"That makes understanding the basic justification for the facility, which boasts the world's most powerful laser system, more than a little tricky."
NIF is a way to keep scientists at LLNL employed. That is its #1 justification, and always has been. Ask any insider.
Any hope of laser-based fusion is a pipe dream, and always has been. Nuckolls himself, the guy that started all of this, was shown a calculation in the early 1970s that proves this beyond a doubt. The problem is that the price of the target is many many times the value of the electricity it could produce.
Power on the grid right now is selling for about 3.3 cents a kWh. (see http://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/marketdata/markettoday.asp)
NIF, if it worked, which it doesn't aims to produce about 20 MJ a "shot". Under good conditions you might convert 25% of that to electrical power (don't quote gas peaker efficiencies, they're a different cycle). So we might get 5 MJ per shot.
If you're not familiar with MJ, it's a measure of energy. kWh is a more common one, so I'll convert 5 MJ = 1.39 kWh.
So at current prices, each shot might produce about 5 cents worth of power.
Now simply look at the target. It's a gold-covered cylinder machined to the sixth decimal place accuracy, capped on it's open end by double-pane windows of some incredibly clear optical system, inside of which is an equally perfectly machined plastic sphere containing the fuel that's cryogenically frozen on the inside and then smoothed using an IR laser.
The targets costs thousands and thousands of dollars per shot. And might (if it ever works) delivers a few cents of power. See the problem?
When this was first pointed out to Nuckolls in the early 1970s he worried, and then ignored it. He proposed a system with such high gain that the fuel would be delivered from a perfume mister that would self-form through surface tension into a ball that would be close enough for comfort.
We've spent 40 years learning about the physics of ICF, and what we've learned is that there is absolutely no way this could possibly work. The physics just isn't there. So instead we've pushed ahead with ever less-cost-efficient machines with ever-less-convincing excuses for doing so. Nova, built in the 1980s, was only 2-fold less successful in reaching break-even than NIF. However, NIF costs well over 10 times as much. The price efficiency is *dropping* with every generation.
"BTW, the idea of a Mexican helicopter "mistakenly" landing 16 miles away from its target is utterly ridiculous."
You are clearly not a pilot.
"No competent pilot would ever make such a mistake"
It happens all the time. The UK was able to jam pretty much every radio and radar system the Germans had because Luftwaffe aircraft kept landing at English airbases, mistaking them for France. Let me assure you, the Luftwaffe pilots and navigators had "basic navigational skills and fuel-burn calculations" and were entirely competent.
Do you think things have improved? No: http://bit.ly/XeYY30
"'why they have GPS in aircraft now"
And we know that no one ever gets lost any more when they use their GPS: http://bit.ly/XeYObY
"Your life has greatly improved because of the perfection of Ashthma medication"
Well, *improvement*. I'm sure there will be even better ones in the future.
"Is that drug really a breakthrough though or just an improvement of an existing line"
It is a completely new drug. It works on a different biochemical pathway in the body, specifically the cysteinyl leukotriene pathways. Older drugs generally worked along eosinophil lines, or in the case of "anti-attack" medications, by triggering beta-epinephrine which causes a reaction that offsets the *symptoms* without actually doing anything to the underlying cause.
If the BBC thinks there are no completely new inventions, they are utterly confused about the topic. As we speak there are millions and millions of people around the world working on *completely new* stuff. Like my Singulair example, many of these are due to development from pure science.
Take the LED light bulb for instance. The LED is utterly new and novel. It does not work in any way like any previous light source used by man. Period. Saying it's a "light source" and so it's not new denigrates everyone and everything that the modern world is based on.
"particularly with the media's appetite for sensational stories"
What, like claiming there are no new inventions to get the digerati all a-twitter and drive traffic to your site? Like that, you mean?
I have asthma. Over the past 35 years I have witnessed the slow and steady destruction of this affliction. I started with drugs that were expensive and did little or nothing to actually steady my attacks. Today I use something called Singulair which I take once a day and essentially makes my asthma disappear. It also mutes down all of my allergies, I can pet cats without any side effects now.
According to the BBC, this is not an invention. That's because we had drugs before, and we have other ones today. Clearly this is not *really* any sort of progress, right? The fact that my life, and millions of others, have been utterly transformed is just an illusion!
I calculated that my daily commute would requite 3 kWp of panels if the end-to-end efficiency was 75% - which is what Tesla claims for the Model S. 3 kW of panels is 12 panels. That easily fits on my garage roof. This isn't as insane as it sounds.
