A. Robots will get better at tasks like that. B. Robots designed so that they can be worked on by other robots may well be built with fasteners superior to screws and bolts.
This article seems to be about a grudge match between Paul Kalas, who was the lead in the discovery of this planet and Ray Jayawardhana, another astronomer who seems to want to be the first to have directly imaged an exoplanet. Since Kalas came first, Jayawardhana's only option seems to be to discredit the earlier discovery. One of his arguments is that Fomalhaut B wasn't really directly imaged since it probably has rings (accounting for its brightness) and so the rings were what was imaged and not the planet. The chief argument seems to be that the third picture taken of it doesn't match the expected orbit from the previous 2 pictures. The previous 2 pictures, however, were taken with an instrument that broke before the third picture was taken, so the accuracy of the third picture is in doubt. In any case, no-one seems to be doubting that it's something really, really big, but nowhere near big enough to be a star, that's been imaged in another star system. So, if it's not an exoplanet, it's still something extraordinary.
Mike Green, who you quoted, is a retired professor of pathology who doubts "spontaneous human combustion". The coroner in this article is Dr Ciaran McLoughlin, who concluded that this was a case of "spontaneous human combustion". Annoyingly, the article says that the deceased was found lying with his head towards a fireplace, but that a fire in the fireplace was ruled out as a cause without explaining why it was ruled out as a cause. It may well be the case that they concluded that it was ridiculous that an ember thrown out by a fire could have lit someone on fire like that, but still went with the even more far-fetched idea that he simply burst into flames from within. It would be nice if they included a few more of the actual facts. It would also be nice if they stopped repeatedly referring to it as "spontaneous combustion" over and over again in the article. "Spontaneous combustion" is a real phenomenon (it once happened to the trash can in our kitchen when it was full of linseed oil soaked paper towels) with clearly understood mechanics whereas "spontaneous human combustion" is a dubious explanation for a small collection of events without a good explanation. Although, as far as lacking an explanation, it's interesting how many of these cases occur near, or even _in_ fireplaces.
We have the resources to feed everyone right now, but it wouldn't be permanent. Quite aside from population increase, modern agriculture is dependent on easily accessible petroleum and natural gas. Not just for agricultural equipment, but also because modern agriculture is completely unsustainable and relies on fertilisers mostly made from petrochemicals. When we run out of easy fossil fuels, we'll start running out of food.
Hmm, diagram on that page is very unsatisfactory. Hard to tell if they do use interlocking segments with an o-ring in their design or not. If you actually pour in place, I suppose you could probably do away with the o-ring design by just leaving enough clear space that you can weld the inner sections together safely, then pour directly on top of the previously solidified propellant rather than having to do the careful alignment and rely on relatively flimsy o-rings. Maybe it just doesn't matter if hot gases leak out between segments. The reason it was a problem with the shuttle is because the escaping gases burned their way into the main liquid fueled tank. If your solid fuel rocket is just a single column and not attached to anything, it may not matter.
Regarding the temperature going up a little, try this. Boil some water, the temperature won't go above about 100 degrees Celsius. When the water has all boiled away however, the temperature regulation mechanism is gone and the temperature goes up drastically. If you observed the boiling water simplistically, you could say "over thirty minutes, the temperature of the system has not gone up by more than a margin of error." while ignoring the fact that more than half the water is gone. Earth's climate similarly has plenty of heat sinks, such as artic and antartic ice. They melt, and the temperature of the rest of the system stays more constant. Climatologists have to look at a lot of factors. This is one otherwise smart guy looking at a very complex issue in a simplistic way and concluding that it's bunk because he doesn't understand it, but he's used to understanding things and being smarter than other people, so he assumes that he does understand it and that the people studying are all idiots.
Uh, yeah. If you're not married, they can set you up for plenty of other things as well. As for fire regulations... I'm pretty sure framing someone for something (adultery is a felony in at least one state), presumably for blackmail purposes, is already a criminal act. Violating fire regulations isn't exactly going to be much of a stretch for people willing to do that.
