"Well-regulated militia" usually boils down to "seven guys in a cabin in the woods, with bad beards and a bunch of guns". The first time a cop or a marshall comes out to resolve some unrelated dispute on or adjacent to the property, things escalate, because "Hey you feds! We have guns! Get off our land! Live free or die!" That just never ends well. In fact it always always ends badly.
But my point was, seven guys with guns in a cabin in the woods is not any kind of deterrent for the Feds. If any sizeable branch of the government were ever intentionally turned on the American people, seven guys with guns and bad beards would probably be the first ones up against the wall.
But you're kidding yourself. Nobody's going to turn the US military on the American populace. This is just a dumb survivalist fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. America is not Syria.
Yeah, here is the thing right here. "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." This is clearly out of date. You can have all the guns you want - your sawed-off shotguns, your full-auto assault weapons with hundred round cartridges, rainbow unicorn uzi's with sparkle decals, whatever. Knock yourself out. None of that makes you part of a militia, and actually a militia full of guys with guns is no deterrent to some kind of (entirely imaginary) land invasion of North America.
a.) Wars simply are not fought that way any more. The next war will be fought with drones, robotic autonomous vehicles, with persistent surveillance, with computers, and (possibly) organic weapons, pulse weapons, and in orbit.
b.) No country in its right mind would have any interest in invading the USA. What could possibly be gained from it? Can you imagine what a horrendous pain it would be? We can't even hold down sparsely-populated agrarian society from the last century (e.g. Afghanistan) with the largest military in the entire world.
There's no UN invasion coming. There's no jack-booted socialist brigade marching across the Atlantic to steal your concealed carry privileges. There's no invasion coming from the ghetto. Get over it. There's no deterrent effect because there's no one to be deterred.
If you want to own a gun, because it makes you feel powerful, and because you can secretly fantasize about blowing away the guy who cut ahead of you in line at Home Depot or whatever, go ahead. But stop hiding behind the second amendment, because the militia thing doesn't even work as a fantasy any more.
"[...] an endless series of little experiments that have no practical application. They all end up as science papers and PhDs."
People who wrote science papers;
Sir Isaac Newton Charles Darwin Ptolemy Albert Einstein Craig Ventner Carl Sagan Jonas Salk Barbary McClintock James Watson Marie Curie Pythagoras Robert Oppenheimer Allan Turing Kurt Gödel Galen Johnny Von Neumann Stanislaw Ulam...
People who just manned up and established working space stations without doing all those little fiddly science things;
Note that RBSP is engineered to function to a region which most spacecraft avoid or pass through only briefly. There's a lot that's different in the design of these craft relative to a typical LEO satellite.
Wow, I just want to say, this is the first OP in a while that is actually news to me! Great post! Especially, I prior had no idea that NSSDC exists! Cool beans!
My mother, in her little blue Ford escort, was crushed to death under an oncoming SUV that was gigantic relative to the size of its passenger, and barely controllable on an icy Buffalo-area road in winter. I am, understandably, dubious about this constant "CAFE kills" blurp that occurs in every last conversation of fuel economy. I'm willing to bet that if most people used the same size vehicles, rather than vehicle size being related to income level, everyone would drive more carefully and charitably.
The cost of waiting a week to launch RBSP after a hurricaine has passed is waaaaaaay less than the cost of letting RBSP crash because of weather. RBSP's development costs - I don't know for sure, but on the order of 7 or 8 hundred million dollars(?) It's not the same as "hey, let's go for it on fourth-and-long". This isn't football. Nobody's going to think its a "ballsy" decision to launch a rocket in an oncoming hurricaine (unless that what it was designed to do.) What they'll think it is, is "stupid".
"To decry weapons in the hands of people, is to say that people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions."
Why does this argument apply to handguns, but not say bazookas, flamethrowers, rocket-propelled grenades? Why can't the people be trusted to make their own best decisions with bazookas?
We all consent to allow the government to have a monopoly on violence. That's what, for instance, police officers are for. They're our representatives who we've given some powers to that we believe ordinary citizens shouldn't have. If you feel like it's your job to carry around a gun and shoot people who are going postal, then maybe you should consider becoming a police officer.