Click through the links until you find the original abstract.
The paper is about their experiments to understand the emittance of firefly scales. The conclusion is that the scales improve emittance by 55% when replicated on a cheap LED they were using as a test source.
They had no plans on using this for any practical purpose, which isn't surprising given that many optical devices already use this technique, and have for years. You can buy laser-etching solar cell surfacers off the 'web. Google it yourself.
This is simply another excellent example of a team misleading their university's press department by releasing link spammy titles, followed by the press team failing to do their job and apply any due diligence, followed by the blogrolling that occurs when a self-described TV producer reads the same link spam and fails utterly in their duty as well./. copied it from Giz, who copied it from the press release, and no one bothered to actually look at the paper in question.
"learning independence, [snip. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that"
No, I can't say that.
Everything I've heard over the last two decades, repeatedly in many contexts, is that girls are much better working in teams. Moreover, it is this ability that was previously mentioned as why they do better in school, as well as adding value to workplaces (basically having a woman in a team improves the entire team performance).
It is true that "learning independence" is not an antonym of "teamwork", but I suspect they are not synonyms either. Of the two extremes, I would guess that it lays closer to the antonym end of the line.
No, it wouldn't. Because many of the base features of the language would have never been implemented as base features of the language. But they were, and they still are, and wouldn't be.
This isn't an Ada issue, it's an issue with any procedural language that was "extended". Object Pascal is another good example.
A LONG time ago. This was in the period long enough after its release that people were getting used to what worked and what didn't. Like C, Ada has any number of constructs that you don't really use because they tend to make things harder. If you used its base functionality you had what was basically Pascal with very strong error checking, and that I didn't mind.
But throughout my (limited) use, I couldn't help but shake the feeling that Ada *really* wanted to be an OOPS language. For instance, there's constructs in the language itself (as opposed to libraries or such) that return the bounds for variables. That way you can do bounds checking in code using those constructs. The difference between that construct and a dot-syntax OOPS language is basically zero, yet they put all of this machinery into the basic system but not the rest that would give it true OOPS functionality (at the time, I suspect this has changed).
If anything is "wrong" with Ada, it's that it was defined maybe 3 or 4 years too soon. The structured programming of Pascal was clearly a major input, but at the time of definition the fact that OOPS was the future was still being *heavily* debated. I do wonder what a post-OOPS Ada would have looked like.
"awful lot of NIMBY going on. We could've and should've been building new reactors since the 70"
The two are unrelated. As with all power sources, NIMBY is considerable and noisy, but has little real influence in the end.
What killed nukes was a combination of cash-flow, overbuilding, credit problems and double-digit inflation. Even today, getting funding for reactors is extremely difficult. That has nothing to do with NIMBY and a whole lot to do with NINJA loans five years ago.
"this was the first new nuke plant licensed in 30 years" [inserting missing statement] "in the US"
Quick math shows that the plant and associated wires comes to about $7.25 a watt in CAPEX. and minimum sizes are 1 GW. Onshore wind turbines are going in for $2 to $2.50 a watt, all in, and scale from a few hundred kilowatts up.
PV, wind and nuclear are all within a factor of 2. Hydro is half of any of those. All the others are at least one order of magnitude away, the best definition of "significantly" I can think of.
"Advances in health technologies will help people live longer, but 60% of the world's population is expected to live in an urban environment."
Why is there a "but" in that statement? Shouldn't it be a period? Did I miss something? It doesn't seem like the report has any linkage between health and urbanization, so it seems the two are unrelated.
> So what you're saying is that we already know everything, and there is nothing left to discover or improve?
No, I'm saying precisely what I said...
After studying the problem for 50 years, we know that the targets costs are orders of magnitude more than the price of the electrical power they could produce. We also know that the price/performance ratio is fixed; that is, if you want more performance, you need to pay more money.
The conclusion is that there is no way the system can produce economical power.
This doesn't "outlaw" some new sort of development, but it does suggest that this approach as a power system is a dead end. And that being the case, why spend more money on it when we already have alternatives that *do* work and *do* produce economical power?
Or to put this more simply:
1) I can buy a complete system of solar panels, inverters, batteries and wires that will produce power 24/7 today. It will produce power for the equivalent of about 25 cents a kWh. That price is falling every day.
2) I cannot buy a fusion reactor. When I can, after billions of more dollars and decades of development, it will produce power for about $10 a kWh.
"This is about creating a clean, reliable, cost effective energy solution."
