For all eligible invalid clicks, we will offer credits which can be used to purchase new advertising with Google. We do not know how many will apply and receive credits, but under the agreement, the total amount of credits, plus attorneys fees, will not exceed $90 million. -- Google blog.
All this is costing Google are the legal fees.
Nope. If they have to run a 'credit' ad to get it's clicks, then a 'paid' ad cannot be running. This is costing Google the income from paid aids that are replaced by credit ads.
In most non-engineering faculties this is well accepted, however in the Applied Sciences Faculty the users are computer savvy -- they do not like the idea of giving out control of their computers to people they don't know.
The computers don't belong to the users of the Applied Science Faculty. Those are not 'their' computers.
Actually von Braun thought the Saturn V was a mildly interesting side road - his real interest was in reuseable shuttlecraft.
People keep repeating this, but it just isn't true. The Space Shuttle concept was an offshoot of the Dynasoar which was an offshoot of the Silbervogel (Silverbird). The Sibervogel was Eugen Sänger's baby, not Von Braun's
Right. That's why Von Braun wrote an entire *book*, as well as a series of articles for Collier's magazine, as well as movie for Disney... All pushing the Shuttle-> Station-> Moon-> Mars plan in the 1952, which was a follow on to a design from 1948!
Von Braun actually believed that the Saturn V was the future to space access, and became a big believer in a Saturn V launched Orion. His idea was that the SatV would get the craft up there, then the Orion would take us to other planets.
Von Braun was a master political opportunist whose life goal was to get to Mars. If that meant building A4's or Saturn V's, so be it. He adapted to what his masters would pay for - but never changed his core vision.
If the Space Shuttle had been Von Braun's baby, then he wouldn't have resigned in protest when the government cancelled the Saturn V program.
I never said the Shuttle was Von Braun's baby - just that a shuttle was his vision. (And he resigned because NASA wasn't going to Mars anytime soon, not after the Administration shot down the Shuttle-> Station-> Moon-> Mars plan.)
In fact, NASA has (by-and-large) been following von Braun's Shuttle-> Station-> Moon-> Mars plan since the day it changed it's name from NACA.
This has always been NASA's vision as a whole, and has not had all that much to do with Von Braun himself.
Von Braun was working to make good on that vision, but he had his own ideas about how it should be accomplished. Most of them featured the Saturn V prominently.
In the 1940's they featured derivatives of the A4, in the 1960's they featured derivatives of the Saturn V. I.E. they featured what he was paid to develop. As I said, as masterful oppurtunist.
Pegasus, which costs two orders of magnitude over it's initial promise
For something never tried before.
You held it up as an example of sucess. No matter how hard you wave your hands - it wasn't.
Sure, the hard work of getting off the pad and through the lower atmosphere has already been done, but the insanely freaking hard job of getting up to orbital velocity still remains to be done
Yes, but it's also true that a significant portion of the fuel a vehicle carries is used for getting off the ground in the first place.
Only if you have a really bad vehicle design. A typical design will use 5% or less of it's fuel between ignition and vehicle first motion. Maybe 20% tops by the time it gets to any reasonably achievable air launch altitude and speed. To save that 20% of your fuel (which is cheap) you have add weight (in the form of structural reinforcement) to your rocket - worse yet, a non trivial portion of that weight is in the upper stages where it's impact on performance is the greatest.
The reason convential rockets are so expensive isn't because of fuel costs or the costs of the structure to contain the fuel. Both are trivially cheap. Conventional rockets (current ones) are expensive because they require insane amounts of man hours to prepare to launch, and their margins are so thin, you have to spend insane amounts of man hours in getting the payload weight down.
No one's built an SSTO yet because, among other problems, the huge mass that would be required
The Titan II first stage (circa 1964) has more than adequate performance for a low performance SSTO. Nobody has built a high performance SSTO because there is no economic incentive to do so.
why do that when you can let something else do the job of getting started and then drop off?
Because air launch doesn't do a significant job of getting started in return for the costs it imposes.