There's no connotation that what they're hoping to produce with a reprap would have any practical use other than shooting people. That's one thing I object to. Oh hey, just while I'm typing this, lookee at the new headline that just popped up: "Several People Shot Near the Empire State Building". Yeah, I trust everybody in America to make sane, reasonable choices with regard to guns.
This. A million times this. DOES IT DAWN ON YOU ALL THAT NOONE IN AMERICA IS HAVING ANY PROBLEMS GETTING ANY GUNS? THEE ARE MORE GUNS THAN PEOPLE! Try thinking of something else for a moment!
Plus, if you're really worried about the UN jackbooted thugs coming to take your guns away, reprap probably won't help you much. The feds will soon have an indefinitely large supply of drones, military robots, persistent surveillance, ballistic armor, over-the-horizon standoff weaponry, OH, and they're monitoring your cellphone, your land lines, your emails, etc. Please, by all means, make a zip gun that shoots a 22 shell. That will hold off the UN hordes. (Maybe it would have been wiser to limit the defense budget decades ago, if this is really what you are worried about, Mr. Live-Free-Or-Die?)
This, a million times this. I am very disappointed TiME was not selected. Hopefully there will be a 'next time' for Titan.
BTW TiME would have had a 'mast' with sensors, that in effect would have acted to some degree as a sail. NASA had gone so far as to model the winds over Titan's seas, primarily to see if the vessel could reasonably function there, but the possibility of using the mast to get some wind propulsion surely was being considered. So, a boat, yes.
"The problem is that government funded science hasn't really done that much for us." This is just utter BS. Its hard for me to imagine a more fallacous statement. If you include that science that was done under the aegis of fighting wars, its hard to think of a facet of life or a field of endeavor that hasn't been affected by public investment.
Just for starters, a lot of the early development of computers was done by governments during and after the war, and private actors that participated (for instance the IAS - read TURING'S CATHEDRAL) accepted public money for their work.
Lots of the work at sequencing the human (and other) genome was funded by NIH, and the private actors that later contributed all received money and their training through NIH.
Most medicines, vaccines, new treatments in the medical world are to some degree the result of public investment.
I'm just going to type a little list - you are welcome to look these up and check for accuracy Radar GPS the internet drones supercomputers satellites vitamin-fortified foods sonar velcro and tang
You're the same guy from the other NASA thread. Don't you ever get tired of crabbing about the government?
What you're saying is beginning to sound more and more like some kind of objectivist viewpoint. That doesn't immediately discredit it, but I'd suggest (especially if you're going to talk about science, here, and make assertions as if you know something about it) you need to back up what you're saying with some (any) kind of citation or evidence.
"government funding has crowded out private for basic science" - what? Is there any evidence you can point to for this?
"researchers now focus on maintaining funding rather than doing science or delivering value" - again, what? Researchers get paid, and get better positions and more credibilty, by publishing in peer-reviewed journals, novel and substantial research. You can't tread water as a researcher. There's not enough money around for that to work for very long. But if you have some evidence or even anecdotal data to show, please do so.
"vaccines and antibiotics[...] an expensive testing situation where developing a valuable drug isn't sufficiently profitable even though it can save many lives" that's at least a swag at a particular example. It's a particularly bad one however, because people nearly universally demand and expect that new human vaccines and medicines to be thoroughly tested. The government is pretty clearly reflecting the will of the majority on this. And yes, it's expensive, but the work itself is big, and rigorous, and the liabilities for screwing it up are enormous. None of that has to do with commercial spaceflight however.
"Point here is that we're chosen a few big projects over many more scientific productive projects, by abandoning economies of scale. It's basic engineering and economics."
There are no small, inexpensive missions to Saturn. Space is hard. Take a look at the rate of success at NASA, and compare it to that of other nations' space programs. It's not that other nations don't see the value in doing them, or that they see an obvious flaw in our approach.
