But we are building aircraft with much greater payload than C5 (which can do 120 tonnes). Airbus A380 - 150 tonnes. Antonov An-225 - 250 tonnes, over twice more than C5.
If payload were the only issue - you'd have a point.
The last is just enough to lift the smallest, fueled configuration of Delta IV! (not that it's capable of such launch...) The one that can place 8.6 tonnes into LEO while launching from the ground. With comparable rocket launched from high altitude, small "spaceplane" to LEO should be already doable. Certainly old-style capsule.
While the AN-225 might be able to carry it - it can't launch it. In addition, the Delta will have to be modified to take the stresses of being fully fueled and carried in the horizontal position, the stress of launching in a horizontal position, and the stresses of maneuvering under power from the horizontal launch position to the nearly vertical flight position.
Once all these (very heavy) modification are complete, the Delta's payload capacity will be radically slashed - if not negative.
Haven't you ever wondered why air launch keeps being suggested then quietly dropped? Or why, per Kg, the Pegasus is one of the most expensive launchers around when theoretically it should be among the cheapest?
You don't even need non-existing aircraft...
Just to name one significant design problem - at separation both the booster and the carrier aircraft are going to vibrate like a plucked bowstring. Just overcoming that is going to be a serious design issue. Nobody has ever airdropped a payload anywhere near as large as a Delta IV.
Those other rides don't go to space. And commercial suborbital flights have only been around a few years. Frankly, you don't seem to understand the market.
On the contrary - unlike the space advocacy community, I understand the market thoroughly. What I don't do is delude myself. (For example, making ludicrous statements like "commercial suborbital has only been around a few years" when not one commercial suborbital flight has yet flown.)
Nonsense. SS2 only has about an eighth of the energy required to reach orbit. Worse yet, the general design scales very poorly.
Energy is cheap. Delta v is the real issue. And sure, the TPS used on the SpaceShipTwo won't scale to orbital. I guess they'll just have to design a new TPS (Thermal Protection System). Guess who can do that now?
Energy, fuel, is indeed cheap. The structure to contain it, less so. The engines to handle it even less so. As to who can design a new TPS? Who knows? There is exactly zero design experience around for it, unless you count a few doddering retirees from North American Rockwell or the handful of Boeing/NASA engineers who updated the Shuttle's TPS a decade ago.
Yes, they are serious problems. But Scaled Composites (the SpaceShipTwo builder) has a history of solving serious problems.
However, they don't have a track record of building spacecraft or of building large high performance aircraft of the type a carrier aircraft an orbital SS2 analogue would require. You might as well cite their experience at designing cookware, as that's just about as relevant.
As for TPS, I think that's exaggerated. Shuttle has a tricky TPS (required to use fragile tiles on its belly) because it is dense for its cross-sectional area. The designers can get around that merely by reducing that density (that is, making the vehicle "fluffier"). There's a lot more than the Shuttle demonstration (both the US and Russia have tested other types of reentry systems and materials, especially on the space capsules. There's even a demonstration of an inflatable reentry parafoil system. And there's a lot of good modeling out there for reentry systems due to NASA and its contractors.
There's a lot of talk about 'fluffy' spacecraft, but very little talk about handling and control problems caused by being 'fluffy'. As far as reusable heat shields other than the Shuttle, there is zero operational experience.
The only way to believe that it don a set of blinders and to wish away a wide variety of inconvenient facts.
Or to don a set of blinders and grossly exaggerate the few difficulties you understand.
ROTFLMAO. This from the guy who spins smoke into 'facts', ignores unpleasant facts, and confuses demonstrations and modeling with actual working designs? You have to be kidding me.
It doesn't help that you don't understand the importance of making a profit. Engineering problems are easy to solve in comparison.
You haven't a fucking clue what you are talking about.
There's our Orient Express, people. It's a short step from tourists to passengers.
Given that SS2 has a range of only a few dozen miles, it's a pretty shitty passenger aircraft. From the SS2 to _orbital_ passengers is roughly as big a jump as between the DC-3 and a 747.
They're answering the question "Can we make money doing this?" Virgin is exploring a virgin market (pun intended).
