It's stifling technological innovation, as if there's not already enough of that at NASA (how old is the shuttle?) -- read the proposals. All of the planned missions will be done using reconfigurations of existing shuttle technology.
You've got it all backwards - Stifling technological 'innovation' is a dammed good thing. For forty years technologic innovation has been the bane of NASA actually accomplishing anything - each new mission is seen as reason to spend ever more money on ever more gold plating. What we have in hand is quite suitable.
FWIW, I certainly hope that one of the first things the next president does is come in and cut this program out and let scientists decide what's valuable for science return,
ROTFL. If you have a method for getting scientists to agree on the best missions for science return - I'm sure the next President will be a willing listener. (Scientists are typically not in agreement on the topic.)
Once upon a time the US Army developed an atomic artillery shell that could be fired from your standard 155mm Howitzer. I have heard rumors that authority to use atomic shells was (to be) vested in field commanders, possibly as low as the regiment level.
Partly truth and partly fiction.
Their are two different concepts at work here. First there is what is called Release Authority - which always resides with the NCA. He, and only he can make the decision to release the weapons (I.E. make them available to fire)[1]. The second concept is Firing Authority, the actual decision to pull the trigger and send a nuclear weapon downrange.
Regardless of who holds firing authority, he cannot excercise it until the weapon has been released. Thus while a regimental commander can make the decision to use the weapons, he cannot execute that decision until they have been released.
[1]Though release can be conditional - I.E. orders can be given in advance by the NCA to release the weapons to the field commanders if certain specific preconditions are met.
Disclaimer: I may have this wrong in some of the details, I was over on the strategic side (which works slightly differently), not on the tactical side.
What the article is about is a new policy statement by the US (i.e. an international "FYI") about when the president will haul off and nuke something
No, what the article is about is a fine tuning of existing military doctrine and planning - the reality is that nothing substantive is changing. Strategic strikes in advance of a known attack or to destroy an enemies WMD capacity have been part of the US's overall nuclear planning and strategy for fifty years.
I don't see how they think they have the authority to let the president authorize a first strike. The power to declare war belongs to the Congress, not the president, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 limits the power of the President of the United States to wage war without the approval of the Congress.
That's true. It's also true that the President is the Commander-in-Chief, and can use the military as he sees fit *without* seeking approval from Congress.
Some notes of reality guys:
The President has long had the authority to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike. We've had plans for strikes to destroy the bad guy's WMD since the 50's. We've had plans to attack in advance of a known attack the same length of time. This document changes nothing but some verbiage.
This document is military doctrine I.E. it lays out a range of potential military scenarios and possible responses to them - its not a plan and its not a strategy.
Remove the profit motive and the problem almost solves itself. There was almost no "bad science" reporting in Soviet Union, there were no horoscopes in newspapers, there were no mediums, white/black wizards and extrasenses on TV, there was no "yellow press".
Nor was there any news reporting in the same sense as in the US.
And before someone says it, the argument "But they didn't have freedom of press" doesn't hold water.
Please provide evidence in support of this.
Soviet papers relied on the judgement of the journalists and editors, just like everywhere else, not on instructions from Kremlin. What they wanted to print, they printed,
Of course, the judgement of the journalists and editors was heavily shaded by the attitudes of the Kremlin - no need for detailed instruction. You won't find articles praising Solzhenitsyn for example - or of many other authors, artists, etc... etc...
As a bonus, workers (i.e. those people who actually make stuff) were covered in the press as well
Sure - if you consider articles praising the heroic action of workers in meeting their quota as 'coverage'. (But you won't find articles questioning whether that quota was reasonable, not will the articles mention how quality drops late in the month to meet quota.) Another popular topic was how workers 'volunteered' to help bring in the harvest. (But no articles on the system failed to produce enough tractors/etc to bring in the harvest, or how even the 'heroic' efforts failed to produce enough food to feed the country.)
Have you wondered why China is pushing so hard for Space exploration?
That's easy - Having A Space Program is what Real Nations Do. And China *badly* wants to be thought of as a Real Nation and important on the world stage.
We have more than just Tang to thank the space program for. Most of the technolgy we have today is either a direct or indirect result from space exploration.
Sure. If you squint *reaaal* hard and handwave vigorously to disguise the technology that isn't a result of the space program. I.E. most of it.
