"The station orbit choice, all by itself, was responsible for a huge cost increase. A high inclination orbit was chosen to bring the Ruskies on board."
You're suggesting that part of the ISS budget overruns are the launches themselves and not on-the-ground construction.
The main contractor on the entire International Space Station project, Boeing already has built up $1 billion in overruns in other phases of the program on top of its original $8 billion contract with NASA, Williams said.
...
From Huntington Beach, Calif., on Monday, Boeing spokesman Alan Buis acknowledged that the propulsion module project has faced overruns but declined to provide a figure.
...
He added, however, that NASA recently reduced these requirements and Boeing will give NASA a new estimate by June 29 based on the lessened requirements.
Within the aerospace industry, cost overruns of 10 percent on projects are not considered uncommon. But Boeing's overrun on the module is at least 37 percent and at a point where NASA is re-evaluating the contract.
The 20 percent increase is attributable to a range of factors, said NASA's Gretchen McClain, a deputy associate administrator responsible for station planning. Those include (...) a major cost overrun by the Boeing Co., NASA's prime contractor.
One question the task force will need to answer, Pike said, is whether NASA turned over too much control to the prime contractor, Boeing. The overruns have been blamed on unrealistic budgeting by both Boeing and NASA.
It would seem that Boeing taking the contract and running, while not the only factor, still provided for a great deal of the ISS budget overrun.
(The really funny thing is the second link is from the parent post.)
"and not helping out when contractors go over budget (a fact of life in federal government contracts)."
"Throw money at it until the problem goes away." I see you're well on your way to being qualified to run for political office. Everybody else is funding government cheese, so we should too!
"You, Guppy06, assert that I cannot blame either the President or our Congress for the fact that NASA lacks the money to do anything other than bandage the ISS plans."
Alright, so I forgot to insert the word "rationally" into that sentence.
But the fact still remains that the ISS is over-budget to the tune of $5 billion (with a "b"). That's nine zeroes, more money than the GDP of many nations. That money is essentially up in smoke. If it needed to be spent, Boeing should have had a more realistic project bid ($5 billion isn't just out of the ballpark, it's out of the damned city as far as I'm concerned). It doesn't pay for the space station, the space station was paid for $5 billion ago. All it pays for is a little piece of paper with some signatures on it. And you're complaining that the White House and the Capitol weren't shoveling cash into the incinerator fast enough?
Like I said, I should have put the word "rationally" in there...
"Time and time again, he has harped on cutting NASA's budget. He has forced [chron.com] the agency to abandon most all other programs, except extending the life of the shuttles."
I'd say Boeing should bear at least part of the blame.
In the real world, when you have a contract to do something and you end up going over budget, you have two options: Swallow the loss or swallow the loss. However, government contracts don't work that way. Contractors get to write clauses in the contracts that essentially say "If we go over budget, the government will pay us the difference." The original bids are nothing but ink on paper.
As an example, Northrop-Grumman recently purchased Avondale Shipyards in SE Louisiana. Currently, they're working on two projects. One is to build transports for the US Navy, and the other is oil tankers for what is now Conoco-Phillips. As with all US shipyards, they've grown fat and lazy with government contracts and the work they do is sub par (the private sector avoids US shipyards like the plague they are unless the Jones Act requires one).
Both contracts are way behind schedule and well above budget, but the Conoco-Phillips contract is the only one hemorrhaging money. The US Navy (ie. you and me) keeps on pouring good money after bad because the contract requires it. Sure, the GAO sniffed around a little a few months back, but nothing has changed because of it (it keeps people employed for the time being, which is all congresscritters really care about). The shipyard has already sworn off all future commercial contracts (like Newport News) and has actually offered to pay Phillips if they pretty please don't opt for the additional hulls in the contract.
NASA is over-budget because the ISS is over-budget. The ISS is over-budget because
Boeing is over-budget, and
NASA was dumb enough to sign the contract
Congress and the White House, for whatever reason, essentially told NASA "Too bad, you deal with the lost money," which meant NASA had to cut funding for other things (Pluto-Kuiper Express, shuttle replacements, ISS lifeboat, etc.).