Imagine drving a compact car across the US. Imagine using a semi-trailer and a thousand pound adapter fixture (which much stay on the compact the whole way) to push the compact for the first hundred miles. That is what proportion of the work air launch does for an LEO booster.
you start talking aircraft designs where the C-5 is considered too small.
Then build a bigger aircraft. There are bigger designs than the C-5 out there - the An-225 among them.
The AN-225 couldn't even air launch a Mercury/Atlas.
C'mon, we're innovators, we can come up with something that could do the job. Like, say, an XB-70 and smaller spaceplane?
The consensus among people who know how these things work is this - Blackstar (if it exists) will work only if you use insanely expensive fuels. Fuels which are extremely corrosive, extremely toxic, and extremely difficult to work with. This means you get a difficult to build, insanely expensive to maintain, and fairly low performance vehicle.
Actually, carrier-plane based systems are very successful. Take a look at the Pegasus booster and SpaceShipOne, for instance,
Pegasus, which costs two orders of magnitude over it's initial promise, and whose cost/LB to orbit is essentially the same as the overly expensive Atlas and Delta series (with a significantly worse safety record)... SpaceShipOne, which is a high performance aircraft, not an orbiter...
Yeah. Those are really convincing arguments for the 'sucess' of air launch for LEO payloads
and the rumored Blackstar program. Plus, with a manned aircraft launching from high altitude, the hard work of getting off the pad and through the lower atmosphere has already been done,
Sure, the hard work of getting off the pad and through the lower atmosphere has already been done, but the insanely freaking hard job of getting up to orbital velocity still remains to be done. (Air launch gets you, at best, something like 1/20th of the energy needed for orbit - at no noticeable savings.)
and there's less to throw away
Not noticeably.
the launcher simply returns to its launch site just like a normal aircraft does (and in fact the Pegasus has always used modified aircraft built for other purposes rather than needing a specialized design).
Pegasus can do this because it's a low payload, low performance booster. Once you start talking significant payloads - you start talking aircraft designs where the C-5 is considered too small.
I suppose cost is one of the big reasons a rocket sled hasn't been tried. A full scale ramp would be a major investment.
No, it hasn't been tried for one reason only; when you run the numbers - it doesn't work. The cost/LB turns out to be greater current expendables, and a much higher percentage of parasitic mass is required.
If the sled is rocket driven, you still deal with burning lots of fuel,
Rocket fuel is cheap. The total cost of the Shuttle's liquid and solid fuels is somewhere around 2 million dollars.
As far as alternatives to vertical ground launches go, dropping from a carrier plane sounds like a better way to go to me
Only so long as you don't intend to send any significant mass into orbit. (An aircraft that could carry a Mercury capsule and booster is bigger than the C5. An aircraft that could carry an Apollo, even for a LEO mission, would make the AN-225 look like a toy.)
I don't see any quotes from Von Braun. In fact, Von Braun thought the Saturn V was his baby for launches.
Actually von Braun thought the Saturn V was a mildly interesting side road - his real interest was in reuseable shuttlecraft. In fact, NASA has (by-and-large) been following von Braun's Shuttle-> Station-> Moon-> Mars plan since the day it changed it's name from NACA.
Under NASA's original plan - Apollo was just a general purpose earth orbiter with a seperate (expendable) heavy lifter for cargo. Both were supposed to be replaced with reusable craft. (Expendables were to be used at first only because they were easy to develop - reuseable is hard, much harder than was thought then.) The moon was thought to be reachable "sometime in the 70's, pherhaps in time for the Bicentennial".
Then Kennedy made his "because it's hard" speech and imposed an entirely new schedule. (But even as NASA was very publically racing to the Moon, it was also preparing for the day they could return to the von Braun vision. The Phase II shuttle study contracts were signed on July 20, 1969.) As soon as we reached the Moon, and Congress asked NASA, "what next" - and NASA answered "Shuttle-> Station-> Moon-> Mars". (The political fallout from this overambitious (and expensive) plan in a time of a tightening budget is still being felt today.)
