SpaceX will make $2.6 Billion do way cooler stuff than $4.2 Billion to Boeing. SpaceX is a young, hungry company that is on the forefront of multiple industries. Boeing, while still a great company, is older an no doubt bogged down in more levels of bureaucracy.
There's another factor that everyone is ignoring - SpaceX is proposing a craft that's a modification of an existing vehicle and which is also expected to be subsidized by commercial use. Boeing on the other hand is proposing a craft that's clean-sheet new and has no other customers.
The fact that to deliver the same development and certification process costs $1.6 billion less for SpaceX over Boeing is also interesting.
It's not the same development and certification process - as SpaceX will be flying a modification of an existing (certified) spacecraft, while Boeing's is a new and unflown design.
Given that Boeing will already be 3 years late to the party, when SpaceX has manned capability up and running this coming January?
The mixed tense of the latter half of the sentence aside... The January test is that of a flight abort, not a qualification or validation flight. (And thus does not represent "manned capability".) The first full-up unmanned flight test isn't manifested until 2016 and no manned flight is currently manifested.
We're supposed to wait another couple of years for manned launch capability
We're *already* waiting at least a year and half for the first unmanned test flight - with the first manned test flight currently unscheduled (but at least a year after the first unmanned test flight according to the original projections). Your argument that Boeing will be "late to the party" and that "we must wait" is thus not based on reality.
BTW, I agree with you in regards to Dreamchaser. It is a good enough vehicle that the ESA is even looking at using it, and Sierra Nevada is already on record saying they will continue the development of this vehicle even without additional development money from NASA.
The ESA "looks at" all kinds of things (they even "looked at" the one time darling of the space fanbois - Kliper), and such is about as meaningful as a celebrity endorsement. And going on record as intending to do something you don't have the money to do is equally meaningless.
Indeed the only company that has said they will stop any further development if their vehicle isn't selected is Boeing.
Except for the nit-picky fact that they've said nothing of the sort.
Boeing vs SpaceX? without doing all the number crunching it is hard to make an educated judgment.
This is Slashdot. This isn't about educated judgements, number crunching, or reasoned discussion. This is all about geek fanboyism and that all contracts are awarded solely on the amount slipped under the table being an article of faith.
Other than that, you're absolutely correct - Dragon and (especially) Dreamchaser represent fairly risky designs. Boeing presents a largely conventional alternative. This matters a great deal in the technical evaluation of the proposals, and contrary to popular belief such evaluations play a large role in determining who is awarded such contracts. It's not, by a long shot, just about who offers the least expensive option.
I've seen lots of stuff about what SpaceX is doing, but not a lot about Boeing on the space front these days.
If that's true, then you badly need to re-think where you get your space news. (Slashdot and other popular sites tends to disproportionately worship SpaceX.) I only casually follow and *I* knew about Boeing.
So, is this something which actually exists and is being tested? Or is this vapor ware?
It's something that actually exists and is actually being worked on.
It's funny... you keep using the subjective word "successful" to imply reaching an objective goal. And all without providing any links to back up your subjective claims.
Really? Asking for actual evidence rather than handwaving indicates that I "clearly don't want to believe"? That's about the most ignorant and stupid thing I've ever heard.
So many US Soldiers spend all their free time playing video games. (source: was in the US Army for 4 years)
Nothing new. Back when I was in the Navy (onboard an SSBN) in the 80's, it was movies or playing cards or zoning out with a cassette player and a set of headphones for most of the crew.
Excuse me? Reading for pleasure is one of those things that opens up your mind to new possibilities, that is a window into a new world, that doesn't result in the brainrot of modern TV programming.
Excuse me? Horseshit. It depends greatly on *what* you read. I'd guess that 90% of the readers on the boat read male romance novels - I.E. cheap westerns, Mac Bolan (and his spin-offs and clones), low rent spy thrillers, and dozen other kinds of complete tripe. Not all reading "opens your mind" or "doesn't result in brainrot". There's a lot of pure crap out there right on the same level as TV programming, and there has been ever since books became available to the masses.
. And at war time, reading books would have been a luxury both at home and at the battlefield. So selling them at the cost of production or at lost is more likely investing for the future loyalty of customers.
There's also the marketing angle - every company that contributed in even the smallest way to the war effort made damm sure to trumpet it in their advertising and promotional materials, both during the war and for a period after.
Germany is well on the way to doing this on the scale of a whole country.
Sure... if you squint hard enough and tilt your head at the right angle and ignore the 75% of their energy that doesn't come from renewables. Otherwise, not so much. It remains to be seen how far that number can be pushed.
All of the recent articles about autonomous cars seem to be trying to make people think they're terrible will never work and are a disaster waiting to happen.
I don't blame google for not wanting to publish all the details about it, its a research project and the media seems to have an agenda to make autonomous cars into the boogeyman.
