Er, no. NASA's major expense is paying *people*. People eat, need housing, often use cars, and so forth. Core inflation is a fairly reasonable indicator of NASA's needs.
You know, at the height of the "illegal immigrants are killing America!" hype, I saw a fairly well-researched and well-reasoned piece that basically laid out how much they cost America and the answer is a lot less than the politicians and pundits were claiming (or at least implying). They don't tend to use many public services like Medicare, mostly it's just public schools. (And it's not clear to me that the actual attendees aren't mostly born here, making them US citizens.) On the other hand, most of them pay taxes: they certainly pay the local sales tax and property taxes. In fact, after factoring in what they do for the economy, it was likely that the illegal immigrants were actually giving us all a boost rather than costing us money. (Not that this makes it all OK, I hasten to add, it's not a purely economic question even if the pundits/politicians want to scare you that way.)
Budget surpluses are not accidental as your post would seem to imply. It's true that short-falls can be due to bad luck (a Katrina, a 9/11, or what have you hits), but given the way our Federal budgets are definitely skewed toward deficit spending (everyone wants their pork and no one in Congress cares about sticking the next generation with the bill), any surplus takes real effort and will from the White House and the Hill. This will continue to be the case until such time as we can find a way to penalize our legislators for deficit-spending.
So maybe the lesson here is "spaceflight is hard," and not "NASA sucks"? You're talking about writing software for custom-built hardware to do things that no Earth-based software has to do. And it's not like you can beta test stuff out like Mozilla does, either. If there's some obscure combination of hardware and software settings that will lead to a glitch, but everything is fine otherwise, it'll be damn hard to locate without spending many millions more for extremely extensive testing. There's a point of diminishing returns, perfection simply doesn't happen.
NASA didn't even write most of the flight software for Cassini until it was launched. (So I've been told, this was before my time on the project.) If you think about it, it makes sense: you don't even know if the spacecraft is going to make it into Earth orbit, let alone to the target. Why spend millions writing the stuff that you don't have to until you are pretty sure it'll make it.
Now, what you're personally complaining about is an update. A patch, if you will. Are you saying that NASA should never update software to improve performance on multi-decade missions?
Why are you ignoring the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Russians, and Europeans for baseline comparisons? Not to mention our own home-grown private industries like Ball, Boeing, and Lockheed-Martin. Or perhaps you'd prefer the military (as the grandfather post suggest), which also flies spacecraft?
OK, lookit. There are about a dozen instruments on Cassini. One (1) failed to return data on this pass. Yes, this pass was good for CDA, but it isn't the only instrument. It isn't even the only one that can sample the plume in situ. INMS, RPWS, MIMI, and CAPS all come to mind as candidates to give us useful information (INMS in particular can help clarify composition). All of these returned their data from what I've heard. (And no, that's all I can say until those teams want to speak up.)
CDA's failure is unfortunate to be sure, but it isn't catastrophic. Could the entire news media please stop sensationalizing this?
"They" is a pretty vague pronoun here. While this certainly happened, I'm unaware of any evidence that such behavior was encouraged or even approved of by the Founding Fathers, or even the population as a whole. It's generally easy to get a some angry, vicious people together to commit acts of terror. This should not be used to tar an entire population, however. (Either in our history, or in the Middle East today.)
Incidentally, I suspect that the Civil War provides better examples of very deliberate terrorism. Both sides committed acts and I don't know of either side acting to stop its own. (And I'm not even going to get into the distinction between terrorism and "total war", there.)
I had a similar response to Hyperspace (although my specific irritations are lost in the mists of bad memory and over a decade of time). Honestly, I'm not really inclined to give a special weight to an inventor of String Theory anyway; I'm very unimpressed with the scientific merits of that theory and I rather feel it borders on a non-science.
The less fuel you have, the shorter the mission and/or less chances to change your mind. Yep, reaction mass (Cassini doesn't have fuel per se) is one of the most common limiting factors in missions. (Although it should be noted, not the only one.) As the mission wears on, we're having to scale back the kinds of things we want to do with the spacecraft because the reaction mass is getting too precious.