- JAXA's Akatsuki-Venus mission failed to enter orbit around Venus last year.
- Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Martian satellites failed to even escape Earth's orbit.
- Russia's resupply mission to ISS exploded less than six minutes after takeoff. (August 2011)
- ESA's Mars Express mission lost it's Beagle-2 lander. (crashed? nobody knows.)
- Cassini's Huygens probe (ESA) had a fair number of problems, including, at one point, its spinning in the opposite to intended direction during descent.
- India's Chandrayaan lunar probe operated for 312 days before failing, rather than its nominal 2-year mission (probably for thermal reasons.)
NASA's record, and particularly on Mars, distinguishes itself from those of all other countrys' space programs.
Is your argument really that NASA is somehow spending more per mission than it could or should? If so, I can assure you, having worked in both, the relative degree of oversite and budgetary controls for NASA is at least an order of magnitude higher than it is for the defense and intelligence communities. And you're getting good money for your tax dollar at NASA, because a lot of the things NASA does simply can't be done anywhere else, at any price. Also there are plenty of people grinding away day and night trying to think of how to do planetary exploration more cheaply. Of that you can be sure.
Is your argument instead that NASA shouldn't be doing planetary science? Because that's kind of in its charter.
Is your argument that you don't get why anyone is doing planetary science? You can say "Eh" all you want, but there is very clearly a scientific community that sees the value in this work. Lots of scientists expatriate from other countries to work in or with NASA, for starters.
Is your argument that we should spend less money on space, and more money on (some other scientific endeavor)? Science is a meritocracy and if you've a great new idea, you should put it forward. But by its very nature, it's hard to know what scientific undertakings will bear fruit.
NASA's budget is about a half of one percent of your federal tax dollar. If your real aim is to slim down the federal budget, NASA is way down in the noise. You ought to start with defense, intelligence, entitlements, and tax evasion - those are the biggies.
Space science is another such endeavor. It's been used as rationalization for some of the most ridiculously overpriced infrastructure (the International Space Station) ever built. Even the unmanned space programs have devolved into building new overpriced widgets rather than actual space science.
New Horizons - first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Kepler - (at least) tripled the number of known exoplanets. Messenger - first artificial satellite of Mercury. Cassini/Heugens - first spacecraft orbiting Saturn and its moons. Discovered methane lakes on Titan. Discovered cryovolcanoes on Enceladus. First landing on Titan. [...] Dawn - first close-up images of major asteroids (Ceres, Vesta). First demonstration of ion thrusters in space. Radiation Belt Storm Probes - understanding the (critical to life on earth) Van Allen radiation belt. Solar Probe Plus - closest man-made object to the Sun. [...]
It's a pernicious myth that the unmanned space program is not producing new and significant results. I really don't understand why it keeps recurring on this website, amazingly. Is it a myth born out of abject ignorance? (If so, go RTF NASA websites.) Or is it an article of faith of people of a specific political bent, absolutely unsubstantiated by facts or actual knowledge of space science?
Their ideas are so elegant that I can’t believe they haven’t already been done, and because it would take about a week for someone with very modest venture capitol (that part they are missing) to implement the idea well This is where the campaign is asking for your trust and your donations to allow us to setup a new model for funding space, but we can’t give you the details, because if we do the idea is going to get built by someone else and the profit will go somewhere other than to researchers.
This is kind of asking us to take a lot on faith. "Send us your money so that we can do some secret thing that's going to be great. Oh, and I really need money to cover my staff's salary." You're not going to find a more passionate advocate for space exploration than me, but even I feel leery about contributing given the opacity of the enterprise.
My second thought is, if you do successfully create some quasi-third-option (not public, not private) enterprise to do actual planetary exploration, it is by definition competitive with NASA. Immediately, immediately, Ron Paul and all the strict constitutionalists and tea partiers and deficit hawks are going to point to Uwingu and say "Hey, we don't need a federal agency for that! Look, private enterprise is doing it!" It would be just another, better reason to kill NASA by budget cuts.
Steve, Steve, please stop! I don't want a new, smaller connector! AAAAAAAGGH!
