Shut up with the war criminal talk; it devalues the label when it actually happens. In a democracy, which the US is, the citiziens are ultimately responsible for the actions of their government and its military forces. So if you don't like those actions then try to change enough minds of the voters to change the national policies. If you can't do that and just can't stand the situation then you are just SOL (a term I picked up during my time on active duty); or you can renounce your citizenship and get out. But retaining US citizenship and calling my military acquantances "valid targets" is dangerously close to treason; if it could be proved that your talk led directly to a military casualty, I don't think the 1st Amendment would or should protect you.
"which can be seen in the fall of the USD vs all other currencies" -- doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Compare the dollar to the next biggest currency in the world which doesn't have its exchange rate officially manipulated -- the Euro. They've danced around each other for the last five years with little relative change. During the 2008-09 financial crisis there was a flight to the USD (because it was/is considered a safe haven); much of its relative decline since then can be attributed to unwinding those holdings.
You can shut up about the drone pilots. As a former military pilot myself, we wanted every standoff weapon there was -- air-to-air missiles with longer ranges; air launched cruise missiles with longer ranges, precision guided bombs with longer ranges. We weren't hanging our butts over the combat zone to rack up style points, we had a job to do and minimizing risk to ourselves was part of that -- if for nothing else, to save the expense of training replacements. Before air launched weapons, everyone wanted longer range artillery for the same reasons. The drones are just better standoff weapons. If you don't like them, your complaint is with the policy makers (and the citizens who elect them), not the operators.
Who in hell modded this up? Some guy gets a hard time from some prosecutor so now it's "revoking immunity" to kill 168 people (who had nothing to do with McVeigh's crazed gripe with the feds) including a bunch of kids? Here in Austin we had the nut who flew into the side of the building housing some IRS offices, killing some innocent guy there just doing his job. If you want the US to become a real police state just let a couple of more incidents like this occur. I'll take the police over deranged, self-important losers that think killing kids is some kind of "blow for freedom!"
I've never said this before, but mod this guy up! Exactly right -- the Russians built a vehicle that was damn near to a copy of the Shuttle, flew it once, then went back to building Soyuzes. They made their programmatic decision, the US made a different one. For everyone who bemoans the US shutting down the Shuttle and saying, "Now we have to have to buy rides from the Russians!", there is your reason. Now the US is making a similar decision, 30 years later.
One modern (well, early 20th century) modification to your description -- a tenant of General Relativity is that you cannot tell the difference between a force you detect due to gravity and a force due to acceleration without some outside reference. So, if you are in a train with no windows and felt a backward pull, there is no experiment you could do to determine if you were accelerating in an inertial frame or oriented such that gravity was trying to pull you back. After a while, of course, you could deduce that the train could not accelerate forever, but that is a characteristic of trains, not the physics involved. I probably messed something up in there...
So which election did James Garfield steal and which military tool did he use inappropriately? A snippet of his presidency from Wiki, "Garfield's presidency lasted just 200 days—from March 4, 1881, until his death on September 19, 1881, as a result of being shot by assassin Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881. Garfield was the second of four United States Presidents who were assassinated. President Garfield advocated a bi-metal monetary system, agricultural technology, an educated electorate, and civil rights for African Americans." Another snippet, "he was shot twice by an assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled federal office-seeker armed with a.44 caliber pistol."
This talk about "2nd Amendment remedies" is such complete BS. It's sad but if I posted anything about Lincoln or Kennedy there are loons out there who would say, "they deserved it."
That brings up what the real purpose of Insurance is. Is its purpose to level out the risk for everyone no matter what their predisposition to the risk of a loss is? Or is its purpose to level out the risk of a catastrophic loss to an acceptable level among a population with about the same predisposition to suffering the loss? I don't think anyone would argue that in the case of automobile insurance the amount you pay for insurance should reflect the risk and severity of the claims you will probably make on the policy -- otherwise the good drivers will be subsidizing the bad ones. In a pure insurance situation the "good risks" should not generally subsidize the "bad risks". Now for medical insurance we get all squeamish about this principle, especially because some risks are out of the individual's control (heredity) and some lifestyle risks are well within their control. If I have reliable knowledge that I am not a high medical risk for anything at this time, then from a personal financial point of view I would like a medical insurance policy which only includes similar individuals. Do we want to do this as a society -- I don't know. I know for a fact that I don't want my medical insurance premiums subsidizing someone else's risky lifestyle choices. Is it desirable for the "good genetic risks" to subsidize the "bad risks"? -- that is question which needs to be honestly laid out and discussed, no matter how uncomfortable. Clearly some individuals are a priori higher medical risks than others. Saying, "everyone could be a bad risk" is not an honest way to approach it.
