The problem with your argument is the "duly-elected" adjective, and then "They might not like his decisions. But he IS the President". Trump was elected and governs by the constitutional rules in place but those rules are flawed and he got in via a loophole which allowed him to be elected while his general election opponent got millions of more votes than he did. OK, fine that's the Constitution with its anti-democratic electoral college. But when you get elected by a minority of the vote you shouldn't try to (or be able to) run the country like you got some massive mandate and step all over the majority who voted against you -- that's some third world one-party crap. Anyone with nerd credentials should have the engineering insight to recognize that a system which produces massively differing policy outcomes based on the swing of a few thousand votes is unstable and flawed. If your engineered system runs into a corner case and starts to tear itself apart do you want to step in and override the programming in the emergency or just stand back and say, "that's the way its built, we've got to just let it run."?
Well, first of all, there was plenty of mid-air refueling of the Navy's tactical aircraft before the F-18 came along. At introduction in the '80s, the F-18 initially replaced two carrier based aircraft -- the F-4 (on the small carriers not suitable for F-14s) and the A-7. It is a better fighter than the F-4 in almost every respect, including range, and vastly better as a close-in dogfighter for what that's worth. It is better than the A-7 as an attack aircraft in every respect except in range and it is far more survivable than the A-7 in any combat situation. Not needing to hit the tanker on a strike isn't an advantage if you get shot down on ingress. At the time it was designed, the F-18 wasn't intended to replace the F-14, any more than the F-16 was intended to replace the F-15. However the F-14 fleet got old and was always expensive and the F-18 turned out to be "good enough" for the fighter role against the threats the Navy encountered since the time the F-18 entered service so its better flexibility, maintainability, and more modern avionics made it the Navy's selection as an actual replacement for the F-14 when the bigger F-18E and F were proposed (yeah, I know, the E and F are almost new designs, not just derivatives). Same thing happened to the A-6 and EA-6 which eventually got replaced by the F-18F and F-18G -- the old specialized airplanes no longer had enough of an advantage to make up for the overall system wide advantages of an all F-18 fleet. The F-18 (and F-35) are compromised, multirole airplanes, but the Navy really likes that because the carriers don't have room for a bunch of specialized models.
The Dragon resupply spacecraft that go to the ISS via Falcon 9 come back to earth, carrying items back for NASA. The Comsats going to geosynchronous orbit have end-of-life disposal processes to put them into graveyard orbits where they won't cause any trouble. The DOD satellites, they do their own DOD thing. Musk's Tesla Roadster launched on the Falcon Heavy is way past earth orbit in interplanetary space out with the asteroids.
He's not just "shooting military and communication satellites to LEO". He's doing that in such a way that it is breaking up the entrenched, fossilized existing launch providers, most notably ULA, Arianespace, and the Russians. That by itself is a service to the world. His other grandiose plans, it is too early to judge. Tesla, whether it survives or not, seems to have at least set an expectation for EVs and the infrastructure to support them which is pushing the other automakers to compete, and not just build bigger and bigger pickup trucks which cost more than a loaded up Tesla Model 3.
Germany and Japan were both really destroyed by WWII (they lost, were occupied, and Japan had been nuked) and they recovered within a couple of decades to become world class, dominant economic powers; by 1990 Japan had surpassed the Soviet Union despite much less population and far fewer natural resources. Well, make that, West Germany recovered; East Germany under a Soviet style government/economy didn't do so well. After what Japan went through in that war and their subsequent recovery, no one else can complain about starting over from a devastated country.
If it is a really heavy payload it will be on either a Falcon Heavy or a Delta IV Heavy rocket, the #1 and #2 operational launch vehicles in the world measured by payload mass to orbit. Both made in USA, neither with Russian engines.
