I'll just pick one example of Werner von Braun's influence (and superiority) on launch vehicle design. von Braun's team in Huntsville produced the vehicle (Jupiter C) which launched the first American satellite. The Jupiter C was a derivative of the Redstone IRBM developed by the von Braun team in the US which was itself a direct descendant of the V2. von Braun's team launched the Jupiter C in less than two months days after they were authorized to do so after the failure of the first Vanguard satellite (developed by the US Naval Research Laboratories) launch attempt in Dec 1957. In 1956 von Braun's team had launched a similar vehicle to the Jupiter C to within 7/8ths of orbital velocity and could have shortly gone to orbit thus beating Sputnik 1 by a year but the Eisenhower administration prohibited them from doing so. By the way, it was a Redstone (derivative of the V2) which launched the first two Mercury missions.
Compare most dog breeds today to their wolf ancestors from only a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago and you can see that humans have been ransacking natural evolution since before historical times. These deformed creatures would never have arisen from natural evolution. Same argument applies to the (pre-GMO) corn raised as a crop compared to its grassy ancestor.
The Japanese in WWII had the whole religion/racial superiority thing going for them. And if you want to go a little further back, a lot of the stated justification for the European conquest of the New World with its killings and genocides was to bring a proper religion to the "heathens", at the point of a sword if they weren't cooperative. Whether religion was the main driver of either of these can be debated but the associated religious leaders didn't do much to inhibit the evil acts done in their names. Your examples of absolute numbers are large but there were a lot more people available to be killed in the 20th century than in the centuries before.
The AC got it right before me, but I'll repeat -- the American atheists don't fear God but sometimes have problems with the the other "God-fearing" people who can't seem to keep it to themselves. From personal experience, the American atheists have a problem with things like having to stand up in the THIRD GRADE in a PUBLIC SCHOOL and recite the Lord's Prayer every day. That sort of thing, and worse, are what the atheists have asked not to be included in the required experience of living in this society.
This is going to sound a bit insensitive but the astronauts you refer to need to start with their families and it needs to apply to government and private crews. At least one of the widows from the Apollo 1 crew sued and got a settlement and some or all of the family members of the crew killed in the Challenger loss sued and got settlements either from Morton-Thiokol or the Government. I'm not going name names because of the touchiness of the issue but it is easy enough to look up.
The successor to Voyager I was built a few years ago -- it's called New Horizons. Launched in 2006 and halfway to Pluto right now. Proudly Made in USA. Tell me about superior Chinese tech when they send something to Pluto.
The one thing you left out of your informative post is that Lightsquared bought the radio spectrum it intends to use for cheap because it was restricted to satellite use. If they can convert that to terrestrial use they make a cool 500% profit ($2 billion vs $12 billion according to this link http://www.generalaviationnews.com/2011/10/27/coalition-debunks-claims-by-lightsquared-on-gps-issue/) on the radio spectrum. Those of us in the casual GPS user community have watched this unfold in disbelief that the FCC would allow something to shut down most of the existing GPS receivers in the country. I at least figured that the FAA and military would step in and put and end to this. Lightsquared must really have some political juice in Washington DC.
The most important reason to attempt to quantify the effort which goes into a project is so that you can predict the effort which the next project will require, and have solid numbers to back up your predictions rather than just someone's vague feelings or unquantified remembrances of previous projects. This is true of any engineering project. A second and related reason is to identify efforts in the project which don't seem to justify their costs by their results. This quantification doesn't help the current project as much as it helps the next one. I agree that the measures of "number of lines of code, bugs per line ratio or anything like that" don't work very well but something has to be tried or we are just reduced to art (authors, etc), not engineering, with no predictable product, end date, or cost.
This is going to be not quite right, but... Supernova explosions and the Big Bang started with different precursors and followed different mechanisms. Supernovas start with a big batch of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium to begin with ( could be all the way up to iron, I think) then they blow up in an extremely dense mixture of the elements, during which there are tremendous neutron fluxes to build heavier elements. During the Big Bang there were no elemental precursors just mass-energy beyond current physics -- as it expanded many particles "condensed" out of the mass energy, but it all was expanding so fast that there was no time for all that many stable particles to form (and the antimatter and matter mostly annihilated each other). There was only enough time where the whole thing was dense enough to form atomic nuclei for hydrogen, helium and a tiny amount of lithium to form. Now, I'll stand back to be demolished by someone who really knows the field.