"- Activity that could potentially lead to our end as a race." -- depends on how you define "race" and "end". Given sufficient improvement in capabilities (man - machine hybrids, perhaps) you would have to say that the human race as instantiated now would then be superseded by something better (make that -- "more capable"). Some people will argue whether this will be a "good" thing and whether it should be allowed. Not me, I know which side I would like to be on. I would change your first line to "- Activity that could potentially lead to our end as a race, with no descendents." Even then there is the question of whether having only machines as our descendents with no biological link would be acceptable.
I have seen this comment so many times lately... Anyone who was there in 1975 when the last Apollo-Saturn launched could have said the same thing. From 1975 to 1981, between Apollo and the Shuttle, we went into a period where the US had no operational manned space capability and I don't recall near the wailing then about how the US had given up on manned space flight. Now we are probably looking at a similar time period until the US again regains the ability to provide its own manned launch capability. In many ways the 1975-81 period was grimmer than it is now. We still have Americans in space on the ISS, we still have a robust (American and international) unmanned program, we have promising private ventures to provide space launch services -- none of which we had in the late 70's, and we had similar talk then about how in general "America was in decline". The emblematic event of the late 70's in space exploration was Skylab falling uncontrolled out of orbit because was the Shuttle was so late becoming operational. We came through that time OK, though it took a while. The Shuttle != US space exploration, not even close; it's time to move on.
OK, this one of the new "Big Lies" that is repeated enough that it might become accepted -- 'that public sector workers don't produce anything, only the private sector does'. Total BS. Examples: When a scientist employed by the Naval Research Laboratories invents a better laser, is something of value produced -- yes. When an employee of the city picks up your garbage, is a service of value performed -- yes. When a SEAL puts a bullet through the head of bin Laden, is a service of value performed -- yes. All examples of public employees producing valuable goods and services. The purveyors of this line of BS need to read some economics and learn the definition of "production". And I've known lots of persons employed in the private sector who produced absolutely nothing of value. If you want to, you could try to make some deranged argument that the private sector could always perform a service cheaper or better than the public sector, which is at least coherent, if not correct.
Patriotism has historically had a huge place in space activities, especially early on. The first 15 years of manned space activities was all about patriotism and international competition; granted much of the manned programs weren't primarily about science. But the early unmanned lunar and planetary missions were very much international competitions between the US and the Soviets. For many, (probably most) of the taxpayers paying the bills the patriotic aspect of space science and any big science is a very important aspect. NASA and NSF are funded to a large extent so that "we don't fall behind". Americans have been faulted for excessive nationalism and patriotism, but the fact is that the US has more probes leaving the Solar System (that would be all of them) than any other country. The EU has more people and a bigger economy than the US, why aren't there rovers on Mars or probes leaving the Solar System with the EU flag on them; why isn't the EU space program on par with that of the US? Why aren't there Japanese rovers on Mars (I had high hopes for them when they became a technological and economic near-superpower in the '80s).
If it makes you feel any better, (it did for me) that number ($20 billion) for air conditioning in Afghanistan is highly debatable and was put forward by a guy who was a brigadier general but now is in the private sector, selling technologies branded as energy-efficient to the Defense Department. More from the source article (http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning): "Now it's important to note that wrapped up in Anderson's $20 billion figure are all kind of other expenditures – for instance, the cost of building and maintaining roads in Afghanistan, securing those roads, managing the security operations for those roads. That all costs a lot of money and is part of the overall war effort in Afghanistan." And, "The Pentagon disputes the calculation made by Anderson about air conditioning costs. Defense Department spokesman Dave Lapan says that in fiscal year 2010, the Pentagon spent approximately $15 billion on energy for all military operations around the world. The Pentagon says when it comes to Afghanistan, it spent $1.5 billion from October 2010 to May 2011 on fuel. That fuel was used for heating and air conditioning systems, but also for aircraft, unmanned aerial systems, combat vehicles, computers and electricity inside military structures."
