Wages have been rising in China, for those who have a job, but unemployment is off the charts in China's old industrial rust belt (20% or higher - it's hard to get accurate statistics out of the Chinese government). Here's an article from a few years back:
It's not clear to me if rising wages in China have offset the loss in jobs. Costs are also rising fast in China. Essential commodities like food and fuel have become much more expensive in the past decade, which is crippling to the poor - especially rural peasants, given that well north of 20% of them don't have a job. If your wages go up by $10 a month but your costs go up by $15, and half your family is unemployed, you aren't exactly better off.
Right now the real urban unemployment rate in China is sitting at around 9.5% (the government figures are closer to 5%, but nobody believes those).
The global free trade bandwagon has been great for the wealthy, especially bankers. A tiny middle class gets to feed off their crumbs, and it's looking more and more like starvation for everybody else. We've seen this story before, and the ending is never pretty, but the free trade "let them eat cake" crowd never learns from its mistakes until their heads start bouncing off the cobblestones.
The US will never be a manufacturing powerhouse again. We're too rich. We dont want dirty factories polluting our lands and more minimum wage jobs in factory conditions.
I call bullshit. Germany is still a manufacturing powerhouse. They're rich. Their government just has an industrial policy that goes beyond "ship all the jobs overseas and bail out the criminal banksters with loot stolen from taxpayers". We should employ policies similar to theirs here.
The protectionist law Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act [wikipedia.org], which became law in 1930, led to the Great Depression
Sorry, that's yet another right wing free trader myth with absolutely no basis in reality. The stock market collapse took place in October, 1929. Banks were already failing and international trade had already plummeted by the time Smoot-Hawley was passed and took effect. And the tariffs imposed by Smoot-Hawley were in general far, far lower than those the US had already employed for much of its history.
Trade almost always collapses during panics and depressions, and tariffs have nothing to do with it. Exchange rates go crazy and credit dries up, which makes it difficult or even impossible (not to mention risky) to engage in international trade. Declining wages at home also means that it doesn't make a lot of sense to go thru the hassle of international trade, when you can probably do about as well manufacturing, growing or mining the same stuff at home (without all the risk).
I'd just add that the US is running such colossal trade deficits that at this point we'd be better off if we blew up every container ship that came into port and cut off trade entirely. That'll effectively happen anyway at some point - eventually Asian government won't be able to finance this enormous trade imbalance anymore, leading to a collapse in the dollar and our inability to afford any imported goods. It would be far wiser for the US to enact tariffs in a series of graduated steps, giving it time to rebuild domestic industry in an orderly fashion instead of waiting around for the inevitable currency collapse and then attempting to rebuild in the midst of total economic (and likely social and political) chaos.
You could get away with an 87% corporate tax in the 1950's, because corporations really had no where else to go.
Taxes in Europe and Japan were even higher. Still are, in most instances. So that argument doesn't hold water.
Try that today, and the only result you're going to get is corporations fleeing overseas as fast as they could go.
Well then, tax the profits their remaining US entity makes at 95%. That should discourage any flight to offshore tax havens. Unless they want to pull out of the US market entirely, which is fine by me. I'm sure US-based companies will have no trouble displacing them.
Oh, and once they pull out, invalidate all of their patents within the US. Hey, you don't operate here, so why should we waste our time and resources enforcing your patents?
If you're going to do it, at least go software RAID so that you don't have to worry about having a back up controller and worrying if that works.
Uh, bad idea. If your array is corrupted and you can't boot into the OS, your software RAID array could become totally inaccessible. I had this happen on an XP box with one of Intel's crappy hardware/software RAID arrays. Box couldn't boot, array was corrupted, and my slipstreamed XP disc didn't have the drivers required to run on my SATA DVD drive. Whoops!
Instead of buying an EIDE DVD drive, which would have worked with my XP disc, I ended up just upgrading to Win 7, which did work with the SATA DVD drive and which recognized and rebuilt the array. Still, it was a huge hassle and about a $100 expense.
Never again. If I ever bother with RAID in the future, it'll be with a (popular) hardware RAID controller. No more Winmodem-esque RAID solutions for me, thank you. But I honestly think RAID is a waste of time for home machines. You'd be better off spending that money on offsite backup solutions like CrashPlan.
And in reality, the difference in track record between one flight and a dozen flights is to some extent meaningless - because every flight of an expendable is a first flight.
No, this isn't accurate. While each vehicle is different - there's always the potential for vehicle-specific manufacturing defects or incidents on launch (a lightning or bird strike, for example) - after a certain number of successful flights you can be pretty certain there aren't any obvious inherent design flaws with the vehicle that'll lead to serious safety issues.
Of course, there could still be some non-obvious stuff that'll bite you in the ass 20 or 40 missions out, but the less complex the vehicle the less likely it is you'll have those kind of issues.
I might add that our "reusable" Shuttle seems especially prone to the very kind of vehicle-specific manufacturing defects and launch incidents that can also wreck expendable boosters. And unfortunately, there was no cost-effective way to alter its . . . unusual . . . design to mitigate its propensity to suffer from those kind of issues. Which is a pity, as the taxpayers sunk a ridiculous fortune into its development and deployment.
There's no reason to have separate launch vehicles for crew and cargo as long as, in the event of an abort, you can get the crew off safely.
