We've done everything possible to stifle innovation over the past 20 years.
Yet, somehow, despite all the highly modded Chicken Little comments in this discussion about how the US has stifled innovation... innovation continues to happen.
I suspect the reason that Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield is concerned about Federal spending cuts is because the institute she presides over is afraid of the gravy spigot being closed.
Read the link for the references to the REAL "Chicken Little" experiment that started it all.
Then read this link about the problems with the experiment, and then this link which explains how the results of the first experiment are not now believed to be possible.
Short version: "Chicken Little" is like cold fusion. It's received a lot of press, but the experiment has not withstood scrutiny by the scientific community. The experiment has never been able to be replicated, and further experiments show that results of the first are essentially impossible.
But, as usual, the hype long survives the reality.
Why not glue lots of these Kicksats, self powered, to the outside of any spacecraft
Because it's an expensive, heavy, and complex way to impose a huge performance penalty on the spacecraft with very low odds of actually gaining any useful data.
Set #1 - the people in class 82028 on the day it started, eighteen people of which seven eventually graduated.
Set #2 - the nominal size of classes at the school, versus the number that graduated as part of class 82028, eighteen versus twelve.
The sets overlap because of the drop back system - if you failed a block, you dropped back a class to repeat the block and then continued with that class. If you failed a second time in a different block, you could be dropped back if your average was over 70. If you failed a second time but a different block with an average under 70, or failed the same block twice in a row, or failed a third block, you were booted from the school.
Well, you understand a child's version of it. But the reality is, it's far more complex than that - and they over engineered the Little Boy so that it wouldn't have to be tested. (This is obvious to anyone that's ever actually studied the matter.) But if you pay attention to real world, you'll notice nobody builds gun types anymore - they're too inefficient and too large for their yield. The uranium is far better used in an implosion weapon.
Rapidly? Thor lives on in the first stage of the Delta II
But it doesn't live on as a weapon system. In fact, even as the space race was getting going, the liquid fueled IRBM's and ICBM's were starting to be phased out. (Thor deployments ended in 1962.)
It wasn't until Saturn and Polaris that the programs really diverged as shrinking warheads meant that the military could transition to SRB's which have all sorts of advantages for a fleet of standby missiles.
You really don't know nearly as much as you think you do - go study the history of Minuteman. But even so, Polaris was deployed in 1960 - at the dawn of the space race. The Saturn-I flew in 1961, even as the Redstone and Jupiter missiles it was based on were fading into obsolescence.
Well, no sub is even close to being 1000' long....;)
But an oft overlooked factor is the small size of the crews. We operated my weapons system (sixteen Tridents and their control, launching, testing and support equipment) with just eighteen people. There was just no room for anyone that wasn't at least above average. The Missile Techs (which generally came from the bottom third of the rankings in school) even called themselves the "scum of the cream".
The schools were brutal. When I attended SWSEA, the drop rate (I.E. people kicked out of the school) *averaged* thirty percent. My class started with 18 people, and graduated with 12. I was the only person in the class who had never been 'dropped back' (failed a block, and been transferred to a class behind you in the cycle to repeat it), and with a 99.988 average was the *number two* man in the class. Of the 18 people I started with, only 7 of us eventually completed the school and graduated.
Being [mumble] feet under the North Atlantic with an up angle, throttles at the stops, and still going *down* - that's stressful.
So is watching a crane lifting an 72,000 pound solid fueled missile (essentially 72,000 pounds of explosive) suddenly stop operating - with a thunderstorm spitting lightning a mile away. (Thank $Diety is was a test bird, I.E. no live warheads.)
Or try working topside at sea in near hurricane conditions and green water washing over the deck....
IT 'stress' is a walk in the park in gentle spring sunshine after a couple of years in the military - and that's *without* spending any time in a combat zone.
If the information he copied detailed the dimensions, composition and timing of the fission primary, then such information leaking to the public would essentially allow anybody that acquired weapons grade plutonium and tritium to create a highly compact nuclear warhead, small enough to fit on a rocket or easily hidden in a small space.
Indeed. What few people seem to realize is that while the principles of nuclear weapons are simple indeed... the actual engineering is anything but.
The real problem in our society isn't the lack of STEM graduates... it's the lack of enough people who work with real world stuff and raw materials to appreciate this.
I should mod you down, but will respond instead. The saturn was started in the 50's. Even the test systems was done in 1960-1962, BEFORE kennedy's speech.
Not just the Saturn - the Apollo CSM was already in development[1] and was in the process of morphing from being the lunar lander to being the command ship with a separate lunar lander. The (in)famous mode debate over direct ascent vs. EOR vs. LOR was already underway.