This so OT I really shouldn't comment but it is so BS it needs a response:
"Still the economy remained strong until 2007 when Democrats took over Congress."
In reality, the economy was running full throttle on the back of the crazed housing/lending bubble which everyone knew was unsustainable at the time. And still the government was running a deficit.
I'm open to the arguments you are making, but the real metric should be, "Given the same funding from 1970 (or whenever STS funding started) to 2011, would we have done more in space by continuing to build Apollo-Saturn vehicles or the Shuttle?" The Russians have done alright by continuing their line of Soyuz spacecraft. Mass production or not, we built a lot of Saturn 1 and Saturn 1B vehicles in a short time in the early 1960s. Saturn V's were maybe a bit of a different beast and there may have been low rate production problems with them, but big Titans became available for big unmanned payloads by the 70's.
The Shuttle requires a lot of maintenance between flights so it isn't as if we built them and just did "million-mile checkups" every once in a while.
As far as the LoM and LoC stats go, you are correct on the historical numbers but going forward it is probably legitimate to hypothesize an Apollo-Saturn loss rate to evolve as the Soyuz rate did, which became about the same as the Shuttle. The Shuttle had at least one LoM (STS-83), and I will almost count the mission which launched Galileo to Jupiter as a LoM because part of the reason the high gain antenna failed was due to Shuttle driven delays and trucking it around the country -- I admit that is a stretch. To be fair to the Saturn V and IBs -- they never had a LoC and arguably no LoMs (second flight of the Saturn V was bad), it was the Apollo craft which failed both times.
The Air Force had the choice between sticking with the Shuttle and going back to expendable boosters in the 80's for their unmanned flights and they picked expendables -- again maybe not completely fair if we are only discussing man-rated vehicles.
I guess we can make Saturn vs STS arguments forever, to little practical use, but I am willing to listen. Around work it is a generational split.
You have to wonder what we could have done building one Saturn V and four Saturn IBs per year for the last 30 years (with incremental upgrades along the way). For example, it took one Saturn V launch and one Saturn 1B to launch, repair, and crew Skylab.
I am not depressed at all. I saw the first Shuttle launch in 1981 (on TV). After 30 years it is time for something new. As long as the Shuttle stayed around it prevented the new from coming along. And the Shuttle wasn't going anywhere new. So even if nothing replaces it (unlikely), would we really better off if Atlantis was still flying 30 years from now on its 10 jillionth orbit of the Earth instead of shutting down after it's 5 jillionth now? Seeing the Apollo-Saturn vehicles come and go in 8 years -- now that was depressing
Man, your comment needs to be modded way up. Any project which goes FOUR times over budget needs to be cut off, no matter what its merits. Either the proponents originally intentionally underestimated the costs in order to get the project approved or the project development team is incompetent -- in neither case should the reward be project continuance. You have to ask, "If the true cost would have been known at inception would the project have been funded?" I am the biggest fan of space science and astronomy but there has to be some kind of accountability, and as others have pointed out JWST is taking funds for other worthy projects.
Interesting comment -- I think that we generally associate fusion with reactions involving light nuclei and fission with reactions involving heavy nuclei because usually for net energy release, light nuclei must fuse to form heavier ones and heavy nuclei must split to make lighter ones. However in this case we start with 11B and 1H and end up with 4He, lighter than than the 11B. So the 11B fissions just the same as 235U fissions when hit with a neutron. So, technically, I don't see this as a fusion reaction hardly at all, but just as much fission as: n + 235U -> fission products. You could argue that the incorporation of the 1H in the heavier products makes it a fusion reaction, too, but the same could be said of the neutron (practically a proton [1H] in many descriptions) in the uranium fission. I think this is an interesting case which shows that the everyday definitions of "fusion" and "fission" aren't always sufficient to really describe the reaction.
