So then, we're not actually entering an era of commercial space - we've been there for decades... Because Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, etc... have frickin' well blown up more private launches than SpaceX has booked - and they've flown successfully an order of magnitude more.
I'd be more impressed if his reasons didn't amount to "I know your business better than you do" and "even if you think I don't, I still do and here's a couple of irrelevant examples to prove it". (And if you read the rest of his blog, it's just more of the same "I'm the greatest" drivel.)
The failure of NASA, speaks to a much deeper issue growing in US culture.
What failure in NASA? Not providing Buck Rogers for your entertainment and amusement? (As opposed to actually getting on with the hard and mostly boring bits, which they have done.) Failing to meet some abstract standard of cost and performance? (Which borders on the ludicrous - it's like complaining about the low performance and high cost of a 8008 in 1971. There's simply no track record on which to base such a standard.)
This is the same thing that causes us to buy cheap products from china, that break, and instead of fixing them, we just buy more.
You should read up on the history of discount stores - the desire, in the US, for lower cost and greater convenience without regards to quality goes back several generations (at least).
Basically, you're remembering a golden era that never existed and are thus depressed because of the failure of a golden future (which vision you created from whole cloth in the first place) to materialize.
An updated version of the Pratt & Whitney PW2000 series engine, probably uprated to 42,000 lb. thrust. Four of these engines will replace the eight P&W TF33's now used on the B-52H.
Very unlikely. Boeing and USAF have been looking at similiar upgrades since high bypass turbofans became common in the 1970's - each time with the same result... The upgrade would be hideously expensive for rather modest performance gains and operational savings.
With more powerful engines, we could see B-52's carry heavier bomb loads and still fly longer ranges.
Again, very unlikely. The engines aren't the only controlling factor - the wing, fuselage structures, and landing gear play into determining payload too. A significant increase in bomb load will require modifying those as well.
The real reason we've stayed on Earth and its orbiting bodies is that we've concentrated too much on packing enough fuel with them for a round-trip, and not enough on finding ways to allow Humans to live indefinitely in enclosed Martian settlements.
Yes, because that makes much more sense than spending hundreds of times more on fuel and boosters to send enough material for them to build a settlement. Plus the tens of times more on fuel and boosters per year to keep the settlement running. Plus the increase in budget by a couple of zeros to develop the technology to merely allow them to live right on the edge of disaster while being utterly dependent on those annual shipments....
Given that all fines and fees collected bu the US Government go into a common fund (subsequently spent by Congress), and not by the agency collecting them... As the person above said, with regards to their budget, I doubt this is a motive.
But, as with the budget, don't let facts stand in your way.
Facebook has enforced that rule somewhat inconsistently... So either she got caught up in one of the spasms of enforcement, or there's something more going on here. I suspect the latter because of other inconsistencies and omissions on her part.
In our life time, nobody knows the name of any astronauts and the only time there is coverage is when something explodes.
Welcome to the real world.
That's the nature of exploration and expansion - everybody knows who Columbus was, but nobody knows the name of the guy(s) who actually surveyed and mapped the coast line. Or the guy(s) who went into the wilds to map. etc... etc...
The problem with space exploration is people like you who live under the delusion that unless it's exciting and fueling their masturbatory fantasies, then it's obviously not worth doing.
People are more worried about potholes and "banning" gay sex than they are about furthering the progress of all mankind.
Guess what? That's what they were mostly worried about back then too. That and beating the commies... "Furthering the progress of mankind" (which was nothing but cynical political propaganda to start with anyhow) wasn't anywhere on the list.
However, precisely for those reasons, NASA should have stated that the reasons were ambiguous and contradictory, they should NOT have declared one set of results to randomly supersede the results of another
I stopped reading at this point - because after such clueless bilge, it's unlikely you're going to say anything of value and quick skim of the balance of your post just confirmed that.
The MER are resolutely geological. That is not even an issue. Ask Steve Squyers what MER is doing, and he will say "geological traverses on Mars." He said exactly those words in plenary at the last LPSC2012. That's what they were intended to do, and that is what Opportunity is still doing.
But who don't seem to understand is why we're doing the geological studies. (Actually, as I said before, it's worse than that - you don't want to understand.)
But, as I said, there has been no surface biological investigation of Mars since Viking.
But the problem is - you steadfastly refuse to understand why. Anyone who has followed Martian exploration should know the current strategy is to "follow the water", to follow the precursors to life. To understand the geology and chemistry of the planet. Because we cannot design valid biological experiments until those things are done..
What you propose is to repeat what we tried, and what failed to work, thirty years ago - without offering a single reason to do so.