When all is said and done, you cannot place all the blame on either President Bush in particular or the Republican Party in general. If any one "thing" is to get all the blame, it's the whole God damned bureaucracy.
"Columbia didn't have the fuel to shift its orbit in synch with ISS. It is extremely difficult to change your orbital inclination. Much more difficult that merely changing altitude or phase."
However, I'd imagine they had the ability to remain on orbit for a decent amount of time, possibly time enough to get a second shuttle and/or one or two Soyuz capsules up to meet it and transfer crew. Both NASA and Rosaviakosmos have experience (albeit brief) with having multiple spacecraft in orbit at the same time. In fact, IIRC, the Soviet Union even launched two Soyuz at the same time once.
Of course, it's all moot now...
At any rate, I'd love to have been a back-seat astronaut. Those are the ones that get to go do EVA!:)
You forgot to mention the gray ones they put on the nose and leading edges of the wings. Those are the ones that are designed to withstand the most heat, IIRC. The bottom of the orbiter just has to deal with bow shock. The leading edges have to deal with both bow shock and friction.
"If its a design flaw like with Challenger then it could easily be a simlar kind of time scale which will likely have a ripple effect on ISS."
I'd say it'd take longer than post-Challenger. The design flaw there was with the boosters. They're outright disassembled to refuel to begin with, so making structural changes to them is relatively easy. The only post-Challenger changes to the orbiter fleet I can think of were a few little safety features.
If the Columbia's loss is attributable to a design flaw, that means it's a problem with the orbiter itself. I know I probably shouldn't be feeling this way about the situation, but if we're lucky, retrofitting changes into the orbiter fleet will be more expensive than, say, finishing up a shuttle replacement.
On the other hand, it could be a flaw in something that was unique only to the Columbia. Challenger and future orbiters are essentially of a different generation (which is why Columbia wasn't able to reach the ISS).
"The asteroid threat is an even more nebulous way to extract money from idiots than the climate change one, or the terrorist one, for that matter."
I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to an AC troll (is there any other kind?), but....
Terrorism is a big unknown that relies on people (a bigger unknown). Climate change is debatable, at least the man-made variety. But...
The distinct lack of living dinosaurs around here is real, as real as an impact crater near the Yucatan from about the same time period.
Shoemaker-Levy 9 was real.
The moon is real. The best theory so far about its existance involves something impacting the earth.
All the rocky bodies in our star system are pock-marked with impact craters. Even the planets with weather systems haven't been able to hide them all.
We're all living on the densest object within light-hours. Only two other planets have a higher surface gravity than ours.
We're only about eight light-minutes to the star system's center of mass. Objects passing near us are exponentially faster than objects passing near Jupiter.
According to geologists and astronomers, statistics say we're about due for another one of the dinosaur-killing scale (if not bigger).
Whether you choose to accept the facts or not is up to you, but your own foolishnes is no reason for the rest of the species to get vaporized along with you.
"In other news [reuters.com], Iraqis welcomed the news as God's vengeance"
That's not news, that's expected. Reuters might as well be reporting "Sky is blue," "Sun rises in east, sets in west," or "Israelis and Palestinians kill each other." (OK, so I'm cynical.)
The real news in the article is:
There were no such signs of jubilation over the shuttle disaster in any of the Palestinian territories.
I find this surprising considering their jubilation back in 2001. The shuttle fleet is just as much a symbol of the US as was the NY WTC, if not moreso, and it had an Israeli soldier on board to boot. Was Dr. Chawla a Hindu?
I'll be sending a copy of this off to the White House and my three congresscritters. I suggest that everybody else try to do something similar.
---
Consider this letter a preemptive strike. I feel that it is important to express my views and opinions on an important topic that is sure to be hotly debated in the coming weeks and months.
In July of 1994, a series of over twenty fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted the surface of Jupiter, a planet 1400 times the size of our own. The average energy released by the impact of each fragment was equivalent to over 200 billion tons of TNT. This is several times more powerful than the entire planet's nuclear arsenal combined, and several million more times powerful than the two atomic bombs that brought an end to the Second World War. One fragment, the seventh to impact, released energy equal to 6 trillion tons of TNT. Any single one of those fragments would have been enough to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. If all the pieces of Shoemaker-Levy 9 had hit our world, it is difficult to know if even our planet would survive intact. Needless to say, there wouldn't be anybody around to find out how things turn out afterwards.