Thanks to the scientists who discovered the thinning of the ozone and thanks to the policymakers who created the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer in the late 80's, we still have an ozone layer today. The whining back then about taking action to preserve the atmosphere in a state which supports us was about the same as it is now -- I can still recall the cries that we would have to give up all our air conditioners and refrigerators.
To some extent I can see where you are coming from. I was on some international travel in 2003-2004 and it was striking how different the Iraq coverage was by CNN International vs. the domestic CNN feed. However, don't blame the government for that -- the vast majority of people want to hear news which reinforces their already held opinions of things (and it has always been that way). The big news organizations are there to make money (not so true 50 years ago, but there really was no 'golden age' of unbiased news reporting) and for that they sell their audiences what they want to hear, in any country or society nowadays. Don't blame the government for that -- look around and blame your fellow citizens and "news consumers". There is plenty of news and evidence available which puts into question the official reports and societal held opinions, if people are willing to just pay attention. And the fricking "US is the Great Satan" meme is just as bogus as any of them so give that a rest. You don't need better governments, you need better citizens, and most of them aren't willing to be so.
This is a common meme, but I don't think it holds up objectively. For example, the US currently has an operating lunar orbiter (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) as well as operating spacecraft in orbit around Mercury, Mars, and Saturn. The US will soon be launching a new orbiter to Jupiter. The US Dawn spacecraft will enter orbit around the asteroid Vesta this July. This is a golden age for US planetary exploration. The US manned program is hitting a slow spot, which gets all the news and it remains to be seen what happens to the unmanned budget in coming years but the US will have to do a lot of "cutting back" before anyone else is even close.
The US taxpayers through the US Government paid an enormous sum to bring almost all the known moon rocks on earth here. There should be no legitimate way for private individuals to obtain possession of any of that material (obviously this doesn't apply to the Russian samples and the lunar meteorites). Otherwise, they become another example of rich and/or connected private entities getting their hold on stuff that the American public originally paid for. I imagine that NASA's goal here is to protect that principle. It would be much more annoying to me to know that Billionaire Jack HedgeFund had a moon rock in his private collection which was originally obtained through the collective effort of tens of thousands of American workers and the taxes of all of the Americans.
If someone wanted to finance a sample return trip to the moon and get their own samples, I'm sure NASA would be fine with it and would be willing to help out if it fit with one of the agency's current research goals.
There may be examples where the government taxed some successful, free market, standing-on-its-own business to support an unrelated item but the airlines and air travel ain't one of them. Two totally disparate examples -- 1) the history of the Boeing 707, which was successful only because of government purchases of its sister ship, the KC-135 and 2) more recently, after the 9/11 attacks the Feds wrote the airlines a check for $20 billion with no questions asked or else all of them would have folded up within a couple of months. For example 1) you may say that the market would have eventually built a jet airliner -- maybe, maybe not but certainly military contracts and technology have advanced passenger air travel since 1903. And for 2), I've heard the argument that 'the gov't closed the airspace', -- for a day or so, but it wasn't closed $20 billion worth and besides without a government guarantee of well regulated airspace how much air travel do you think there would be after the first couple of hundred mid-airs?
The issue is somewhat more complicated than you make it out to be. In no particular order...
The F-35 and F-22 will outperform the older fighters but are they so superior as to make up for the fewer numbers we can buy? We had similar arguments in the '80s about whether it was better to have 4 F-15s or 40 MIG-21s in a combat situation -- luckily we never had to find out. And many of the improvements in the new aircraft are to radars and other avionics which can be integrated into new builds of the older airframes. Aerodynamically, the F-16 and F-18 are currently limited by the pilot's abilities to stay conscious during the maneuvers in some (not all) regimes anyway. Given a choice between a few F-22/F-35s and twice or three times as many F-18Es, considering that with the cheaper aircraft you can afford to fly more, train more, and afford to lose one every once in a while I don't know that it is a clear choice. The F-22/F-35 are probably the last generation of manned fighters, maybe we could have gotten away with F-18Es and upgraded F-15s as the last, as the drones come in and take on more of the actual combat. I will admit that stealth is the big attribute which the new fighters have which can't be built into the old airframes. It might make the new ones worth it.