His new connector is going to only connect to my new phone Steve is making me buy!! And no one else's! And I can't stop him! He's already in my house! At my refridgerator, eating all the peanut butter!
And on his new connector, there's a PRIME NUMBER of pins! NINETEEN! It's IIINDIIIIVIIIISSSSSIIIIIIIBLLLLLLLE!!
His connector is going to read all my iTunes playlists and delete all the the old Yes! and make me listen to new Yes! And Night Ranger! And Starship! HE BUILT THIS CITY!!!
His secret UN jackbooted thugs are going to come into my parents' basement, and make me give up all of my mini-USB! and my micro-USB! Even though they signed! They're watching me right now! They're listening, through the fillings in my teeth!
Steve just won't quit!!!! BECAUSE now, he's a zombie CEO! Zombie!
(I'm sorry, but I'm losing it. This is the dumbest thread ever on Slashdot. If you don't like the connectors, get a different phone. Or, you know, like the article says, get an adaptor.)
NASA is due (this month?) to make a final selection between three competing Discovery-class proposals. Among them is the Titan Mare Explorer, the first attempt to put a boat on an extraterrestrial sea. How cool would that be? Good overviews of the proposal are here;
"Determining whose need is most critical: The United Network for Organ Sharing uses measurements of clinical and laboratory problems to divide patients into groups that determine who is in most critical need of a liver transplant. In early 2002, UNOS enacted a major modification to the way in which people were assigned the need for a liver transplant. Previously, patients awaiting livers were ranked as status 1, 2A, 2B, and 3, according to the severity of their current disease. Although the status 1 listing has remained, all other patients are now classified using the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) scoring system if they are aged 18 years or older, or the Pediatric End-Stage Liver Disease (PELD) scoring system if they are younger than 18 years. These scoring methods were set up so that donor livers could be distributed to those who need them most urgently [...blah blah blah...]"
No single doctor can determine who gets a transplant and who does not. There's a rigorous process to determine need, there's a council or committee overseeing decisions, the whole process is documented, insurance companies are scrutinizing the whole thing very closely. Just because some elected officials chose to question a specific decision, that does not and shouldn't imply that the system is broken or corrupt. Imagine the lawsuits that would ensue if people had plausible reasons to believe the system was tainted!
And I hardly think having to fly from California and buy a home to convalesce in in Memphis could be fairly described as "convenient".
The need to have at least one FPP a day implying that Steve Jobs is the Anti-Christ is pretty badly coloring the judgements of the editors here, especially now that Steve is dead (or is he?) Get a new obsession, Slashdot!
I'm sorry, this is just too much. Every week there's at least a couple of these what's-wrong-with-American-education stories. It's always that Americans are doing it wrong, somewhere else is doing it better.
It's entirely reasonable to survey the different approaches to teaching and try to select the best for your own kids/schools/country. But the underlying nationalistic streak in all these articles, and the bogus tone of imminent disaster, is just baiting. And you're going to provide a big fat forum for the libertarians and plutorepublicans to grind away at "why don't we totally defund public education, it's clearly not working". Someone will misquote ol' Thom Jefferson.
God, I would like to be able to differentiate this week from the one that came before. Why is this what Slashdot has become? How is this "news for nerds"? This looks much more like "bait for hot-headed middle-aged guys".
Slashdot Mirror
"Well-regulated militia" usually boils down to "seven guys in a cabin in the woods, with bad beards and a bunch of guns". The first time a cop or a marshall comes out to resolve some unrelated dispute on or adjacent to the property, things escalate, because "Hey you feds! We have guns! Get off our land! Live free or die!" That just never ends well. In fact it always always ends badly.
But my point was, seven guys with guns in a cabin in the woods is not any kind of deterrent for the Feds. If any sizeable branch of the government were ever intentionally turned on the American people, seven guys with guns and bad beards would probably be the first ones up against the wall.
But you're kidding yourself. Nobody's going to turn the US military on the American populace. This is just a dumb survivalist fantasy that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. America is not Syria.