Now I hate to be 'that guy' but knowing that in all the: legalese, time, preperation, and double checking that went into the ABM treaty that the inclusion of a weather weapon cant be purely speculative or coincidental.
Do you have a cite to these assertions? (And by cite, I mean "verbiage in treaty" not "tinfoil hat site".)
Even if all the magazines on the stands were each owned by an individual publisher, they'd still be mostly interested in selling magazines and making a profit.
That's probably not true. I used to do tech work for magazines, and the small specialist mags were always staffed by people who were really excited about the topic.
Utterly meaningless - No matter how excited about the topic, without a focus on profit - they'll be out of a job soon.
Think of it like restaurants. Obviously, every restaurant owner has to sell food and make a profit. But there's a world of difference between a single-location, owner-operated restaurant and a giant chain. The decision-makers in the big chains are insulated from the consequences of their decisions. And the clock-punchers on the spot don't have the same incentive to care.
Utterly meaningless again - regardless of the number of locations, the focus is on profit. Otherwise there soon won't be any locations.
Or compare it to the web. Look at how much cool stuff has appeared on the web, and look how little of it has come from large, corporate publishers. The best technical reviews don't come from USA Today or Ziff-Davis; instead I go to Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, Ars Technica, and a host of other small publishers who do it because that's what they want to do, and for whom making a profit is secondary.
And strike three - utterly bloody meaningless. If you don't concentrate on profit, you go under - like dozens (hundreds) of such sites have. (And look how virtually all of those sites break up reviews into as many pages as possible - all to generate as much ad space as possible. I leave it to you to determine why they do that.)
I got a real education when I lived next door to a fairly high-up Sports Illustrated reporter. In watching him do his work, he would basically try and find an angle, and then shape the facts to fit his angle. Technically, he wouldn't "lie", but he would definitely flake and form things to give the impression that he'd decided to write ahead of time. That was generally for background pieces that he would write, but even for sporting events he followed that formula. He would write his article before the event had even finished, sometimes with multiple endings in case things went for one outcome or another (this is Standard Operating Procedure in the industry).
It's well known among sports writers that this is a standard practice at Sports Illustrated - and has been since day one. It's less clear that it is, as you claim with no evidence, standard practice across the whole of journalism, or even the subset that is popular magazines. You can't draw a curve through a single point.
In realizing his "algorithm" to producing articles, I began to look at other journalist articles. And lo and behold -- I saw the same sort of pattern. When you realize this, you can see the "angle" they've decided to write, and the pattern shows up like a flashing red light. All the successful ones do this. They decide ahead of time what would make an exciting article to write.
Of course you saw the same kind of pattern - you were predisposed to discover it. You (mistakenly or not) believed that the SI practice is standard, and when you discovered 'evidence' that it was, you concluded that it was. That's called circular logic.
About 80% of the zines on the stands are owned by just a half dozen publishers these days. Their job is to sell zines, not benefit scientific understanding, unless their readership has some decided and saleable interest.
The mistake many people make is in thinking that the current situation represents some change from a golden past - it doesn't. Even if all the magazines on the stands were each owned by an individual publisher, they'd still be mostly interested in selling magazines and making a profit.
Plus, there's more of a sense of adventure and risk-taking. An accident? A few cosmonauts died? It's tragic, but they knew the risks. Lets celebrate their glorious memory, and send some more people up there.
A nice soundbite - but the reality is both fatal accidents (Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11) resulted in lengthy stand downs before they tried again. I.E. pretty the same thing as the US does.
Equally, when three of three Zond lunar flights failed to some degree - they didn't send Cosmonauts on the fourth, the program was cancelled instead.
Plus, people there are more careful not to allow accidence since being at fault for something comparable to the disaster we had in the US is liable to get you quietly imprisoned for life or even executed.
Four N-1 failures, two Soyuz fatal accidents, three Zond failures - not one single person known to have been imprisoned or executed.
I wonder how much it actually cost the Russian space agency to put him there and bring him back (safely) a week later.
Nobody outside of Russia knows, and it's often suspected that the Russians don't know either. (There's actually about 5 agencies/companies/enterprises involved, all tangled in a gordian knot.)
Could it be that the Russian space agency has established a decent tourism business for space where they are actually turning a decent profit?
That's highly unlikely considering the prices they have offered for the Soyuz (booster, not capsule) in the past - which range from 30 to 50 million US Dollars.