We don't know what is the drug company's return on investment it "demanded' for developing the drug or what they need to recoup investment. We do know that most companies (especially those with monopolies) tend to price whatever the market will bear. The cost of developing this drug is a sunk cost and, in isolation, according to simplistic economics should have no bearing on its present price. The present cost has a floor of only what it takes to manufacture the drug and a ceiling which is in principle unlimited, set only by what the customers are willing to pay. The pharmaceutical industry has a bad reputation for extorting money out of desperate or uninformed customers well after development costs of a drug have been recovered (example, Mylan and the Epipen). The whole drug price situation is complicated because the end user rarely pays the cost directly -- that is either an insurance company or the government, and both of them have powerful political pressures not to push back too hard on drug prices. In other industries where the government pays a lot for the product (military contracting) the vendors are subject to intense financial oversight to see where the money goes -- perhaps the pharma companies should get the same treatment.
I will say this for this particular launch, with all those strap on SRBs, that rocket got up and went when it left the launch pad. The Falcons and other launches I've watched lately kind of lazily climbed off the pad. This one looked like an Estes rocket in comparison. Otherwise, I agree with your general sentiment. Even the quality of the in-flight video wasn't as good as Space-X and we didn't get to see the staging.
Though the US has definitely been too cavalier about throwing its military around since WWII, I can think of two counterexamples to your statement. The Korean War in the 50's was started by an invasion of the South by N. Korea, which was a USSR client at the time. The 'first' Gulf War in the 90's was started by an invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. You can argue whether the US should have intervened in either, but the US didn't start either one and especially in the case of Korea didn't want that fight at the time given how quickly the S. Korea/US/UN forces were so quickly overwhelmed at the beginning.
I am bandwidth starved here and you deserve a better answer than I can give you, but a few things: First of all I shouldn't have implied NASA got DOD level funding in the 60's, but it got funding as if it were a major DOD program in the 60's and using your own numbers, 1/7 of the DOD budget would be a major program. And in any comparison to DOD in the 60's you have to note that the DOD share of the federal budget was much larger then than it is now so the NASA budget was also a much larger percentage of the federal budget. So more accurately I would have said that NASA received DOD-like priority in the federal budget, which it hasn't enjoyed since then. Good old wikipedia says NASA got 4.4% of the federal budget in 1966 (at peak) vs about 0.5% now, so a major change in priority. That NASA priority in the 60's was driven only because of the competition with the Soviets, it was another front in the Cold War.
I don't think you can quote 1975 dollars for Saturn hardware as none of it was built in 1975 unless you quote numbers already inflated to 1975. The more accurate pricing would have been from 1966 through 1969 -- that's about a 50% difference right there. From the wikipedia article on the Saturn V: " In the time frame from 1969 to 1971 the cost of launching a Saturn V Apollo mission was US $185 to $189 million,[1][2] of which $110 million was for the production of the vehicle[3] (equivalent to $1.26 billion in 2016)." So about $750 million for the vehicle, (which come to think of it is actually pretty good compared to $400 million for a Delta IV Heavy now) and I acknowledge that you can subtract the cost of the S-IVB for some applications.
I think the ISS vs Skylab comparison is appropriate especially since the ISS is often held up as a bloated, underperforming boondoggle (my opinion for a long time, still is somewhat). But the elegantly executed Skylab was more expensive per astronaut-day... Would Skylab successors have been cheaper, nobody knows.
"The STS was a bad left turn for launchers..." -- I totally agree with you there. Would we have been better off sticking to Saturn hardware? It's hard to say. I've had many arguments with younger co-workers who are STS fans. (Somehow I got off to kind of defending the STS vs Saturn in my original post, wtf?). Politically in the 70's the Saturn program was over, the assembly lines were shut down, the assembly personnel laid off (my father was laid off from his Saturn V job in 1970). The US populace was bored with space, we'd beat the Soviets, the space race was over. I doubt the country in the 70's had the desire to start those assembly lines back up again, while the STS offered a "new way, cheap and reusable", which didn't work out but it got the vehicle built. Maybe NASA could have gotten ahead then sticking with the DOD launchers still in production. One point I had to concede to my STS fans -- the STS at its best had a higher launch rate than NASA ever got with the manned Titans and Saturns.