Even the current Administrations VSE is just the von Braun Vision with a new paint job.
A quick test I performed showed interesting results. I plugged in the word Galen in both Live and Google. Live returned 1,160,846 results while Google gave 13,200,000 results. Considering Live was just released the discrepancy isn't hard to understand. What was interesting was what the first result was. In the case of Live the first result was a photo studio run by Galen and Barbara Powell. For Google the first result was much more relevant: a link to the University of Virgina Health System which talked about the medical practice from the past of which Galen is listed in the links.
The first result from Google is only more relevant if you were expecting it, or if you were searching on medical topics. OTOH, if you are searching for people with the given name Galen, it's not more relevant. (I.E. you have fabricated as reason to prefer Google out of thin air, relevance is in the eye of the beholder.)
More than once I've googled a word, only to find it co-opted as the name of a piece of software - and thus had to wade through pages of crap to find what I was interested in.
The second result for both Live and Google were the same, the Galen Institute homepage.
While one test doesn't a study make, considering Microsofts track record of returning results, I don't forsee myself using their service (especially with all the clutter on the screen).
Well, I did several tests, most of them on obscure keywords (I.E. not camped by spam pages) - and in each and every one of the result was that both systems delivered virtually the same pages, with only ordering difference between them.
Hell, when England made the Domesday Book in 1086 Christians probably went ape-shit over it for the same reason.
As someone who has studied the Domesday extensively - no, the Christians did not. (And really there wasn't anyone but Christians around anyhow.) In fact, the creation of the Domesday pretty much passed from public notice except as a seven days wonder. The reputation of the book as a source of 'dome' (doom [1]) came about somewhat later.
The Wikipedia article is quite misleading (on a number of matters) - but the one germane here is that the book was not created as some form of unimpeachable record, but as a detailed survey of the state of England so that William knew how much taxes he could collect to repay the cost of the Conquest and to finance further adventures on the Continent. It only started being used as such a record in the first decades of the 11th century, years after William died.
[1] 'Doom' in in more classical sense as meaning 'fate', rather than the more common usage and meaning as 'death/ disaster/ fear/ fire/ foes'
The new business model should be to give away the recordings because they were always a loss leader anyway, and make your money on live shows and merch.
The assumption is that every artist is a live performer. While live performance is one talent, recording, remixing, songwriting, arranging, and many other musical skills don't lend themselves well to the stage. But music would be much poorer without them.
Indeed. It also makes the assumption that most of the money comes from merchandising and live performance and that recordings generate very little - which is only true of the small band. (Who sell damm few albums.) When you get big, the numbers reverse - the live performances are little more than commercials for the album/cd/what have you. Better yet, a recording can generate income for decades rather than just one night. (Johnny Cash, or more accurately his estate, has something on the order of fifty albums in print. That tells me more than anything else the power of the recording to generate cash flow.)
Assuming that the economics of $GARAGE_BAND is the same as those of $MEGA_BAND is a dangerous path. They aren't.
Then I realized that given the makeup of/. (lots of "hard science" geeks)
heh. If only that were the case. The makeup of slashdot is computer nerds, who generally know very little about science, but think it's "cool".
It's actually worse than that - most of/.'s computer geeks assume that being knowledgeable about computers makes them homo superior and thus by default they understand every topic. Completely.
Virtually always they're wrong.
There aren't two cultures (science and the humanities), but three cultures, science, humanities, and technology. There's a little crossover between the sciences and technologies, with each group thinking they understand the other (but really don't).
I'd hesistate to call technology a culture on par with the other two. Most 'technology' workers are merely the white collar equivalent of the lathe operator of a century ago. Both are jobs that require skill and experience - and the world depended utterly on each in it's turn. But both are utterly dependent on the tools provided to them by others. And both are utterly replaceable. Only the 'technologist' continues to convince himself that he is something 'special' and deserves treatment above and beyond the norm in compensation for that.