Peer review is done, as the name suggests, by peers. Management who will muzzle you for political reasons are not peers, they are censors. They're not peers, even if they're nominally scientists as well. The word peer suggests an equal. Politically motivated management can be considered not the equals of those they manage either because they are in a position of authority and are therefore above those they manage or because they are scum and below those they manage. Take your pick, basically.
Since a super-Jupiter would probably have a higher escape velocity than Jupiter, it might be easier to strip atmosphere from Jupiter than from a super-jupiter. Also, I'm assuming that solar wind that hits a gas giant dead on probably results in net absorption rather than net loss of atmosphere and that most of the loss occurs where the solar wind hits the sphere of the planet at a tangent. Jupiter does, presumably (unless the material is very much denser), have a smaller circumference than a super-jupiter, so that might slow the loss by a bit. Of course, none of that makes a huge difference, like you said, it would still take close enough to forever that it couldn't have happened yet for a planet like Earth to have once been a Jupiter.
Sure, and people back in the 19th century and earlier surely said, in regards to debtors prisons, something like: "It's always hard to hear about [life imprisonment] levied against individuals who have no way to pay [their debts] but what does the guy expect? He knew what he was doing was illegal." There's worlds of middle ground between no consequences for copyright infringement and 15 years worth of US median-level income for a small infraction. That's where the constitutionality of the fine comes in. It all depends on how you define "excessive" in the eighth amendment. Only the insane or the callous consider these kinds of fines to not be excessive.
How much can you compress and cut a track for it to still be infringing though? You could reduce the length of the track so it's just one large but still infringing segment, or you could just choose easily compressed tracks such as a version of 4'33" which is 4 minutes and 33 minutes of silence (actually ambient noise, but another artists one minute of silence was considered derivative enough to be infringing, so apparently any recording of silence is sufficient). Then you could probably compress it hundreds of times. There's no reason you couldn't get the files down to 10 KB, and have them still be infringing. They'd still be "perfect digital copies" even though the quality is awful. Then you'd be able to get the entire US GDP worth on one 1 TB drive. For that matter, we have 3 TB drives now. Even easier to fit the whole economy worth on there.
Then, there's the question of duplication of the same track. Is two copies of the same track worth 300,000? If that's the case, what about symlinks? What about 100,000,000 copies of the same track? No? How about 10,000 different songs and 9,999 derivative works of each, differing by some small part? Easy to store in a file-system with a custom compression algorithm or that supports block-based data de-duplication. The industry associations, the lawmakers, the executive branch and the courts have demonstrated that there's no depths of ridiculousness they won't stoop to, so I don't see any reason any of these ideas would be invalid.
I think they "get around" (ignore) that because the torture isn't a punishment, it's just part of "enhanced interrogation". In other words, they'll apply it to the innocent just as readily as the guilty, so it's fair to all.
Chances are pretty good that the GP is one of those people who thinks that s/he is more intelligent than most. Most likely that's because s/he really is more intelligent than most. It doesn't take much to be above average intelligence.
it's also kind of appalling that they still do these transects with some guys in a bush plane: no continual video record, no constant gps track, etc.
They mentioned that they take the whales position relative to the plane with a clinometer and the plane has its own instruments which must include GPS, so they'll either be using the plane's GPS info or other instrument info or the laptop they use for recording has its own GPS. As for a continual video record, Dr. Monnet points out that they have a lot of trouble even getting good photos so they mostly don't bother. Without some very expensive and bulky instruments that would need to be mounted outside the plane, making a video record would be a ridiculous proposition considering their mission. The human eye can simply track a much larger area. With a video camera, zoom out enough that you cover the area the eye can cover and you get no detail and can't spot a thing. Zoom in enough and you can pick up things the eye couldn't spot, sure, but it's so shaky from a plane that it's practically worthless and you're only covering a small portion of what the spotters can see with their eyes. Dr. Monnet points out that what they can actually spot depends very much on the particular spotter and the conditions that day. In any case, their primary mission is tracking whale migration over time. Catching interesting things on video isn't really part of that.