"Stallion"? Maybe you're the one who's projecting.
Yeah, here is the thing right here. "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." This is clearly out of date. You can have all the guns you want - your sawed-off shotguns, your full-auto assault weapons with hundred round cartridges, rainbow unicorn uzi's with sparkle decals, whatever. Knock yourself out. None of that makes you part of a militia, and actually a militia full of guys with guns is no deterrent to some kind of (entirely imaginary) land invasion of North America.
a.) Wars simply are not fought that way any more. The next war will be fought with drones, robotic autonomous vehicles, with persistent surveillance, with computers, and (possibly) organic weapons, pulse weapons, and in orbit.
b.) No country in its right mind would have any interest in invading the USA. What could possibly be gained from it? Can you imagine what a horrendous pain it would be? We can't even hold down sparsely-populated agrarian society from the last century (e.g. Afghanistan) with the largest military in the entire world.
There's no UN invasion coming. There's no jack-booted socialist brigade marching across the Atlantic to steal your concealed carry privileges. There's no invasion coming from the ghetto. Get over it. There's no deterrent effect because there's no one to be deterred.
If you want to own a gun, because it makes you feel powerful, and because you can secretly fantasize about blowing away the guy who cut ahead of you in line at Home Depot or whatever, go ahead. But stop hiding behind the second amendment, because the militia thing doesn't even work as a fantasy any more.
"[...] an endless series of little experiments that have no practical application. They all end up as science papers and PhDs."
People who wrote science papers;
Sir Isaac Newton ...
Charles Darwin
Ptolemy
Albert Einstein
Craig Ventner
Carl Sagan
Jonas Salk
Barbary McClintock
James Watson
Marie Curie
Pythagoras
Robert Oppenheimer
Allan Turing
Kurt Gödel
Galen
Johnny Von Neumann
Stanislaw Ulam
People who just manned up and established working space stations without doing all those little fiddly science things;
There's an article in this month's IEEE Spectrum about the Air Force pursuing the idea of "plug-and-play" satellites;
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/satellites/us-air-forces-plugandplay-satellites
Note that RBSP is engineered to function to a region which most spacecraft avoid or pass through only briefly. There's a lot that's different in the design of these craft relative to a typical LEO satellite.
BTW, launch video is available here;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mlaQothGWA
Wow, I just want to say, this is the first OP in a while that is actually news to me! Great post! Especially, I prior had no idea that NSSDC exists! Cool beans!
Cite or GTFO.
My mother, in her little blue Ford escort, was crushed to death under an oncoming SUV that was gigantic relative to the size of its passenger, and barely controllable on an icy Buffalo-area road in winter. I am, understandably, dubious about this constant "CAFE kills" blurp that occurs in every last conversation of fuel economy. I'm willing to bet that if most people used the same size vehicles, rather than vehicle size being related to income level, everyone would drive more carefully and charitably.
The cost of waiting a week to launch RBSP after a hurricaine has passed is waaaaaaay less than the cost of letting RBSP crash because of weather. RBSP's development costs - I don't know for sure, but on the order of 7 or 8 hundred million dollars(?) It's not the same as "hey, let's go for it on fourth-and-long". This isn't football. Nobody's going to think its a "ballsy" decision to launch a rocket in an oncoming hurricaine (unless that what it was designed to do.) What they'll think it is, is "stupid".
"To decry weapons in the hands of people, is to say that people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions."
Why does this argument apply to handguns, but not say bazookas, flamethrowers, rocket-propelled grenades? Why can't the people be trusted to make their own best decisions with bazookas?
We all consent to allow the government to have a monopoly on violence. That's what, for instance, police officers are for. They're our representatives who we've given some powers to that we believe ordinary citizens shouldn't have. If you feel like it's your job to carry around a gun and shoot people who are going postal, then maybe you should consider becoming a police officer.
There's no connotation that what they're hoping to produce with a reprap would have any practical use other than shooting people. That's one thing I object to. Oh hey, just while I'm typing this, lookee at the new headline that just popped up: "Several People Shot Near the Empire State Building". Yeah, I trust everybody in America to make sane, reasonable choices with regard to guns.