Not to conduct such research on mice and let hundreds of thousands of people die of heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
And yet it's perfectly alright to eliminate all natural population controls of homo sapiens - resulting in overpopulation to the point of using up our resources, so all the billions of humans can suffer miserable lives before they inevitably die of dehydration or starvation?
None of the diseases listed above have ever constituted a significant natural check on human population expansion. They are either too rare (cancer, diabetes) or strike mostly after the reproductive age (heart disease).
OTOH - here in the real world, the curves are pretty plain. World population will peak sometime in the next century, and then will start to decline. Nobody is quite sure where the bottom is - somewhat below current levels, but not as low as many of the Greens would like seems a safe bet. (If you are using a computer - it's virtually certain that you live in a country whose birth rate is slipping below replacement, if it isn't there already.) The evidence is overwhelming, when a nation moves into the First World, it's birthrate starts a slow and steady decline. Why? Because children become more expensive, both to the individual and to society.
More people ought to contact their representatives about NASA funding. Unfortunately space exploration doesn't seem to get as much press time as other "important" issues these days.
Unsurprising - since the general public has historically been vastly disinterested in space exploration.
Sadly, the decision to award the contract to Morton Thiokol was made on sound engineering (and penny pinching) grounds. At the time the contract was awarded, there was essentially no experience with big monolithic solids, and a fairly large base of experience with large segmented solids.
You lost me. If there was no experience in the field,
I'll try and explain, I thought I made myself clear.
There are two ways to build big solids -
Cast the grain in a single large pour. At the time the SRM contract was awarded, this was bleeding edge technology. Barely tested, poorly understood, and having many problems when considered as part of the overall Shuttle system.
Cast the grain in segments. At the time the SRM contract was awarded this was a fairly well established field. The largest motors were somewhat smaller than the SRM, but it was believed that all that was needed was a simple scaling of existing designs.
The field that lacked experience was big monolithic motors, not big segmented motors.
why should Morton Thiokol have been chosen over any geographically closer competitor, with the resultant transportation and assembly problems? Just low bidder?
Usually when NASA puts out a RFP, it includes it's research data (and/or a general design) as well as the specifications, the contractor then proposes a specific design. NASA analyses the competing designs and chooses among them. (Contrary to popular belief, price is only one of many, many criteria used by the goverment to evaluate proposals.)
In the instance of the SRM, Aerojet General proposed monolithic solids, and Morton Thiokol proposed segmented solids. There were no other bidders.
Or a political plum, as I implied?
Many people parrot things that they don't understand the meaning of because it agrees with their biases.
Of course nobody knew about it. I can't even file my income taxes without the aid of a computer program and a book.
Which says more about your lack than the complexity of the tax laws. I've done my taxes (which include a small business, investments, and for the last four years an estate) for years, by hand, using nothing but a handful of pamphlets from the IRS, a calculator (sans memory) and a few sheets of scrap paper. It takes me about two hours each evening for a week. (But then I keep good records all year, most of folks tax time stress comes from poor recordkeeping - so says my sister the CPA in tax practice.)
As a test, I also submitted my information to a professional last year. The total additional savings came to less than what he cost me - a net loss compared to doing it myself. (To the average, and wilfully ignorant, Joe - what he did would look amazing I admit.)
The complexity of doing your own taxes is a myth - a myth propogated by generations of accountants, lawyers, and scam artists who make their living off of that fear.
The Shuttle was and is a great idea, but the execution was flawed due to too much pennypinching during the design phase.I'm not sure design was the real problem.
As usual, when government money is involved, engineering loses out to politics. The history of the Shuttle might have been far different if Morton Thiokol (who had a huge logistical disadvantage) hadn't been awarded a certain contract.
Sadly, the decision to award the contract to Morton Thiokol was made on sound engineering (and penny pinching) grounds. At the time the contract was awarded, there was essentially no experience with big monolithic solids, and a fairly large base of experience with large segmented solids.