Most, if not all, of the "academics" who I know personally who are doing research into climate change would prefer that their results show that there is no significant change occurring and our use of fossil fuels isn't affecting things. They like to drive gasoline fueled cars and flip on a switch for cheap electricity like everyone else. They just publish what the science says, though. The scientist who can show convincingly that we aren't facing a problem will be a hero to the public and the research community -- unfortunately the real world isn't cooperating.
Technically you are right but Occam's Razor gets pretty dull if you have to hypothesize that one type of neutrino is superluminal and another is not. Other than mass, aren't electrons, muons, and tau particles pretty much identical? Shouldn't their associated neutrinos be, too? So you are right that SN 1987a doesn't prove that muon neutrinos aren't superluminal, but it, combined with the similarities of the leptons and their neutrinos is still a strong indicator that they aren't.
In addition to spirito's earlier comment that the Shuttle couldn't get near to geosynchronous orbit (the max the Shuttle ever got to was just under 400 miles, geosynch is about 25,000), as the article states "one of the primary drivers of the high cost is the launch costs". Thus bringing any components back defeats the purpose of the cost savings of harvesting in the first place -- one more task the Shuttle never did nor could do economically as promised.
Care to enlighten us about the secret US Military base in Antarctica? I've been there a few times and am pretty familiar with the place. Other than US Military airlifters on lease to the National Science Foundation there is no military presence (anymore). Up to about 1995, the Navy had a bigger role in the logistics and administration down there but not since.
You have to give LBJ credit for NASA -- he was the biggest presidential supporter of NASA there ever was, including JFK. As VP he was Kennedy's lead representative for the space program. He retained his support when he became president. One of the larger injustices of the Apollo program is that Nixon was the one to welcome the Apollo 11 crew back from the moon instead of Johnson.
As you can tell, I did not have the same concern about the government's actions in this case as many other posters did. However, my real point was that there is a logical inconsistency in how the protections of the 5th amendment are being proposed or I am not understanding some aspect of the situation. The 5th amendment clearly does not distinguish between American citizens and non-citizens, and no reasonable person would want it to. Given that, if al-Awlaki was supposed to have 5th amendment protections in Yemen, then so should every other person/alleged terrorist which we have knocked off on foreign soil through military and CIA action in the last ten years, but no one is trying to claim that -- why not? Your Michigan militia members get 5th amendment protections because they are on US territory, as would anyone else, citizen or non-citizen. That's the only way I can see around the otherwise huge inconsistency in application of the 5th amendment. Now, if you are making the argument that the US should not be executing alleged terrorists without trials through foreign military action in the first place, then that is a whole different discussion with difficult issues and some merit on both sides.
Not a constitutional scholar but I see some problems with the interpretation of the 5th amendment in this case. The amendment does not say, "No US citizen,", it says "No person," so al-Awlaki doesn't get special treatment because he is a US citizen. al-Awlaki was not in US territory at the time of his killing or his offenses, so he does not get any special treatment for being in US territory. So, then, how is he in any different class than anyone else in the world who has declared they want to kill Americans and actually takes steps to do it (bin Laden, for example)? Where did the 5th amendment apply to the killing of bin Laden? So al-Awlaki's death is just one more in the string of bad guys getting what they asked for by their actions in this post 9-11, 21st century. If he wanted some legal protections against what was coming, he should have turned himself in to the nearest authorities.