This morning, the world awoke to the terrible news of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia with all hands on board. Mere hours after this tragic loss, there is already renewed debate on the cost of our manned space program and suggestions of canceling the program outright. Science pundits from around the world are already trying to remind us that robotic space probes can do scientific research faster, better and cheaper than an astronaut. Although this point is debatable, it is more important to realize that pure scientific research is not the end-goal of our nation's manned space program.
Sooner or later, something large will hit our planet. We don't know if it will be next week, next month, or next year, but we do know that it will happen, and it will kill all life as we know it on our world. This is an undeniable fact, and no amount of scoffing at bad made-for-TV movies will change that.
If every human being is still on this one planet when this happens, our entire species will be nothing more than a mere footnote in history, neither having nor deserving any more notoriety than the passing of the dinosaurs. Nothing that we have accomplished after thousands of years of human civilization will matter. The lives of the seven astronauts we lost today will not matter. The debate on space exploration will not matter, nor will anything else said in Congress. Our accomplishments, our knowledge, our nation, our history, our triumphs and tragedies, everything that any person has ever done will not matter because there will be nobody left for these things to matter to.
Of what good is sending robotic probes to explore Jupiter if there isn't anybody left to use the scientific knowledge gained? What could a war on terrorism possibly mean if there won't be anybody left to live in a world free of murderous zealots?
The tragedy that happened to the Columbia should be taken as a wake-up call to the nation. However, it should not be taken as a sign that we need to abandon the idea of sending people into space, but to the fact that a piece of US history like the Columbia should have been in the National Air air Space Museum, not orbit. Our country and our species needs to take spaceflight seriously again.
In the past decade, we have been swamped with proposals for replacements for the space shuttle that would be both safer and cheaper to operate, but funding to all of them was cut. We initially had grand ideas for the International Space Station, but even now it is operating with a crew half the size it should have been. Plans for missions to the moon and even Mars have been brought up, but these have vanished in the face of "pressing" problems that are more important only in the short term. In the long-term, not even national defense is as important as manned space exploration. Even the US military can't save us from a comet.
We need to focus more on sending people to other worlds in our solar system. We should do this not for pure scientific research, not for national pride, but because we are the only ones who can.
Please focus more on the urgent need to send people into space, and please help give Columbia the distinction of being both the first and last space shuttle launched.
"Umm, excuse me. The space shuttle nominally takes off from Kennedy Space Center and lands at KSC. Exactly how is this "travel" as you define it?"
The same can be said about your daily commute. While your daily displacement vector always comes to zero, scalar miles are still being racked up on your car.
"No, it's not. More precisely, manned space travel isn't worth the risk. (Unmanned missions are risk-free by comparison)"
Only in the forseeable short-term. If something large comes on a collision course with this planet and we have been unwilling (not "unable") to put people on other planets on a permanent basis, our footnote in history will neither have nor deserve any more notoriety than the dinosaurs. Buildings, cars, computers, language... nothing will matter woth a damn. We may as well be dinosaurs.
"The future of space travel is unmanned probes exploring every corner of the solar system."
If people aren't being moved from point A to point B, it's not travel. Space travel is important because it is travel. Putting robots all over the star system won't do anything to help us get off this rock.
"Why risk human lives and billions of dollars on lower orbit?"
Because if you weren't so damned hung up on scientific research and short-term profit potential, you'd understand that it is far more important to put people on Europa than robots. Mapping the ocean floor of Europa through a 40+ minute light-lag won't do a damned thing for the survival of the species when Shoemaker-Levy 9's evil twin comes to visit us.
"True of shoulder launched missiles, but I'm not so sure about things like the Aegis SM2's, or fighter launched air-to-air missiles. However, it's safe to say, it's very very unlikely it's a missile."
Time to play devil's advocate.