This. A million times this. DOES IT DAWN ON YOU ALL THAT NOONE IN AMERICA IS HAVING ANY PROBLEMS GETTING ANY GUNS? THEE ARE MORE GUNS THAN PEOPLE! Try thinking of something else for a moment!
Plus, if you're really worried about the UN jackbooted thugs coming to take your guns away, reprap probably won't help you much. The feds will soon have an indefinitely large supply of drones, military robots, persistent surveillance, ballistic armor, over-the-horizon standoff weaponry, OH, and they're monitoring your cellphone, your land lines, your emails, etc. Please, by all means, make a zip gun that shoots a 22 shell. That will hold off the UN hordes. (Maybe it would have been wiser to limit the defense budget decades ago, if this is really what you are worried about, Mr. Live-Free-Or-Die?)
Maybe someone can design some 3-d printable forceps for late-term abortions?
This, a million times this. I am very disappointed TiME was not selected. Hopefully there will be a 'next time' for Titan.
BTW TiME would have had a 'mast' with sensors, that in effect would have acted to some degree as a sail. NASA had gone so far as to model the winds over Titan's seas, primarily to see if the vessel could reasonably function there, but the possibility of using the mast to get some wind propulsion surely was being considered. So, a boat, yes.
"The problem is that government funded science hasn't really done that much for us." This is just utter BS. Its hard for me to imagine a more fallacous statement. If you include that science that was done under the aegis of fighting wars, its hard to think of a facet of life or a field of endeavor that hasn't been affected by public investment.
Just for starters, a lot of the early development of computers was done by governments during and after the war, and private actors that participated (for instance the IAS - read TURING'S CATHEDRAL) accepted public money for their work.
Lots of the work at sequencing the human (and other) genome was funded by NIH, and the private actors that later contributed all received money and their training through NIH.
Most medicines, vaccines, new treatments in the medical world are to some degree the result of public investment.
I'm just going to type a little list - you are welcome to look these up and check for accuracy
Radar
GPS
the internet
drones
supercomputers
satellites
vitamin-fortified foods
sonar
velcro and tang
You're the same guy from the other NASA thread. Don't you ever get tired of crabbing about the government?
What you're saying is beginning to sound more and more like some kind of objectivist viewpoint. That doesn't immediately discredit it, but I'd suggest (especially if you're going to talk about science, here, and make assertions as if you know something about it) you need to back up what you're saying with some (any) kind of citation or evidence.
"government funding has crowded out private for basic science" - what? Is there any evidence you can point to for this?
"researchers now focus on maintaining funding rather than doing science or delivering value" - again, what? Researchers get paid, and get better positions and more credibilty, by publishing in peer-reviewed journals, novel and substantial research. You can't tread water as a researcher. There's not enough money around for that to work for very long. But if you have some evidence or even anecdotal data to show, please do so.
"vaccines and antibiotics[...] an expensive testing situation where developing a valuable drug isn't sufficiently profitable even though it can save many lives" that's at least a swag at a particular example. It's a particularly bad one however, because people nearly universally demand and expect that new human vaccines and medicines to be thoroughly tested. The government is pretty clearly reflecting the will of the majority on this. And yes, it's expensive, but the work itself is big, and rigorous, and the liabilities for screwing it up are enormous. None of that has to do with commercial spaceflight however.
In bed!
"If these missions are so worthwhile, then why are there only one or two of them?"
There are currently more than a few unmanned NASA space missions;
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html
"Point here is that we're chosen a few big projects over many more scientific productive projects, by abandoning economies of scale. It's basic engineering and economics."
There are no small, inexpensive missions to Saturn. Space is hard. Take a look at the rate of success at NASA, and compare it to that of other nations' space programs. It's not that other nations don't see the value in doing them, or that they see an obvious flaw in our approach.
- JAXA's Akatsuki-Venus mission failed to enter orbit around Venus last year.
- Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Martian satellites failed to even escape Earth's orbit.