One minor quibble, you don't just do navigation images after a fly-by. They're being taken all the time to monitor the spacecraft's trajectory.
You know, I've been valiantly trying to get "megameters" accepted in my discipline, but I'm having little luck. I sort of snapped when I saw someone label a plot in "kilo-kilometers".
It's not. The plumes extend well beyond 1000 km. And you'll notice that we cut through a much brighter (hence denser) part of the plume before passing under the moon as well.
Very true, although it's a bit more complicated still: chaos pretty well guarantees that even if you plan out a great trajectory in advance, you'll drift and end up in trouble down-stream. Plus there are inevitable changes required due to problems (like with Huygens or changing models of the Titan atmosphere) or due to changing objectives: someone wants to go closer to a given moon, that takes arranging.
A lot of trajectory planning seems to be an art, from where I stand on the sidelines (albeit with a decent view). The tour-designers have a bag of tricks that the reach into to get us what we want. They're amazingly good at what they do.
Any time any maneuver like this is considered, there's a study group assembled to examine the risks. As some articles are mentioning, a 25-km flyby was considered, but was deemed a little too risky after looking at the studies.
The spacecraft is flying 200 km from the south pole of Enceladus. The plume extends *thousands* of kilometers into space. We're not passing through the top of the plume by any means. We're getting right into it.
Well, some journalists. I know science journalists with advanced degrees in their fields. If the need of such people were to rise, I don't doubt that we'd see more get trained.
It's not entirely clear that even a non-boring paper (and I've read some of those, too) would be accessible to all but the most keen person outside the immediate field. Apart from reading the abstract and conclusions, that is. (Which is all a lot of scientists typically read, come to it...)
You are repeating feminist nonsense from decades ago. Nope, I've seen the studies. (Actually read a some of 'em even.) Unless you can site a peer-reviewed study to back up your claims (and you haven't even tried yet), I'm going to continue to suspect that you haven't even checked, relying rather on your assumptions.
You are repeating feminist nonsense from decades ago. Men have no problems with women studying sciences. In my electrical engineering program, almost everyone I knew would have loved to have girls in our classes. Gosh, then all the cases of sexism I've witnessed first-hand (like your posts so far) are just my imagination!? Not to mention the peer-reviewed research on the topic?
Ah ha, yeah, you are a Wellesley grad. Nope. Once again failing in your flying leap assumptions
You're a bit too defensive, and your willingness to throw around perjoratives without much provocation demonstrates that you are in fact a militant, hypocritical feminist with little concern for the facts. Defensive maybe, but you started the perjoratives and the insults so you're in a poor position to whine about feeling hurt.
Seriously. You're probably a smart girl, but the vast majority of men - particularly as they get older - just don't want to deal with that feminist bullshit. Epic fail, I'm definitely a man. You're simply a misogynist.
My recollection of the story is the exact opposite. He tried to apply the theory once and actually failed. But this is a dim, distant recollection floating in the mists of my undergraduate (or perhaps even high school) years, back when such stories were told on clay tablets...
If you're correct, I totally agree that the test is stronger that I had suggested.
Wow, sexism *and* illogical assumptions all in one post. Well done.
It is a fact that there are more scientists that are men than women, by a very large margin. Not really. There is a gap, but it's shrinking (albeit more slowly than many of us would like). The last statistics I saw indicated that more women than men got bachelors degrees in natural sciences and around half of all PhDs. Note that this varies quite a lot by field, however. Physics, for example, is much lower at around 20-25% women earning advanced degrees.
Women are simply not interested in being scientists or engineers. This is also untrue. Girls are lower levels of education are quite interested in studying science. It's only when sexist jerks start telling them that they it's un-feminine to be a scientist and that they can't do it (overtly or subtly) that they back off. This was the crux of the issue around Larry Summer's comments a few years ago. He, like you, was pretending like data doesn't exist on this matter, preferring his own assumptions instead.