This is an argument which has been argued many times and it is moot now since the history has already been written. Personally I would have loved to see von Braun's missions to Mars with a nuclear upper stage on the uprated Saturn V, etc. That just wasn't going to happen in the 80's as he planned though, STS or not.
"If you want to cry about something, go back to the 50 year vacation the U.S. took from space development at the end of the Apollo program." As much as I'd like to agree with you on an emotional level, I don't think the facts support it. At worst the STS was an expensive detour from space development and some development came of it. For all its expense and underdelivering on promises, I read an analysis that the ISS provides person-days on orbit more cheaply than Skylab did. It's just that Saturn-Apollo hardware was really expensive, but us who grew up watching it happen didn't realize that because Saturn-Apollo budgets were really big, more like DOD budgets for competition with the Soviets in the 60's. Those 60's NASA budgets were not sustainable going forward, even Kennedy got cold feet when he saw them laid out. Its not like anyone else is any further, for all the Russian's vaunted prowess in space, they are only incrementally improving on their tech from the 60's. At least we tried something different. Plus I won't go into the US's complete dominance and mind-boggling developments in uncrewed science missions to everywhere in the solar system for the last 20+ years.
The Block I version of the SLS which will launch in 2019 (if it makes that date) will not beat the Saturn V or even be close. SLS Block I is good for 70 metric tons to orbit (LEO). The Saturn V could orbit twice that mass. The SLS Block II will be at about Saturn V capability some years later when it gets launched. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dallas -- not a great example for your argument. Dallas is quite cosmopolitan and politically blue, as are all the big cities in Texas (have to get down to Fort Worth to get to a big Texas city which doesn't have a Democratic mayor). And it has all the big city advantages you mentioned if you count DFW airport as the 'port'. But your overall argument is only strengthened by Dallas, Houston, Austin -- big blue cities with booming economies. Ironic that the conservatives who gripe so much about Austin's politics are fine with living in it or nearby to take advantage of its economy, instead of taking their talents out to the many deep red areas in the state.
Even visible light can interact with electrons in molecules and promote them out of ground state, which perturbs the molecule, A single photon of visible light can do this -- that's generally how dyes work. It is how chlorophyll (for example) works too, to extract energy from sunlight, though I think (without looking it up) that chlorophyll requires a two photon cascade to actually work -- it has to get hit twice in close succession to work, each time going to a higher electronic energy state. But the point is a single visible light photon (and UV photons are more energetic) can push a molecule into a higher electronic state. The 'electronic transitions' in molecules are on the order of the energy of a photon of visible or UV light, but generally not much less. The photons of microwaves are several orders of magnitudes less energetic than visible or UV light (a 500 nm wavelength visible light photon has 100,000 times more energy than a 5 cm microwave photon). UV gives you a sunburn and skin cancer because each UV photon is energetic enough to alter electronic configurations in skin molecules, it doesn't have to be fully ionizing to cause the damage. I don't know of any molecules so fragile that a single microwave photon can change their state in the way UV does. High power microwaves do their damage with a different mechanism (bulk heating).
The one plan I ever saw for nuclear thermal (a paper by Von Braun outlining a Mars mission) was to use nuclear thermal as an upper stage. The reactor isn't turned on (and producing fission products, like Chernobyl and Fukishima) until everything was safely on an escape trajectory away from earth. In any kind of earthly accident scenario, the worst which could happen is to put only the initial radioactive fuel into the ecosphere. If that were Uranium-235, U235 isn't very radioactive with a half life of 700 million years, not much smaller than that of potassium-40 (1.2 billion years) which is everywhere naturally. K40 plus all the other background sources; a spacecraft reactor full of U235 spread around wouldn't make a sensible difference. That assumes that an accident would even break containment...