And with that, I'm done replying to you. You're stuck in the past, and are utterly unwilling to entertain any notion contrary to your mistaken beliefs and make every effort to dismiss them as phantasms. Wake up Mr Van Winkle - it's 2012 and the world has moved on and left you behind.
Well, one of the things they found with Viking and again with Phoenix is that designing and operating equipment/experiments that do anything that's at all complex in terms of handling and processing is pretty difficult. (Especially when, as was discovered by Phoenix, when the handling properties of the materials to be sampled turn out to be different than thought.) We're seriously in the stone age when it comes to doing anything much more than looking at the surface of things, and we're still crawling up a steep learning curve.
Something those who propose that robots can do more and better than people have mostly failed to notice.
And seriously, have you been living in a cave the three plus decades? This is all pretty much common knowledge if you've been following Mars exploration for the last fifteen odd years rather than nursing a thirty year old grudge.)
Oh, I follow it. I was just at the LPSC2012, for example.
Your complete and total ignorance of current Martian exploration strategy says different. Worse yet, the ignorance seems willful since you dismiss the MER rovers as being "merely geological". I could on, but to sum up - you may be following Mars exploration, but you've got such a serious set of blinders on that the version you're relaying here is utterly unrelated to reality.
With all due respect, I don't think this is common knowledge among readers of slashdot, which is where I happen to be posting at this instant.
A common enough mistake on the 'net - to assume that there isn't anyone actually knowledgeable about and reading the posting. But you've been around long enough that you should know better. So, like your claims about following Martian exploration - your claims and reality are at odds with each other.
Part of life is to learn from your mistakes, and I regard this as a big one I wish someone would learn something from.
And that's the problem - they did learn from their mistakes, and you're holding it against them. They haven't spent the last thirty years doing nothing, they've spent them looking at the Viking results and studying terrestrial extremophiles so that when we went back to Mars is was with a deeper understanding of the chemical and geological processes rather than just poking around in the dark after PR. They didn't make the mistake you want them to make, which is leap blindly rather than proceeding from knowledge. NASA and JPL screwed up badly back in the 70's - and they've spent the time since trying to recover from that.
When you get old enough to drive, and try driving a car with essentially no steering (because the power steering pump is no longer providing pressure) and little brakes (ditto for the brake pump)... you'll understand.
The biological experimental protocols did not mention the mass spectrometer at all.
That's pretty much unsurprising. I bet if you go back and look you'll find they didn't mention the weather instruments or the cameras either. Each set of instruments is going to have it's own protocols.
To this day, I feel this was a violation of the pre-launch protocols for the biological experiments. If the mass spectrometer trumped all, why fly the biologicals?
Because NASA was following basic scientific procedures and guarding against false positives. This was triply important for Viking when they were performing complex chemical experiments (the biological suite) with pretty much zero knowledge of the soil chemistry. There was no way of knowing in advance whether or not something in the soil might cause a false positive, so the mass spectrometer served to determine the soil chemistry in order to analyze the results of the biological experiments.
Because of the way this was handled, this problem has never been investigated further on Mars. We have had successful 4 lander / rovers since then, but no biological tests whatsoever.
That's because they've changed the strategy for looking for life - away from "pin the tail on the donkey" (blind stabs in the dark like Viking) and towards more basic chemical research. Biological experiments are sexy, but they're meaningless without the proper foundation of knowledge to design them and to interpret their results.
(And seriously, have you been living in a cave the three plus decades? This is all pretty much common knowledge if you've been following Mars exploration for the last fifteen odd years rather than nursing a thirty year old grudge.)
It shows you just how isolated they are. Any other country wanting to build a rocket to send a satellite into space could build on the 100+ years of research and development done by the rest of the world.
Yeah. It's not like anyone else ever has problems on their first flight. Or their second. Or their third...
But I will point out that your objection is specious. Budgeting doesn't depend on who borrowed a book, only that it was borrowed.
You specified that *all* records were deleted - which means there's no record of it being borrowed. But getting details wrong is typical when you make stuff up.
Consider various postings about the TSA. TSA gained relevance on/. due to their use of body scanners and so forth; however, at least a few of the more recent posts is about the gross ineptitude of the TSA, tech being merely one outlet for set ineptitude. Yet no one complains about TSA articles
Of course not - the Slashdot mindset requires it's Two Minute Hate. All the TSA articles did was replace FUD about Amazon and Microsoft that was the primary source of the Two Minute Hate before that.
Certainly, there are important matters outside of tech/science that require long, deep debates, and I've yet to find anywhere on the internet that can facilitate that as well as Slashdot does (take that as you will).