Partly right, mostly wrong. While you're correct that they're answering the question "can somebody make money selling high altitude thrill rides", the thrill ride market is no more virgin than a porn starlet after a gang bang. Thrill rides have been around for a long time, and are widely available.
Further the vehicle is significant progress towards an orbital vehicle. Performancewise, it generates about a quarter to third of the delta v that would be required to get to space (it'll have almost as much gravity losses as an orbital shot).
Nonsense. SS2 only has about an eighth of the energy required to reach orbit. Worse yet, the general design scales very poorly.
Extending the design to an orbital one will have to overcome some serious problems, in particular, a serious thermal protection system will need to be designed. But these are known engineering issues with existing solutions (NASA has done a number of studies on reentry of winged and lifting body designs).
Indeed, there are serious problems to overcome - like the problem of building an aircraft big enough to lift an orbital capable analogue of SS2. (You're talking an aircraft bigger than the C5 by a wide margin.) There's even more serious problems with the thermal protection system... While it is true that NASA has generated a mountain of paper studies, our only actual experience with hypersonic reentry and thermal protection systems is essentially limited to the Space Shuttle. (I.E. No, there are no existing solutions to leverage - just a wide variety of theoretical approaches.)
In summary, it's not just a glorified thrill ride, but a stepping stone to orbital space flight.
The only way to believe that it don a set of blinders and to wish away a wide variety of inconvenient facts.
The fact that this aircraft has been publicly acknowledged suggests that they have something far more advanced that they are not telling us about at the Skunk Works.
That's what everyone claims every time a formerly classified aircraft is revealed - despite the fact that no successor to any of those programs has ever come out into the light.
One comment on tfa raised an obvious question: Why deploy an advanced and experimental stealth aircraft in Kandahar against an enemy that doesn't have radar (nor any capability to threaten aircraft)?
For the same reason we use Aegis destroyers against pirates off of Somalia - we use what we have. We don't keep any 18th century sloops around in case we need to go against fishing boats, nor any biplane drones for use in Afghanistan.
The next question, about why this story was leaked
This isn't a leak - it's an official USAF confirmation.
As opposed to the liberal smear campaign of the last few years where anyone who didn't treat AGW as an article of faith was endlessly ridiculed and accused of all manner of dark motives?
FWIW, when I was in the [USN] Submarine Service, we were prepared to do the same thing if a crew member went off the rails. (Though the doc had a couple of sets of soft restraints we'd use instead of tape.)
That being said, we did use 'EB Green' (a tape that makes the useless crap falsely sold to John Q public as 'duct tape' look like tissue paper) for a wide variety of things.
Beating the high score isn't all that impressive really - it's a testing for aptitude, not for ability. As such, the simulator scores average pretty abysmal.
Heck, my average grades in my Navy training were around 99.90... Then I got to the Fleet and found out how little high scores in school had to do with the real world of operations.
> The market became so over-saturated with games that the public became disgusted with them.
Not quite. At the lowest point after the crash, members of the public were no less enthused about them than they were a year or two earlier. It was MERCHANTS who wouldn't touch videogames with a dirty twenty-foot pole, let alone sell them.
Despite not being middle schooler anymore, you seem to have never stopped and thought that there just might be a reason why merchants wouldn't touch them after the crash.
I've noticed that the perception that videogames "died" after "the crash" is strongest among people who were already adults when it happened.
Which shouldn't come as a surprise as it adults (in general) who step up to the counter and fork over the cash. Which, during and after the crash, is precisely what they didn't do - and in droves. And when folks won't step up to the counter and fork over cash, merchants stop stocking whatever is they aren't buying in favor of something that they are.
For those of us who were in middle school, the "crash" was an irrelevant abstraction.
I assure you, that for the (tens of?) thousands of people who lost their jobs, it was not irrelevant abstraction. Nor for the retailers stuck with unsold and unsaleable merchandise.
The software is designed to run at the lowest priority, idle. It takes up 16-50MB of RAM while running. Given that most school labs only run web browsers, office applications, and low-quality educational games, I doubt the systems were running out of memory. Antivirus apps take up a lot more than that, as to most web browsers. So on the charge of "slowing down education programs in every classroom" -- no.
