-plane in a single generation was completely nuts. The aim would be whatever you can build in five years, not one day more. Each subsequent generation starts the moment the last first flies. (With early design work starting even sooner.) So the second generation would have started somewhere around 1975, flying by 1980. Third generation flying in '85, fourth generation around '90... But I'm proposing increments that are probably a fraction of the ones you were picturing.
And just to be pedantic, NASA did start work on successors to the Shuttle in that period. So did the USAF. Giant SSTO spaceplanes, like NASP then VentureStar, which repeated every mistake from the STS program. Pushing the state of the art beyond reasonable limits, while insisting that there are "no show stoppers", under-bidding and over-promising, then blowing budgets and under-delivering. Then when you get cancelled, scream for years about funding and a "lack of leadership".
From the other AC:
What about MSL?
MSL went significantly overbudget and overschedule. (Only the gob-smacking failures of JWST makes MSL's budget look reasonable.) But nonetheless, when it landed, people were excited... because NASA had "actually done something". Which suggests that not only are people excited about space, but they are starved for something to be excited about. It's worth noting that, unlike MER, Viking, etc, they built a single version of MSL with no possibility of a backup. Mars 2020 will be based on the same design, but again, will be a single unit. This is a trend at NASA. Like the 8 years between MSL and Mars 2020. Just long enough to lose most of the team, forget most of the lessons learned.
Similarly, not only did MER and MSL not carry any follow-ups to the Viking life experiments, neither will Mars 2020 even though "search for signs of (fossil) life on Mars!" is the centre of the NASA PR for Mars 2020.
It's no longer "news" to find that a private sector company has a leaner, less bureaucratic environment and workflow than a Federal government agency.
Except almost all work at NASA is done by private contractors. Likewise the development of military technology. The cultural failure extends through the whole aerospace industry except for a few small innovators, of whom SpaceX is the largest.
This isn't just mindless "private sector good, government bad". Most of the harm done to NASA is due to that mindless, unquestioning political belief that the private sector is more efficient... even at government funded programs.
The poster said "1961". There was a market for commercial satellite launches, there was clearly a value in weather satellites and Landsat type imaging. The military uses for space don't need explaining. So the NASA and Army development in the '50s and very early '60s did indeed create the technology that spawned a commercial space industry.
But during the '60s, the focus shifted from incremental, step-wise development of space technology to the all-in balls-to-the-wall development of Apollo. However, it's important to note that the purpose of Apollo was to develop a heavy lift launcher larger than the Soviets were capable of building and demonstrate it in a way the Soviets weren't capable of matching. It succeeded, and the Soviets pulled their heads in, and everyone signed the Outer Space Treaty. Job done. Last one to the bar buys the first round.
But Apollo wasn't about the myth of Apollo. "We chose to go to the moon in this decade..." blah blah. It was never an exploration program. (For example, only one astronaut amongst the dozen to walk on the moon, just one in the entire Apollo astronaut corps, was an actual geologist. And he only flew on the last ever mission.) Therefore Apollo can't be used to rebut Eepok's explore/commercialise/explore premise.
Then the military with their 'we-want-it-don't-much-care-how' attitude that brought you the Shuttle Kludge pushed in and pretty much trashed the Shuttle
It's a standard part of the myth, but it's not true. The involvement of the USAF in the Shuttle design came at the request of (and lobbying by) NASA management in order to try to get defence funding for the Shuttle (and when that failed, to just make the Shuttle uncancellable. "National security!" It's part of the reason why the Shuttle (and now SLS) used SRBs, to keep ATK profitable, to preserve ICBM production knowledge.) The USAF initially bought into the bullshit being spread by NASA about the Shuttle's proposed capabilities ("launch once a week, cost under $100m per launch!"), but never enough to contribute funding. And then when the true limits and costs of the Shuttle became apparent, they pulled all involvement and funded the EELV upgrades.
The problems of the Shuttle were entirely of NASA's own making. Likewise "Freedom", now ISS. Likewise JWST. Likewise Constellation/SLS/Orion. Likewise their other failed programs. They, and their strongest supporters in Congress, keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and expecting a different result.
Adding procedures is easy, removing procedures is hard.
Adding procedures is usually like a bug-fix in a program, correcting for unintended behaviour or interaction in the other procedures. But reducing procedures is more like scrapping an entire code-base and starting with a blank sheet. Exciting, but much bigger and much riskier. (And more likely to go wrong and piss people off. See Slashdot Beta.)
So, who funded the Native Americans who found the "New World" thousands of years before he did?
Their community.
Each explorer of the next-valley-over was reared and fed and protected and trained by the rest of the tribe through mostly communal ownership of major resources. The explorer then returned with news of bounteous herds of Caribou (or clams or whatever) and gave that knowledge to the entire tribe to replay their tolerance for his youthful indulgence. They, in turn, shared the new wealth amongst the whole tribe. The idea that the explorer alone would claim rights to the new land/resource for himself and "sell" access to the others would be so foreign to the tribe they wouldn't understand what the words mean.
[Occasionally, one presumes, groups might break off from the main tribe and forge ahead into the new land, due to politics or ambition. But even then, the ownership of the new resource was shared amongst the break-away tribe.]
NASA isn't hot because it hasn't done anything since they retired the Space Shuttle in 2011.
I would suggest that the current malaise at NASA extends through the Shuttle program. Operating a first generation prototype for over a quarter of a century? Hell, just flying the same five vehicles for a quarter of a century (not even replacing those that crashed) is hardly a sign of a place that will thrill an innovative young engineer. It's more like a railway museum than a space agency.