We already have those, and they actually work and generate profits.
This doesn't work, possibly won't ever work, and can't possibly be profitable.
John Nuckolls, the guy that pretty much single-handedly drove ICF research through LLNL, was presented with this problem when the concept was first seriously presented in the early 1960s. At the time he thought the fuel loads could be sprayed from an atomizer and costs fractions of a cent. The next 50 years of experimentation conclusively demonstrated this is *simply not possible*. Not "it's an engineering problem", but "not possible". Curing the Rayleigh instabilities requires target perfection that costs thousands of dollars a shot. And those shots can only ever return pennies worth of power.
Do the math yourself. And when you do, compare it to current wind prices at 5 to 6 cents/kWh, solar around 10 to 15, or hydro at 1 to 2. There's more than enough of those three to produce every erg used on the planet, and they actually work, right now.
The NIF is physically limited to shots up to about 50 MJ. To put that in more familiar terms, that's about 14 kWh.
At current baseload prices here in Ontario, about 3.5 cents/kWh, that shot is worth about 50 cents. That's assuming that we convert it entire to electricity, which is of course impossible. A more realistic conversion with 25% thermal efficiency gets us 15 cents of power.
The fuel target costs tens of thousands of dollars.
$10,000 >> 15 cents
Anyone see a problem here? And don't wave this away, we literally have absolutely no idea how to make the fuel cost less than the power is worth. None whatsoever.
And that's not the only one, of course. The beamlines feed about 1.8 MJ of UV laser light into the chamber. That is generated from 4 MJ of IR in the main beamlines. That's fed from 350 MJ of electrical power. To get 50 MJ out.
350 MJ >> 50 MJ >> 15 MJ of electricity after conversion
So there's that too. At current efficiencies, you're better off burning money.
We have some febrile ideas about how to get this improved by a factor of 10, or maybe even 100. But that's still *below* energy break even. And we don't need break even for this to be practical, we need 10 to 100x.
This is never going to happen. It's a weapons program, always was. Testing we don't need for a weapon we don't want.
"Actually, the precise military design requirement that borked it was that the shuttle craft had to be capable of re-entry and landing entirely over the US continental area. They didn't want to overfly Russia, China or Europe."
That is incorrect. Quite the opposite, in fact.
There was not one requirement, but two. The easier one was the need to launch a new generation of very large spy sats with an expected weight of 40,000 lbs. These had to be placed in polar orbit, so the Shuttle wouldn't have got the boost from launching to the east. As a result, the system required the more commonly quoted figure, 65,000 lbs from Kennedy.
The second was the requirement for what is now known as "Abort, once around". The idea was to launch the Shuttle into a polar orbit, deploy, and then land, all in one mission. As the Shuttle's orbit takes about 90 minutes, that means that when it returned to the US, the launch pad is now 1,000 miles to the east of where it was on launch. This meant that the Shuttle had to manoeuvre in the atmosphere (which is way cheaper than using rockets to do it) and to get that sort of "cross range" performance they had to move to a delta wing.
And thus the Shuttle that we all know. It's about 3 times as big as the original design, and has more wing than it needs.
Slashdot Mirror
"That makes understanding the basic justification for the facility, which boasts the world's most powerful laser system, more than a little tricky."
NIF is a way to keep scientists at LLNL employed. That is its #1 justification, and always has been. Ask any insider.
Any hope of laser-based fusion is a pipe dream, and always has been. Nuckolls himself, the guy that started all of this, was shown a calculation in the early 1970s that proves this beyond a doubt. The problem is that the price of the target is many many times the value of the electricity it could produce.
Power on the grid right now is selling for about 3.3 cents a kWh. (see http://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/marketdata/markettoday.asp)
NIF, if it worked, which it doesn't aims to produce about 20 MJ a "shot". Under good conditions you might convert 25% of that to electrical power (don't quote gas peaker efficiencies, they're a different cycle). So we might get 5 MJ per shot.
If you're not familiar with MJ, it's a measure of energy. kWh is a more common one, so I'll convert 5 MJ = 1.39 kWh.
So at current prices, each shot might produce about 5 cents worth of power.
Now simply look at the target. It's a gold-covered cylinder machined to the sixth decimal place accuracy, capped on it's open end by double-pane windows of some incredibly clear optical system, inside of which is an equally perfectly machined plastic sphere containing the fuel that's cryogenically frozen on the inside and then smoothed using an IR laser.
The targets costs thousands and thousands of dollars per shot. And might (if it ever works) delivers a few cents of power. See the problem?