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Shut up with the war criminal talk; it devalues the label when it actually happens. In a democracy, which the US is, the citiziens are ultimately responsible for the actions of their government and its military forces. So if you don't like those actions then try to change enough minds of the voters to change the national policies. If you can't do that and just can't stand the situation then you are just SOL (a term I picked up during my time on active duty); or you can renounce your citizenship and get out. But retaining US citizenship and calling my military acquantances "valid targets" is dangerously close to treason; if it could be proved that your talk led directly to a military casualty, I don't think the 1st Amendment would or should protect you.
"which can be seen in the fall of the USD vs all other currencies" -- doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Compare the dollar to the next biggest currency in the world which doesn't have its exchange rate officially manipulated -- the Euro. They've danced around each other for the last five years with little relative change. During the 2008-09 financial crisis there was a flight to the USD (because it was/is considered a safe haven); much of its relative decline since then can be attributed to unwinding those holdings.
You can shut up about the drone pilots. As a former military pilot myself, we wanted every standoff weapon there was -- air-to-air missiles with longer ranges; air launched cruise missiles with longer ranges, precision guided bombs with longer ranges. We weren't hanging our butts over the combat zone to rack up style points, we had a job to do and minimizing risk to ourselves was part of that -- if for nothing else, to save the expense of training replacements. Before air launched weapons, everyone wanted longer range artillery for the same reasons. The drones are just better standoff weapons. If you don't like them, your complaint is with the policy makers (and the citizens who elect them), not the operators.
Who in hell modded this up? Some guy gets a hard time from some prosecutor so now it's "revoking immunity" to kill 168 people (who had nothing to do with McVeigh's crazed gripe with the feds) including a bunch of kids? Here in Austin we had the nut who flew into the side of the building housing some IRS offices, killing some innocent guy there just doing his job. If you want the US to become a real police state just let a couple of more incidents like this occur. I'll take the police over deranged, self-important losers that think killing kids is some kind of "blow for freedom!"
I've never said this before, but mod this guy up! Exactly right -- the Russians built a vehicle that was damn near to a copy of the Shuttle, flew it once, then went back to building Soyuzes. They made their programmatic decision, the US made a different one. For everyone who bemoans the US shutting down the Shuttle and saying, "Now we have to have to buy rides from the Russians!", there is your reason. Now the US is making a similar decision, 30 years later.
One modern (well, early 20th century) modification to your description -- a tenant of General Relativity is that you cannot tell the difference between a force you detect due to gravity and a force due to acceleration without some outside reference. So, if you are in a train with no windows and felt a backward pull, there is no experiment you could do to determine if you were accelerating in an inertial frame or oriented such that gravity was trying to pull you back. After a while, of course, you could deduce that the train could not accelerate forever, but that is a characteristic of trains, not the physics involved. I probably messed something up in there...
So which election did James Garfield steal and which military tool did he use inappropriately? A snippet of his presidency from Wiki, "Garfield's presidency lasted just 200 days—from March 4, 1881, until his death on September 19, 1881, as a result of being shot by assassin Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881. Garfield was the second of four United States Presidents who were assassinated. President Garfield advocated a bi-metal monetary system, agricultural technology, an educated electorate, and civil rights for African Americans." Another snippet, "he was shot twice by an assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled federal office-seeker armed with a .44 caliber pistol."
This talk about "2nd Amendment remedies" is such complete BS. It's sad but if I posted anything about Lincoln or Kennedy there are loons out there who would say, "they deserved it."
That brings up what the real purpose of Insurance is. Is its purpose to level out the risk for everyone no matter what their predisposition to the risk of a loss is? Or is its purpose to level out the risk of a catastrophic loss to an acceptable level among a population with about the same predisposition to suffering the loss? I don't think anyone would argue that in the case of automobile insurance the amount you pay for insurance should reflect the risk and severity of the claims you will probably make on the policy -- otherwise the good drivers will be subsidizing the bad ones. In a pure insurance situation the "good risks" should not generally subsidize the "bad risks". Now for medical insurance we get all squeamish about this principle, especially because some risks are out of the individual's control (heredity) and some lifestyle risks are well within their control. If I have reliable knowledge that I am not a high medical risk for anything at this time, then from a personal financial point of view I would like a medical insurance policy which only includes similar individuals. Do we want to do this as a society -- I don't know. I know for a fact that I don't want my medical insurance premiums subsidizing someone else's risky lifestyle choices. Is it desirable for the "good genetic risks" to subsidize the "bad risks"? -- that is question which needs to be honestly laid out and discussed, no matter how uncomfortable. Clearly some individuals are a priori higher medical risks than others. Saying, "everyone could be a bad risk" is not an honest way to approach it.