In theory the BOINC software and the SETI@Home application take up minimal resources (memory and CPU) while the computer is actually in use. In practice it's very, very buggy and ill behaved - with memory leaks and a tendency to decide it wants those resources anyhow. Thus I have no problem believing it slowed down every computer, because that's exactly why I eventually uninstalled BOINC on my home machines. Over time, it had gotten buggier and more ill behaved.
Regarding computer replacement parts -- not really. Those machines are going to sit there no matter what, and they will fail at the same rates regardless of what software is running on them. OTOH, if they were running 24/7 and that was being done only so SETI@Home could run, then yes -- replacement costs of fans and harddrives would have gone up.
Yup. Since uninstalling BOINC, my fans run much less often and hard drives don't go into 'churning fits'.
NASA (like the rest of the government) needs to be focused on its "core competencies" (no I'm not a PHB).
If you aren't a PHB, then why complain using PHB/Marketdroid fuzzy buzzwords?
Where does building data centers fit into NASA's mission statement?
NASA does all manner of things that aren't launching things into space because without doing those things, the things they do launch into space might as well be chunks of firewood. For example, operating a large communications network, or operating a considerable chunk of data processing horsepower. But, you need to read TFA - they didn't develop a data center, they took commercially available hardware and deployed the [open source!] NEBULA cloud managment application on that hardware.
I realize that there are tremendous amounts of data that needs to be captured, analyzed and archived (the Terra satellite sends a terabyte of data a day alone I think) but isn't this something that can be done more efficiently by private industry (Google?). Maybe it can be even outsourced providing it is not of a sensitive nature, I mean isn't the data for all mankind?
Actually, given the byzantine nature of Federal procurement, it may not be more efficient to be done by an outside contractor. Doubly so given the even more byzantine web of privacy, access, and security requirements.
Yes, the science data is for all mankind, but there is usually a 'hold back period' of a year or two where only the science team (usually from outside NASA) has access to it. This is only fair, as they're the guys who fought for funding for the instrument, designed it, developed it, tested it, operated it - and spent years of their lives doing so. (We're used to talking about 'NASA satellites', but in reality NASA is often just the bus driver and road crew for instruments from outside of NASA.)
A 45 year old typewriter looks good on display and most probably still types perfectly well.
Almost certainly the 45 year old typewriters is nothing but a brick. Dust has settled deep into it's innards, clogging and slowing the mechanism. The lubricants have either evaporated or dried, further gumming up the works. The remnants of ink on the heads attracts dust too... slowly turning them into Q-tips.
Seriously, it appears that few if any of the posters here have ever actually spent much time around typewriters... And thus don't appreciate that they are mechanical devices, not magical ones. Like all mechanical devices, typewriters (especially heavily used ones) require regular cleaning, lubrication, and adjustment to remain functional. Without all that, they slowly but steadily become useless.
Actually, it's a reasonable system for heating large building complexes where a central facility can heat the water. Many Universities and large corporate complexes already use similar methods for heating their campuses.
'Already' is a bit misleading however - central heating installations like these, using steam or hot water, go back over a century - New York's dates from 1880.
These complexes can also cool their buildings in the summer by pumping chilled water through the system.
Or they can use hot water to drive absorption chillers, or steam to drive turbine centrifugal chillers.
No. It means 'real beef' made from free range cows will be bought at specialty stores for top dollar rather than this mass produced anti-biotic, hormoned, rotten grain fed crap they try to pass off as 'beef' now.
Seriously... Have you ever bought and ate a real steak. No... Not the kind you buy at Western Corral, but the NY cut or Filet mignon aged beef marinated over 24 hours cooked by a professional with the right blend of herbs spices that melts in your mouth usually costing you over 30-40 or even $100 per plate (depending on where you go) combined with a matched set of alcohol.