When this was first pointed out to Nuckolls in the early 1970s he worried, and then ignored it. He proposed a system with such high gain that the fuel would be delivered from a perfume mister that would self-form through surface tension into a ball that would be close enough for comfort.
We've spent 40 years learning about the physics of ICF, and what we've learned is that there is absolutely no way this could possibly work. The physics just isn't there. So instead we've pushed ahead with ever less-cost-efficient machines with ever-less-convincing excuses for doing so. Nova, built in the 1980s, was only 2-fold less successful in reaching break-even than NIF. However, NIF costs well over 10 times as much. The price efficiency is *dropping* with every generation.
Having used the linked-to tool mentioned in the article, the answer is a resounding "no".
What an ass-tasktic demo.
"BTW, the idea of a Mexican helicopter "mistakenly" landing 16 miles away from its target is utterly ridiculous."
You are clearly not a pilot.
"No competent pilot would ever make such a mistake"
It happens all the time. The UK was able to jam pretty much every radio and radar system the Germans had because Luftwaffe aircraft kept landing at English airbases, mistaking them for France. Let me assure you, the Luftwaffe pilots and navigators had "basic navigational skills and fuel-burn calculations" and were entirely competent.
Do you think things have improved? No: http://bit.ly/XeYY30
"'why they have GPS in aircraft now"
And we know that no one ever gets lost any more when they use their GPS: http://bit.ly/XeYObY
"the universe will disappear at the speed of light"
At the speed of light this process would take forever.
Not "a long time", forever.
It's a basic fact of there being a limited speed, and acceleration. Look up Unruh Effect.
"Your life has greatly improved because of the perfection of Ashthma medication"
Well, *improvement*. I'm sure there will be even better ones in the future.
"Is that drug really a breakthrough though or just an improvement of an existing line"
It is a completely new drug. It works on a different biochemical pathway in the body, specifically the cysteinyl leukotriene pathways. Older drugs generally worked along eosinophil lines, or in the case of "anti-attack" medications, by triggering beta-epinephrine which causes a reaction that offsets the *symptoms* without actually doing anything to the underlying cause.
If the BBC thinks there are no completely new inventions, they are utterly confused about the topic. As we speak there are millions and millions of people around the world working on *completely new* stuff. Like my Singulair example, many of these are due to development from pure science.
Take the LED light bulb for instance. The LED is utterly new and novel. It does not work in any way like any previous light source used by man. Period. Saying it's a "light source" and so it's not new denigrates everyone and everything that the modern world is based on.
"particularly with the media's appetite for sensational stories"
What, like claiming there are no new inventions to get the digerati all a-twitter and drive traffic to your site? Like that, you mean?
I have asthma. Over the past 35 years I have witnessed the slow and steady destruction of this affliction. I started with drugs that were expensive and did little or nothing to actually steady my attacks. Today I use something called Singulair which I take once a day and essentially makes my asthma disappear. It also mutes down all of my allergies, I can pet cats without any side effects now.
According to the BBC, this is not an invention. That's because we had drugs before, and we have other ones today. Clearly this is not *really* any sort of progress, right? The fact that my life, and millions of others, have been utterly transformed is just an illusion!
I calculated that my daily commute would requite 3 kWp of panels if the end-to-end efficiency was 75% - which is what Tesla claims for the Model S. 3 kW of panels is 12 panels. That easily fits on my garage roof. This isn't as insane as it sounds.
"Oh wait - that's only 25% to 30% efficient"
In a car? More like 10%, and when considered in traffic and city driving, maybe 7 to 8%.
Click through the links until you find the original abstract.
The paper is about their experiments to understand the emittance of firefly scales. The conclusion is that the scales improve emittance by 55% when replicated on a cheap LED they were using as a test source.
They had no plans on using this for any practical purpose, which isn't surprising given that many optical devices already use this technique, and have for years. You can buy laser-etching solar cell surfacers off the 'web. Google it yourself.
This is simply another excellent example of a team misleading their university's press department by releasing link spammy titles, followed by the press team failing to do their job and apply any due diligence, followed by the blogrolling that occurs when a self-described TV producer reads the same link spam and fails utterly in their duty as well. /. copied it from Giz, who copied it from the press release, and no one bothered to actually look at the paper in question.
Nothing to see here folks, move along
"learning independence, [snip. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that"
No, I can't say that.