No, not so much. The recent articles are more in response to the numerous [Google press release based] articles with headlines like "Autonomous car drives 10,000 miles safely!". So, yeah, I do blame Google for not publishing the full truth, choosing instead in favor of spin and hype. It's not a media agenda, or a conspiracy, it's called balance and investigative journalism. (Something everyone here routinely calls for - right until the spotlight hits their fandom. Then it's an "agenda" and a "conspiracy".)
Do you know what "scientific experiments" the cosmonauts were doing in MIR for all those years? Taking pictures maybe? (no maybe about it, that's why there were up there).
The were doing all manner of scientific experiments. And the pictures they took were of far too low a resolution to be useful. (Since they were made with normal handheld cameras.) The space station the Russians used for intelligence work was the Almaz series - the last of which was flown in 1976 and then cancelled because manned stations were much more expensive and had lower capability than unmanned reconnaissance birds. (Essentially the same reason the US cancelled the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.)
Is it a coincidence that the Shuttle's cargo bay was a perfect fit for US spy satellites?
No, it isn't, and everyone with a clue (a class which does not include you) knows it, so salaciously implying it was some kind of a secret is bullshit. The other thing that everyone with a clue knows is that the Shuttle never launched into the polar orbit such birds required and that while they did fly DoD missions, they flew about ten times as many non-DoD missions. (Refuting your nonsensical claim that they only purpose of the space program was for "espionage".)
Meanwhile we all act like blissful idiots by avoiding the real issues. Island nations often lack enough natural resources to provide a decent life for their populations. The type of government does very little to change that.
(Etc.. etc...)
The problem with your theory is that it runs afoul of reality (Or to put it another way, you're theory is bullshit) - there's plenty of island nations (many of them right next door to Cuba) who are doing just fine. The two nations that are worst off are Cuba (with a Communist government) and Haiti (with essentially no government). The nations that are the best off all have democratic governments. And it's worth noting that the nation sharing the same island as Haiti is both democratic and has one of the most vibrant economies of the region, and is the tenth largest in Latin America.
Why is this +5? Yes, RT.com frequently publishes propaganda, but this story is available on any number of alternative news sites, and is based entirely on a report from the Cuban government itself.
But you can't be bothered to provide a link showing the report and thus establishing that the alternative news sites aren't merely copying RT.com? Seriously, nowadays being "available on a number of sites" is no proof of the accuracy or veracity of a report - too many sites (especially no budget "alternative" ones, but seemingly legitimate sites as well) copy and paraphrase from each other.
Every space program from the 1950's on has been primarily for two purposes: 1) Espionage 2) Missile technology.
The Mercury program was for espionage... how exactly? And the same goes for missile technology, missiles are pretty much universally solid fueled (except for a few legacy Soviet era weapons), space boosters almost universally liquid using solids only as booster (except for a few converted cold war era boosters).
Seriously, while the US and Russian space programs both rely on remote descendents of legacy military hardware, the technology diverged back in the 60's. Space programs want safe (which means liquids, meaning the vehicle is largely inert and thus safe to work around until late in the launch sequence), missile programs want storeable for decades and minimal maintenance issues (which means solids).
So my wife called to ask me to pick up "one more thing" three times and I didn't even know until I got back home.
I think seeing notifications would be mildly useful.
The problem isn't that you need to be notified... the problem is either that you're too stupid to know when you can or cannot know you've received a call, or if you do know you're too stupid to check your phone in a situation where you can't know if you've received a call. You don't need an iWatch, you just need to pay the ef attention to what's going on around you.
My guess, without having any particular knowledge, is that the factory will have some kind of internal grid system (fairly common), and aligning the factory with a compass direction means you can easily convert between internal coordinates and lat/lon GPS coordinates. Of course assuming you aren't converting by hand, it's not really hard to convert even if the factory were not axis-aligned.
Even if it has an internal grid system, I can't come up with a plausible why you'd want to convert from GPS to the internal grid. To be accurate enough to use GPS to locate yourself on the grid... well, unless the grid is good sized (at least 2-3 meters on a side) you simply can't, not in real time anyway. And once the building is closed in, the accuracy will likely degrade even further. Using GPS to establish the grid... well, again the compass heading of the grid is easy to correct for. There's no particular advantage to aligning to any particular compass heading because you can correct in software, and that's already common.
(Different AC) What original AC is saying is that our current medicine doesn't resemble Star Trek style tricorder, hypospray, targeted transporter non-penetrative surgery that we might expect from a Star Trek future.
So, let me get this straight... you're unhappy with the present because it doesn't hold up to the predictions of a piece of fiction?
If the Apollo program were announced today, in 9 years we'd still be arguing over the color of the rocket by PhDs in colorometry.