And guess where that professional chef likely got his 'real' meat from? The same place Western Corral does - from a factory 'farm' that mass produces antibiotic and hormone laden crap. The only difference between the two being that the professional was willing to fork over the big bucks for Prime graded meat while Western Corral buys a much lesser grade. Both are equally 'real'.
Then the professional chef spends the big bucks on aging, where Western Corral doesn't.
Then the professional uses a proper grill with a trained cook, while Western Corral uses minimum wage labor.
Then the professional multiplies his food cost by 8x-10x to pay for all the labor and equipment, where Western Corral marks up 1x-2x and makes up the difference in volume and selling $.10/liter soda at $5.00/liter.
But they both start with the same beef. Free range beef is a vanishingly small proportion of the market, and is increasingly produced in factory environments.
And marinated for 24 hours? Really? If the steak is of high quality and properly handled, you might as well pour cheap ketchup over it. Good steak doesn't need marinade, and in the case of the filet you'll destroy what little flavor it has to start with. You're a pretentious git who not only has swallowed the hype whole, you haven't a clue as to how the professional or Western Corral works.
Yes, you get a higher specific impulse and thrust that way... But you also increase the weight and complexity of your vehicle, and add considerable ground handling and operational problems and costs. (It's expensive to manufacture and handle Oxygen Clean hardware, even more so when you're handling cryogenic oxygen.)
It's very disappointing to the science community (who at least understand the reasoning) but extremely disappointing to the rest of the world who can't fathom why something so expensive, with such a long development time...still has not provided any research.
In other words, the scientific community actually doesn't "understand the reasoning" and is as ignorant as the general public.
Just switching from a fragile tile-covered aircraft strapped to the side of a flaking-foam-covered hydrogen tank to an inherently ballistically stable capsule placed as far from the flaming end of the rocket as possible (i.e., on top of it) will achieve the desired 10x safety factor improvement.
Except, there's no such thing as an 'inherently ballistically stable capsule'. It takes considerable engineering effort, aerodynamic analysis, CP/CG managment, etc., to make the capsule stable. Consider this: An ICBM re entry vehicle is the (roughly) the same shape as a capsule, but re enters pointy end *forward*.
And if they want to do all this at minimum cost, they could just buy Soyuz vehicles, the world's safest, most reliable manned space transportation system.
It's worth noting that Soyuz's demonstrated safety/reliability rate, is actually slightly lower than that of the Shuttle. (I.E. nowhere near the automagic 10x improvement you believe will occur if we switch to capsules.) The Soyuz has also demonstrated an annoying propensity to significant failures that ride the ragged edge of disaster.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia is one of Slashdot's blindspots - where the usual thought out points go out of the window in the groupthink, and mod points are dished out purely on who can criticise Wikipedia, for whatever reason, be it a personal bad experience of editing there, or some axe to grind against its policies.
Which should tell you something... because in years past, the situation was precisely the opposite. In any article about the Wikipedia posts praising it and explaining how it was the most wonderful thing since sliced bread were 'mindlessly' modded up, while posts critiquing it or pointing out problems were 'mindlessly' modded down. Positive articles about the Wikipedia abounded... The few articles critical of Wikipedia that slipped through the editors blind spots were filled with '+5 Insightful' articles that amounted to ad hominem attacks on the article, editor, or rare post that dared to ask where the emperor's new clothes were.
He didn't say "it ain't so". RTFA. In fact, it doesn't even dispute it even though that's presumably the intent, it simply talks of looking further into the figures.
Simply looking deeper into the numbers is one thing - spouting facts and figures in an attempt to impress and overwhelm the reader and thus distract him from actually thinking about the numbers is a different thing entirely. The latter is precisely what is happening here, and you fell for it hook line and sinker.
The first two things listed may not be directly related to the number of editors - but that's the point! "Number of editors leaving" is a rather meaningless figure. You have to look at the whole picture, which is what he's doing. And the second one is related - they're still getting new articles, so there's yet to be any problem.
Looking at the whole picture, and actually thinking about the numbers he presents rather than being impressed by their size, doesn't paint the rosy picture you and he want us to be dazzled by. If the number of editors is remaining stable, while the number of articles is going up - that means each editor is overseeing an increasing number of articles, which means the amount of attention he can pay to any given article goes inevitably down.