Monolithic solids were (and are) difficult to make, a problem made worse by the Shuttle's requirement that the two solid be matched in thrust within 1%. (Easily done by pouring one medium sized batch in a LH and RH segment, difficult with one large and long curing grain.) In addition there were questions about handling the monolithic motors, which were extraordinarily heavy (and large) by the standards of the day. There were questions about storing the monolithic motors (much more difficult than storing segments). There were questions about the possibility of propellant slump in stored motors (because of the vast weight)... And on, and on, and on.
In the end, the choice came down to either (what seemed to be) a straightforward scaling of existing motor experience, or a completely new (and expensive) research and development program with uncertain results.
So, you are correct - history might have been very different had Morton Thiokol not been awarded the contract. The Shuttle might never have flown at all - because the problems with monolithic solids couldn't be worked out. Or it might have ended up even more expensive. Or maybe the solids become the pacing item in the program - rather than the SSMEs and the tiles. A flight program free of troubles caused by the solid motors is only one possible (and by no means certain or likely) outcome.
Actually, the way I'd do it is to have a set of giant space-based telescopes on a polar orbit around the moon such that they were always visible from Earth. Less atmospheric drag, so won't have as many problems as Hubble, and the orbit is much less crowded.
Actually, a telescope in lunar oribit has just as many problems as Hubble - because lunar orbits are unstable. This means that you need active propulsion systems for any kind of useful orbital lifetime.
While a million sounds impressive, here's a game which puts the "1 million articles" into a more realistic perspective. From the main page, click on "random article" 10 times and analyze the content.
For example, my results...
[snippage of list of one paragraph articles]
Note: This is not a jab at Wikipedia, which I love reading/contributing to, but rather a demonstration of how much work is still needed to flesh out its body of articles.
Indeed. A random walk of the 'pedia reveals many things. Like how many 'articles' are merely lists. And how many 'articles' are short blurbs about any character who ever appeared (however minor the role) in a popular TV show/series of books. And how many 'articles' are nothing but episode summaries of the said popular TV shows....
1,000,000 articles is a lot of articles - but there isn't much article to a lot of articles.
It's still an impressive technology, re-useability has a great appeal,
Do keep in mind that Shuttle isn't really reusable - more like 'rebuildable'.
but what has the cost per launch got to now, and how does it compare with more conventional rocket launches?
The Shuttle is more expensive that current expendable yes - but then platinum is more expensive than gold too. (I.E. current expenables are too expensive by a large margin.)
The Shuttle isn't expensive because it's reuseable, it's expensive because it's a badly designed reuseable that takes far, far too many man hours to get ready for each flight. Current generation expendables are more expensive than they could be, not because of lack of technology, but because the big space players have no incentive to lower the costs. (And with their overhead, they's probably not be able to anyhow.)
Why is this a half-truth? Crop rotation does work to counter destruction of the land by farming.
It's a half truth because that boon (countering depletion) comes at cost, requiring a greater amount of cropland (I.E. destroying more grassland/forest) for the same amount of output.
Of course the rotations cited above only produce soybeans for part of the cycle - so you have to consider the economic and enviromental impacts/costs/benifits of the other parts.
Farming, done the right way, is *not* grossly destructive to the ground. There are regions here in Europe that have been farmed for several thousands of years, and they are still very fertile. Plants do suck nutritients from the ground, but also from the air and solved in the water (minerals); good farming practices such as crop rotation let the soil recover in-between crops.
Well, that's a half truth at best. Crop rotation works, but it takes three times as much land to produce the same amount of (human consumable) output as does non-rotated land. A typical cycles is 1 year human consumable, 1 year animal fodder, 1 year fallow.
There's nothing more irritating for a pilot than to be told that an airplane is going to fall out of the sky becuase somebody's using a cellphone. That's total BS!
EMI is a stone cold fact - whether you are a pilot or not.
I fly aircraft with advanced avionics regularly and I've never seen a single example where a mobile telephone left on will interfere with anything.
And I've driven tens of thousands of miles and never had a tire blow out while in motion - but it can and does happen. A singular data point proves nothing.