Everything I've heard over the last two decades, repeatedly in many contexts, is that girls are much better working in teams. Moreover, it is this ability that was previously mentioned as why they do better in school, as well as adding value to workplaces (basically having a woman in a team improves the entire team performance).
It is true that "learning independence" is not an antonym of "teamwork", but I suspect they are not synonyms either. Of the two extremes, I would guess that it lays closer to the antonym end of the line.
No, it wouldn't. Because many of the base features of the language would have never been implemented as base features of the language. But they were, and they still are, and wouldn't be.
This isn't an Ada issue, it's an issue with any procedural language that was "extended". Object Pascal is another good example.
"Anybody here using Ada, or has used Ada"
A LONG time ago. This was in the period long enough after its release that people were getting used to what worked and what didn't. Like C, Ada has any number of constructs that you don't really use because they tend to make things harder. If you used its base functionality you had what was basically Pascal with very strong error checking, and that I didn't mind.
But throughout my (limited) use, I couldn't help but shake the feeling that Ada *really* wanted to be an OOPS language. For instance, there's constructs in the language itself (as opposed to libraries or such) that return the bounds for variables. That way you can do bounds checking in code using those constructs. The difference between that construct and a dot-syntax OOPS language is basically zero, yet they put all of this machinery into the basic system but not the rest that would give it true OOPS functionality (at the time, I suspect this has changed).
If anything is "wrong" with Ada, it's that it was defined maybe 3 or 4 years too soon. The structured programming of Pascal was clearly a major input, but at the time of definition the fact that OOPS was the future was still being *heavily* debated. I do wonder what a post-OOPS Ada would have looked like.
"awful lot of NIMBY going on. We could've and should've been building new reactors since the 70"
The two are unrelated. As with all power sources, NIMBY is considerable and noisy, but has little real influence in the end.
What killed nukes was a combination of cash-flow, overbuilding, credit problems and double-digit inflation. Even today, getting funding for reactors is extremely difficult. That has nothing to do with NIMBY and a whole lot to do with NINJA loans five years ago.
"this was the first new nuke plant licensed in 30 years" [inserting missing statement] "in the US"
Quick math shows that the plant and associated wires comes to about $7.25 a watt in CAPEX. and minimum sizes are 1 GW. Onshore wind turbines are going in for $2 to $2.50 a watt, all in, and scale from a few hundred kilowatts up.
http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/RE_Technologies_Cost_Analysis-WIND_POWER.pdf
So if you have to gather money for a power project, which do you think is going to take less than five years to arrange?
Stop looking for boogiemen. Follow the money.
"The latter is slowly becoming possible as an energy source, but is still significantly more carbon intensive than most alternatives"
Completely wrong. I'll quote figures from the most opposed source:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/comparativeco2.html
PV, wind and nuclear are all within a factor of 2. Hydro is half of any of those. All the others are at least one order of magnitude away, the best definition of "significantly" I can think of.
"They have one of the highest domestic consumptions of energy per capita in the world"
What?! They're 29th on the list. They use less than HALF the power of the US or Canada.
"What do you think will take nuclear's place? Solar and wind?"
I'm an empiricist, so let's see what the numbers say. Installed worldwide power during the 2011 time frame:
Wind, 41 GW
PV, 27 GW
natgas, ~15 GW
hydro, ??
nuclear, -7 GW
In the US in 2012 until October (latest stats available):
natgas, 5,702 MW
wind, 5,403 MW
coal, 2,276 MW
pv, 1,032 MW
biomass, 409 MW
Renewables represented 46% of all new generation until October 2012 (the last number I can get)
So, "yes", we are not only going to, we *are* replacing nuclear with wind and PV, and ng for peaking (which you need for nukes as well)
"but you still have CO2 and you still have the problems associated with extraction."
Half as much CO2, and a small drillhead instead of a mountaintop removal. I'll take that.
"Advances in health technologies will help people live longer, but 60% of the world's population is expected to live in an urban environment."
Why is there a "but" in that statement? Shouldn't it be a period? Did I miss something? It doesn't seem like the report has any linkage between health and urbanization, so it seems the two are unrelated.
"Hydro isn't available in most places"
That is true, there are places in the world without hydro. We would have to build a better grid to serve them.
ICF doesn't work at all.
Which of those sounds easier to fix?
> So what you're saying is that we already know everything, and there is nothing left to discover or improve?
No, I'm saying precisely what I said...
After studying the problem for 50 years, we know that the targets costs are orders of magnitude more than the price of the electrical power they could produce. We also know that the price/performance ratio is fixed; that is, if you want more performance, you need to pay more money.