In actuality, since editors tend to cluster, that means that more and more articles are out on the fringes - under (at best) only loose or rote supervision, or not actually watched on a regular basis but only checked when someone happens to wander by. The first means that edits are often reverted without the editor actually spending much time looking at the new edit. The latter means the articles are (often) increasingly out of date. (I now routinely find articles weeks to months out of date, and found one a couple of weeks back that was three years out of date.) Articles out on the fringes are also especially vulnerable to vandalism.
Your last statement is particularly troubling to me. Just because there isn't a problem "yet", doesn't mean one can safely ignore trends. To use the traditional Slashdot automobile analogy: If your "check oil" light comes on, and your engine is still running normally, only a fool places a bit of tape over the light and pretends it doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
If payload were the only issue - you'd have a point.
While the AN-225 might be able to carry it - it can't launch it. In addition, the Delta will have to be modified to take the stresses of being fully fueled and carried in the horizontal position, the stress of launching in a horizontal position, and the stresses of maneuvering under power from the horizontal launch position to the nearly vertical flight position.
Once all these (very heavy) modification are complete, the Delta's payload capacity will be radically slashed - if not negative.
Haven't you ever wondered why air launch keeps being suggested then quietly dropped? Or why, per Kg, the Pegasus is one of the most expensive launchers around when theoretically it should be among the cheapest?
Just to name one significant design problem - at separation both the booster and the carrier aircraft are going to vibrate like a plucked bowstring. Just overcoming that is going to be a serious design issue. Nobody has ever airdropped a payload anywhere near as large as a Delta IV.
On the contrary - unlike the space advocacy community, I understand the market thoroughly. What I don't do is delude myself. (For example, making ludicrous statements like "commercial suborbital has only been around a few years" when not one commercial suborbital flight has yet flown.)
Energy, fuel, is indeed cheap. The structure to contain it, less so. The engines to handle it even less so. As to who can design a new TPS? Who knows? There is exactly zero design experience around for it, unless you count a few doddering retirees from North American Rockwell or the handful of Boeing/NASA engineers who updated the Shuttle's TPS a decade ago.
However, they don't have a track record of building spacecraft or of building large high performance aircraft of the type a carrier aircraft an orbital SS2 analogue would require. You might as well cite their experience at designing cookware, as that's just about as relevant.
There's a lot of talk about 'fluffy' spacecraft, but very little talk about handling and control problems caused by being 'fluffy'. As far as reusable heat shields other than the Shuttle, there is zero operational experience.
Or to don a set of blinders and grossly exaggerate the few difficulties you understand.
ROTFLMAO. This from the guy who spins smoke into 'facts', ignores unpleasant facts, and confuses demonstrations and modeling with actual working designs? You have to be kidding me.
You haven't a fucking clue what you are talking about.
Private space industry has existed since the dawn of the space age.
Boeing, LockMart, Arianespace, etc. have been making a profit off of space for decades.
Given that SS2 has a range of only a few dozen miles, it's a pretty shitty passenger aircraft. From the SS2 to _orbital_ passengers is roughly as big a jump as between the DC-3 and a 747.
Partly right, mostly wrong. While you're correct that they're answering the question "can somebody make money selling high altitude thrill rides", the thrill ride market is no more virgin than a porn starlet after a gang bang. Thrill rides have been around for a long time, and are widely available.
Nonsense. SS2 only has about an eighth of the energy required to reach orbit. Worse yet, the general design scales very poorly.
Indeed, there are serious problems to overcome - like the problem of building an aircraft big enough to lift an orbital capable analogue of SS2. (You're talking an aircraft bigger than the C5 by a wide margin.) There's even more serious problems with the thermal protection system... While it is true that NASA has generated a mountain of paper studies, our only actual experience with hypersonic reentry and thermal protection systems is essentially limited to the Space Shuttle. (I.E. No, there are no existing solutions to leverage - just a wide variety of theoretical approaches.)
The only way to believe that it don a set of blinders and to wish away a wide variety of inconvenient facts.