A modern jetliner has redundant GPS receivers, fuel systems, hydraulic systems, etc. If a 767 can run out of fuel and the pilot land the aircraft safely using non-powered backup instruments and almost no hydraulic power, which has happened, then some bonehead leaving their cellphone on isn't going to pose much of a problem.
Apples, bicycles, and tuna fish. These three things have as much to do with each other as the three things you cite.
This move puts Chinese companies at a competitive disadvantage -- how can they connect to foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers?
Politically reliable and trusted individuals will have acess to the 'Western' internet (and the traffic will be closely monitored), and the masses - won't. (This isn't rocket science - this kind of communication control is old hat.)
Our organization currently has a headache when non-developers make an Access database, get their department relying on it, and then leaving the organization. When things break, the developers get sucked into having to maintain this monstrosity.
Never mind the fact that the developers *job* is to support the rest of the organization.
We're trying hard to disavow them completely, but it's hard to say no when the customer insists its part of a vital healthcare function. For those, we've sometimes rewritten them using a real SQL back-end, web browser client, and code we can support and maintain.
In other words - you can't be bothered to learn to use the tools your clients use. You insist on your way or they highway (or would like to be able to).
A few posts up someone asked why software engineers don't get any respect.
Slashdot Mirror
They are the Universities computers.
The reason convential rockets are so expensive isn't because of fuel costs or the costs of the structure to contain the fuel. Both are trivially cheap. Conventional rockets (current ones) are expensive because they require insane amounts of man hours to prepare to launch, and their margins are so thin, you have to spend insane amounts of man hours in getting the payload weight down.
The Titan II first stage (circa 1964) has more than adequate performance for a low performance SSTO. Nobody has built a high performance SSTO because there is no economic incentive to do so.Because air launch doesn't do a significant job of getting started in return for the costs it imposes.Imagine drving a compact car across the US. Imagine using a semi-trailer and a thousand pound adapter fixture (which much stay on the compact the whole way) to push the compact for the first hundred miles. That is what proportion of the work air launch does for an LEO booster.
The AN-225 couldn't even air launch a Mercury/Atlas.The consensus among people who know how these things work is this - Blackstar (if it exists) will work only if you use insanely expensive fuels. Fuels which are extremely corrosive, extremely toxic, and extremely difficult to work with. This means you get a difficult to build, insanely expensive to maintain, and fairly low performance vehicle.What you don't get is cheap acess.
Yeah. Those are really convincing arguments for the 'sucess' of air launch for LEO payloads
Sure, the hard work of getting off the pad and through the lower atmosphere has already been done, but the insanely freaking hard job of getting up to orbital velocity still remains to be done. (Air launch gets you, at best, something like 1/20th of the energy needed for orbit - at no noticeable savings.)Not noticeably.Pegasus can do this because it's a low payload, low performance booster. Once you start talking significant payloads - you start talking aircraft designs where the C-5 is considered too small.Under NASA's original plan - Apollo was just a general purpose earth orbiter with a seperate (expendable) heavy lifter for cargo. Both were supposed to be replaced with reusable craft. (Expendables were to be used at first only because they were easy to develop - reuseable is hard, much harder than was thought then.) The moon was thought to be reachable "sometime in the 70's, pherhaps in time for the Bicentennial".
Then Kennedy made his "because it's hard" speech and imposed an entirely new schedule. (But even as NASA was very publically racing to the Moon, it was also preparing for the day they could return to the von Braun vision. The Phase II shuttle study contracts were signed on July 20, 1969.) As soon as we reached the Moon, and Congress asked NASA, "what next" - and NASA answered "Shuttle-> Station-> Moon-> Mars". (The political fallout from this overambitious (and expensive) plan in a time of a tightening budget is still being felt today.)
Even the current Administrations VSE is just the von Braun Vision with a new paint job.
More than once I've googled a word, only to find it co-opted as the name of a piece of software - and thus had to wade through pages of crap to find what I was interested in.