Funding was slashed in 1968-'72 because the NASA funding in the mid '60s was unsustainable. In 1966 the NASA budget was almost 4.5% of the entire federal budget -- more than 1 dollar out of every 25 spent by the feds went to NASA. This was possible only because it was perceived by the US public as a race against the Russians and another arena of the Cold War. NASA's budget dried up in the late '60s and early '70s because the public didn't care any more -- after Apollos 11 and 12 the US had 'won' and the public was done with it. Apollo 13's drama brought in some interest, but by 1971 and Apollo 14, the public really was no longer interested. Your implication that Nixon "wanted to fund NASA" and the democrats stopped him is bizarre and false -- I have to say I've never heard that one before. NASA of the '60s was a Democrat creation and Johnson as Vice-President and President was its most important booster/sponsor. Without Kennedy and Johnson (both of them) there would have been no Apollo. Look up Eisenhower's attitude toward space exploration and NASA -- he wanted nothing of them and was forced only by Sputnik to even allow any of it to go forward in his term with hardware already available -- von Braun could have launched the first artificial satellite in 1956 and was ordered not to. And recall, Nixon was Eisenhower's VP -- he obviously wasn't lobbying for spaceflight as VP, why would he care as President?
Half-life of the fuel is irrelevant. The reduction in RTG electrical output over time is mostly because of the deterioration of the thermocouples which convert the heat to electricity, not reduction in heat output of the fuel.
Were there any real deniers of luminiferous aether or was everyone (who cared) shocked when a supposedly routine experiment cast doubt on its existence?
The "event" of spectacular brightness lasts a couple of months or so and depends on the type of supernova. As far as the "endings" are concerned, the remnant debris can be seen for thousands of years at least -- the Crab nebula and its central pulsar is a supernova remnant from a supernova seen on Earth in 1054 AD.
A good question which really needs someone who can state the answer precisely to speak up. I would say that the vast majority of LM's projects and corporate culture is geared to the close oversight government contract model where the government very tightly micromanages the work. There are an infinite number of "Preliminary Design Reviews", "Design Reviews", etc. The contractor is paid based on successful "passage" of these reviews. Thus the contractor is almost a part of government and they get paid for following the process whether the result is successful or not. The newer "private" space vehicle companies have more freedom in their design and processes but get paid (and succeed or fail) based on a successful result. The above is an oversimplification, of course, and I don't want to denigrate the talented and hardworking staff at LM and the other established aerospace corps (though many of the established corps have the attitude that they are entitled to their government projects!). Also there is a huge amount of incest between the government and the established aerospace corps in that employees go back and forth between corporate and government employment -- this leads to even more of the attitude that there is a blurred line between the organizations, and the expectation that all government aerospace spending "rightfully" belongs to LM and Boeing. Before anyone at the giants jumps on me -- I've been there on both sides of the industry, and besides, I said this was an oversimplification.
We as technological humans are past the state of natural biological evolution so you don't have to worry about "crap DNA" polluting the human gene pool. Human technological evolution is now faster than human natural biological evolution by orders of magnitude and will determine the future path of humanity. Many people with genetic problems which would have doomed them for most of human history are great contributors to human society now.
There has been a fairly large disparity in the cost of labor in the US vs most 3rd world countries since at least WWII, it's just that for the first 30 years after that war, the state of the rest of the world and transportation and communications infrastructure did not allow the corporations to exercise unbridled, unaccountable greed like they do now. For example, you couldn't have a call center outside the US with 1960's tech communications infrastructure. If the captains of industry in 1955 had been able to outsource their labor to where the prevailing wage was 5 cents/hr then, they would have eagerly done so. It is a classic 'race to the bottom' now as far as workers' compensation and living standards are concerned. It's bad for most of us but may be inevitable since the corps have pretty much captured the government (we need another Teddy Roosevelt!). And to address the poster's concern -- in our new oligarchic society there will be plenty of the rich who can drop 200K for a space ride with little concern about where the next 200K will come from.
Forgot to add -- the entire state of Texas was declared a federal natural disaster area by the US Dept of Agriculture at the end of June. It's technically for the drought, but drought and heat go together in the summer around here.
Hiding out all day in the air conditioning != "just fine". Ask the farmers and ranchers in TX if they are doing just fine. The municipal water supplies for some Hill Country cities (Llano, etc.) are already dried up or soon will be. Another summer like this one with no winter rains again and Lake Travis dries up and then no one in Central TX will be doing fine.