Your reply really looks like a troll, though it's too late for anyone else to be paying attention to this conversation by now.
Why? Because I don't agree with the Google worshipping majority? Because I introduce facts into the discussion rather than fanboy enthusiasm?
Gmail is -way- better than Yahoo! mail, and the reason is exactly innovation.
See... Here's an example of exactly what I'm talking about - a claim with no supporting facts, just a buzzword and enthusiasm.
Any deficiency you may see in the UI is more than compensated for by the far superior UI speed.
The fact that I cannot sort my mail (for example, by sender) is in no way made up for by the speed of the interface. Instead, I have to search for one sender, then search for another, then search for another. During each search I cannot see the other senders without undoing my search.
The fact that I cannot open more than one mail by simply right clicking is in no way made up for by the speed of the interface.
The fact that to delete mail requires scrolling through a drop down menu rather than simply clicking a button is in no way made up for by the speed of the interface.
Various software companies try to discredit the open source movement by stating that the movement is made up of juvenile, unprofessional, irresponsible individuals. By responding in the manner that he did, Eric only propogates this incorrect stereotype.
Of course anyone who read/. could be forgiven for not knowing that is a stereotype as opposed to the real public face of the movement.
Of everything ESR has done, for better or for worse, "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" is probably his best work. It was very good, solid writing. Calling it "pot smoking nonsense" indicates you either haven't read it, or just don't understand it.
Y'know, my right wing Christian neighbor says the same thing about the Bible. My left left wing neighbor says the same things about Gore's enviromental ramblings and Hillary's self-indulgent nonsense.
My response to them, and to you, (and the mods who modded you up) is simple: If your only defense is "you obviously don't understand it", that is nothing but a glaring statement of the weakness of the writing in question.
But what about all the other stuff that's still hidden, that's in the Google pipeline? You could call it the Google Iceberg. The cool stuff that is yet to come. It looks like Google is pretty good at staying ahead by innovating.
Google? Innovate? Don't make me laugh.
The last real innovation Google made was Adsense/Adwords. Ever since then they've been racing to provide services that other folks have been providing for years (mail, maps, chat). They been accomplishing that the same time honored way Microsoft did - by buying the products they need, or coming out with a slightly better (or at least almost-as-good) product as their competitors. (Gmails interface is still somewhat deficient compared to Yahoo!s for example.)
If you told the "typical" American that NASA doesn't launch any spacecraft, including the shuttle, they would generally try to contridict you.
I don't bother telling typical Americans much about the space program at all. They don't care, and what little they know is wrong.
Yes, you are technically correct that the people doing the launches are not NASA employees but rather NASA subcontractors, but that is really splitting hairs.
No, I'm not 'technically' correct - I'm precisely correct. They are private employees of private corporations, it's you that's splitting hairs in order to throw dirt.
In terms of general voter support, most ordinary citizens still do support NASA,
Very few voters cast their votes on the basis of the candidates stance on NASA. Ergo, NASA does not matter to the voters. Existence proof: During the last Presidential election, not one single candidate (even the unlikely ones) spent any significant time during their campaigns on space issues - whether real issues (like CATS) or stunts. No presidential campaign since ever has devoted any significant time, ink, or dollars to the issue.
And yes, speeches by John F. Kennedy, LBJ, and even Nixon did indeed promise that eventually ordinary Americans would eventually go into space thanks to the pioneering efforts of the original astronauts.
ROTFLMAO. No such promises were made, period. The belief that they were is based on wishful thinking *period*.
As far as actual revenue from "space-tourism", the best current example I can come up with is Space Adventures, which has indeed sold several flights into space.
As is typical of your statement so far - this one fails to support your contention that Virgin Atlantic has 'discovered a huge market'.
Zero-G Adventure has been booking flights as well. Just for the "Vomit Comet" style free-fall experience, people are willing to pay about $4000 per flight, and they don't seem to be hurting for customers at the moment. Indeed, they are expanding into many other areas with more planes, and in particular Las Vegas seems to be the next major city they will be flying out of. Maybe they are Baby Boomers and greying Gen-X'ers who want to be "Buck Rogers" in their own mind, but these are still people with a passion that want to get into space.