I'd take that as damming Slashdot with faint praise - because long deep debates is something it sucks at.
After the PATRIOT Act made it legal to for the feds to confiscate book borrowing records from libraries without even a warrant, most libraries switched over to lending software that deleted all records once a book was returned.
Not buying it - as circulation records are a libraries lifeblood come budget time.
For example, the Orteig Prize inspired the Lindbergh flight
And it's a shining example of exactly what I was talking about. The Spirit of St. Louis was a point solution optimized to win the prize - technologically and evolutionarily it was a dead end.
After the contest, there was a surge in investement in aviation based companies which no-doubt fueled research in solving even more "real-world" problems.
Correlation does not imply causation. The rising demand (in general) for aviation, and the rising demand for warplanes no doubt played large roles as well.
The X-prize is another interesting data point.
Same deal - intended to inspire the development of craft that could be scaled to reach LEO, resulted in a point solution that is outstanding at meeting the narrow goal of the prize but scales poorly towards the intended result.
The x-prize (like the orteig prize) also fueled investment in space access companies
Same deal - you've got cause, effect, correlation and causation, and the order and reasons why things happened all blended together backasswards.
Slashdot Mirror
So then, we're not actually entering an era of commercial space - we've been there for decades... Because Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, etc... have frickin' well blown up more private launches than SpaceX has booked - and they've flown successfully an order of magnitude more.
I'd be more impressed if his reasons didn't amount to "I know your business better than you do" and "even if you think I don't, I still do and here's a couple of irrelevant examples to prove it". (And if you read the rest of his blog, it's just more of the same "I'm the greatest" drivel.)
Really Mr Larsen, get over yourself.
What failure in NASA? Not providing Buck Rogers for your entertainment and amusement? (As opposed to actually getting on with the hard and mostly boring bits, which they have done.) Failing to meet some abstract standard of cost and performance? (Which borders on the ludicrous - it's like complaining about the low performance and high cost of a 8008 in 1971. There's simply no track record on which to base such a standard.)
You should read up on the history of discount stores - the desire, in the US, for lower cost and greater convenience without regards to quality goes back several generations (at least).
Basically, you're remembering a golden era that never existed and are thus depressed because of the failure of a golden future (which vision you created from whole cloth in the first place) to materialize.
Very unlikely. Boeing and USAF have been looking at similiar upgrades since high bypass turbofans became common in the 1970's - each time with the same result... The upgrade would be hideously expensive for rather modest performance gains and operational savings.
Again, very unlikely. The engines aren't the only controlling factor - the wing, fuselage structures, and landing gear play into determining payload too. A significant increase in bomb load will require modifying those as well.
And, contrary to the OP's claim - we can't built B-52's at all. Production ceased back in the early 60's, and factory is long gone.
Planning for a service life that long isn't the same as knowing the service life will be that long.
Yes, because that makes much more sense than spending hundreds of times more on fuel and boosters to send enough material for them to build a settlement. Plus the tens of times more on fuel and boosters per year to keep the settlement running. Plus the increase in budget by a couple of zeros to develop the technology to merely allow them to live right on the edge of disaster while being utterly dependent on those annual shipments....
Given that all fines and fees collected bu the US Government go into a common fund (subsequently spent by Congress), and not by the agency collecting them... As the person above said, with regards to their budget, I doubt this is a motive.
But, as with the budget, don't let facts stand in your way.
Facebook has enforced that rule somewhat inconsistently... So either she got caught up in one of the spasms of enforcement, or there's something more going on here. I suspect the latter because of other inconsistencies and omissions on her part.
Yes and no... It comes from a 1955 book about the rise of and life under the Nazi's.
Wikipedia has a decent if superficial article on the phrase.
Welcome to the real world.
That's the nature of exploration and expansion - everybody knows who Columbus was, but nobody knows the name of the guy(s) who actually surveyed and mapped the coast line. Or the guy(s) who went into the wilds to map. etc... etc...
The problem with space exploration is people like you who live under the delusion that unless it's exciting and fueling their masturbatory fantasies, then it's obviously not worth doing.
Guess what? That's what they were mostly worried about back then too. That and beating the commies... "Furthering the progress of mankind" (which was nothing but cynical political propaganda to start with anyhow) wasn't anywhere on the list.
I stopped reading at this point - because after such clueless bilge, it's unlikely you're going to say anything of value and quick skim of the balance of your post just confirmed that.
But who don't seem to understand is why we're doing the geological studies. (Actually, as I said before, it's worse than that - you don't want to understand.)