That's what everyone claims every time a formerly classified aircraft is revealed - despite the fact that no successor to any of those programs has ever come out into the light.
For the same reason we use Aegis destroyers against pirates off of Somalia - we use what we have. We don't keep any 18th century sloops around in case we need to go against fishing boats, nor any biplane drones for use in Afghanistan.
This isn't a leak - it's an official USAF confirmation.
That's roughly as reliable as The Onion or the Weekly World News.
As opposed to the liberal smear campaign of the last few years where anyone who didn't treat AGW as an article of faith was endlessly ridiculed and accused of all manner of dark motives?
FWIW, when I was in the [USN] Submarine Service, we were prepared to do the same thing if a crew member went off the rails. (Though the doc had a couple of sets of soft restraints we'd use instead of tape.)
That being said, we did use 'EB Green' (a tape that makes the useless crap falsely sold to John Q public as 'duct tape' look like tissue paper) for a wide variety of things.
Beating the high score isn't all that impressive really - it's a testing for aptitude, not for ability. As such, the simulator scores average pretty abysmal.
Heck, my average grades in my Navy training were around 99.90... Then I got to the Fleet and found out how little high scores in school had to do with the real world of operations.
Computers now do what they are programmed to do when the user uses the specified input device in a specified way!
Despite not being middle schooler anymore, you seem to have never stopped and thought that there just might be a reason why merchants wouldn't touch them after the crash.
Which shouldn't come as a surprise as it adults (in general) who step up to the counter and fork over the cash. Which, during and after the crash, is precisely what they didn't do - and in droves. And when folks won't step up to the counter and fork over cash, merchants stop stocking whatever is they aren't buying in favor of something that they are.
I assure you, that for the (tens of?) thousands of people who lost their jobs, it was not irrelevant abstraction. Nor for the retailers stuck with unsold and unsaleable merchandise.
In theory the BOINC software and the SETI@Home application take up minimal resources (memory and CPU) while the computer is actually in use. In practice it's very, very buggy and ill behaved - with memory leaks and a tendency to decide it wants those resources anyhow. Thus I have no problem believing it slowed down every computer, because that's exactly why I eventually uninstalled BOINC on my home machines. Over time, it had gotten buggier and more ill behaved.
Yup. Since uninstalling BOINC, my fans run much less often and hard drives don't go into 'churning fits'.
If you aren't a PHB, then why complain using PHB/Marketdroid fuzzy buzzwords?
NASA does all manner of things that aren't launching things into space because without doing those things, the things they do launch into space might as well be chunks of firewood. For example, operating a large communications network, or operating a considerable chunk of data processing horsepower. But, you need to read TFA - they didn't develop a data center, they took commercially available hardware and deployed the [open source!] NEBULA cloud managment application on that hardware.
Actually, given the byzantine nature of Federal procurement, it may not be more efficient to be done by an outside contractor. Doubly so given the even more byzantine web of privacy, access, and security requirements.
Yes, the science data is for all mankind, but there is usually a 'hold back period' of a year or two where only the science team (usually from outside NASA) has access to it. This is only fair, as they're the guys who fought for funding for the instrument, designed it, developed it, tested it, operated it - and spent years of their lives doing so. (We're used to talking about 'NASA satellites', but in reality NASA is often just the bus driver and road crew for instruments from outside of NASA.)
Read what I wrote you idiot - you'll see I mentioned cleaning.
Almost certainly the 45 year old typewriters is nothing but a brick. Dust has settled deep into it's innards, clogging and slowing the mechanism. The lubricants have either evaporated or dried, further gumming up the works. The remnants of ink on the heads attracts dust too... slowly turning them into Q-tips.
Seriously, it appears that few if any of the posters here have ever actually spent much time around typewriters... And thus don't appreciate that they are mechanical devices, not magical ones. Like all mechanical devices, typewriters (especially heavily used ones) require regular cleaning, lubrication, and adjustment to remain functional. Without all that, they slowly but steadily become useless.
'Already' is a bit misleading however - central heating installations like these, using steam or hot water, go back over a century - New York's dates from 1880.