"- Activity that could potentially lead to our end as a race." -- depends on how you define "race" and "end". Given sufficient improvement in capabilities (man - machine hybrids, perhaps) you would have to say that the human race as instantiated now would then be superseded by something better (make that -- "more capable"). Some people will argue whether this will be a "good" thing and whether it should be allowed. Not me, I know which side I would like to be on. I would change your first line to "- Activity that could potentially lead to our end as a race, with no descendents." Even then there is the question of whether having only machines as our descendents with no biological link would be acceptable.
I have seen this comment so many times lately ... Anyone who was there in 1975 when the last Apollo-Saturn launched could have said the same thing. From 1975 to 1981, between Apollo and the Shuttle, we went into a period where the US had no operational manned space capability and I don't recall near the wailing then about how the US had given up on manned space flight. Now we are probably looking at a similar time period until the US again regains the ability to provide its own manned launch capability. In many ways the 1975-81 period was grimmer than it is now. We still have Americans in space on the ISS, we still have a robust (American and international) unmanned program, we have promising private ventures to provide space launch services -- none of which we had in the late 70's, and we had similar talk then about how in general "America was in decline". The emblematic event of the late 70's in space exploration was Skylab falling uncontrolled out of orbit because was the Shuttle was so late becoming operational. We came through that time OK, though it took a while. The Shuttle != US space exploration, not even close; it's time to move on.
OK, this one of the new "Big Lies" that is repeated enough that it might become accepted -- 'that public sector workers don't produce anything, only the private sector does'. Total BS. Examples: When a scientist employed by the Naval Research Laboratories invents a better laser, is something of value produced -- yes. When an employee of the city picks up your garbage, is a service of value performed -- yes. When a SEAL puts a bullet through the head of bin Laden, is a service of value performed -- yes. All examples of public employees producing valuable goods and services. The purveyors of this line of BS need to read some economics and learn the definition of "production". And I've known lots of persons employed in the private sector who produced absolutely nothing of value. If you want to, you could try to make some deranged argument that the private sector could always perform a service cheaper or better than the public sector, which is at least coherent, if not correct.
Patriotism has historically had a huge place in space activities, especially early on. The first 15 years of manned space activities was all about patriotism and international competition; granted much of the manned programs weren't primarily about science. But the early unmanned lunar and planetary missions were very much international competitions between the US and the Soviets. For many, (probably most) of the taxpayers paying the bills the patriotic aspect of space science and any big science is a very important aspect. NASA and NSF are funded to a large extent so that "we don't fall behind". Americans have been faulted for excessive nationalism and patriotism, but the fact is that the US has more probes leaving the Solar System (that would be all of them) than any other country. The EU has more people and a bigger economy than the US, why aren't there rovers on Mars or probes leaving the Solar System with the EU flag on them; why isn't the EU space program on par with that of the US? Why aren't there Japanese rovers on Mars (I had high hopes for them when they became a technological and economic near-superpower in the '80s).
If it makes you feel any better, (it did for me) that number ($20 billion) for air conditioning in Afghanistan is highly debatable and was put forward by a guy who was a brigadier general but now is in the private sector, selling technologies branded as energy-efficient to the Defense Department. More from the source article (http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning): "Now it's important to note that wrapped up in Anderson's $20 billion figure are all kind of other expenditures – for instance, the cost of building and maintaining roads in Afghanistan, securing those roads, managing the security operations for those roads. That all costs a lot of money and is part of the overall war effort in Afghanistan." And, "The Pentagon disputes the calculation made by Anderson about air conditioning costs. Defense Department spokesman Dave Lapan says that in fiscal year 2010, the Pentagon spent approximately $15 billion on energy for all military operations around the world. The Pentagon says when it comes to Afghanistan, it spent $1.5 billion from October 2010 to May 2011 on fuel. That fuel was used for heating and air conditioning systems, but also for aircraft, unmanned aerial systems, combat vehicles, computers and electricity inside military structures."