- Russia's resupply mission to ISS exploded less than six minutes after takeoff. (August 2011)
- ESA's Mars Express mission lost it's Beagle-2 lander. (crashed? nobody knows.)
- Cassini's Huygens probe (ESA) had a fair number of problems, including, at one point, its spinning in the opposite to intended direction during descent.
- India's Chandrayaan lunar probe operated for 312 days before failing, rather than its nominal 2-year mission (probably for thermal reasons.)
NASA's record, and particularly on Mars, distinguishes itself from those of all other countrys' space programs.
Is your argument really that NASA is somehow spending more per mission than it could or should? If so, I can assure you, having worked in both, the relative degree of oversite and budgetary controls for NASA is at least an order of magnitude higher than it is for the defense and intelligence communities. And you're getting good money for your tax dollar at NASA, because a lot of the things NASA does simply can't be done anywhere else, at any price. Also there are plenty of people grinding away day and night trying to think of how to do planetary exploration more cheaply. Of that you can be sure.
Is your argument instead that NASA shouldn't be doing planetary science? Because that's kind of in its charter.
Is your argument that you don't get why anyone is doing planetary science? You can say "Eh" all you want, but there is very clearly a scientific community that sees the value in this work. Lots of scientists expatriate from other countries to work in or with NASA, for starters.
Is your argument that we should spend less money on space, and more money on (some other scientific endeavor)? Science is a meritocracy and if you've a great new idea, you should put it forward. But by its very nature, it's hard to know what scientific undertakings will bear fruit.
NASA's budget is about a half of one percent of your federal tax dollar. If your real aim is to slim down the federal budget, NASA is way down in the noise. You ought to start with defense, intelligence, entitlements, and tax evasion - those are the biggies.
Space science is another such endeavor. It's been used as rationalization for some of the most ridiculously overpriced infrastructure (the International Space Station) ever built. Even the unmanned space programs have devolved into building new overpriced widgets rather than actual space science.
New Horizons - first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
Kepler - (at least) tripled the number of known exoplanets.
Messenger - first artificial satellite of Mercury.
Cassini/Heugens - first spacecraft orbiting Saturn and its moons. Discovered methane lakes on Titan. Discovered cryovolcanoes on Enceladus. First landing on Titan. [...]
Dawn - first close-up images of major asteroids (Ceres, Vesta). First demonstration of ion thrusters in space.
Radiation Belt Storm Probes - understanding the (critical to life on earth) Van Allen radiation belt.
Solar Probe Plus - closest man-made object to the Sun.
[...]
It's a pernicious myth that the unmanned space program is not producing new and significant results. I really don't understand why it keeps recurring on this website, amazingly. Is it a myth born out of abject ignorance? (If so, go RTF NASA websites.) Or is it an article of faith of people of a specific political bent, absolutely unsubstantiated by facts or actual knowledge of space science?
Their ideas are so elegant that I can’t believe they haven’t already been done, and because it would take about a week for someone with very modest venture capitol (that part they are missing) to implement the idea well This is where the campaign is asking for your trust and your donations to allow us to setup a new model for funding space, but we can’t give you the details, because if we do the idea is going to get built by someone else and the profit will go somewhere other than to researchers.
This is kind of asking us to take a lot on faith. "Send us your money so that we can do some secret thing that's going to be great. Oh, and I really need money to cover my staff's salary." You're not going to find a more passionate advocate for space exploration than me, but even I feel leery about contributing given the opacity of the enterprise.
My second thought is, if you do successfully create some quasi-third-option (not public, not private) enterprise to do actual planetary exploration, it is by definition competitive with NASA. Immediately, immediately, Ron Paul and all the strict constitutionalists and tea partiers and deficit hawks are going to point to Uwingu and say "Hey, we don't need a federal agency for that! Look, private enterprise is doing it!" It would be just another, better reason to kill NASA by budget cuts.
My suggestion is that any OP with the 'politics' tag should not allow anonymous comments. Geez I'm embarrassed to have an account on this site!
Steve Jobs is making me do it!