Everybody is rulling out terrorism because no known surface- or air-to-air missle could have hit the shuttle. But none of this rules out the possibility of sabotage. Right now, we can only assume that the debris seen falling off the orbiter during launch was an accident.
Seriously. I feel the situation is all the more tragic in the way we lost a piece of history as well. It should have been put in a museum after it retired.
" why I can't even find references to Topostat in a google search (all hits point to mapmaking, not a medical agent)."
Looks like the answer to your question is "you need to refine your searching skills." Look for "blood-clotting spray." It looks like you can buy 3 oz. cans on-line for ~$13. There are also cans of "spray-on bandage" available for the same price (apparently a different product).
"All other things being equal, businesses will go with the cheaper source every time. What we need to do, as a country, is to level the playing field. We need tariffs, laws, and fines to discourage firms from outsourcing desirable jobs."
An artificial leveling of playing fields as you describe doesn't work. Ask Argentina. Without foreign competition, domestic innovation will slow if not stop. And then the Japanese cars start coming in.
The only solution is to level the playing field, but in a true sense. Things won't actually get better until everybody else's standard of living is brought up. What we should be doing is making sure ours doesn't go down in the process (or, at the very least, make sure it's a controlled descent).
"Unregulated capitalism doesn't work."
If that were true, there would be drasticly different standards of living from state to state. Most parts of the US look like other parts of the US because states don't have the ability to regulate interstate commerce. States are able to pass their own labor laws, tax laws, etc, but they have no legal power to prevent businesses from moving to another state.
I would imagine it has fairly limited civillian uses. Most people don't find themselves in need to stop massive bleeding at a moment's notice. Combine that with what was probably a high price tag, and you're left with mostly government, industrial and paramedic customers instead of something on the shelf of your local Walgreens.
Take this with a grain of salt, I'm just guessing.
"Who has an estimate on how long it will take for the Army to outfit its troops with anti-personnel rocket launchers?"
Why? In real life, assult rifles hurt a lot more than they do in some popular FPSs (Half-Life comes to mind).
Besides, FPSs have the advantage of the Incredible Shrinking Ammo, the ability to carry dozens of reloads for that rocket launcher with no detrimental effects.
Oh, and then there's the ability to fire (accurately!) what is essentially a support weapon while walking/running/jumping. And people/objects behind you don't need to worry about backwash...
Slashdot Mirror
"What fuel have we then for the flame wars?!?"
BSD is dying.
"Guglielmo Marconi"
You mean that guy who knocked off Tesla's invention?
You're suggesting that part of the ISS budget overruns are the launches themselves and not on-the-ground construction.
From June 2000:From February 1998:From August 2001:It would seem that Boeing taking the contract and running, while not the only factor, still provided for a great deal of the ISS budget overrun.
You forgot the China "spy" plane incident.
"Congress tells them to go to hell."
Actually, most of Congress voted along the lines of "Not my state." As usual.
"Our President and Congress disagree, apparently, and are stranging NASA by cutting budgets"
Exsqueeze me? Baking powder?
(The really funny thing is the second link is from the parent post.)
"and not helping out when contractors go over budget (a fact of life in federal government contracts)."
"Throw money at it until the problem goes away." I see you're well on your way to being qualified to run for political office. Everybody else is funding government cheese, so we should too!
"You, Guppy06, assert that I cannot blame either the President or our Congress for the fact that NASA lacks the money to do anything other than bandage the ISS plans."
Alright, so I forgot to insert the word "rationally" into that sentence.
But the fact still remains that the ISS is over-budget to the tune of $5 billion (with a "b"). That's nine zeroes, more money than the GDP of many nations. That money is essentially up in smoke. If it needed to be spent, Boeing should have had a more realistic project bid ($5 billion isn't just out of the ballpark, it's out of the damned city as far as I'm concerned). It doesn't pay for the space station, the space station was paid for $5 billion ago. All it pays for is a little piece of paper with some signatures on it. And you're complaining that the White House and the Capitol weren't shoveling cash into the incinerator fast enough?
Like I said, I should have put the word "rationally" in there...
I'd say Boeing should bear at least part of the blame.