I well remember all the crying and whining about how we'd have to give up refrigeration and air conditioning when this happened. Exactly the same sentiments when the laws phasing out leaded gasoline came into force -- we were going to have to give up cars. Now those people were the real doom and gloom snowflakes -- civilization ending because we needed to make some technological changes to existing infrastructure and technology.
The moon shot of the '60s was part of the "war machine" then. Without the Cold War and competition in space against the Soviets there would have been no Apollo program. Most Americans of the time couldn't have cared less about increasing the knowledge base, they just wanted to beat the Russkies.
Thanks for that, it needs to be said every time an article like this comes up, it seems. And, it's not like the US has abandoned the moon; NASA has had the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter operating in orbit around the moon since 2009 where it is still operating and returning scientific observations. And NASA has the two ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun) spacecraft operating in orbits around the Earth-Moon L1 and L2 Lagrangian points (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/news/artemis-orbit.html)! So that makes three NASA lunar observing satellites currently in operation.
Interesting space program trivia: Weitz was one of only three astronauts who flew to space on both Apollo and Space Shuttle hardware (unless I missed someone in my quick research). The other two were John Young and Owen Garriot. Some others almost did, in the sense that they were in the astronaut corps during both 'eras', but didn't make a flight into space on both. Fred Haise flew on Apollo 13 and flew the Space Shuttle Enterprise in glide tests.
I'll end up saying something similar to the Reverend, maybe less angry. We're (at least not me) aren't intolerant of smokers, especially now that little of it is done inside. I recognize it's a tough addiction to kick (I can't even kick my mild desire for sugary sodas). What I don't care for is cigarette butts all over the place. I don't throw my soda cans on the ground, they go into a recycle bin. If smokers would do something similar and get the other smokers to do the same, I'd have no problems with it.
I count myself as a Musk cultist, but you won't need a retardant suit. The thing is, Musk has at least delivered on some of his promises and they actually seem like a fairly well reasoned approach to getting us somewhere. Musk's work is showing results in cheap, high cadence (and high cadence over time spawns reliability) access to space, what the Space Shuttle promised but didn't come close to delivering, and what no one else was showing any progress toward, until Musk came along and forced everyone else's hand. Once the infrastructure is in place to reliably and cheaply put tonnage into orbit then the high tech stuff can have a chance to take us outward (von Braun stated as much in the mid-60s, though he was thinking of Saturn 1B/V technology). Launch to LEO should be a boring activity, not an adventure every time. Musk is making inexpensive launch to LEO (and first stage recovery) boring. I'm impressed by what he has done and will likely do in the near term (Falcon Heavy), not necessarily his plans for the far term. NASA screwing around with the SLS isn't going anywhere (literally) in the long term, too expensive and very likely too finicky considering it will never get economies of scale or significant experience with numbers of launches with that vehicle. To be honest I don't see Musk or NASA getting to Mars on the paths they are on, but Musk (and hopefully Bezos, too) is creating the logistics infrastructure to make it possible someday.
Polio and smallpox weren't able to evolve into something worse when we attacked their propagation model with vaccines. They didn't find a way (well, except I suppose you could consider the anti-vac'cers a start on that).
Even the tiniest bit of research on your part would turn up, "Testing also determined Mauna Kea to be superb for nighttime viewing due to many factors, including the thin air, constant trade winds and being surrounded by sea." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Kea_Observatories). "constant trade winds and being surrounded by sea" -- your other proposed locations don't have that. The location in the middle of the Pacific (not the edge, or surrounded by land) provides a very rare advantage to Hawaii. And as the insightful AC pointed out to you there are a lot of observatories in Chile for its good location so it is not like Chile is shunned. By the way, your statement, "the higher the mountain the lesser density of the air, which will always result in better results" is wrong -- any site underneath a jet stream will likely have poor seeing and there are no mountains which go to 40,000 feet (10 km) to get above that.