While there are a reasonable number of women in the medically related sciences, few study engineering or physics related disciplines. 20-25% of the total fraction of physicists seems as if it's pushing the meaning of "few", doesn't it?
You clearly have a) not attended a major university and studied a scientific discipline and b) likely received a liberal arts education that focused excessively on perpetuating the myth of egalitarianism. And you clearly need to get out more and stop hanging out with the same guys who share your sexist views. I actually *did* receive a liberal arts education. My alma mater has shown that women both want to be physics majors and are capable of it by sustaining the highest number graduated in the country (apart from Bryn Mawr). Perhaps *you* attended the wrong school?
Speaking as someone who has to read the peer-reviewed media, I seriously doubt more than the tiniest of fractions of the population would read scientific papers if they had access. It's only by sheer force of will that *I* slog though papers, and I have an intrinsic motivation as a fellow scientist.
Basically, I'm saying that most of us are really boring writers.
From what I've read, you're probably right, although it doesn't negate the example. (Precisely because, as you noted, the theory was adopted too readily.) I actually don't feel like Mercury's perihelion precession was a good test since the theory was designed around that observation. It definitely gave the new theory extra merit, but it doesn't count for as much as post-theory experiments that support the new theory.
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Er, no. NASA's major expense is paying *people*. People eat, need housing, often use cars, and so forth. Core inflation is a fairly reasonable indicator of NASA's needs.
You know, at the height of the "illegal immigrants are killing America!" hype, I saw a fairly well-researched and well-reasoned piece that basically laid out how much they cost America and the answer is a lot less than the politicians and pundits were claiming (or at least implying). They don't tend to use many public services like Medicare, mostly it's just public schools. (And it's not clear to me that the actual attendees aren't mostly born here, making them US citizens.) On the other hand, most of them pay taxes: they certainly pay the local sales tax and property taxes. In fact, after factoring in what they do for the economy, it was likely that the illegal immigrants were actually giving us all a boost rather than costing us money. (Not that this makes it all OK, I hasten to add, it's not a purely economic question even if the pundits/politicians want to scare you that way.)
Budget surpluses are not accidental as your post would seem to imply. It's true that short-falls can be due to bad luck (a Katrina, a 9/11, or what have you hits), but given the way our Federal budgets are definitely skewed toward deficit spending (everyone wants their pork and no one in Congress cares about sticking the next generation with the bill), any surplus takes real effort and will from the White House and the Hill. This will continue to be the case until such time as we can find a way to penalize our legislators for deficit-spending.
Er, I think you're stridently agreeing with me, here.
So maybe the lesson here is "spaceflight is hard," and not "NASA sucks"? You're talking about writing software for custom-built hardware to do things that no Earth-based software has to do. And it's not like you can beta test stuff out like Mozilla does, either. If there's some obscure combination of hardware and software settings that will lead to a glitch, but everything is fine otherwise, it'll be damn hard to locate without spending many millions more for extremely extensive testing. There's a point of diminishing returns, perfection simply doesn't happen.
NASA didn't even write most of the flight software for Cassini until it was launched. (So I've been told, this was before my time on the project.) If you think about it, it makes sense: you don't even know if the spacecraft is going to make it into Earth orbit, let alone to the target. Why spend millions writing the stuff that you don't have to until you are pretty sure it'll make it.
Now, what you're personally complaining about is an update. A patch, if you will. Are you saying that NASA should never update software to improve performance on multi-decade missions?
Why are you ignoring the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Russians, and Europeans for baseline comparisons? Not to mention our own home-grown private industries like Ball, Boeing, and Lockheed-Martin. Or perhaps you'd prefer the military (as the grandfather post suggest), which also flies spacecraft?