As Dr. Monnet points out during the actual transcript of the interview, these bears probably drowned because the sea ice in the area went away (which is a pretty undisputed fact) therefore the bears have to swim much further and the waves during storms are much higher.
It's very clear from the interview though, that the paper wasn't meant to be some big significant thing. It was meant to be a report to a nature journal that they saw more polar bears swimming than typical, then, shortly after, they saw more dead, apparently drowned, polar bears than they'd ever seen. That's the sort of thing you write small papers about to journals. He mentions a paper a colleague wrote about seeing mallards eating salmon. This is just reporting on observations they've made tangential to their actual mission, which is observing whale populations (and as he points out during the interview, concluding that they're doing just fine and that human development isn't affecting them is pretty much part of the job even when it isn't really true).
From my point of view it makes them look worse than the summary suggests. They seem to have a "numbers soup" grasp of math. Numbers go in and get boiled away from what they actually represent, then you recombine them in whatever crazy way you want.
Actually reading that article (written in a clearly biased editorial style from a publication that makes no attempt to hide its bias), it seems that the story is about a physicist with no chops in climatology resigning from the American Physical Society for taking a position on global warming. I have mixed feelings about this, on the one hand, a physicist like him, is clearly only an unskilled amateur in climate science. On the other hand, he's resigning because a group of physicists who are presumably also all unskilled amateurs are also taking a position, so he may be justified resigning. On the other hand, this obviously marks him as a minority among many very smart people, containing plenty of other nobel laureates. The American Physical Society is probably only taking a position because of the charged nature of the debate where most of the climate change "skeptics" feel the need to attack science as a whole. This leads instinctively to them circling the wagons.
In any case. A genius in one field can still be a crackpot in another. Fred Hoyle, the famous astronomer probably most famous for his work on nucleosythesis in stars and who even coined the term "Big Bang" (only because he was mocking it in favour of his own Steady State theory), was convinced that Archaeopteryx was a fake and never really had feathers. The incorrect assumptions that supported his conclusion were obvious to any enthusiastic amateur. It didn't stop him from being convinced and very vocal about it. Since then, the evidence of Archaeopteryx feathers, and dinosaur feathers in general, has been overwhelming.
If you read the transcript (admittedly a bit of a read), the implications are that these polar bears probably drowned attempting a long swim right when a storm came along. The scientist discusses how, during the 26 years of the surveys in the area, there has been a stark change in the characteristics of the area. The lack of ice forces the polar bears to swim further between rests and also allows the waves to get much higher during storms. That wasn't actually in the journal article he was being investigated in, but he discusses it with his interrogators near the end of the transcript where he's clearly getting some of his frustrations out about the ridiculousness of the particular situation and about the situation with his employer overall. The stuff about the high turnover rate of scientists is interesting. Apparently to even publish in the first place he has to go through what amounts to an official censorship system.
Ah. Can I assume that they are completed in one pour and conclude that completing a large solid rocket booster in one pour is therefore not impossible?
I did read the findings of the commission , although it's been a long time. Would "came apart like wet tissue paper" have been more accurate? They were extra-fragile in the Challenger case because they were cold, but even when not cold, they apparently made it a significant fraction of the way towards total failure on many previous uses. I may have misremembered just how severe the previous failures were. Oh, and I certainly know who Richard Feynman was. The fact that the O-rings were already a known problem for about a decade before Challenger blew up is one of the things that lead him and the commission to call Challenger "an accident rooted in history".
The commission found NASA and Morton-Thiokol to blame both for not stopping the launch despite a known unsafe condition and for not moving to correct the flaw with the O-Rings in the first place. In any case, although the story of a manager telling an engineer to "take off [his] engineering hat and put on [his] management hat" may be apocryphal, clearly the immediate cause of the Challenger disaster was management (Morton-Thiokol's management declared the situation safe under pressure from NASA management) over-riding sensible engineering concerns.
