No hard feelings, especially since I see you are well informed in space history and not just repeating the meme without knowledge. One thing is certain about the first decade of space exploration -- without the competition between the USSR and USA, neither of them would have done near as much and they both achieved great things.
Kind of funny but wrong or misleading both by commision and omission. Commission: 1st Venusian probe and 1st Martian probe -- the USSR had the first landers on each (which operated for a few seconds or minutes) but the USA had the first flybys of each (Mariner II for Venus and Mariner IV for Mars; Mariner II was the first successful mission of any kind to another planet besides the earth-moon system) and "space probes" by definition include flybys.
Omission: The list of "firsts" which USA-NASA accomplished is long, but the highlights are: Manned moon landing (had to put that one in first) First and so far only probes to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. First and only orbiters of Jupiter and Saturn. First and only spacecraft on escape trajectories from the solar system. First probe to Pluto (on its way now). First and only probes to Mercury (Mariner 10 flyby and Mercury Messenger in orbit now). Only landers on Mars which worked for more than a 15 seconds. The list above is far from exhaustive. Both the USSR and USA had notable space accomplishements and neither would have moved as fast without the competition of the other, but this pervasive meme that the USSR did everything first is just false.
Well those bombed Germans and Japanese civilians must have known something you don't because at end of the war they were falling all over each other to surrender to the US and western allies rather than be overrun by the Russians.
What rational person who has observed gun control politics in this country for the last 50 years thinks there will not be readily available guns for sale legally in the USA anytime in the foreseeable future? That's my problem with the "gun enthusiasts". At absolute worst the Rambo pretenders may not be able to buy a semi-automatic rifle that looks like a "real army gun" like an AR-15 in some states, but they will always able to get semi-automatics which are functionally the same. I don't have a problem with gun ownership (I have a few rifles and shotguns), but I'm scared that the people that seem to want them the most are so easily deluded with, "Obama is going to take their guns away!" -- that's my relatives I'm describing. I'm really peeved that I didn't foresee this in 2008 and buy a bunch of Remington, Lugar, etc stock before the 2009 inauguration.
"the extreme effort involved probably even set us back by a couple of decades" -- I've heard that more than a few times. While it sounds plausible, it often seems to come from either the (dwindling few) old timers who thought we could go to space via the X-15 and later spaceplanes (seems unlikely in retrospect), or from NASA apologists trying to excuse the stagnation there since the ISS and STS ate up the budget for real exploration -- not to assign you (parent poster) to either class. In any case the STS really set us back by a couple of decades so we'll never know what would have happened had we continued the use of Apollo hardware through the 70's and 80's.
Read the AC comment before mine, it says about about what I was going to say. Certainly within galaxies and galaxy groups, there are enough interactions that we would see the results of the matter-antimatter annihilation if there were significant amounts of both, especially gamma rays at the energy of electron-positron annihilations. And many cosmic ray particles come from a long ways out, maybe even intergalactic, I think -- if there was a lot of antimatter out there we would see more antimatter in the incoming cosmic rays. Actually the AMS experiment on the ISS is directly measuring the presence of antimatter (mostly positrons) in the cosmic rays which make it to the vicinity of the earth. They aren't seeing much -- certainly not enough to support the presence of antimatter stars, gas, etc in our galaxy.
I didn't mean to imply that the EU armed forces are 'useless' or 'cowardly' and agree they have fought bravely both in WWII and many times since. Don't take what I said as disparaging the soldiers of any of the European forces. In the case of Srebrenica I think that the European leaders who put them there there did not consider and plan for the eventuality that their "peacekeepers" would actually end up in a shooting confrontation and so let their troops down, not the other way around. Not to slight anyone else, but the Brits have a good reputation as being the supreme professional soldiers, maybe that is just anglophile propaganda from movies since WWII:). On the other hand, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, the European nations as a whole have decided not to spend as much on their military forces as it would take to make the EU a self sufficient military power able to handle events as the US can (the recent Libyan intervention comes to mind). My original post was to point out that Europe has been no better than the US in executing short-sighted foreign policies since WWII -- that's a problem of their leaders and ultimately voters, as it is in the US. I would love for the EU to become a true superpower in every facet, on par with the US, to provide aid in common interests and a friendly counterbalance when US policy goes off track.