The Apollo program was successful because it had a clear goal (put a man on the moon, and return him safely to earth) and a hard deadline (before the decade is out).
You left out two other key factors... It was founded on a body of engineering, research, and development that was already in progress at the time President Kennedy announced it. And President Kennedy died in Dallas, allowing it to be pushed as his monument and temporarily stilling the debate over the stunning cost of the program.
Modern scientists and engineers can do the same when given the same framework. The DARPA Grand Challenge and the Ansari X Prize are two examples where clear goals and hard deadlines in a competitive environment lead to rapid advances.
It's no clear that either program lead to useful advances. I'm less knowledgeable about the DARPA Grand Challenge, but the X-Prize lead to an evolutionary dead end that's still grounded. Such prizes often do, as they tend to select for designs optimized to win the prize rather than for technology that's amenable to scaling or to wider introduction and use.
Instead of doling out grants to people that write boring unambitious proposals, we should be setting bold and ambitious goals, and redirect the money to reward actual accomplishments. Pulling a string works a lot better than pushing it.
Pulling a string is easy, because you know where to pull... that's not even remotely true of research.
Secondly, that's a generalization which ignores matriarchal cultures, and cultures ruled by women. I.e. Entire British Empire (which basically ruled the world) for quite a while, even having entire eras named after their queens and not their family names, which should be assumed practice if those cultures were inherently misogynistic.
Matriarchal cultures and "cultures ruled by women" (which are the same thing, women ruling the state != women ruling the culture) are, especially in the West, quite the exception. (As anyone educated, which category you are not included in, quite well knows.) In fact, the culture of the British Empire was heavily misogynistic. For further insight into this, look into who served in Parliament, as Ministers, etc... etc... during the reigns of those queens.
And that's the least of the logical, factual, and historical errors your ignorance and imbecility leads you into. You haven't a clue what you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
There's another factor that everyone is ignoring - SpaceX is proposing a craft that's a modification of an existing vehicle and which is also expected to be subsidized by commercial use. Boeing on the other hand is proposing a craft that's clean-sheet new and has no other customers.
It's not the same development and certification process - as SpaceX will be flying a modification of an existing (certified) spacecraft, while Boeing's is a new and unflown design.
The mixed tense of the latter half of the sentence aside... The January test is that of a flight abort, not a qualification or validation flight. (And thus does not represent "manned capability".) The first full-up unmanned flight test isn't manifested until 2016 and no manned flight is currently manifested.
We're *already* waiting at least a year and half for the first unmanned test flight - with the first manned test flight currently unscheduled (but at least a year after the first unmanned test flight according to the original projections). Your argument that Boeing will be "late to the party" and that "we must wait" is thus not based on reality.
The ESA "looks at" all kinds of things (they even "looked at" the one time darling of the space fanbois - Kliper), and such is about as meaningful as a celebrity endorsement. And going on record as intending to do something you don't have the money to do is equally meaningless.
Except for the nit-picky fact that they've said nothing of the sort.
That made me actually laugh out loud. :)
This is Slashdot. This isn't about educated judgements, number crunching, or reasoned discussion. This is all about geek fanboyism and that all contracts are awarded solely on the amount slipped under the table being an article of faith.
Other than that, you're absolutely correct - Dragon and (especially) Dreamchaser represent fairly risky designs. Boeing presents a largely conventional alternative. This matters a great deal in the technical evaluation of the proposals, and contrary to popular belief such evaluations play a large role in determining who is awarded such contracts. It's not, by a long shot, just about who offers the least expensive option.
If that's true, then you badly need to re-think where you get your space news. (Slashdot and other popular sites tends to disproportionately worship SpaceX.) I only casually follow and *I* knew about Boeing.
It's something that actually exists and is actually being worked on.
It's funny... you keep using the subjective word "successful" to imply reaching an objective goal. And all without providing any links to back up your subjective claims.
Really? Asking for actual evidence rather than handwaving indicates that I "clearly don't want to believe"? That's about the most ignorant and stupid thing I've ever heard.
Nothing new. Back when I was in the Navy (onboard an SSBN) in the 80's, it was movies or playing cards or zoning out with a cassette player and a set of headphones for most of the crew.
Excuse me? Horseshit. It depends greatly on *what* you read. I'd guess that 90% of the readers on the boat read male romance novels - I.E. cheap westerns, Mac Bolan (and his spin-offs and clones), low rent spy thrillers, and dozen other kinds of complete tripe. Not all reading "opens your mind" or "doesn't result in brainrot". There's a lot of pure crap out there right on the same level as TV programming, and there has been ever since books became available to the masses.
There's also the marketing angle - every company that contributed in even the smallest way to the war effort made damm sure to trumpet it in their advertising and promotional materials, both during the war and for a period after.