This so OT I really shouldn't comment but it is so BS it needs a response: "Still the economy remained strong until 2007 when Democrats took over Congress." In reality, the economy was running full throttle on the back of the crazed housing/lending bubble which everyone knew was unsustainable at the time. And still the government was running a deficit.
I'm open to the arguments you are making, but the real metric should be, "Given the same funding from 1970 (or whenever STS funding started) to 2011, would we have done more in space by continuing to build Apollo-Saturn vehicles or the Shuttle?" The Russians have done alright by continuing their line of Soyuz spacecraft. Mass production or not, we built a lot of Saturn 1 and Saturn 1B vehicles in a short time in the early 1960s. Saturn V's were maybe a bit of a different beast and there may have been low rate production problems with them, but big Titans became available for big unmanned payloads by the 70's. The Shuttle requires a lot of maintenance between flights so it isn't as if we built them and just did "million-mile checkups" every once in a while. As far as the LoM and LoC stats go, you are correct on the historical numbers but going forward it is probably legitimate to hypothesize an Apollo-Saturn loss rate to evolve as the Soyuz rate did, which became about the same as the Shuttle. The Shuttle had at least one LoM (STS-83), and I will almost count the mission which launched Galileo to Jupiter as a LoM because part of the reason the high gain antenna failed was due to Shuttle driven delays and trucking it around the country -- I admit that is a stretch. To be fair to the Saturn V and IBs -- they never had a LoC and arguably no LoMs (second flight of the Saturn V was bad), it was the Apollo craft which failed both times. The Air Force had the choice between sticking with the Shuttle and going back to expendable boosters in the 80's for their unmanned flights and they picked expendables -- again maybe not completely fair if we are only discussing man-rated vehicles. I guess we can make Saturn vs STS arguments forever, to little practical use, but I am willing to listen. Around work it is a generational split.
You have to wonder what we could have done building one Saturn V and four Saturn IBs per year for the last 30 years (with incremental upgrades along the way). For example, it took one Saturn V launch and one Saturn 1B to launch, repair, and crew Skylab.
I am not depressed at all. I saw the first Shuttle launch in 1981 (on TV). After 30 years it is time for something new. As long as the Shuttle stayed around it prevented the new from coming along. And the Shuttle wasn't going anywhere new. So even if nothing replaces it (unlikely), would we really better off if Atlantis was still flying 30 years from now on its 10 jillionth orbit of the Earth instead of shutting down after it's 5 jillionth now? Seeing the Apollo-Saturn vehicles come and go in 8 years -- now that was depressing
Man, your comment needs to be modded way up. Any project which goes FOUR times over budget needs to be cut off, no matter what its merits. Either the proponents originally intentionally underestimated the costs in order to get the project approved or the project development team is incompetent -- in neither case should the reward be project continuance. You have to ask, "If the true cost would have been known at inception would the project have been funded?" I am the biggest fan of space science and astronomy but there has to be some kind of accountability, and as others have pointed out JWST is taking funds for other worthy projects.
Interesting comment -- I think that we generally associate fusion with reactions involving light nuclei and fission with reactions involving heavy nuclei because usually for net energy release, light nuclei must fuse to form heavier ones and heavy nuclei must split to make lighter ones. However in this case we start with 11B and 1H and end up with 4He, lighter than than the 11B. So the 11B fissions just the same as 235U fissions when hit with a neutron. So, technically, I don't see this as a fusion reaction hardly at all, but just as much fission as: n + 235U -> fission products. You could argue that the incorporation of the 1H in the heavier products makes it a fusion reaction, too, but the same could be said of the neutron (practically a proton [1H] in many descriptions) in the uranium fission. I think this is an interesting case which shows that the everyday definitions of "fusion" and "fission" aren't always sufficient to really describe the reaction.