Please... the US had lots of European help in the screw-ups since WWII. Vietnam, for example, happened because the French wanted to take it back as a colony after the war -- that's what turned Ho Chi Minh against the West. The US's problem there was not telling the French in the 50's to get out. The elected government of Iran was overthrown by the US in the 50's at the behest of Britain and their oil company there (not to excuse the US's actions there, but our mistake was not telling the Brits to screw off at the time [or is it, 'bugger off'?]). More recently, it took the US to put an end to the active fighting in Bosnia in the 90's -- as I recall, the Dutch troops there just stood around while the Bosnian Muslims got massacred in Srebrenica before the US got involved. Those are just the major events I can think of right off. Wasn't there documented French cheating on the UN sanctions against Iraq under Saddam? I'm sure a lot more of the US mistakes around the world can be traced to cleaning up messes the Europeans started -- the whole screwed up map of the Middle East in the 20th century can be traced to European meddling there before and after WWII.
This shouldn't be news to anyone, but Mars 3 wasn't just any old mission. It was the first soft lander on Mars. Transmitted data for about 14-15 seconds, then ceased for unknown reasons.
Well, as someone who has actually done it, I'd say that more accurately, the flyovers are done with funding which would have otherwise been spent on more realistic training flights. Everyone liked to do the public flyovers but as actual training for doing the job the aircraft were bought for they weren't as good as just going out to the training ranges and practicing combat skills.
But the last whole century tells a different story. The rebulding of Europe and Japan after WWII went well in the areas which were under Allied control after the war, due largely to the Marshall Plan in Europe and US directed changes to governance in Japan. And S. Korea was in the same state as N. Korea at the end of armed hostilities in 1953 -- they have turned out rather well. Vietnam doesn't count in this analysis because the US lost that war and wasn't available to help rebuild. The Iraq fiasco to a large extent was due to incompetence in the Bush administration who ignored the analyses of the experts who told them how many troops, etc, would be required to maintain order after the fall of the government but didn't want to believe them.
The elephant in the room of oil company subsidies is what is spent on the US military to keep the sea lanes open for all those oil tankers and keep a lid on the Middle East. The money poured down the Iraq war rathole was in a large part because Bush's neocons figured that they could remake the place and get oil practically for free. If the cost of a gallon of gas reflected the military costs of keeping the oil markets stable, electric cars would drive the gas powered ones off the market overnight.
Though I don't agree, your comment should get modded up as a conversation starter because it is both right and wrong. Yes, many of the TOS episodes are unbearably (can't think of the right word) trite by some modern standards and even at the time it was pointed out (among other things) that the concept of the ship's captain putting himself in life threatening situations was unrealistic (to say the least). However, for the time (and I was there to see it) it was a fascinating and insightful show which often dealt with social issues which were otherwise taboo at the time (the first interracial kiss on US TV, heck actually one of the first integrated casts on US TV!). And the science, while mostly wrong, still exposed many people, for the first time, to concepts of human-computer interaction, personal communications equipment, etc. A very good comparison, I think, is to the original Twilight Zone. An iconic show, many of those episodes are barely watchable today, though they were written by one of the best TV writers ever (Rod Serling), but if you back off from your 21st century expectations and watch them for what they were, mostly morality plays presented on a new medium (TV) you can enjoy even the worst of them. I do have to take extreme exception to your comment about the "age bracket and aversion to science" thing -- many of us old nerdy techies were fascinated by TOS and it probably influenced positively a huge number of us. And TOS certainly deserves the credit for introducing concepts used by later, arguably better shows (TNG, for a direct example). And as a point made by another poster, it's not like today's television fare is a garden of sophisticated, thought provoking programming. I suspect that even the current critical and fan favorites (The Walking Dead, anyone?) will not hold up well in 40 years. Anyway, as I said before, I appreciate your comment to open up this whole discussion; I ponder it myself sometimes while watching a rerun of TOS and thinking, "this isn't as good as I remember it!"
From the very link you posted, "An EU funded research study known as ExternE, or Externalities of Energy, undertaken over the period of 1995 to 2005 found that the cost of producing electricity from coal or oil would double over its present value, and the cost of electricity production from gas would increase by 30% if external costs such as damage to the environment and to human health, from the particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, chromium VI, river water alkalinity, mercury poisoning and arsenic emissions produced by these sources, were taken into account." So the economists (and the honest libertarians) would say that solar at twice the nominal 'market' cost of coal and oil is really at just about parity now when ALL the costs are included. And that doesn't include the cost of the CO2 emissions.
Correcting myself (again), to be more accurate. As MachineShedFred pointed out above, there is also a significant amount of Pu240 in used nuclear fuel rods, which doesn't help NASA any with their Pu238 requirement, either.