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The problem with your argument is the "duly-elected" adjective, and then "They might not like his decisions. But he IS the President". Trump was elected and governs by the constitutional rules in place but those rules are flawed and he got in via a loophole which allowed him to be elected while his general election opponent got millions of more votes than he did. OK, fine that's the Constitution with its anti-democratic electoral college. But when you get elected by a minority of the vote you shouldn't try to (or be able to) run the country like you got some massive mandate and step all over the majority who voted against you -- that's some third world one-party crap.
Anyone with nerd credentials should have the engineering insight to recognize that a system which produces massively differing policy outcomes based on the swing of a few thousand votes is unstable and flawed. If your engineered system runs into a corner case and starts to tear itself apart do you want to step in and override the programming in the emergency or just stand back and say, "that's the way its built, we've got to just let it run."?
Well, first of all, there was plenty of mid-air refueling of the Navy's tactical aircraft before the F-18 came along. At introduction in the '80s, the F-18 initially replaced two carrier based aircraft -- the F-4 (on the small carriers not suitable for F-14s) and the A-7. It is a better fighter than the F-4 in almost every respect, including range, and vastly better as a close-in dogfighter for what that's worth. It is better than the A-7 as an attack aircraft in every respect except in range and it is far more survivable than the A-7 in any combat situation. Not needing to hit the tanker on a strike isn't an advantage if you get shot down on ingress. At the time it was designed, the F-18 wasn't intended to replace the F-14, any more than the F-16 was intended to replace the F-15. However the F-14 fleet got old and was always expensive and the F-18 turned out to be "good enough" for the fighter role against the threats the Navy encountered since the time the F-18 entered service so its better flexibility, maintainability, and more modern avionics made it the Navy's selection as an actual replacement for the F-14 when the bigger F-18E and F were proposed (yeah, I know, the E and F are almost new designs, not just derivatives). Same thing happened to the A-6 and EA-6 which eventually got replaced by the F-18F and F-18G -- the old specialized airplanes no longer had enough of an advantage to make up for the overall system wide advantages of an all F-18 fleet. The F-18 (and F-35) are compromised, multirole airplanes, but the Navy really likes that because the carriers don't have room for a bunch of specialized models.
The Dragon resupply spacecraft that go to the ISS via Falcon 9 come back to earth, carrying items back for NASA.
The Comsats going to geosynchronous orbit have end-of-life disposal processes to put them into graveyard orbits where they won't cause any trouble.
The DOD satellites, they do their own DOD thing.
Musk's Tesla Roadster launched on the Falcon Heavy is way past earth orbit in interplanetary space out with the asteroids.
He's not just "shooting military and communication satellites to LEO". He's doing that in such a way that it is breaking up the entrenched, fossilized existing launch providers, most notably ULA, Arianespace, and the Russians. That by itself is a service to the world. His other grandiose plans, it is too early to judge. Tesla, whether it survives or not, seems to have at least set an expectation for EVs and the infrastructure to support them which is pushing the other automakers to compete, and not just build bigger and bigger pickup trucks which cost more than a loaded up Tesla Model 3.
Germany and Japan were both really destroyed by WWII (they lost, were occupied, and Japan had been nuked) and they recovered within a couple of decades to become world class, dominant economic powers; by 1990 Japan had surpassed the Soviet Union despite much less population and far fewer natural resources. Well, make that, West Germany recovered; East Germany under a Soviet style government/economy didn't do so well. After what Japan went through in that war and their subsequent recovery, no one else can complain about starting over from a devastated country.
If it is a really heavy payload it will be on either a Falcon Heavy or a Delta IV Heavy rocket, the #1 and #2 operational launch vehicles in the world measured by payload mass to orbit. Both made in USA, neither with Russian engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Total number of executive orders:
G W Bush: 291
B. Obama: 276
R. Reagan: 381
Avg number of executive orders/per year:
G W Bush: 36.4
B. Obama: 34.6
D. Trump: 55
We don't know what is the drug company's return on investment it "demanded' for developing the drug or what they need to recoup investment. We do know that most companies (especially those with monopolies) tend to price whatever the market will bear. The cost of developing this drug is a sunk cost and, in isolation, according to simplistic economics should have no bearing on its present price. The present cost has a floor of only what it takes to manufacture the drug and a ceiling which is in principle unlimited, set only by what the customers are willing to pay. The pharmaceutical industry has a bad reputation for extorting money out of desperate or uninformed customers well after development costs of a drug have been recovered (example, Mylan and the Epipen).