I did say that it was probably unfair to say that the location of the manufacture of the boosters was the only reason they had to be made in sections and that doing it in one pour would be a challenge. As I understand it the challenges are from too many bubbles ending up cemented in the mixture in a long pour and from the static issue you mentioned. Also possibly because they might have more chance of cracking during shipping and raising if made as one long piece. None of those challenges seems insurmountable. However, since they had to ship from Utah, they had to make them in sections anyway, so there was no reason to try. What you're saying doesn't seem to disagree with what I'm saying at all, unless you're trying to say that making it as one piece is completely impossible, which I don't believe to be the case. Still, they might have made them in sections wherever they made them, so I guess it's a tenuous case whether location of manufacture caused the Challenger disaster.
Still, there can be little doubt that politics has a lot to do with who NASA uses as suppliers and what state they're located in. Politics also played a very obvious role in the management decisions that doomed the Challenger crew. Politics and management played some role in the Columbia disaster as well. Mainly in quashing attempts to assess the damage and research possible ways to save the astronauts. In the Columbia case, of course, there was probably nothing that could have actually saved them at that point.
As for throttling solid rockets, I didn't say anything about that. That was from a previous poster. In any case, is throttling feasible on small solid rockets like what you'd need on a lander? Not that the original post about using solid rockets from ATK on the lander was serious. Although I suppose a hybrid system with invariable thrust rockets combined with variable ones could be used for a lander.
Definitely pretty ouchy. I was just asking because of the whole airbag question. With no aerobraking, you have to have rocket boosters to land, or you have to have a passive landing system that can absorb a ridiculous amount. Just wasn't sure offhand what the best case scenario was for that ridiculous amount.
Even if your take on the separation of Church and State is correct (and I don't agree that it was only intended to stop government messing with religion and not vice versa), requiring employees to go to a politicians prayer breakfast fails to "protect peoples' religion from the corrupting influence of politics". They might not share a religion, or at least have religious differences, with those running the prayer meeting. For example, they may be atheists or agnostics. Or Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Wiccan, Pastafarian, Catholic, etc. Or they might be expecting a politician to also include the US flag somehow in the proceedings and consider that a form of idolatry.
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A. Robots will get better at tasks like that.
B. Robots designed so that they can be worked on by other robots may well be built with fasteners superior to screws and bolts.
This article seems to be about a grudge match between Paul Kalas, who was the lead in the discovery of this planet and Ray Jayawardhana, another astronomer who seems to want to be the first to have directly imaged an exoplanet. Since Kalas came first, Jayawardhana's only option seems to be to discredit the earlier discovery. One of his arguments is that Fomalhaut B wasn't really directly imaged since it probably has rings (accounting for its brightness) and so the rings were what was imaged and not the planet. The chief argument seems to be that the third picture taken of it doesn't match the expected orbit from the previous 2 pictures. The previous 2 pictures, however, were taken with an instrument that broke before the third picture was taken, so the accuracy of the third picture is in doubt. In any case, no-one seems to be doubting that it's something really, really big, but nowhere near big enough to be a star, that's been imaged in another star system. So, if it's not an exoplanet, it's still something extraordinary.
Mike Green, who you quoted, is a retired professor of pathology who doubts "spontaneous human combustion". The coroner in this article is Dr Ciaran McLoughlin, who concluded that this was a case of "spontaneous human combustion". Annoyingly, the article says that the deceased was found lying with his head towards a fireplace, but that a fire in the fireplace was ruled out as a cause without explaining why it was ruled out as a cause. It may well be the case that they concluded that it was ridiculous that an ember thrown out by a fire could have lit someone on fire like that, but still went with the even more far-fetched idea that he simply burst into flames from within. It would be nice if they included a few more of the actual facts. It would also be nice if they stopped repeatedly referring to it as "spontaneous combustion" over and over again in the article. "Spontaneous combustion" is a real phenomenon (it once happened to the trash can in our kitchen when it was full of linseed oil soaked paper towels) with clearly understood mechanics whereas "spontaneous human combustion" is a dubious explanation for a small collection of events without a good explanation. Although, as far as lacking an explanation, it's interesting how many of these cases occur near, or even _in_ fireplaces.