Few people realize that direct ascent was even in the race, because by 1962 it was already slipping into third place because it was believed that the booster required would be too large to build and fly within the state-of-the-art. The funny part is that NASA so badly underestimated the size and weight of the spacecraft[2] needed to reach the moon, the Saturn V of 1967 ended up being much larger than the Nova they didn't think could be built in 1962.
Are you surprised? You should not be. Presidents do not like to be made a fool of. Kennedy KNEW that it was possible to go to the moon.
Precisely this. Kennedy and his advisers looked wide and deep at the various technology projects underway in the US at the time, and choose the lunar landing because a) it was In Space (the primary battleground), and b) considerable research and engineering had already been done. The various popular histories of the era even down to today merely repeat the propaganda of the time, that NASA started from more-or-less a standing start.
More importantly, Kennedy was told beforehand that we were ahead of USSR with rocket tech (for BMs). Where we lacked was human space time and the testing required.
Indeed. And once the US got going, the Soviets fell ever further behind, and in some ways they never recovered. Even when it comes to space stations - the Soviets wouldn't beat either the total time accumulated or individual flight lengths until years after Skylab. (Which was essentially a program run with the scraps of the Apollo program.)
[1] Yes, Apollo predates Gemini by a wide margin - and NASA's decision to stick with the existing Apollo (what become the Block I Apollo) would come back to bite them in the butt.
[2] NASA's difficulties with estimating size, weight, budget, and schedule goes back a long ways.
NASA today is not the young NASA of the 60's. It's become a bloated bureaucracy.
As the poster above explains, you're understanding of the history of NASA in the 60's is a bit... deficient. The 'young NASA' of the 60's wasn't what you believe it to be, it was in fact a greatly bloated bureaucracy. I wish I could find the flowchart I once saw listing the process it took to approve the adding of a tool to the flight manifest - it took up three pages of reviews and tests and approvals and oversight committees and study board, etc... etc...
The amount of NOx produced from a rocket that uses LOX is negligible for the load. The reason is because the actual burn occurred with the O2, not atmosphere.
Yes, and no. While actual combustion of fuel and oxidizer takes place within the engine, the combustion products are still hot enough to cause reactions between atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen. The real reason they produce negligible amounts is because they spend so little time in the atmosphere. On the gripping hand, a good deal of what they do produce is deposited in the upper layers of the atmosphere - precisely the last place you want to do so. (Especially in the ozone layer.)
It's a hole drilled in a window. Other than destroying the insulation provided by the double panes and pissing off your landlord.... What could go wrong?
Yet, if they don't take risks, then their stockholders bitch about reduced profits, and their depositors bitch about reduced returns/interest on their deposits - and the money and investors move to banks that will take the risk.
Yes, and more importantly, the main story is that they are planning on building them all along I-5, this is just the first one. So people with other Teslas models will have to wait a few more months before they can get from SF to LA.
So how long before I get a charging station on I-5 between Seattle and Portland?
Re:Best comment in article:
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The F-35 Story
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· Score: 1
On the contrary - the British never used VIFF in combat.
I get my information from naval historians, pilots who took part in the war, actual books, etc... Not thirty year old mass media accounts. Despite the urban legends that have circulated since the Falklands war, not one reliable source has ever confirmed the use of VIFF in combat and several have specifically denied it.
Exhibition-grade booth displays and paraphernalia cost thousands of dollars (even tens of thousands for large booths), and if the Pirate Party invested money on materials specifically for this show, they may have just flushed a significant portion of their yearly budget.
If this assumption is true (that they spent a significant portion of their annual budget), then one of both of two things is true: 1) they're idiots for overspending, and 2) they're idiots for not have a reasonable operating budget.
The paranoid might even think that this invite-then-ban manuever was done deliberately.
Paranoids, like garlic, need no reason.
Re:Best comment in article:
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The F-35 Story
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The British routinely used thrust-vectoring in combat with their Harriers
On the contrary - the British never used VIFF in combat. On the other hand, while it was never used in combat, STOVL was and is used on a daily basis to land and take off from LHA's and Brit's baby flattops.
Re:Affordable replacement for something paid for
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The F-35 Story
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The spare parts are already bought and paid for and in the warehouse.
Yep. And that stock of parts is dwindling and it costs ever more to get replacements for parts designed (in some cases) as far back the seventies.
A friend of mine down the road at the naval shipyard just got done with a decade long program to replace a critical component onboard Trident SSBN's. The component was originally designed in the fifties, and units installed on Tridents were updated and manufactured in the seventies and eighties. But the submarines are expected to last into the 2030's, and the last manufacturer of that component closed it's line in 1998. (The equivalent civilian technology having moved on, and the Navy's annual orders being too small to keep the line open.)
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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find the level of contracting with anything military to be very troubling these days. I remember back in the 80's when bases began contracting out things like food services. Okay, that seemed pretty reasonable. But I recently went back to an old base that I had once been stationed at back in the day and being shocked by how far this has really gone. Not only were food services, the PX, laundries, etc. run by civilians--but so was base *security*. Instead of MP's greeting me at the gate, it was a bunch of rent-a-cops.