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I'll just pick one example of Werner von Braun's influence (and superiority) on launch vehicle design. von Braun's team in Huntsville produced the vehicle (Jupiter C) which launched the first American satellite. The Jupiter C was a derivative of the Redstone IRBM developed by the von Braun team in the US which was itself a direct descendant of the V2. von Braun's team launched the Jupiter C in less than two months days after they were authorized to do so after the failure of the first Vanguard satellite (developed by the US Naval Research Laboratories) launch attempt in Dec 1957. In 1956 von Braun's team had launched a similar vehicle to the Jupiter C to within 7/8ths of orbital velocity and could have shortly gone to orbit thus beating Sputnik 1 by a year but the Eisenhower administration prohibited them from doing so. By the way, it was a Redstone (derivative of the V2) which launched the first two Mercury missions.
Compare most dog breeds today to their wolf ancestors from only a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago and you can see that humans have been ransacking natural evolution since before historical times. These deformed creatures would never have arisen from natural evolution. Same argument applies to the (pre-GMO) corn raised as a crop compared to its grassy ancestor.
The Japanese in WWII had the whole religion/racial superiority thing going for them. And if you want to go a little further back, a lot of the stated justification for the European conquest of the New World with its killings and genocides was to bring a proper religion to the "heathens", at the point of a sword if they weren't cooperative. Whether religion was the main driver of either of these can be debated but the associated religious leaders didn't do much to inhibit the evil acts done in their names. Your examples of absolute numbers are large but there were a lot more people available to be killed in the 20th century than in the centuries before.
The AC got it right before me, but I'll repeat -- the American atheists don't fear God but sometimes have problems with the the other "God-fearing" people who can't seem to keep it to themselves. From personal experience, the American atheists have a problem with things like having to stand up in the THIRD GRADE in a PUBLIC SCHOOL and recite the Lord's Prayer every day. That sort of thing, and worse, are what the atheists have asked not to be included in the required experience of living in this society.
This is going to sound a bit insensitive but the astronauts you refer to need to start with their families and it needs to apply to government and private crews. At least one of the widows from the Apollo 1 crew sued and got a settlement and some or all of the family members of the crew killed in the Challenger loss sued and got settlements either from Morton-Thiokol or the Government. I'm not going name names because of the touchiness of the issue but it is easy enough to look up.
The successor to Voyager I was built a few years ago -- it's called New Horizons. Launched in 2006 and halfway to Pluto right now. Proudly Made in USA. Tell me about superior Chinese tech when they send something to Pluto.
The one thing you left out of your informative post is that Lightsquared bought the radio spectrum it intends to use for cheap because it was restricted to satellite use. If they can convert that to terrestrial use they make a cool 500% profit ($2 billion vs $12 billion according to this link http://www.generalaviationnews.com/2011/10/27/coalition-debunks-claims-by-lightsquared-on-gps-issue/) on the radio spectrum. Those of us in the casual GPS user community have watched this unfold in disbelief that the FCC would allow something to shut down most of the existing GPS receivers in the country. I at least figured that the FAA and military would step in and put and end to this. Lightsquared must really have some political juice in Washington DC.
The most important reason to attempt to quantify the effort which goes into a project is so that you can predict the effort which the next project will require, and have solid numbers to back up your predictions rather than just someone's vague feelings or unquantified remembrances of previous projects. This is true of any engineering project. A second and related reason is to identify efforts in the project which don't seem to justify their costs by their results. This quantification doesn't help the current project as much as it helps the next one. I agree that the measures of "number of lines of code, bugs per line ratio or anything like that" don't work very well but something has to be tried or we are just reduced to art (authors, etc), not engineering, with no predictable product, end date, or cost.
This is going to be not quite right, but ... Supernova explosions and the Big Bang started with different precursors and followed different mechanisms. Supernovas start with a big batch of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium to begin with ( could be all the way up to iron, I think) then they blow up in an extremely dense mixture of the elements, during which there are tremendous neutron fluxes to build heavier elements. During the Big Bang there were no elemental precursors just mass-energy beyond current physics -- as it expanded many particles "condensed" out of the mass energy, but it all was expanding so fast that there was no time for all that many stable particles to form (and the antimatter and matter mostly annihilated each other). There was only enough time where the whole thing was dense enough to form atomic nuclei for hydrogen, helium and a tiny amount of lithium to form. Now, I'll stand back to be demolished by someone who really knows the field.