ROTLMAO. Airplane rides proves people have a passion to go into space? It never entered your mind that it might prove they have a passion for extreme (and affordable) adventures? It never entered your mind that these ventures are nothing more than amusement park rides - for which there is a vast market?
And right now manned space exploration is indeed "non-existant". With an average of one launch per year, that is hardly anything to get excited over,
So? The purpose of exploration isn't to generate excitement in the minds of fanboys.
The most ambitious manned spaceflight program that seems to be in the future of NASA is more going back to Gemini, with perhaps a return to the "Big-G" spacecraft that never got built in the 1970's except as a mock-up. If that isn't a step backward, I don't know what is.
It's only a step backwards in the minds of those who confuse exploration with 'boldly going' style stunts.
Apollo did push technology,
No it didn't. Only one single technology was used in Apollo that wasn't in active research when Pres. Kennedy redirected the program from a general purpose orbiter to a lunar lander, thereby setting back space exploration by decades. The technology in question? Supercritical oxygen in the life support system.
That there was some show about it, and perhaps it could have been more science oriented than it was is true, but real science did ha
Rockets fail frequently. Dramatic detonations on the pad, missed orbits due to failed stages, etc.
They do so about.1% of the time - which is not 'frequently' except in the most extreme mis-use of the term.
Why are most people oblivious to this?
Because almost none of them make CNN.
would actually increase mission safety, by decreasing the number of critical maneuvers required, such as orbital rendezvous and docking
There have been a lot of rendezvous and docking maneuvers in space and no one has yet been killed as a result. Mir was almost lost due to a fender bender with a Soyuz, but that's as close as it has gotten.
ROTFLMAO. MIR was almost lost because of a collision with a Progress - not a Soyuz. But let's review docking problems; Apollo 14 - undocked in lunar orbit with a known bad docking mechanism, and had problems redocking. Two different Soyuz flights nearly exhausted their batteries trying (and failing) to dock with a Salyut. One Soyuz recontacted ISS after undocking - hard enough to make the station vibrate noticeably. (And that's just off the top of my head.) The evidence overwhelming support the notion that docking is risky. It equally supports the conclusion that we've been lucky to have only had LOM accidents.
I question the risk value assigned to these events in this analysis.
I suspect that is because the folks at MIT, utterly unlike you, have a clue.
I've been a long-time advocate of pulling NASA out of the LEO launch service.
In case you haven't noticed - with the exception of the Shuttle NASA has been out of the launch business for decades. They don't even launch their own research birds anymore.
As Virgin Atlantic and some of the current space tourism companies have found out, there is a huge market for space travel that is in the range of $100,000 to $1 million, especially closer to the $100,000 range.
LOL. They have found no such market. They have done surveys and found a *potential* market - but whether those translate into actual revenue is a huge unknown. (And the big elephant in the room that space cadets won't acknowledge is that market surveys of that nature are routinely wrong.)
Most ordinary U.S. citizens view NASA as a sort of space advocacy agency of the federal government, and based on at least the P.R. that was thrown about by NASA to try and sell the expense of the current space program to ordinary taxpayers, they promised that "someday" those same taxpayers' grandkids will be going into outer space themselves,
ROTFLMAO. Nobody was promised anything by anybody. This is a myth held by the space cadets who confuse the proof-of-penis-size stunts of the 60's with actual space travel and exploration.
and that the original group of astronauts was only supposed to be a beginning to this exploration of space.
It was - the exploration is ongoing. However, like most exploration it's moved past the stunt and spectacular phase and into the hard workaday grind phase. However, most space cadets confuse 'boring' with non-existent.
At that point NASA support from voters will erode to absolutely nothing.
ROTFLMAO. NASA doesn't have any support from the voters now. Nor does it have any emnity. In fact, the voters simply don't care. (Other than the aerospace workers.)
And for those of you who keep fighting the privitization of space with such arguments as "Who would put up telescopes and run pure science research?" The answer to that is NASA- instead of inefficiently and ineffectively blowing billions of tax dollars keeping the wheeles of their wussified, red tape, burocracy running, they could just bid out the launch of their projects to the lowest bidder in the private sector.
As for Mr.Melvill's decision to disregard flight rules, allow me to point out he was PIC (Pilot In Command), an owner of Scaled, and General Manager. Since it was his lone ass was at stake, he as PIC, part owner, and GM, had the confidence he could handle the situation.