Yeah, I never could understand that one (ALSEP shutdown). By the way, I think it was unjustified for your original post to get modded down like it did (troll and flamebait -- I never got those:)). It sounded a bit trolly on first read but was a worthy speculation.
repost to correct typo: The Pu in the fuel rods is not the right isotope, it is almost all Pu239 (U238 + neutron = Pu239, [after a stage as Np239]). NASA needs Pu238. What Pu238 is in there would be a real bear to separate from the Pu239 (more difficult than the separation of U235 from U238 because the mass difference is less).
The Pu in the fuel rods is not the right isotope, it is almost all Pu239 (U238 + neutron = Pu239, [after a stage as Np239]). NASA needs Pu238. What Pu239 is in there would be a real bear to separate from the Pu239 (more difficult than the separation of U235 from U238 because the mass difference is less).
Considering that Cassini is a WORKING orbiter around Saturn, a thing we are unlikely to see again in most of our lifetimes, I'm good with them funding the use of it as long as it keeps running, for no other reason than to keep looking for things it missed the first (or hundredth) time around. Same for any other working interplanetary spacecraft. If (and only if) someone can make the case that defunding Cassini will directly free up funding for the next probe to Saturn, then maybe, but I don't believe that will happen.
"Texas, which according to left-wing groupthink is a regressive bible-thumping gun-toting desert filled with rednecks who hate Darwin and force kids to pray in school." -- hey, you just perfectly described my whole extended family from southeast Texas! I've been here 40+ years...
Women get to vote Racial minorities get to vote You can't have separate public school systems, water fountains, public transit, etc. for whites and "coloreds" You can't charge a poll tax to keep poor people from voting You can't just dump whatever crap you want into the air and water that other people breathe and drink
Often when the projects are 75%-80% from completion, they are already 200%-500% over budget. Poster child -- JWST. Poster child #2 -- Constellation, though it didn't get close to 75% completion. How far do you let a rogue one go before you pull the plug as it eats up the funding for the other, possibly better managed, projects?
Come on idiots, (not the poster, who probably just made a typo, but the mods who sent it up to +5) -- the TOTAL cumulative government debt is about $14 trillion. The deficit for this year will be in the neighborhood (probably under) of $1 trillion, still a large number but we need to keep the facts straight in these discussions.
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No hard feelings, especially since I see you are well informed in space history and not just repeating the meme without knowledge. One thing is certain about the first decade of space exploration -- without the competition between the USSR and USA, neither of them would have done near as much and they both achieved great things.
Kind of funny but wrong or misleading both by commision and omission. Commission: 1st Venusian probe and 1st Martian probe -- the USSR had the first landers on each (which operated for a few seconds or minutes) but the USA had the first flybys of each (Mariner II for Venus and Mariner IV for Mars; Mariner II was the first successful mission of any kind to another planet besides the earth-moon system) and "space probes" by definition include flybys.
Omission: The list of "firsts" which USA-NASA accomplished is long, but the highlights are:
Manned moon landing (had to put that one in first)
First and so far only probes to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. First and only orbiters of Jupiter and Saturn.
First and only spacecraft on escape trajectories from the solar system.
First probe to Pluto (on its way now).
First and only probes to Mercury (Mariner 10 flyby and Mercury Messenger in orbit now).
Only landers on Mars which worked for more than a 15 seconds.
The list above is far from exhaustive. Both the USSR and USA had notable space accomplishements and neither would have moved as fast without the competition of the other, but this pervasive meme that the USSR did everything first is just false.
Well those bombed Germans and Japanese civilians must have known something you don't because at end of the war they were falling all over each other to surrender to the US and western allies rather than be overrun by the Russians.
What rational person who has observed gun control politics in this country for the last 50 years thinks there will not be readily available guns for sale legally in the USA anytime in the foreseeable future? That's my problem with the "gun enthusiasts". At absolute worst the Rambo pretenders may not be able to buy a semi-automatic rifle that looks like a "real army gun" like an AR-15 in some states, but they will always able to get semi-automatics which are functionally the same. I don't have a problem with gun ownership (I have a few rifles and shotguns), but I'm scared that the people that seem to want them the most are so easily deluded with, "Obama is going to take their guns away!" -- that's my relatives I'm describing. I'm really peeved that I didn't foresee this in 2008 and buy a bunch of Remington, Lugar, etc stock before the 2009 inauguration.
"the extreme effort involved probably even set us back by a couple of decades" -- I've heard that more than a few times. While it sounds plausible, it often seems to come from either the (dwindling few) old timers who thought we could go to space via the X-15 and later spaceplanes (seems unlikely in retrospect), or from NASA apologists trying to excuse the stagnation there since the ISS and STS ate up the budget for real exploration -- not to assign you (parent poster) to either class. In any case the STS really set us back by a couple of decades so we'll never know what would have happened had we continued the use of Apollo hardware through the 70's and 80's.