The whole drug price situation is complicated because the end user rarely pays the cost directly -- that is either an insurance company or the government, and both of them have powerful political pressures not to push back too hard on drug prices.
In other industries where the government pays a lot for the product (military contracting) the vendors are subject to intense financial oversight to see where the money goes -- perhaps the pharma companies should get the same treatment.
I will say this for this particular launch, with all those strap on SRBs, that rocket got up and went when it left the launch pad. The Falcons and other launches I've watched lately kind of lazily climbed off the pad. This one looked like an Estes rocket in comparison.
Otherwise, I agree with your general sentiment. Even the quality of the in-flight video wasn't as good as Space-X and we didn't get to see the staging.
Though the US has definitely been too cavalier about throwing its military around since WWII, I can think of two counterexamples to your statement. The Korean War in the 50's was started by an invasion of the South by N. Korea, which was a USSR client at the time.
The 'first' Gulf War in the 90's was started by an invasion of Kuwait by Iraq.
You can argue whether the US should have intervened in either, but the US didn't start either one and especially in the case of Korea didn't want that fight at the time given how quickly the S. Korea/US/UN forces were so quickly overwhelmed at the beginning.
I am bandwidth starved here and you deserve a better answer than I can give you, but a few things:
First of all I shouldn't have implied NASA got DOD level funding in the 60's, but it got funding as if it were a major DOD program in the 60's and using your own numbers, 1/7 of the DOD budget would be a major program. And in any comparison to DOD in the 60's you have to note that the DOD share of the federal budget was much larger then than it is now so the NASA budget was also a much larger percentage of the federal budget. So more accurately I would have said that NASA received DOD-like priority in the federal budget, which it hasn't enjoyed since then. Good old wikipedia says NASA got 4.4% of the federal budget in 1966 (at peak) vs about 0.5% now, so a major change in priority. That NASA priority in the 60's was driven only because of the competition with the Soviets, it was another front in the Cold War.
I don't think you can quote 1975 dollars for Saturn hardware as none of it was built in 1975 unless you quote numbers already inflated to 1975. The more accurate pricing would have been from 1966 through 1969 -- that's about a 50% difference right there. From the wikipedia article on the Saturn V: " In the time frame from 1969 to 1971 the cost of launching a Saturn V Apollo mission was US $185 to $189 million,[1][2] of which $110 million was for the production of the vehicle[3] (equivalent to $1.26 billion in 2016)." So about $750 million for the vehicle, (which come to think of it is actually pretty good compared to $400 million for a Delta IV Heavy now) and I acknowledge that you can subtract the cost of the S-IVB for some applications.
I think the ISS vs Skylab comparison is appropriate especially since the ISS is often held up as a bloated, underperforming boondoggle (my opinion for a long time, still is somewhat). But the elegantly executed Skylab was more expensive per astronaut-day... Would Skylab successors have been cheaper, nobody knows.
"The STS was a bad left turn for launchers..." -- I totally agree with you there. Would we have been better off sticking to Saturn hardware? It's hard to say. I've had many arguments with younger co-workers who are STS fans. (Somehow I got off to kind of defending the STS vs Saturn in my original post, wtf?). Politically in the 70's the Saturn program was over, the assembly lines were shut down, the assembly personnel laid off (my father was laid off from his Saturn V job in 1970). The US populace was bored with space, we'd beat the Soviets, the space race was over. I doubt the country in the 70's had the desire to start those assembly lines back up again, while the STS offered a "new way, cheap and reusable", which didn't work out but it got the vehicle built. Maybe NASA could have gotten ahead then sticking with the DOD launchers still in production. One point I had to concede to my STS fans -- the STS at its best had a higher launch rate than NASA ever got with the manned Titans and Saturns.