In the real world, when you have a contract to do something and you end up going over budget, you have two options: Swallow the loss or swallow the loss. However, government contracts don't work that way. Contractors get to write clauses in the contracts that essentially say "If we go over budget, the government will pay us the difference." The original bids are nothing but ink on paper.
As an example, Northrop-Grumman recently purchased Avondale Shipyards in SE Louisiana. Currently, they're working on two projects. One is to build transports for the US Navy, and the other is oil tankers for what is now Conoco-Phillips. As with all US shipyards, they've grown fat and lazy with government contracts and the work they do is sub par (the private sector avoids US shipyards like the plague they are unless the Jones Act requires one).
Both contracts are way behind schedule and well above budget, but the Conoco-Phillips contract is the only one hemorrhaging money. The US Navy (ie. you and me) keeps on pouring good money after bad because the contract requires it. Sure, the GAO sniffed around a little a few months back, but nothing has changed because of it (it keeps people employed for the time being, which is all congresscritters really care about). The shipyard has already sworn off all future commercial contracts (like Newport News) and has actually offered to pay Phillips if they pretty please don't opt for the additional hulls in the contract.
NASA is over-budget because the ISS is over-budget. The ISS is over-budget because
- Boeing is over-budget, and
- NASA was dumb enough to sign the contract
Congress and the White House, for whatever reason, essentially told NASA "Too bad, you deal with the lost money," which meant NASA had to cut funding for other things (Pluto-Kuiper Express, shuttle replacements, ISS lifeboat, etc.).When all is said and done, you cannot place all the blame on either President Bush in particular or the Republican Party in general. If any one "thing" is to get all the blame, it's the whole God damned bureaucracy.
"Columbia didn't have the fuel to shift its orbit in synch with ISS. It is extremely difficult to change your orbital inclination. Much more difficult that merely changing altitude or phase."
:)
However, I'd imagine they had the ability to remain on orbit for a decent amount of time, possibly time enough to get a second shuttle and/or one or two Soyuz capsules up to meet it and transfer crew. Both NASA and Rosaviakosmos have experience (albeit brief) with having multiple spacecraft in orbit at the same time. In fact, IIRC, the Soviet Union even launched two Soyuz at the same time once.
Of course, it's all moot now...
At any rate, I'd love to have been a back-seat astronaut. Those are the ones that get to go do EVA!
"1:12 Shuttle: "Roger, ah b---"
1:25-onwards static"
So... even after the crew was cut off, there was a clear radio channel for an additional 10+ seconds?
P. S. It's spelled "Houston."
"There are two types of tiles: black and white."
You forgot to mention the gray ones they put on the nose and leading edges of the wings. Those are the ones that are designed to withstand the most heat, IIRC. The bottom of the orbiter just has to deal with bow shock. The leading edges have to deal with both bow shock and friction.
"If its a design flaw like with Challenger then it could easily be a simlar kind of time scale which will likely have a ripple effect on ISS."
I'd say it'd take longer than post-Challenger. The design flaw there was with the boosters. They're outright disassembled to refuel to begin with, so making structural changes to them is relatively easy. The only post-Challenger changes to the orbiter fleet I can think of were a few little safety features.
If the Columbia's loss is attributable to a design flaw, that means it's a problem with the orbiter itself. I know I probably shouldn't be feeling this way about the situation, but if we're lucky, retrofitting changes into the orbiter fleet will be more expensive than, say, finishing up a shuttle replacement.
On the other hand, it could be a flaw in something that was unique only to the Columbia. Challenger and future orbiters are essentially of a different generation (which is why Columbia wasn't able to reach the ISS).
"Proud to be Canadian"
:)
You know, no future shuttle flights means no future uses of the Canadarm as well...
I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to an AC troll (is there any other kind?), but....
Terrorism is a big unknown that relies on people (a bigger unknown). Climate change is debatable, at least the man-made variety. But...
- The distinct lack of living dinosaurs around here is real, as real as an impact crater near the Yucatan from about the same time period.
- Shoemaker-Levy 9 was real.
- The moon is real. The best theory so far about its existance involves something impacting the earth.
- All the rocky bodies in our star system are pock-marked with impact craters. Even the planets with weather systems haven't been able to hide them all.