You must have grown up around the Army - the Navy has outsourced those since the 70's or even before.
Things like the Exhange, etc.. aren't run by traditional contractors however, but by a private company chartered by the Navy. The same goes for the guards at the gate - they aren't rent-a-cops, but DoD civilians. (But where it does matter, like the weapons magazines up the road from me, the gyrenes still guard the gates.)
All the services pretty much have to nowadays, because they're only allotted so many people in uniform by Congress and those non-mission billets eat up a lot of bodies.
NASA that can't even build a rocket anymore without a Lockheed or Boeing to do all the work for them.
NASA has never built it's own rockets. Even the stuff that was designed in house had the actual R&D, engineering, and manufacturing done by the contractor.
Granted, at 2PM most people would be at work where they won't have access to TV and as much radio but a lot of people (including the elderly and unemployed) will be watching.
I suspect that's pretty much the point of conducting the test at 2PM EST. The system gets tested end-to-end, while the fewest people are inconvenienced.
No, it's because iPhones are marketed like lumber - as a commodity. If I go buy an iPhone, it's just like every other iPhone, right out of the box. No need to do any research. If I read about an app in a blog, I can download it and it runs, period. Etc... etc...
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I seriously doubt these are for use in combat or combat zones - but they *would* be useful as hell stateside and in garrison.
Yet, somehow, despite all the highly modded Chicken Little comments in this discussion about how the US has stifled innovation... innovation continues to happen.
I suspect the reason that Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Susan Hockfield is concerned about Federal spending cuts is because the institute she presides over is afraid of the gravy spigot being closed.
Then read this link about the problems with the experiment, and then this link which explains how the results of the first experiment are not now believed to be possible.
Short version: "Chicken Little" is like cold fusion. It's received a lot of press, but the experiment has not withstood scrutiny by the scientific community. The experiment has never been able to be replicated, and further experiments show that results of the first are essentially impossible.
But, as usual, the hype long survives the reality.
Because it's an expensive, heavy, and complex way to impose a huge performance penalty on the spacecraft with very low odds of actually gaining any useful data.
Two different overlapping sets:
Set #1 - the people in class 82028 on the day it started, eighteen people of which seven eventually graduated.
Set #2 - the nominal size of classes at the school, versus the number that graduated as part of class 82028, eighteen versus twelve.
The sets overlap because of the drop back system - if you failed a block, you dropped back a class to repeat the block and then continued with that class. If you failed a second time in a different block, you could be dropped back if your average was over 70. If you failed a second time but a different block with an average under 70, or failed the same block twice in a row, or failed a third block, you were booted from the school.
Well, you understand a child's version of it. But the reality is, it's far more complex than that - and they over engineered the Little Boy so that it wouldn't have to be tested. (This is obvious to anyone that's ever actually studied the matter.) But if you pay attention to real world, you'll notice nobody builds gun types anymore - they're too inefficient and too large for their yield. The uranium is far better used in an implosion weapon.
Your ignorance is astonishing. If a gun type weapon is so simple to build, then please define for me the effects of insertion rate.
But it doesn't live on as a weapon system. In fact, even as the space race was getting going, the liquid fueled IRBM's and ICBM's were starting to be phased out. (Thor deployments ended in 1962.)
You really don't know nearly as much as you think you do - go study the history of Minuteman. But even so, Polaris was deployed in 1960 - at the dawn of the space race. The Saturn-I flew in 1961, even as the Redstone and Jupiter missiles it was based on were fading into obsolescence.
Well, no sub is even close to being 1000' long.... ;)
But an oft overlooked factor is the small size of the crews. We operated my weapons system (sixteen Tridents and their control, launching, testing and support equipment) with just eighteen people. There was just no room for anyone that wasn't at least above average. The Missile Techs (which generally came from the bottom third of the rankings in school) even called themselves the "scum of the cream".
The schools were brutal. When I attended SWSEA, the drop rate (I.E. people kicked out of the school) *averaged* thirty percent. My class started with 18 people, and graduated with 12. I was the only person in the class who had never been 'dropped back' (failed a block, and been transferred to a class behind you in the cycle to repeat it), and with a 99.988 average was the *number two* man in the class. Of the 18 people I started with, only 7 of us eventually completed the school and graduated.
High stress? Are you serious?
IT 'stress' is a walk in the park in gentle spring sunshine after a couple of years in the military - and that's *without* spending any time in a combat zone.
Indeed. What few people seem to realize is that while the principles of nuclear weapons are simple indeed... the actual engineering is anything but.
The real problem in our society isn't the lack of STEM graduates... it's the lack of enough people who work with real world stuff and raw materials to appreciate this.