This is an argument which has been argued many times and it is moot now since the history has already been written. Personally I would have loved to see von Braun's missions to Mars with a nuclear upper stage on the uprated Saturn V, etc. That just wasn't going to happen in the 80's as he planned though, STS or not.
"If you want to cry about something, go back to the 50 year vacation the U.S. took from space development at the end of the Apollo program." As much as I'd like to agree with you on an emotional level, I don't think the facts support it. At worst the STS was an expensive detour from space development and some development came of it. For all its expense and underdelivering on promises, I read an analysis that the ISS provides person-days on orbit more cheaply than Skylab did. It's just that Saturn-Apollo hardware was really expensive, but us who grew up watching it happen didn't realize that because Saturn-Apollo budgets were really big, more like DOD budgets for competition with the Soviets in the 60's. Those 60's NASA budgets were not sustainable going forward, even Kennedy got cold feet when he saw them laid out. Its not like anyone else is any further, for all the Russian's vaunted prowess in space, they are only incrementally improving on their tech from the 60's. At least we tried something different.
Plus I won't go into the US's complete dominance and mind-boggling developments in uncrewed science missions to everywhere in the solar system for the last 20+ years.
The Block I version of the SLS which will launch in 2019 (if it makes that date) will not beat the Saturn V or even be close. SLS Block I is good for 70 metric tons to orbit (LEO). The Saturn V could orbit twice that mass. The SLS Block II will be at about Saturn V capability some years later when it gets launched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dallas -- not a great example for your argument. Dallas is quite cosmopolitan and politically blue, as are all the big cities in Texas (have to get down to Fort Worth to get to a big Texas city which doesn't have a Democratic mayor). And it has all the big city advantages you mentioned if you count DFW airport as the 'port'. But your overall argument is only strengthened by Dallas, Houston, Austin -- big blue cities with booming economies. Ironic that the conservatives who gripe so much about Austin's politics are fine with living in it or nearby to take advantage of its economy, instead of taking their talents out to the many deep red areas in the state.
Even visible light can interact with electrons in molecules and promote them out of ground state, which perturbs the molecule, A single photon of visible light can do this -- that's generally how dyes work. It is how chlorophyll (for example) works too, to extract energy from sunlight, though I think (without looking it up) that chlorophyll requires a two photon cascade to actually work -- it has to get hit twice in close succession to work, each time going to a higher electronic energy state. But the point is a single visible light photon (and UV photons are more energetic) can push a molecule into a higher electronic state. The 'electronic transitions' in molecules are on the order of the energy of a photon of visible or UV light, but generally not much less.
The photons of microwaves are several orders of magnitudes less energetic than visible or UV light (a 500 nm wavelength visible light photon has 100,000 times more energy than a 5 cm microwave photon). UV gives you a sunburn and skin cancer because each UV photon is energetic enough to alter electronic configurations in skin molecules, it doesn't have to be fully ionizing to cause the damage. I don't know of any molecules so fragile that a single microwave photon can change their state in the way UV does. High power microwaves do their damage with a different mechanism (bulk heating).
The one plan I ever saw for nuclear thermal (a paper by Von Braun outlining a Mars mission) was to use nuclear thermal as an upper stage. The reactor isn't turned on (and producing fission products, like Chernobyl and Fukishima) until everything was safely on an escape trajectory away from earth. In any kind of earthly accident scenario, the worst which could happen is to put only the initial radioactive fuel into the ecosphere. If that were Uranium-235, U235 isn't very radioactive with a half life of 700 million years, not much smaller than that of potassium-40 (1.2 billion years) which is everywhere naturally. K40 plus all the other background sources; a spacecraft reactor full of U235 spread around wouldn't make a sensible difference. That assumes that an accident would even break containment...