Most, if not all, of the "academics" who I know personally who are doing research into climate change would prefer that their results show that there is no significant change occurring and our use of fossil fuels isn't affecting things. They like to drive gasoline fueled cars and flip on a switch for cheap electricity like everyone else. They just publish what the science says, though. The scientist who can show convincingly that we aren't facing a problem will be a hero to the public and the research community -- unfortunately the real world isn't cooperating.
Technically you are right but Occam's Razor gets pretty dull if you have to hypothesize that one type of neutrino is superluminal and another is not. Other than mass, aren't electrons, muons, and tau particles pretty much identical? Shouldn't their associated neutrinos be, too? So you are right that SN 1987a doesn't prove that muon neutrinos aren't superluminal, but it, combined with the similarities of the leptons and their neutrinos is still a strong indicator that they aren't.
In addition to spirito's earlier comment that the Shuttle couldn't get near to geosynchronous orbit (the max the Shuttle ever got to was just under 400 miles, geosynch is about 25,000), as the article states "one of the primary drivers of the high cost is the launch costs". Thus bringing any components back defeats the purpose of the cost savings of harvesting in the first place -- one more task the Shuttle never did nor could do economically as promised.
Care to enlighten us about the secret US Military base in Antarctica? I've been there a few times and am pretty familiar with the place. Other than US Military airlifters on lease to the National Science Foundation there is no military presence (anymore). Up to about 1995, the Navy had a bigger role in the logistics and administration down there but not since.
You have to give LBJ credit for NASA -- he was the biggest presidential supporter of NASA there ever was, including JFK. As VP he was Kennedy's lead representative for the space program. He retained his support when he became president. One of the larger injustices of the Apollo program is that Nixon was the one to welcome the Apollo 11 crew back from the moon instead of Johnson.
As you can tell, I did not have the same concern about the government's actions in this case as many other posters did. However, my real point was that there is a logical inconsistency in how the protections of the 5th amendment are being proposed or I am not understanding some aspect of the situation. The 5th amendment clearly does not distinguish between American citizens and non-citizens, and no reasonable person would want it to. Given that, if al-Awlaki was supposed to have 5th amendment protections in Yemen, then so should every other person/alleged terrorist which we have knocked off on foreign soil through military and CIA action in the last ten years, but no one is trying to claim that -- why not? Your Michigan militia members get 5th amendment protections because they are on US territory, as would anyone else, citizen or non-citizen. That's the only way I can see around the otherwise huge inconsistency in application of the 5th amendment. Now, if you are making the argument that the US should not be executing alleged terrorists without trials through foreign military action in the first place, then that is a whole different discussion with difficult issues and some merit on both sides.
Not a constitutional scholar but I see some problems with the interpretation of the 5th amendment in this case. The amendment does not say, "No US citizen,", it says "No person," so al-Awlaki doesn't get special treatment because he is a US citizen. al-Awlaki was not in US territory at the time of his killing or his offenses, so he does not get any special treatment for being in US territory. So, then, how is he in any different class than anyone else in the world who has declared they want to kill Americans and actually takes steps to do it (bin Laden, for example)? Where did the 5th amendment apply to the killing of bin Laden? So al-Awlaki's death is just one more in the string of bad guys getting what they asked for by their actions in this post 9-11, 21st century. If he wanted some legal protections against what was coming, he should have turned himself in to the nearest authorities.