- We're all living on the densest object within light-hours. Only two other planets have a higher surface gravity than ours.
- We're only about eight light-minutes to the star system's center of mass. Objects passing near us are exponentially faster than objects passing near Jupiter.
- According to geologists and astronomers, statistics say we're about due for another one of the dinosaur-killing scale (if not bigger).
Whether you choose to accept the facts or not is up to you, but your own foolishnes is no reason for the rest of the species to get vaporized along with you.That's not news, that's expected. Reuters might as well be reporting "Sky is blue," "Sun rises in east, sets in west," or "Israelis and Palestinians kill each other." (OK, so I'm cynical.)
The real news in the article is:I find this surprising considering their jubilation back in 2001. The shuttle fleet is just as much a symbol of the US as was the NY WTC, if not moreso, and it had an Israeli soldier on board to boot. Was Dr. Chawla a Hindu?
I'll be sending a copy of this off to the White House and my three congresscritters. I suggest that everybody else try to do something similar.
---
Consider this letter a preemptive strike. I feel that it is important to express my views and opinions on an important topic that is sure to be hotly debated in the coming weeks and months.
In July of 1994, a series of over twenty fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted the surface of Jupiter, a planet 1400 times the size of our own. The average energy released by the impact of each fragment was equivalent to over 200 billion tons of TNT. This is several times more powerful than the entire planet's nuclear arsenal combined, and several million more times powerful than the two atomic bombs that brought an end to the Second World War. One fragment, the seventh to impact, released energy equal to 6 trillion tons of TNT. Any single one of those fragments would have been enough to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. If all the pieces of Shoemaker-Levy 9 had hit our world, it is difficult to know if even our planet would survive intact. Needless to say, there wouldn't be anybody around to find out how things turn out afterwards.
This morning, the world awoke to the terrible news of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia with all hands on board. Mere hours after this tragic loss, there is already renewed debate on the cost of our manned space program and suggestions of canceling the program outright. Science pundits from around the world are already trying to remind us that robotic space probes can do scientific research faster, better and cheaper than an astronaut. Although this point is debatable, it is more important to realize that pure scientific research is not the end-goal of our nation's manned space program.
Sooner or later, something large will hit our planet. We don't know if it will be next week, next month, or next year, but we do know that it will happen, and it will kill all life as we know it on our world. This is an undeniable fact, and no amount of scoffing at bad made-for-TV movies will change that.
If every human being is still on this one planet when this happens, our entire species will be nothing more than a mere footnote in history, neither having nor deserving any more notoriety than the passing of the dinosaurs. Nothing that we have accomplished after thousands of years of human civilization will matter. The lives of the seven astronauts we lost today will not matter. The debate on space exploration will not matter, nor will anything else said in Congress. Our accomplishments, our knowledge, our nation, our history, our triumphs and tragedies, everything that any person has ever done will not matter because there will be nobody left for these things to matter to.
Of what good is sending robotic probes to explore Jupiter if there isn't anybody left to use the scientific knowledge gained? What could a war on terrorism possibly mean if there won't be anybody left to live in a world free of murderous zealots?
The tragedy that happened to the Columbia should be taken as a wake-up call to the nation. However, it should not be taken as a sign that we need to abandon the idea of sending people into space, but to the fact that a piece of US history like the Columbia should have been in the National Air air Space Museum, not orbit. Our country and our species needs to take spaceflight seriously again.
In the past decade, we have been swamped with proposals for replacements for the space shuttle that would be both safer and cheaper to operate, but funding to all of them was cut. We initially had grand ideas for the International Space Station, but even now it is operating with a crew half the size it should have been. Plans for missions to the moon and even Mars have been brought up, but these have vanished in the face of "pressing" problems that are more important only in the short term. In the long-term, not even national defense is as important as manned space exploration. Even the US military can't save us from a comet.
We need to focus more on sending people to other worlds in our solar system. We should do this not for pure scientific research, not for national pride, but because we are the only ones who can.
Please focus more on the urgent need to send people into space, and please help give Columbia the distinction of being both the first and last space shuttle launched.
Sheesh, you're a dense troll...