Read the AC comment before mine, it says about about what I was going to say. Certainly within galaxies and galaxy groups, there are enough interactions that we would see the results of the matter-antimatter annihilation if there were significant amounts of both, especially gamma rays at the energy of electron-positron annihilations. And many cosmic ray particles come from a long ways out, maybe even intergalactic, I think -- if there was a lot of antimatter out there we would see more antimatter in the incoming cosmic rays. Actually the AMS experiment on the ISS is directly measuring the presence of antimatter (mostly positrons) in the cosmic rays which make it to the vicinity of the earth. They aren't seeing much -- certainly not enough to support the presence of antimatter stars, gas, etc in our galaxy.
I didn't mean to imply that the EU armed forces are 'useless' or 'cowardly' and agree they have fought bravely both in WWII and many times since. Don't take what I said as disparaging the soldiers of any of the European forces. In the case of Srebrenica I think that the European leaders who put them there there did not consider and plan for the eventuality that their "peacekeepers" would actually end up in a shooting confrontation and so let their troops down, not the other way around. Not to slight anyone else, but the Brits have a good reputation as being the supreme professional soldiers, maybe that is just anglophile propaganda from movies since WWII :). On the other hand, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, the European nations as a whole have decided not to spend as much on their military forces as it would take to make the EU a self sufficient military power able to handle events as the US can (the recent Libyan intervention comes to mind). My original post was to point out that Europe has been no better than the US in executing short-sighted foreign policies since WWII -- that's a problem of their leaders and ultimately voters, as it is in the US. I would love for the EU to become a true superpower in every facet, on par with the US, to provide aid in common interests and a friendly counterbalance when US policy goes off track.
Please ... the US had lots of European help in the screw-ups since WWII. Vietnam, for example, happened because the French wanted to take it back as a colony after the war -- that's what turned Ho Chi Minh against the West. The US's problem there was not telling the French in the 50's to get out. The elected government of Iran was overthrown by the US in the 50's at the behest of Britain and their oil company there (not to excuse the US's actions there, but our mistake was not telling the Brits to screw off at the time [or is it, 'bugger off'?]). More recently, it took the US to put an end to the active fighting in Bosnia in the 90's -- as I recall, the Dutch troops there just stood around while the Bosnian Muslims got massacred in Srebrenica before the US got involved. Those are just the major events I can think of right off. Wasn't there documented French cheating on the UN sanctions against Iraq under Saddam? I'm sure a lot more of the US mistakes around the world can be traced to cleaning up messes the Europeans started -- the whole screwed up map of the Middle East in the 20th century can be traced to European meddling there before and after WWII.
This shouldn't be news to anyone, but Mars 3 wasn't just any old mission. It was the first soft lander on Mars. Transmitted data for about 14-15 seconds, then ceased for unknown reasons.
Yeah, that's one of comments I wanted to take back right after I posted it (one of many). Why again doesn't Slashdot have a user delete option?
Well, as someone who has actually done it, I'd say that more accurately, the flyovers are done with funding which would have otherwise been spent on more realistic training flights. Everyone liked to do the public flyovers but as actual training for doing the job the aircraft were bought for they weren't as good as just going out to the training ranges and practicing combat skills.
But the last whole century tells a different story. The rebulding of Europe and Japan after WWII went well in the areas which were under Allied control after the war, due largely to the Marshall Plan in Europe and US directed changes to governance in Japan. And S. Korea was in the same state as N. Korea at the end of armed hostilities in 1953 -- they have turned out rather well. Vietnam doesn't count in this analysis because the US lost that war and wasn't available to help rebuild. The Iraq fiasco to a large extent was due to incompetence in the Bush administration who ignored the analyses of the experts who told them how many troops, etc, would be required to maintain order after the fall of the government but didn't want to believe them.
The elephant in the room of oil company subsidies is what is spent on the US military to keep the sea lanes open for all those oil tankers and keep a lid on the Middle East. The money poured down the Iraq war rathole was in a large part because Bush's neocons figured that they could remake the place and get oil practically for free. If the cost of a gallon of gas reflected the military costs of keeping the oil markets stable, electric cars would drive the gas powered ones off the market overnight.