Steve, Steve, please stop! I don't want a new, smaller connector! AAAAAAAGGH!
His new connector is going to only connect to my new phone Steve is making me buy!! And no one else's! And I can't stop him! He's already in my house! At my refridgerator, eating all the peanut butter!
And on his new connector, there's a PRIME NUMBER of pins! NINETEEN! It's IIINDIIIIVIIIISSSSSIIIIIIIBLLLLLLLE!!
His connector is going to read all my iTunes playlists and delete all the the old Yes! and make me listen to new Yes! And Night Ranger! And Starship! HE BUILT THIS CITY!!!
His secret UN jackbooted thugs are going to come into my parents' basement, and make me give up all of my mini-USB! and my micro-USB! Even though they signed! They're watching me right now! They're listening, through the fillings in my teeth!
Steve just won't quit!!!! BECAUSE now, he's a zombie CEO! Zombie!
(I'm sorry, but I'm losing it. This is the dumbest thread ever on Slashdot. If you don't like the connectors, get a different phone. Or, you know, like the article says, get an adaptor.)
In fairness, a description of the other two competing Discovery proposals is here,
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2012/05/and-discovery-nominees-are.html
along with links to NASA quad charts for each, and to larger articles discussing each proposal in detail.
NASA is due (this month?) to make a final selection between three competing Discovery-class proposals. Among them is the Titan Mare Explorer, the first attempt to put a boat on an extraterrestrial sea. How cool would that be? Good overviews of the proposal are here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Mare_Explorer
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2011/08/time-and-updates.html
A more detailed description is here;
http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/titan2010/presentations/aharonson.pdf
Disclosure: If the TiME mission is selected, I am hoping to work on it.
Perhaps he also should have mentioned that he intends for Microsoft to sell more, higher value products and to earn more money!
How do they think of these things? They just must be thinking all the time over there at Microsoft!
http://www.emedicinehealth.com/liver_transplant/article_em.htm ;
"Determining whose need is most critical: The United Network for Organ Sharing uses measurements of clinical and laboratory problems to divide patients into groups that determine who is in most critical need of a liver transplant. In early 2002, UNOS enacted a major modification to the way in which people were assigned the need for a liver transplant. Previously, patients awaiting livers were ranked as status 1, 2A, 2B, and 3, according to the severity of their current disease. Although the status 1 listing has remained, all other patients are now classified using the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) scoring system if they are aged 18 years or older, or the Pediatric End-Stage Liver Disease (PELD) scoring system if they are younger than 18 years. These scoring methods were set up so that donor livers could be distributed to those who need them most urgently [...blah blah blah...]"
No single doctor can determine who gets a transplant and who does not. There's a rigorous process to determine need, there's a council or committee overseeing decisions, the whole process is documented, insurance companies are scrutinizing the whole thing very closely. Just because some elected officials chose to question a specific decision, that does not and shouldn't imply that the system is broken or corrupt. Imagine the lawsuits that would ensue if people had plausible reasons to believe the system was tainted!
And I hardly think having to fly from California and buy a home to convalesce in in Memphis could be fairly described as "convenient".
The need to have at least one FPP a day implying that Steve Jobs is the Anti-Christ is pretty badly coloring the judgements of the editors here, especially now that Steve is dead (or is he?) Get a new obsession, Slashdot!
I'm sorry, this is just too much. Every week there's at least a couple of these what's-wrong-with-American-education stories. It's always that Americans are doing it wrong, somewhere else is doing it better.
It's entirely reasonable to survey the different approaches to teaching and try to select the best for your own kids/schools/country. But the underlying nationalistic streak in all these articles, and the bogus tone of imminent disaster, is just baiting. And you're going to provide a big fat forum for the libertarians and plutorepublicans to grind away at "why don't we totally defund public education, it's clearly not working". Someone will misquote ol' Thom Jefferson.
God, I would like to be able to differentiate this week from the one that came before. Why is this what Slashdot has become? How is this "news for nerds"? This looks much more like "bait for hot-headed middle-aged guys".