Point A = Cape Canaveral
Point B = low earth orbit
OR
Point A = low earth orbit
Point B = Cape Canaveral
"Umm, excuse me. The space shuttle nominally takes off from Kennedy Space Center and lands at KSC. Exactly how is this "travel" as you define it?"
The same can be said about your daily commute. While your daily displacement vector always comes to zero, scalar miles are still being racked up on your car.
"No, it's not. More precisely, manned space travel isn't worth the risk. (Unmanned missions are risk-free by comparison)"
Only in the forseeable short-term. If something large comes on a collision course with this planet and we have been unwilling (not "unable") to put people on other planets on a permanent basis, our footnote in history will neither have nor deserve any more notoriety than the dinosaurs. Buildings, cars, computers, language... nothing will matter woth a damn. We may as well be dinosaurs.
"The future of space travel is unmanned probes exploring every corner of the solar system."
If people aren't being moved from point A to point B, it's not travel. Space travel is important because it is travel. Putting robots all over the star system won't do anything to help us get off this rock.
"Why risk human lives and billions of dollars on lower orbit?"
Because if you weren't so damned hung up on scientific research and short-term profit potential, you'd understand that it is far more important to put people on Europa than robots. Mapping the ocean floor of Europa through a 40+ minute light-lag won't do a damned thing for the survival of the species when Shoemaker-Levy 9's evil twin comes to visit us.
"True of shoulder launched missiles, but I'm not so sure about things like the Aegis SM2's, or fighter launched air-to-air missiles. However, it's safe to say, it's very very unlikely it's a missile."
Time to play devil's advocate.
Everybody is rulling out terrorism because no known surface- or air-to-air missle could have hit the shuttle. But none of this rules out the possibility of sabotage. Right now, we can only assume that the debris seen falling off the orbiter during launch was an accident.
"Very sad. Columbia was my favorite shuttle."
Seriously. I feel the situation is all the more tragic in the way we lost a piece of history as well. It should have been put in a museum after it retired.
... you're surpised an article like this didn't come from the all-your-base department.
Michael, you're slipping!
" why I can't even find references to Topostat in a google search (all hits point to mapmaking, not a medical agent)."
Looks like the answer to your question is "you need to refine your searching skills." Look for "blood-clotting spray." It looks like you can buy 3 oz. cans on-line for ~$13. There are also cans of "spray-on bandage" available for the same price (apparently a different product).
Fun with tetrafluroethane!
"All other things being equal, businesses will go with the cheaper source every time. What we need to do, as a country, is to level the playing field. We need tariffs, laws, and fines to discourage firms from outsourcing desirable jobs."
An artificial leveling of playing fields as you describe doesn't work. Ask Argentina. Without foreign competition, domestic innovation will slow if not stop. And then the Japanese cars start coming in.
The only solution is to level the playing field, but in a true sense. Things won't actually get better until everybody else's standard of living is brought up. What we should be doing is making sure ours doesn't go down in the process (or, at the very least, make sure it's a controlled descent).
"Unregulated capitalism doesn't work."
If that were true, there would be drasticly different standards of living from state to state. Most parts of the US look like other parts of the US because states don't have the ability to regulate interstate commerce. States are able to pass their own labor laws, tax laws, etc, but they have no legal power to prevent businesses from moving to another state.
"Why is this apparently a lost technology?"
I would imagine it has fairly limited civillian uses. Most people don't find themselves in need to stop massive bleeding at a moment's notice. Combine that with what was probably a high price tag, and you're left with mostly government, industrial and paramedic customers instead of something on the shelf of your local Walgreens.
Take this with a grain of salt, I'm just guessing.
"Who has an estimate on how long it will take for the Army to outfit its troops with anti-personnel rocket launchers?"
Why? In real life, assult rifles hurt a lot more than they do in some popular FPSs (Half-Life comes to mind).
Besides, FPSs have the advantage of the Incredible Shrinking Ammo, the ability to carry dozens of reloads for that rocket launcher with no detrimental effects.
Oh, and then there's the ability to fire (accurately!) what is essentially a support weapon while walking/running/jumping. And people/objects behind you don't need to worry about backwash...