Or they can use hot water to drive absorption chillers, or steam to drive turbine centrifugal chillers.
And guess where that professional chef likely got his 'real' meat from? The same place Western Corral does - from a factory 'farm' that mass produces antibiotic and hormone laden crap. The only difference between the two being that the professional was willing to fork over the big bucks for Prime graded meat while Western Corral buys a much lesser grade. Both are equally 'real'.
Then the professional chef spends the big bucks on aging, where Western Corral doesn't.
Then the professional uses a proper grill with a trained cook, while Western Corral uses minimum wage labor.
Then the professional multiplies his food cost by 8x-10x to pay for all the labor and equipment, where Western Corral marks up 1x-2x and makes up the difference in volume and selling $.10/liter soda at $5.00/liter.
But they both start with the same beef. Free range beef is a vanishingly small proportion of the market, and is increasingly produced in factory environments.
And marinated for 24 hours? Really? If the steak is of high quality and properly handled, you might as well pour cheap ketchup over it. Good steak doesn't need marinade, and in the case of the filet you'll destroy what little flavor it has to start with. You're a pretentious git who not only has swallowed the hype whole, you haven't a clue as to how the professional or Western Corral works.
Yes, you get a higher specific impulse and thrust that way... But you also increase the weight and complexity of your vehicle, and add considerable ground handling and operational problems and costs. (It's expensive to manufacture and handle Oxygen Clean hardware, even more so when you're handling cryogenic oxygen.)
In other words, the scientific community actually doesn't "understand the reasoning" and is as ignorant as the general public.
Except, there's no such thing as an 'inherently ballistically stable capsule'. It takes considerable engineering effort, aerodynamic analysis, CP/CG managment, etc., to make the capsule stable. Consider this: An ICBM re entry vehicle is the (roughly) the same shape as a capsule, but re enters pointy end *forward*.
It's worth noting that Soyuz's demonstrated safety/reliability rate, is actually slightly lower than that of the Shuttle. (I.E. nowhere near the automagic 10x improvement you believe will occur if we switch to capsules.) The Soyuz has also demonstrated an annoying propensity to significant failures that ride the ragged edge of disaster.
They do plaster advertisements 'all over' the site. Right now, there is a huge banner ad begging for donations right at the top of every page.
Which should tell you something... because in years past, the situation was precisely the opposite. In any article about the Wikipedia posts praising it and explaining how it was the most wonderful thing since sliced bread were 'mindlessly' modded up, while posts critiquing it or pointing out problems were 'mindlessly' modded down. Positive articles about the Wikipedia abounded... The few articles critical of Wikipedia that slipped through the editors blind spots were filled with '+5 Insightful' articles that amounted to ad hominem attacks on the article, editor, or rare post that dared to ask where the emperor's new clothes were.
Simply looking deeper into the numbers is one thing - spouting facts and figures in an attempt to impress and overwhelm the reader and thus distract him from actually thinking about the numbers is a different thing entirely. The latter is precisely what is happening here, and you fell for it hook line and sinker.
Looking at the whole picture, and actually thinking about the numbers he presents rather than being impressed by their size, doesn't paint the rosy picture you and he want us to be dazzled by. If the number of editors is remaining stable, while the number of articles is going up - that means each editor is overseeing an increasing number of articles, which means the amount of attention he can pay to any given article goes inevitably down.
In actuality, since editors tend to cluster, that means that more and more articles are out on the fringes - under (at best) only loose or rote supervision, or not actually watched on a regular basis but only checked when someone happens to wander by. The first means that edits are often reverted without the editor actually spending much time looking at the new edit. The latter means the articles are (often) increasingly out of date. (I now routinely find articles weeks to months out of date, and found one a couple of weeks back that was three years out of date.) Articles out on the fringes are also especially vulnerable to vandalism.
Your last statement is particularly troubling to me. Just because there isn't a problem "yet", doesn't mean one can safely ignore trends. To use the traditional Slashdot automobile analogy: If your "check oil" light comes on, and your engine is still running normally, only a fool places a bit of tape over the light and pretends it doesn't exist.