We have the resources to feed everyone right now, but it wouldn't be permanent. Quite aside from population increase, modern agriculture is dependent on easily accessible petroleum and natural gas. Not just for agricultural equipment, but also because modern agriculture is completely unsustainable and relies on fertilisers mostly made from petrochemicals. When we run out of easy fossil fuels, we'll start running out of food.
Michigan, where it can theoretically net you a life sentence. I think that's even without their three strikes law.
Hmm, diagram on that page is very unsatisfactory. Hard to tell if they do use interlocking segments with an o-ring in their design or not. If you actually pour in place, I suppose you could probably do away with the o-ring design by just leaving enough clear space that you can weld the inner sections together safely, then pour directly on top of the previously solidified propellant rather than having to do the careful alignment and rely on relatively flimsy o-rings. Maybe it just doesn't matter if hot gases leak out between segments. The reason it was a problem with the shuttle is because the escaping gases burned their way into the main liquid fueled tank. If your solid fuel rocket is just a single column and not attached to anything, it may not matter.
Regarding the temperature going up a little, try this. Boil some water, the temperature won't go above about 100 degrees Celsius. When the water has all boiled away however, the temperature regulation mechanism is gone and the temperature goes up drastically. If you observed the boiling water simplistically, you could say "over thirty minutes, the temperature of the system has not gone up by more than a margin of error." while ignoring the fact that more than half the water is gone. Earth's climate similarly has plenty of heat sinks, such as artic and antartic ice. They melt, and the temperature of the rest of the system stays more constant. Climatologists have to look at a lot of factors. This is one otherwise smart guy looking at a very complex issue in a simplistic way and concluding that it's bunk because he doesn't understand it, but he's used to understanding things and being smarter than other people, so he assumes that he does understand it and that the people studying are all idiots.
Uh, yeah. If you're not married, they can set you up for plenty of other things as well. As for fire regulations... I'm pretty sure framing someone for something (adultery is a felony in at least one state), presumably for blackmail purposes, is already a criminal act. Violating fire regulations isn't exactly going to be much of a stretch for people willing to do that.
Peer review is done, as the name suggests, by peers. Management who will muzzle you for political reasons are not peers, they are censors. They're not peers, even if they're nominally scientists as well. The word peer suggests an equal. Politically motivated management can be considered not the equals of those they manage either because they are in a position of authority and are therefore above those they manage or because they are scum and below those they manage. Take your pick, basically.
Since a super-Jupiter would probably have a higher escape velocity than Jupiter, it might be easier to strip atmosphere from Jupiter than from a super-jupiter. Also, I'm assuming that solar wind that hits a gas giant dead on probably results in net absorption rather than net loss of atmosphere and that most of the loss occurs where the solar wind hits the sphere of the planet at a tangent. Jupiter does, presumably (unless the material is very much denser), have a smaller circumference than a super-jupiter, so that might slow the loss by a bit. Of course, none of that makes a huge difference, like you said, it would still take close enough to forever that it couldn't have happened yet for a planet like Earth to have once been a Jupiter.
Sure, and people back in the 19th century and earlier surely said, in regards to debtors prisons, something like: "It's always hard to hear about [life imprisonment] levied against individuals who have no way to pay [their debts] but what does the guy expect? He knew what he was doing was illegal."
There's worlds of middle ground between no consequences for copyright infringement and 15 years worth of US median-level income for a small infraction. That's where the constitutionality of the fine comes in. It all depends on how you define "excessive" in the eighth amendment. Only the insane or the callous consider these kinds of fines to not be excessive.
How much can you compress and cut a track for it to still be infringing though? You could reduce the length of the track so it's just one large but still infringing segment, or you could just choose easily compressed tracks such as a version of 4'33" which is 4 minutes and 33 minutes of silence (actually ambient noise, but another artists one minute of silence was considered derivative enough to be infringing, so apparently any recording of silence is sufficient). Then you could probably compress it hundreds of times. There's no reason you couldn't get the files down to 10 KB, and have them still be infringing. They'd still be "perfect digital copies" even though the quality is awful. Then you'd be able to get the entire US GDP worth on one 1 TB drive. For that matter, we have 3 TB drives now. Even easier to fit the whole economy worth on there.