Thanks to the scientists who discovered the thinning of the ozone and thanks to the policymakers who created the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer in the late 80's, we still have an ozone layer today. The whining back then about taking action to preserve the atmosphere in a state which supports us was about the same as it is now -- I can still recall the cries that we would have to give up all our air conditioners and refrigerators.
To some extent I can see where you are coming from. I was on some international travel in 2003-2004 and it was striking how different the Iraq coverage was by CNN International vs. the domestic CNN feed. However, don't blame the government for that -- the vast majority of people want to hear news which reinforces their already held opinions of things (and it has always been that way). The big news organizations are there to make money (not so true 50 years ago, but there really was no 'golden age' of unbiased news reporting) and for that they sell their audiences what they want to hear, in any country or society nowadays. Don't blame the government for that -- look around and blame your fellow citizens and "news consumers". There is plenty of news and evidence available which puts into question the official reports and societal held opinions, if people are willing to just pay attention. And the fricking "US is the Great Satan" meme is just as bogus as any of them so give that a rest. You don't need better governments, you need better citizens, and most of them aren't willing to be so.
This is a common meme, but I don't think it holds up objectively. For example, the US currently has an operating lunar orbiter (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) as well as operating spacecraft in orbit around Mercury, Mars, and Saturn. The US will soon be launching a new orbiter to Jupiter. The US Dawn spacecraft will enter orbit around the asteroid Vesta this July. This is a golden age for US planetary exploration. The US manned program is hitting a slow spot, which gets all the news and it remains to be seen what happens to the unmanned budget in coming years but the US will have to do a lot of "cutting back" before anyone else is even close.
The US taxpayers through the US Government paid an enormous sum to bring almost all the known moon rocks on earth here. There should be no legitimate way for private individuals to obtain possession of any of that material (obviously this doesn't apply to the Russian samples and the lunar meteorites). Otherwise, they become another example of rich and/or connected private entities getting their hold on stuff that the American public originally paid for. I imagine that NASA's goal here is to protect that principle. It would be much more annoying to me to know that Billionaire Jack HedgeFund had a moon rock in his private collection which was originally obtained through the collective effort of tens of thousands of American workers and the taxes of all of the Americans. If someone wanted to finance a sample return trip to the moon and get their own samples, I'm sure NASA would be fine with it and would be willing to help out if it fit with one of the agency's current research goals.
There may be examples where the government taxed some successful, free market, standing-on-its-own business to support an unrelated item but the airlines and air travel ain't one of them. Two totally disparate examples -- 1) the history of the Boeing 707, which was successful only because of government purchases of its sister ship, the KC-135 and 2) more recently, after the 9/11 attacks the Feds wrote the airlines a check for $20 billion with no questions asked or else all of them would have folded up within a couple of months. For example 1) you may say that the market would have eventually built a jet airliner -- maybe, maybe not but certainly military contracts and technology have advanced passenger air travel since 1903. And for 2), I've heard the argument that 'the gov't closed the airspace', -- for a day or so, but it wasn't closed $20 billion worth and besides without a government guarantee of well regulated airspace how much air travel do you think there would be after the first couple of hundred mid-airs?
The issue is somewhat more complicated than you make it out to be. In no particular order ...
The F-35 and F-22 will outperform the older fighters but are they so superior as to make up for the fewer numbers we can buy? We had similar arguments in the '80s about whether it was better to have 4 F-15s or 40 MIG-21s in a combat situation -- luckily we never had to find out. And many of the improvements in the new aircraft are to radars and other avionics which can be integrated into new builds of the older airframes. Aerodynamically, the F-16 and F-18 are currently limited by the pilot's abilities to stay conscious during the maneuvers in some (not all) regimes anyway. Given a choice between a few F-22/F-35s and twice or three times as many F-18Es, considering that with the cheaper aircraft you can afford to fly more, train more, and afford to lose one every once in a while I don't know that it is a clear choice. The F-22/F-35 are probably the last generation of manned fighters, maybe we could have gotten away with F-18Es and upgraded F-15s as the last, as the drones come in and take on more of the actual combat. I will admit that stealth is the big attribute which the new fighters have which can't be built into the old airframes. It might make the new ones worth it.