The conclusion is that there is no way the system can produce economical power.
This doesn't "outlaw" some new sort of development, but it does suggest that this approach as a power system is a dead end. And that being the case, why spend more money on it when we already have alternatives that *do* work and *do* produce economical power?
Or to put this more simply:
1) I can buy a complete system of solar panels, inverters, batteries and wires that will produce power 24/7 today. It will produce power for the equivalent of about 25 cents a kWh. That price is falling every day.
2) I cannot buy a fusion reactor. When I can, after billions of more dollars and decades of development, it will produce power for about $10 a kWh.
So, given (1), why bother with (2)?
"This is about creating a clean, reliable, cost effective energy solution."
We already have those, and they actually work and generate profits.
This doesn't work, possibly won't ever work, and can't possibly be profitable.
John Nuckolls, the guy that pretty much single-handedly drove ICF research through LLNL, was presented with this problem when the concept was first seriously presented in the early 1960s. At the time he thought the fuel loads could be sprayed from an atomizer and costs fractions of a cent. The next 50 years of experimentation conclusively demonstrated this is *simply not possible*. Not "it's an engineering problem", but "not possible". Curing the Rayleigh instabilities requires target perfection that costs thousands of dollars a shot. And those shots can only ever return pennies worth of power.
Do the math yourself. And when you do, compare it to current wind prices at 5 to 6 cents/kWh, solar around 10 to 15, or hydro at 1 to 2. There's more than enough of those three to produce every erg used on the planet, and they actually work, right now.
Fusion is not going to happen. Ever.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
In this case I can get more specific:
The NIF is physically limited to shots up to about 50 MJ. To put that in more familiar terms, that's about 14 kWh.
At current baseload prices here in Ontario, about 3.5 cents/kWh, that shot is worth about 50 cents. That's assuming that we convert it entire to electricity, which is of course impossible. A more realistic conversion with 25% thermal efficiency gets us 15 cents of power.
The fuel target costs tens of thousands of dollars.
$10,000 >> 15 cents
Anyone see a problem here? And don't wave this away, we literally have absolutely no idea how to make the fuel cost less than the power is worth. None whatsoever.
And that's not the only one, of course. The beamlines feed about 1.8 MJ of UV laser light into the chamber. That is generated from 4 MJ of IR in the main beamlines. That's fed from 350 MJ of electrical power. To get 50 MJ out.
350 MJ >> 50 MJ >> 15 MJ of electricity after conversion
So there's that too. At current efficiencies, you're better off burning money.
We have some febrile ideas about how to get this improved by a factor of 10, or maybe even 100. But that's still *below* energy break even. And we don't need break even for this to be practical, we need 10 to 100x.
This is never going to happen. It's a weapons program, always was. Testing we don't need for a weapon we don't want.
"Actually, the precise military design requirement that borked it was that the shuttle craft had to be capable of re-entry and landing entirely over the US continental area. They didn't want to overfly Russia, China or Europe."
That is incorrect. Quite the opposite, in fact.
There was not one requirement, but two. The easier one was the need to launch a new generation of very large spy sats with an expected weight of 40,000 lbs. These had to be placed in polar orbit, so the Shuttle wouldn't have got the boost from launching to the east. As a result, the system required the more commonly quoted figure, 65,000 lbs from Kennedy.
The second was the requirement for what is now known as "Abort, once around". The idea was to launch the Shuttle into a polar orbit, deploy, and then land, all in one mission. As the Shuttle's orbit takes about 90 minutes, that means that when it returned to the US, the launch pad is now 1,000 miles to the east of where it was on launch. This meant that the Shuttle had to manoeuvre in the atmosphere (which is way cheaper than using rockets to do it) and to get that sort of "cross range" performance they had to move to a delta wing.
And thus the Shuttle that we all know. It's about 3 times as big as the original design, and has more wing than it needs.
If you want to cry, look up the SERV on the wiki
> $5k? I mean, that won't even cover their legal fees for one case.
Exactly.
Note that commercial limits are much higher, as they should be. So expect cases about what makes you "commercial".
"If there's nobody to bribe politicians"
Or more simply, implement a completely transparent registry of all lobbyists, who they *really* represent, and all their meetings:
https://ocl-cal.gc.ca/eic/site/012.nsf/eng/home
Go ahead and try to bribe, or strong-arm. Someone *will* notice. There's people who's only job is to watch the list and report on it.
Coles Notes version please.