Then, there's the question of duplication of the same track. Is two copies of the same track worth 300,000? If that's the case, what about symlinks? What about 100,000,000 copies of the same track? No? How about 10,000 different songs and 9,999 derivative works of each, differing by some small part? Easy to store in a file-system with a custom compression algorithm or that supports block-based data de-duplication. The industry associations, the lawmakers, the executive branch and the courts have demonstrated that there's no depths of ridiculousness they won't stoop to, so I don't see any reason any of these ideas would be invalid.
I think they "get around" (ignore) that because the torture isn't a punishment, it's just part of "enhanced interrogation". In other words, they'll apply it to the innocent just as readily as the guilty, so it's fair to all.
Chances are pretty good that the GP is one of those people who thinks that s/he is more intelligent than most. Most likely that's because s/he really is more intelligent than most. It doesn't take much to be above average intelligence.
markhahn wrote:
They mentioned that they take the whales position relative to the plane with a clinometer and the plane has its own instruments which must include GPS, so they'll either be using the plane's GPS info or other instrument info or the laptop they use for recording has its own GPS. As for a continual video record, Dr. Monnet points out that they have a lot of trouble even getting good photos so they mostly don't bother. Without some very expensive and bulky instruments that would need to be mounted outside the plane, making a video record would be a ridiculous proposition considering their mission. The human eye can simply track a much larger area. With a video camera, zoom out enough that you cover the area the eye can cover and you get no detail and can't spot a thing. Zoom in enough and you can pick up things the eye couldn't spot, sure, but it's so shaky from a plane that it's practically worthless and you're only covering a small portion of what the spotters can see with their eyes. Dr. Monnet points out that what they can actually spot depends very much on the particular spotter and the conditions that day. In any case, their primary mission is tracking whale migration over time. Catching interesting things on video isn't really part of that.
As Dr. Monnet points out during the actual transcript of the interview, these bears probably drowned because the sea ice in the area went away (which is a pretty undisputed fact) therefore the bears have to swim much further and the waves during storms are much higher.
It's very clear from the interview though, that the paper wasn't meant to be some big significant thing. It was meant to be a report to a nature journal that they saw more polar bears swimming than typical, then, shortly after, they saw more dead, apparently drowned, polar bears than they'd ever seen. That's the sort of thing you write small papers about to journals. He mentions a paper a colleague wrote about seeing mallards eating salmon. This is just reporting on observations they've made tangential to their actual mission, which is observing whale populations (and as he points out during the interview, concluding that they're doing just fine and that human development isn't affecting them is pretty much part of the job even when it isn't really true).
From my point of view it makes them look worse than the summary suggests. They seem to have a "numbers soup" grasp of math. Numbers go in and get boiled away from what they actually represent, then you recombine them in whatever crazy way you want.
Actually reading that article (written in a clearly biased editorial style from a publication that makes no attempt to hide its bias), it seems that the story is about a physicist with no chops in climatology resigning from the American Physical Society for taking a position on global warming. I have mixed feelings about this, on the one hand, a physicist like him, is clearly only an unskilled amateur in climate science. On the other hand, he's resigning because a group of physicists who are presumably also all unskilled amateurs are also taking a position, so he may be justified resigning. On the other hand, this obviously marks him as a minority among many very smart people, containing plenty of other nobel laureates. The American Physical Society is probably only taking a position because of the charged nature of the debate where most of the climate change "skeptics" feel the need to attack science as a whole. This leads instinctively to them circling the wagons.
In any case. A genius in one field can still be a crackpot in another. Fred Hoyle, the famous astronomer probably most famous for his work on nucleosythesis in stars and who even coined the term "Big Bang" (only because he was mocking it in favour of his own Steady State theory), was convinced that Archaeopteryx was a fake and never really had feathers. The incorrect assumptions that supported his conclusion were obvious to any enthusiastic amateur. It didn't stop him from being convinced and very vocal about it. Since then, the evidence of Archaeopteryx feathers, and dinosaur feathers in general, has been overwhelming.