Though I don't agree, your comment should get modded up as a conversation starter because it is both right and wrong. Yes, many of the TOS episodes are unbearably (can't think of the right word) trite by some modern standards and even at the time it was pointed out (among other things) that the concept of the ship's captain putting himself in life threatening situations was unrealistic (to say the least). However, for the time (and I was there to see it) it was a fascinating and insightful show which often dealt with social issues which were otherwise taboo at the time (the first interracial kiss on US TV, heck actually one of the first integrated casts on US TV!). And the science, while mostly wrong, still exposed many people, for the first time, to concepts of human-computer interaction, personal communications equipment, etc. A very good comparison, I think, is to the original Twilight Zone. An iconic show, many of those episodes are barely watchable today, though they were written by one of the best TV writers ever (Rod Serling), but if you back off from your 21st century expectations and watch them for what they were, mostly morality plays presented on a new medium (TV) you can enjoy even the worst of them. I do have to take extreme exception to your comment about the "age bracket and aversion to science" thing -- many of us old nerdy techies were fascinated by TOS and it probably influenced positively a huge number of us. And TOS certainly deserves the credit for introducing concepts used by later, arguably better shows (TNG, for a direct example). And as a point made by another poster, it's not like today's television fare is a garden of sophisticated, thought provoking programming. I suspect that even the current critical and fan favorites (The Walking Dead, anyone?) will not hold up well in 40 years. Anyway, as I said before, I appreciate your comment to open up this whole discussion; I ponder it myself sometimes while watching a rerun of TOS and thinking, "this isn't as good as I remember it!"
From the very link you posted, "An EU funded research study known as ExternE, or Externalities of Energy, undertaken over the period of 1995 to 2005 found that the cost of producing electricity from coal or oil would double over its present value, and the cost of electricity production from gas would increase by 30% if external costs such as damage to the environment and to human health, from the particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, chromium VI, river water alkalinity, mercury poisoning and arsenic emissions produced by these sources, were taken into account." So the economists (and the honest libertarians) would say that solar at twice the nominal 'market' cost of coal and oil is really at just about parity now when ALL the costs are included. And that doesn't include the cost of the CO2 emissions.
Correcting myself (again), to be more accurate. As MachineShedFred pointed out above, there is also a significant amount of Pu240 in used nuclear fuel rods, which doesn't help NASA any with their Pu238 requirement, either.
Yeah, I never could understand that one (ALSEP shutdown). By the way, I think it was unjustified for your original post to get modded down like it did (troll and flamebait -- I never got those:)). It sounded a bit trolly on first read but was a worthy speculation.
repost to correct typo:
The Pu in the fuel rods is not the right isotope, it is almost all Pu239 (U238 + neutron = Pu239, [after a stage as Np239]). NASA needs Pu238. What Pu238 is in there would be a real bear to separate from the Pu239 (more difficult than the separation of U235 from U238 because the mass difference is less).
The Pu in the fuel rods is not the right isotope, it is almost all Pu239 (U238 + neutron = Pu239, [after a stage as Np239]). NASA needs Pu238. What Pu239 is in there would be a real bear to separate from the Pu239 (more difficult than the separation of U235 from U238 because the mass difference is less).
Considering that Cassini is a WORKING orbiter around Saturn, a thing we are unlikely to see again in most of our lifetimes, I'm good with them funding the use of it as long as it keeps running, for no other reason than to keep looking for things it missed the first (or hundredth) time around. Same for any other working interplanetary spacecraft. If (and only if) someone can make the case that defunding Cassini will directly free up funding for the next probe to Saturn, then maybe, but I don't believe that will happen.
"Texas, which according to left-wing groupthink is a regressive bible-thumping gun-toting desert filled with rednecks who hate Darwin and force kids to pray in school." -- hey, you just perfectly described my whole extended family from southeast Texas! I've been here 40+ years ...
Other Progressive laws:
Women get to vote
Racial minorities get to vote
You can't have separate public school systems, water fountains, public transit, etc. for whites and "coloreds"
You can't charge a poll tax to keep poor people from voting
You can't just dump whatever crap you want into the air and water that other people breathe and drink
Often when the projects are 75%-80% from completion, they are already 200%-500% over budget. Poster child -- JWST. Poster child #2 -- Constellation, though it didn't get close to 75% completion. How far do you let a rogue one go before you pull the plug as it eats up the funding for the other, possibly better managed, projects?
Too many zeros for me at the speed I was reading, sorry.
Come on idiots, (not the poster, who probably just made a typo, but the mods who sent it up to +5) -- the TOTAL cumulative government debt is about $14 trillion. The deficit for this year will be in the neighborhood (probably under) of $1 trillion, still a large number but we need to keep the facts straight in these discussions.