Funding was slashed in 1968-'72 because the NASA funding in the mid '60s was unsustainable. In 1966 the NASA budget was almost 4.5% of the entire federal budget -- more than 1 dollar out of every 25 spent by the feds went to NASA. This was possible only because it was perceived by the US public as a race against the Russians and another arena of the Cold War. NASA's budget dried up in the late '60s and early '70s because the public didn't care any more -- after Apollos 11 and 12 the US had 'won' and the public was done with it. Apollo 13's drama brought in some interest, but by 1971 and Apollo 14, the public really was no longer interested. Your implication that Nixon "wanted to fund NASA" and the democrats stopped him is bizarre and false -- I have to say I've never heard that one before. NASA of the '60s was a Democrat creation and Johnson as Vice-President and President was its most important booster/sponsor. Without Kennedy and Johnson (both of them) there would have been no Apollo. Look up Eisenhower's attitude toward space exploration and NASA -- he wanted nothing of them and was forced only by Sputnik to even allow any of it to go forward in his term with hardware already available -- von Braun could have launched the first artificial satellite in 1956 and was ordered not to. And recall, Nixon was Eisenhower's VP -- he obviously wasn't lobbying for spaceflight as VP, why would he care as President?
Half-life of the fuel is irrelevant. The reduction in RTG electrical output over time is mostly because of the deterioration of the thermocouples which convert the heat to electricity, not reduction in heat output of the fuel.
Were there any real deniers of luminiferous aether or was everyone (who cared) shocked when a supposedly routine experiment cast doubt on its existence?
The "event" of spectacular brightness lasts a couple of months or so and depends on the type of supernova. As far as the "endings" are concerned, the remnant debris can be seen for thousands of years at least -- the Crab nebula and its central pulsar is a supernova remnant from a supernova seen on Earth in 1054 AD.
A good question which really needs someone who can state the answer precisely to speak up. I would say that the vast majority of LM's projects and corporate culture is geared to the close oversight government contract model where the government very tightly micromanages the work. There are an infinite number of "Preliminary Design Reviews", "Design Reviews", etc. The contractor is paid based on successful "passage" of these reviews. Thus the contractor is almost a part of government and they get paid for following the process whether the result is successful or not. The newer "private" space vehicle companies have more freedom in their design and processes but get paid (and succeed or fail) based on a successful result. The above is an oversimplification, of course, and I don't want to denigrate the talented and hardworking staff at LM and the other established aerospace corps (though many of the established corps have the attitude that they are entitled to their government projects!). Also there is a huge amount of incest between the government and the established aerospace corps in that employees go back and forth between corporate and government employment -- this leads to even more of the attitude that there is a blurred line between the organizations, and the expectation that all government aerospace spending "rightfully" belongs to LM and Boeing. Before anyone at the giants jumps on me -- I've been there on both sides of the industry, and besides, I said this was an oversimplification.
We as technological humans are past the state of natural biological evolution so you don't have to worry about "crap DNA" polluting the human gene pool. Human technological evolution is now faster than human natural biological evolution by orders of magnitude and will determine the future path of humanity. Many people with genetic problems which would have doomed them for most of human history are great contributors to human society now.
There has been a fairly large disparity in the cost of labor in the US vs most 3rd world countries since at least WWII, it's just that for the first 30 years after that war, the state of the rest of the world and transportation and communications infrastructure did not allow the corporations to exercise unbridled, unaccountable greed like they do now. For example, you couldn't have a call center outside the US with 1960's tech communications infrastructure. If the captains of industry in 1955 had been able to outsource their labor to where the prevailing wage was 5 cents/hr then, they would have eagerly done so. It is a classic 'race to the bottom' now as far as workers' compensation and living standards are concerned. It's bad for most of us but may be inevitable since the corps have pretty much captured the government (we need another Teddy Roosevelt!). And to address the poster's concern -- in our new oligarchic society there will be plenty of the rich who can drop 200K for a space ride with little concern about where the next 200K will come from.
Forgot to add -- the entire state of Texas was declared a federal natural disaster area by the US Dept of Agriculture at the end of June. It's technically for the drought, but drought and heat go together in the summer around here.
Hiding out all day in the air conditioning != "just fine". Ask the farmers and ranchers in TX if they are doing just fine. The municipal water supplies for some Hill Country cities (Llano, etc.) are already dried up or soon will be. Another summer like this one with no winter rains again and Lake Travis dries up and then no one in Central TX will be doing fine.