I well remember all the crying and whining about how we'd have to give up refrigeration and air conditioning when this happened. Exactly the same sentiments when the laws phasing out leaded gasoline came into force -- we were going to have to give up cars. Now those people were the real doom and gloom snowflakes -- civilization ending because we needed to make some technological changes to existing infrastructure and technology.
The moon shot of the '60s was part of the "war machine" then. Without the Cold War and competition in space against the Soviets there would have been no Apollo program. Most Americans of the time couldn't have cared less about increasing the knowledge base, they just wanted to beat the Russkies.
Thanks for that, it needs to be said every time an article like this comes up, it seems. And, it's not like the US has abandoned the moon; NASA has had the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter operating in orbit around the moon since 2009 where it is still operating and returning scientific observations. And NASA has the two ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun) spacecraft operating in orbits around the Earth-Moon L1 and L2 Lagrangian points (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/news/artemis-orbit.html)! So that makes three NASA lunar observing satellites currently in operation.
And I did miss one, as I am corrected by a knowledgeable AC; Vance Brand. ASTP, STS-5, STS-41B, STS-35.
Interesting space program trivia: Weitz was one of only three astronauts who flew to space on both Apollo and Space Shuttle hardware (unless I missed someone in my quick research). The other two were John Young and Owen Garriot. Some others almost did, in the sense that they were in the astronaut corps during both 'eras', but didn't make a flight into space on both. Fred Haise flew on Apollo 13 and flew the Space Shuttle Enterprise in glide tests.
I'll end up saying something similar to the Reverend, maybe less angry. We're (at least not me) aren't intolerant of smokers, especially now that little of it is done inside. I recognize it's a tough addiction to kick (I can't even kick my mild desire for sugary sodas). What I don't care for is cigarette butts all over the place. I don't throw my soda cans on the ground, they go into a recycle bin. If smokers would do something similar and get the other smokers to do the same, I'd have no problems with it.
I count myself as a Musk cultist, but you won't need a retardant suit. The thing is, Musk has at least delivered on some of his promises and they actually seem like a fairly well reasoned approach to getting us somewhere. Musk's work is showing results in cheap, high cadence (and high cadence over time spawns reliability) access to space, what the Space Shuttle promised but didn't come close to delivering, and what no one else was showing any progress toward, until Musk came along and forced everyone else's hand. Once the infrastructure is in place to reliably and cheaply put tonnage into orbit then the high tech stuff can have a chance to take us outward (von Braun stated as much in the mid-60s, though he was thinking of Saturn 1B/V technology). Launch to LEO should be a boring activity, not an adventure every time. Musk is making inexpensive launch to LEO (and first stage recovery) boring. I'm impressed by what he has done and will likely do in the near term (Falcon Heavy), not necessarily his plans for the far term. NASA screwing around with the SLS isn't going anywhere (literally) in the long term, too expensive and very likely too finicky considering it will never get economies of scale or significant experience with numbers of launches with that vehicle. To be honest I don't see Musk or NASA getting to Mars on the paths they are on, but Musk (and hopefully Bezos, too) is creating the logistics infrastructure to make it possible someday.
Polio and smallpox weren't able to evolve into something worse when we attacked their propagation model with vaccines. They didn't find a way (well, except I suppose you could consider the anti-vac'cers a start on that).
Even the tiniest bit of research on your part would turn up, "Testing also determined Mauna Kea to be superb for nighttime viewing due to many factors, including the thin air, constant trade winds and being surrounded by sea." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Kea_Observatories). "constant trade winds and being surrounded by sea" -- your other proposed locations don't have that. The location in the middle of the Pacific (not the edge, or surrounded by land) provides a very rare advantage to Hawaii. And as the insightful AC pointed out to you there are a lot of observatories in Chile for its good location so it is not like Chile is shunned. By the way, your statement, "the higher the mountain the lesser density of the air, which will always result in better results" is wrong -- any site underneath a jet stream will likely have poor seeing and there are no mountains which go to 40,000 feet (10 km) to get above that.