The problem is - it wasn't his lone ass at stake. Mr Allen's investment was at stake. A one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft was at stake. The reputation of private space travel was at stake.
Since he completed the mission, was his decision the correct decision at the time?
No, it was not. And if he was a pilot working for me - he'd be grounded, hero or not.
And what would be wrong with bringing in large volumes of dirt to fill-in the bowl (putting it above sea-level) before constructing builtings? Sections of New Orleans already above sea level survived quite well.
Nothing is wrong with it - but it will lull people into a false sense of security because it bandages the flavor of the month without providing any real protection.
Currently people are all hyped about the flooding - but the reality is that less than 1% of the area devastated and less than 10% of the people in said area are in the flooded areas. The real issue is hurricanes. Certainly areas 'survived' - but then New Orleans didn't get the brunt of the storm. (Which hit to the east.)
Slashdot Mirror
Their are two different concepts at work here. First there is what is called Release Authority - which always resides with the NCA. He, and only he can make the decision to release the weapons (I.E. make them available to fire)[1]. The second concept is Firing Authority, the actual decision to pull the trigger and send a nuclear weapon downrange.
Regardless of who holds firing authority, he cannot excercise it until the weapon has been released. Thus while a regimental commander can make the decision to use the weapons, he cannot execute that decision until they have been released.
[1]Though release can be conditional - I.E. orders can be given in advance by the NCA to release the weapons to the field commanders if certain specific preconditions are met.
Disclaimer: I may have this wrong in some of the details, I was over on the strategic side (which works slightly differently), not on the tactical side.
Some notes of reality guys:
Equally, when three of three Zond lunar flights failed to some degree - they didn't send Cosmonauts on the fourth, the program was cancelled instead.
Four N-1 failures, two Soyuz fatal accidents, three Zond failures - not one single person known to have been imprisoned or executed.One suspects you've read too many Clancy novels.
The fact that I cannot open more than one mail by simply right clicking is in no way made up for by the speed of the interface.
The fact that to delete mail requires scrolling through a drop down menu rather than simply clicking a button is in no way made up for by the speed of the interface.
etc... etc...
My response to them, and to you, (and the mods who modded you up) is simple: If your only defense is "you obviously don't understand it", that is nothing but a glaring statement of the weakness of the writing in question.
The last real innovation Google made was Adsense/Adwords. Ever since then they've been racing to provide services that other folks have been providing for years (mail, maps, chat). They been accomplishing that the same time honored way Microsoft did - by buying the products they need, or coming out with a slightly better (or at least almost-as-good) product as their competitors. (Gmails interface is still somewhat deficient compared to Yahoo!s for example.)
I don't bother telling typical Americans much about the space program at all. They don't care, and what little they know is wrong.
No, I'm not 'technically' correct - I'm precisely correct. They are private employees of private corporations, it's you that's splitting hairs in order to throw dirt.
Very few voters cast their votes on the basis of the candidates stance on NASA. Ergo, NASA does not matter to the voters. Existence proof: During the last Presidential election, not one single candidate (even the unlikely ones) spent any significant time during their campaigns on space issues - whether real issues (like CATS) or stunts. No presidential campaign since ever has devoted any significant time, ink, or dollars to the issue.
ROTFLMAO. No such promises were made, period. The belief that they were is based on wishful thinking *period*.
As is typical of your statement so far - this one fails to support your contention that Virgin Atlantic has 'discovered a huge market'.
ROTLMAO. Airplane rides proves people have a passion to go into space? It never entered your mind that it might prove they have a passion for extreme (and affordable) adventures? It never entered your mind that these ventures are nothing more than amusement park rides - for which there is a vast market?
So? The purpose of exploration isn't to generate excitement in the minds of fanboys.
It's only a step backwards in the minds of those who confuse exploration with 'boldly going' style stunts.
No it didn't. Only one single technology was used in Apollo that wasn't in active research when Pres. Kennedy redirected the program from a general purpose orbiter to a lunar lander, thereby setting back space exploration by decades. The technology in question? Supercritical oxygen in the life support system.
Currently people are all hyped about the flooding - but the reality is that less than 1% of the area devastated and less than 10% of the people in said area are in the flooded areas. The real issue is hurricanes. Certainly areas 'survived' - but then New Orleans didn't get the brunt of the storm. (Which hit to the east.)
Ignorant asshole.