Not just the Saturn - the Apollo CSM was already in development[1] and was in the process of morphing from being the lunar lander to being the command ship with a separate lunar lander. The (in)famous mode debate over direct ascent vs. EOR vs. LOR was already underway.
Few people realize that direct ascent was even in the race, because by 1962 it was already slipping into third place because it was believed that the booster required would be too large to build and fly within the state-of-the-art. The funny part is that NASA so badly underestimated the size and weight of the spacecraft[2] needed to reach the moon, the Saturn V of 1967 ended up being much larger than the Nova they didn't think could be built in 1962.
Precisely this. Kennedy and his advisers looked wide and deep at the various technology projects underway in the US at the time, and choose the lunar landing because a) it was In Space (the primary battleground), and b) considerable research and engineering had already been done. The various popular histories of the era even down to today merely repeat the propaganda of the time, that NASA started from more-or-less a standing start.
Indeed. And once the US got going, the Soviets fell ever further behind, and in some ways they never recovered. Even when it comes to space stations - the Soviets wouldn't beat either the total time accumulated or individual flight lengths until years after Skylab. (Which was essentially a program run with the scraps of the Apollo program.)
[1] Yes, Apollo predates Gemini by a wide margin - and NASA's decision to stick with the existing Apollo (what become the Block I Apollo) would come back to bite them in the butt.
[2] NASA's difficulties with estimating size, weight, budget, and schedule goes back a long ways.
As the poster above explains, you're understanding of the history of NASA in the 60's is a bit... deficient. The 'young NASA' of the 60's wasn't what you believe it to be, it was in fact a greatly bloated bureaucracy. I wish I could find the flowchart I once saw listing the process it took to approve the adding of a tool to the flight manifest - it took up three pages of reviews and tests and approvals and oversight committees and study board, etc... etc...
Yes, and no. While actual combustion of fuel and oxidizer takes place within the engine, the combustion products are still hot enough to cause reactions between atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen. The real reason they produce negligible amounts is because they spend so little time in the atmosphere. On the gripping hand, a good deal of what they do produce is deposited in the upper layers of the atmosphere - precisely the last place you want to do so. (Especially in the ozone layer.)
That's just the thing - it wasn't. While it's true that the early space boosters were based on IRBM's and ICBM's, the technology rapidly diverged.
It's a hole drilled in a window. Other than destroying the insulation provided by the double panes and pissing off your landlord.... What could go wrong?
Yet, if they don't take risks, then their stockholders bitch about reduced profits, and their depositors bitch about reduced returns/interest on their deposits - and the money and investors move to banks that will take the risk.
So how long before I get a charging station on I-5 between Seattle and Portland?
I get my information from naval historians, pilots who took part in the war, actual books, etc... Not thirty year old mass media accounts. Despite the urban legends that have circulated since the Falklands war, not one reliable source has ever confirmed the use of VIFF in combat and several have specifically denied it.
If this assumption is true (that they spent a significant portion of their annual budget), then one of both of two things is true: 1) they're idiots for overspending, and 2) they're idiots for not have a reasonable operating budget.
Paranoids, like garlic, need no reason.
On the contrary - the British never used VIFF in combat. On the other hand, while it was never used in combat, STOVL was and is used on a daily basis to land and take off from LHA's and Brit's baby flattops.
Yep. And that stock of parts is dwindling and it costs ever more to get replacements for parts designed (in some cases) as far back the seventies.
A friend of mine down the road at the naval shipyard just got done with a decade long program to replace a critical component onboard Trident SSBN's. The component was originally designed in the fifties, and units installed on Tridents were updated and manufactured in the seventies and eighties. But the submarines are expected to last into the 2030's, and the last manufacturer of that component closed it's line in 1998. (The equivalent civilian technology having moved on, and the Navy's annual orders being too small to keep the line open.)
You must have grown up around the Army - the Navy has outsourced those since the 70's or even before.
Things like the Exhange, etc.. aren't run by traditional contractors however, but by a private company chartered by the Navy. The same goes for the guards at the gate - they aren't rent-a-cops, but DoD civilians. (But where it does matter, like the weapons magazines up the road from me, the gyrenes still guard the gates.)
All the services pretty much have to nowadays, because they're only allotted so many people in uniform by Congress and those non-mission billets eat up a lot of bodies.
NASA has never built it's own rockets. Even the stuff that was designed in house had the actual R&D, engineering, and manufacturing done by the contractor.
I suspect that's pretty much the point of conducting the test at 2PM EST. The system gets tested end-to-end, while the fewest people are inconvenienced.
No, it's because iPhones are marketed like lumber - as a commodity. If I go buy an iPhone, it's just like every other iPhone, right out of the box. No need to do any research. If I read about an app in a blog, I can download it and it runs, period. Etc... etc...