If you read the transcript (admittedly a bit of a read), the implications are that these polar bears probably drowned attempting a long swim right when a storm came along. The scientist discusses how, during the 26 years of the surveys in the area, there has been a stark change in the characteristics of the area. The lack of ice forces the polar bears to swim further between rests and also allows the waves to get much higher during storms. That wasn't actually in the journal article he was being investigated in, but he discusses it with his interrogators near the end of the transcript where he's clearly getting some of his frustrations out about the ridiculousness of the particular situation and about the situation with his employer overall. The stuff about the high turnover rate of scientists is interesting. Apparently to even publish in the first place he has to go through what amounts to an official censorship system.
Ah. Can I assume that they are completed in one pour and conclude that completing a large solid rocket booster in one pour is therefore not impossible?
I did read the findings of the commission , although it's been a long time. Would "came apart like wet tissue paper" have been more accurate? They were extra-fragile in the Challenger case because they were cold, but even when not cold, they apparently made it a significant fraction of the way towards total failure on many previous uses. I may have misremembered just how severe the previous failures were. Oh, and I certainly know who Richard Feynman was. The fact that the O-rings were already a known problem for about a decade before Challenger blew up is one of the things that lead him and the commission to call Challenger "an accident rooted in history".
The commission found NASA and Morton-Thiokol to blame both for not stopping the launch despite a known unsafe condition and for not moving to correct the flaw with the O-Rings in the first place. In any case, although the story of a manager telling an engineer to "take off [his] engineering hat and put on [his] management hat" may be apocryphal, clearly the immediate cause of the Challenger disaster was management (Morton-Thiokol's management declared the situation safe under pressure from NASA management) over-riding sensible engineering concerns.
I did say that it was probably unfair to say that the location of the manufacture of the boosters was the only reason they had to be made in sections and that doing it in one pour would be a challenge. As I understand it the challenges are from too many bubbles ending up cemented in the mixture in a long pour and from the static issue you mentioned. Also possibly because they might have more chance of cracking during shipping and raising if made as one long piece. None of those challenges seems insurmountable. However, since they had to ship from Utah, they had to make them in sections anyway, so there was no reason to try. What you're saying doesn't seem to disagree with what I'm saying at all, unless you're trying to say that making it as one piece is completely impossible, which I don't believe to be the case. Still, they might have made them in sections wherever they made them, so I guess it's a tenuous case whether location of manufacture caused the Challenger disaster.
Still, there can be little doubt that politics has a lot to do with who NASA uses as suppliers and what state they're located in. Politics also played a very obvious role in the management decisions that doomed the Challenger crew. Politics and management played some role in the Columbia disaster as well. Mainly in quashing attempts to assess the damage and research possible ways to save the astronauts. In the Columbia case, of course, there was probably nothing that could have actually saved them at that point.
As for throttling solid rockets, I didn't say anything about that. That was from a previous poster. In any case, is throttling feasible on small solid rockets like what you'd need on a lander? Not that the original post about using solid rockets from ATK on the lander was serious. Although I suppose a hybrid system with invariable thrust rockets combined with variable ones could be used for a lander.
Definitely pretty ouchy. I was just asking because of the whole airbag question. With no aerobraking, you have to have rocket boosters to land, or you have to have a passive landing system that can absorb a ridiculous amount. Just wasn't sure offhand what the best case scenario was for that ridiculous amount.
Given that the project name is Morpheus, I just hope they don't fall asleep while operating rockets.
Even if your take on the separation of Church and State is correct (and I don't agree that it was only intended to stop government messing with religion and not vice versa), requiring employees to go to a politicians prayer breakfast fails to "protect peoples' religion from the corrupting influence of politics". They might not share a religion, or at least have religious differences, with those running the prayer meeting. For example, they may be atheists or agnostics. Or Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Wiccan, Pastafarian, Catholic, etc. Or they might be expecting a politician to also include the US flag somehow in the proceedings and consider that a form of idolatry.
Or hey, maybe they just don't want to go.