But the problem is - you steadfastly refuse to understand why. Anyone who has followed Martian exploration should know the current strategy is to "follow the water", to follow the precursors to life. To understand the geology and chemistry of the planet. Because we cannot design valid biological experiments until those things are done..
What you propose is to repeat what we tried, and what failed to work, thirty years ago - without offering a single reason to do so.
And with that, I'm done replying to you. You're stuck in the past, and are utterly unwilling to entertain any notion contrary to your mistaken beliefs and make every effort to dismiss them as phantasms. Wake up Mr Van Winkle - it's 2012 and the world has moved on and left you behind.
Well, one of the things they found with Viking and again with Phoenix is that designing and operating equipment/experiments that do anything that's at all complex in terms of handling and processing is pretty difficult. (Especially when, as was discovered by Phoenix, when the handling properties of the materials to be sampled turn out to be different than thought.) We're seriously in the stone age when it comes to doing anything much more than looking at the surface of things, and we're still crawling up a steep learning curve.
Something those who propose that robots can do more and better than people have mostly failed to notice.
Your complete and total ignorance of current Martian exploration strategy says different. Worse yet, the ignorance seems willful since you dismiss the MER rovers as being "merely geological". I could on, but to sum up - you may be following Mars exploration, but you've got such a serious set of blinders on that the version you're relaying here is utterly unrelated to reality.
A common enough mistake on the 'net - to assume that there isn't anyone actually knowledgeable about and reading the posting. But you've been around long enough that you should know better. So, like your claims about following Martian exploration - your claims and reality are at odds with each other.
And that's the problem - they did learn from their mistakes, and you're holding it against them. They haven't spent the last thirty years doing nothing, they've spent them looking at the Viking results and studying terrestrial extremophiles so that when we went back to Mars is was with a deeper understanding of the chemical and geological processes rather than just poking around in the dark after PR. They didn't make the mistake you want them to make, which is leap blindly rather than proceeding from knowledge. NASA and JPL screwed up badly back in the 70's - and they've spent the time since trying to recover from that.
When you get old enough to drive, and try driving a car with essentially no steering (because the power steering pump is no longer providing pressure) and little brakes (ditto for the brake pump)... you'll understand.
That's pretty much unsurprising. I bet if you go back and look you'll find they didn't mention the weather instruments or the cameras either. Each set of instruments is going to have it's own protocols.
Because NASA was following basic scientific procedures and guarding against false positives. This was triply important for Viking when they were performing complex chemical experiments (the biological suite) with pretty much zero knowledge of the soil chemistry. There was no way of knowing in advance whether or not something in the soil might cause a false positive, so the mass spectrometer served to determine the soil chemistry in order to analyze the results of the biological experiments.
That's because they've changed the strategy for looking for life - away from "pin the tail on the donkey" (blind stabs in the dark like Viking) and towards more basic chemical research. Biological experiments are sexy, but they're meaningless without the proper foundation of knowledge to design them and to interpret their results.
(And seriously, have you been living in a cave the three plus decades? This is all pretty much common knowledge if you've been following Mars exploration for the last fifteen odd years rather than nursing a thirty year old grudge.)
Translation: "I don't have any real comment or understanding, so GO SPACEX! GO SPACEX! ".
Yeah. It's not like anyone else ever has problems on their first flight. Or their second. Or their third...
Translation: "I don't have a citation either, but trust me".
Translation: I don't have a citation.
You specified that *all* records were deleted - which means there's no record of it being borrowed. But getting details wrong is typical when you make stuff up.
Translation: I either didn't read or understand what the OP said - but I picked up on the word "police", so I'll post an anti-police rant.
Of course not - the Slashdot mindset requires it's Two Minute Hate. All the TSA articles did was replace FUD about Amazon and Microsoft that was the primary source of the Two Minute Hate before that.
I'd take that as damming Slashdot with faint praise - because long deep debates is something it sucks at.
Not buying it - as circulation records are a libraries lifeblood come budget time.
[[Citation Needed]]
And it's a shining example of exactly what I was talking about. The Spirit of St. Louis was a point solution optimized to win the prize - technologically and evolutionarily it was a dead end.
Correlation does not imply causation. The rising demand (in general) for aviation, and the rising demand for warplanes no doubt played large roles as well.
Same deal - intended to inspire the development of craft that could be scaled to reach LEO, resulted in a point solution that is outstanding at meeting the narrow goal of the prize but scales poorly towards the intended result.
Same deal - you've got cause, effect, correlation and causation, and the order and reasons why things happened all blended together backasswards.