Well, I did several tests, most of them on obscure keywords (I.E. not camped by spam pages) - and in each and every one of the result was that both systems delivered virtually the same pages, with only ordering difference between them.The Wikipedia article is quite misleading (on a number of matters) - but the one germane here is that the book was not created as some form of unimpeachable record, but as a detailed survey of the state of England so that William knew how much taxes he could collect to repay the cost of the Conquest and to finance further adventures on the Continent. It only started being used as such a record in the first decades of the 11th century, years after William died.
[1] 'Doom' in in more classical sense as meaning 'fate', rather than the more common usage and meaning as 'death/ disaster/ fear/ fire/ foes'
Assuming that the economics of $GARAGE_BAND is the same as those of $MEGA_BAND is a dangerous path. They aren't.
Virtually always they're wrong.
I'd hesistate to call technology a culture on par with the other two. Most 'technology' workers are merely the white collar equivalent of the lathe operator of a century ago. Both are jobs that require skill and experience - and the world depended utterly on each in it's turn. But both are utterly dependent on the tools provided to them by others. And both are utterly replaceable. Only the 'technologist' continues to convince himself that he is something 'special' and deserves treatment above and beyond the norm in compensation for that.OTOH - here in the real world, the curves are pretty plain. World population will peak sometime in the next century, and then will start to decline. Nobody is quite sure where the bottom is - somewhat below current levels, but not as low as many of the Greens would like seems a safe bet. (If you are using a computer - it's virtually certain that you live in a country whose birth rate is slipping below replacement, if it isn't there already.) The evidence is overwhelming, when a nation moves into the First World, it's birthrate starts a slow and steady decline. Why? Because children become more expensive, both to the individual and to society.
There are two ways to build big solids -
The field that lacked experience was big monolithic motors, not big segmented motors.
Usually when NASA puts out a RFP, it includes it's research data (and/or a general design) as well as the specifications, the contractor then proposes a specific design. NASA analyses the competing designs and chooses among them. (Contrary to popular belief, price is only one of many, many criteria used by the goverment to evaluate proposals.)In the instance of the SRM, Aerojet General proposed monolithic solids, and Morton Thiokol proposed segmented solids. There were no other bidders.
Many people parrot things that they don't understand the meaning of because it agrees with their biases.As a test, I also submitted my information to a professional last year. The total additional savings came to less than what he cost me - a net loss compared to doing it myself. (To the average, and wilfully ignorant, Joe - what he did would look amazing I admit.)
The complexity of doing your own taxes is a myth - a myth propogated by generations of accountants, lawyers, and scam artists who make their living off of that fear.
Monolithic solids were (and are) difficult to make, a problem made worse by the Shuttle's requirement that the two solid be matched in thrust within 1%. (Easily done by pouring one medium sized batch in a LH and RH segment, difficult with one large and long curing grain.) In addition there were questions about handling the monolithic motors, which were extraordinarily heavy (and large) by the standards of the day. There were questions about storing the monolithic motors (much more difficult than storing segments). There were questions about the possibility of propellant slump in stored motors (because of the vast weight)... And on, and on, and on.
In the end, the choice came down to either (what seemed to be) a straightforward scaling of existing motor experience, or a completely new (and expensive) research and development program with uncertain results.
So, you are correct - history might have been very different had Morton Thiokol not been awarded the contract. The Shuttle might never have flown at all - because the problems with monolithic solids couldn't be worked out. Or it might have ended up even more expensive. Or maybe the solids become the pacing item in the program - rather than the SSMEs and the tiles. A flight program free of troubles caused by the solid motors is only one possible (and by no means certain or likely) outcome.
1,000,000 articles is a lot of articles - but there isn't much article to a lot of articles.
The Shuttle isn't expensive because it's reuseable, it's expensive because it's a badly designed reuseable that takes far, far too many man hours to get ready for each flight. Current generation expendables are more expensive than they could be, not because of lack of technology, but because the big space players have no incentive to lower the costs. (And with their overhead, they's probably not be able to anyhow.)
A few posts up someone asked why software engineers don't get any respect.
Your attitude is a clear indication of why.