Sure... if you squint hard enough and tilt your head at the right angle and ignore the 75% of their energy that doesn't come from renewables. Otherwise, not so much. It remains to be seen how far that number can be pushed.
So the truth is flamebait now?
No, not so much. The recent articles are more in response to the numerous [Google press release based] articles with headlines like "Autonomous car drives 10,000 miles safely!". So, yeah, I do blame Google for not publishing the full truth, choosing instead in favor of spin and hype. It's not a media agenda, or a conspiracy, it's called balance and investigative journalism. (Something everyone here routinely calls for - right until the spotlight hits their fandom. Then it's an "agenda" and a "conspiracy".)
The were doing all manner of scientific experiments. And the pictures they took were of far too low a resolution to be useful. (Since they were made with normal handheld cameras.) The space station the Russians used for intelligence work was the Almaz series - the last of which was flown in 1976 and then cancelled because manned stations were much more expensive and had lower capability than unmanned reconnaissance birds. (Essentially the same reason the US cancelled the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.)
No, it isn't, and everyone with a clue (a class which does not include you) knows it, so salaciously implying it was some kind of a secret is bullshit. The other thing that everyone with a clue knows is that the Shuttle never launched into the polar orbit such birds required and that while they did fly DoD missions, they flew about ten times as many non-DoD missions. (Refuting your nonsensical claim that they only purpose of the space program was for "espionage".)
(Etc.. etc...)
The problem with your theory is that it runs afoul of reality (Or to put it another way, you're theory is bullshit) - there's plenty of island nations (many of them right next door to Cuba) who are doing just fine. The two nations that are worst off are Cuba (with a Communist government) and Haiti (with essentially no government). The nations that are the best off all have democratic governments. And it's worth noting that the nation sharing the same island as Haiti is both democratic and has one of the most vibrant economies of the region, and is the tenth largest in Latin America.
But you can't be bothered to provide a link showing the report and thus establishing that the alternative news sites aren't merely copying RT.com? Seriously, nowadays being "available on a number of sites" is no proof of the accuracy or veracity of a report - too many sites (especially no budget "alternative" ones, but seemingly legitimate sites as well) copy and paraphrase from each other.
The Mercury program was for espionage... how exactly? And the same goes for missile technology, missiles are pretty much universally solid fueled (except for a few legacy Soviet era weapons), space boosters almost universally liquid using solids only as booster (except for a few converted cold war era boosters).
Seriously, while the US and Russian space programs both rely on remote descendents of legacy military hardware, the technology diverged back in the 60's. Space programs want safe (which means liquids, meaning the vehicle is largely inert and thus safe to work around until late in the launch sequence), missile programs want storeable for decades and minimal maintenance issues (which means solids).
The problem isn't that you need to be notified... the problem is either that you're too stupid to know when you can or cannot know you've received a call, or if you do know you're too stupid to check your phone in a situation where you can't know if you've received a call. You don't need an iWatch, you just need to pay the ef attention to what's going on around you.
Even if it has an internal grid system, I can't come up with a plausible why you'd want to convert from GPS to the internal grid. To be accurate enough to use GPS to locate yourself on the grid... well, unless the grid is good sized (at least 2-3 meters on a side) you simply can't, not in real time anyway. And once the building is closed in, the accuracy will likely degrade even further. Using GPS to establish the grid... well, again the compass heading of the grid is easy to correct for. There's no particular advantage to aligning to any particular compass heading because you can correct in software, and that's already common.
Well, true. After all this time I don't know why I continue to be surprised.
So, let me get this straight... you're unhappy with the present because it doesn't hold up to the predictions of a piece of fiction?
You left out two other key factors... It was founded on a body of engineering, research, and development that was already in progress at the time President Kennedy announced it. And President Kennedy died in Dallas, allowing it to be pushed as his monument and temporarily stilling the debate over the stunning cost of the program.
It's no clear that either program lead to useful advances. I'm less knowledgeable about the DARPA Grand Challenge, but the X-Prize lead to an evolutionary dead end that's still grounded. Such prizes often do, as they tend to select for designs optimized to win the prize rather than for technology that's amenable to scaling or to wider introduction and use.
Pulling a string is easy, because you know where to pull... that's not even remotely true of research.
Matriarchal cultures and "cultures ruled by women" (which are the same thing, women ruling the state != women ruling the culture) are, especially in the West, quite the exception. (As anyone educated, which category you are not included in, quite well knows.) In fact, the culture of the British Empire was heavily misogynistic. For further insight into this, look into who served in Parliament, as Ministers, etc... etc... during the reigns of those queens.
And that's the least of the logical, factual, and historical errors your ignorance and imbecility leads you into. You haven't a clue what you're talking about.
A difference completely without distinction.
Of course we don't laugh, that reference isn't used for humor, it's used as an insult.
What a moron you are.