OK, lookit. There are about a dozen instruments on Cassini. One (1) failed to return data on this pass. Yes, this pass was good for CDA, but it isn't the only instrument. It isn't even the only one that can sample the plume in situ. INMS, RPWS, MIMI, and CAPS all come to mind as candidates to give us useful information (INMS in particular can help clarify composition). All of these returned their data from what I've heard. (And no, that's all I can say until those teams want to speak up.)
CDA's failure is unfortunate to be sure, but it isn't catastrophic. Could the entire news media please stop sensationalizing this?
"They" is a pretty vague pronoun here. While this certainly happened, I'm unaware of any evidence that such behavior was encouraged or even approved of by the Founding Fathers, or even the population as a whole. It's generally easy to get a some angry, vicious people together to commit acts of terror. This should not be used to tar an entire population, however. (Either in our history, or in the Middle East today.)
Incidentally, I suspect that the Civil War provides better examples of very deliberate terrorism. Both sides committed acts and I don't know of either side acting to stop its own. (And I'm not even going to get into the distinction between terrorism and "total war", there.)
I had a similar response to Hyperspace (although my specific irritations are lost in the mists of bad memory and over a decade of time). Honestly, I'm not really inclined to give a special weight to an inventor of String Theory anyway; I'm very unimpressed with the scientific merits of that theory and I rather feel it borders on a non-science.
One minor quibble, you don't just do navigation images after a fly-by. They're being taken all the time to monitor the spacecraft's trajectory.
You know, I've been valiantly trying to get "megameters" accepted in my discipline, but I'm having little luck. I sort of snapped when I saw someone label a plot in "kilo-kilometers".
It's not. The plumes extend well beyond 1000 km. And you'll notice that we cut through a much brighter (hence denser) part of the plume before passing under the moon as well.
Very true, although it's a bit more complicated still: chaos pretty well guarantees that even if you plan out a great trajectory in advance, you'll drift and end up in trouble down-stream. Plus there are inevitable changes required due to problems (like with Huygens or changing models of the Titan atmosphere) or due to changing objectives: someone wants to go closer to a given moon, that takes arranging.
A lot of trajectory planning seems to be an art, from where I stand on the sidelines (albeit with a decent view). The tour-designers have a bag of tricks that the reach into to get us what we want. They're amazingly good at what they do.
Any time any maneuver like this is considered, there's a study group assembled to examine the risks. As some articles are mentioning, a 25-km flyby was considered, but was deemed a little too risky after looking at the studies.
The optical instruments won't be set to the ram direction during a plume pass.
The spacecraft is flying 200 km from the south pole of Enceladus. The plume extends *thousands* of kilometers into space. We're not passing through the top of the plume by any means. We're getting right into it.
Early afternoon is, I believe, the plan. JPL (http://jpl.nasa.gov) and CICLOPS (http://ciclops.org) are both planning releases that I know of.
Well, some journalists. I know science journalists with advanced degrees in their fields. If the need of such people were to rise, I don't doubt that we'd see more get trained.
It's not entirely clear that even a non-boring paper (and I've read some of those, too) would be accessible to all but the most keen person outside the immediate field. Apart from reading the abstract and conclusions, that is. (Which is all a lot of scientists typically read, come to it...)
My recollection of the story is the exact opposite. He tried to apply the theory once and actually failed. But this is a dim, distant recollection floating in the mists of my undergraduate (or perhaps even high school) years, back when such stories were told on clay tablets...
If you're correct, I totally agree that the test is stronger that I had suggested.
Speaking as someone who has to read the peer-reviewed media, I seriously doubt more than the tiniest of fractions of the population would read scientific papers if they had access. It's only by sheer force of will that *I* slog though papers, and I have an intrinsic motivation as a fellow scientist.
Basically, I'm saying that most of us are really boring writers.
From what I've read, you're probably right, although it doesn't negate the example. (Precisely because, as you noted, the theory was adopted too readily.) I actually don't feel like Mercury's perihelion precession was a good test since the theory was designed around that observation. It definitely gave the new theory extra merit, but it doesn't count for as much as post-theory experiments that support the new theory.