Well, yes and no. It doesn't hurt, but producing a man-rated booster is a lot more expensive, especially when it has to be man-rated from the start. And man rating a really big launcher - one capable of boosting large cargo into orbit at once - can add all sorts of unnecessary cost and complexity to an already expensive heavy booster project. The Russians have been running two separate launchers - Soyuz for people and Proton for cargo - for decades, which has been very cost-effective for them.
It would probably be cheaper and simpler to design a booster with the longterm goal of man-rating it, but to not support that in the initial development. I think ESA took that approach with Ariane V, although no work has commenced on man-rating that launcher (yet, anyhow). The Russians intend to man-rate the under-development Proton replacement Angara rocket at some point, once it's been successfully deployed as an unmanned booster.
Yet, when gov't spends as much as necessary to make flight as-safe-as-possible, everyone wails on how expensive and time-consuming it is.
Nobody is complaining about the government making their launchers as safe as possible. The problem with NASA for the past 40 years has been their insistence on spending a fortune trying to make a vehicle that's inherently less-safe than a simple Saturn V or Soyuz-style booster "as-safe-as-possible". Not surprisingly, they wasted a ton of taxpayer cash and were left with a vehicle that wasn't as safe, as reliable, or as capable as its predecessors. It was, however, fantastically more expensive. If they'd performed an accurate cost-benefit analysis, they would have never built the Shuttle in the first place.
Private industry performed the dreaded cost-benefit analysis, and with a comparative pittance in government support one private firm has already successfully launched a new heavy booster - something NASA hasn't been able to accomplish in 30 years, after literally spending tens of billions on failed Shuttle replacements. SpaceX went with a proven form factor and utilized their engineering smarts to simplify their booster as much as possible, further enhancing its inherent reliability and making it far easier to maintain and improve that reliability as development advances. Most of the other private companies have employed a similar strategy, so it wouldn't surprise me if many of them ultimately reap similar results.
NASA's behavior over the past 4 decades is a classic illustration of the famous Sun Tzu statement, "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
Phrasing it slightly differently, the U.S. taxpayers demanded reliability and safety from the very first flight. If you demand reliability starting from the very first fllght, this is going to be expensive.
That's not really what taxpayers demanded, though. The need for flawless reliability from the first flight was driven primarily by the Shuttle's form factor, it's "re-usability" and outrageous cost. The damn thing was so expensive NASA literally couldn't afford a failure simply from a price perspective (forget the astronauts), so a ton of expensive testing and engineering had to be baked into the program as a result.
When the Shuttle was originally conceived as a much smaller manned glider to ride piggyback on a Saturn booster it was a much cheaper and simpler affair, and the Saturns had already been tested and deployed. Nixon nixed that plan due to the cost, and directed NASA to build an independent Shuttle with its own - supposedly cheaper - launch system, based around the reusable craft itself. Huge mistake, especially when the military got involved and bloated up the size and capabilities of the craft (abilities they pretty much never used).
NASA tried to justify the exploding cost of the Shuttles by making utterly unrealistic plans to fly dozens of missions a year in an attempt to recoup their development costs. Never happened. They never even came close. But the annual program costs never came down, in spite of only running a handful of flights a year. In fact I read somewhere recently that launch costs are up to around $1 billion a flight, simply because so few Shuttles get launched each year, yet it costs NASA billions just to keep the program's lights on.
Of course, all that pork made the Shuttles a sacred pig in Washington, so the program lived on like a cash eating zombie decades after it was obvious the Shuttle had failed to provide any kind of improvement over the Saturn V launcher it replaced. Not only was it not an improvement, it ultimately proved far more costly to run, and it totally eliminated our heavy launch abilities. The Shuttle was a catastrophic failure long before Challenger blew, and the taxpayers are probably the only people not to blame for that (apart from continuing to elect morons year after year, anyhow).
Shuttle flew more times than all other manned systems combined.
Yes, at a tremendous cost in money and lives.
In other words, Shuttle's safety record isn't mediocre. It's better than Apollo, better than Soyuz.
The Shuttle's safety record is abysmal given its cost. Worse, there's little indication the craft is any safer now than it was the day it first launched - if anything, age seems to be making the Shuttle less reliable (or at least, increasingly expensive to maintain at a safe level). Whereas Soyuz has clearly improved over the decades, both in terms of performance as well as reliability, and hasn't suffered a fatality since the earliest missions of the 1970's. In no way is the Shuttle's safety record "better" than that of today's Soyuz.
I won't go into "abysmal performance" beyond noting that 30 ton cargo capacity. When you find another manned space vehicle that can carry as much as five tons of cargo, let me know....
Shuttle defenders always cite some useless capability the Shuttle possesses in their attempts to justify this enormous white elephant. "But it can haul 30 tons of cargo!" "But it has more tiles than the average public restroom!" "But it can cook 7 astronauts at once!". The Saturn V could boost 120 tons into orbit. We gave that up in order to build a launcher that could only lob 30 tons into orbit, yet ended up costing around as much per-launch. Some deal!
As if humans need to ride along with cargo, anyhow. You can boost a bunch of humans into orbit cheaper and safer with smaller boosters, and save the heavy lifters for cargo runs. The Soviets figured this out early on, which is why their program was able to accomplish a lot without spending a lot of money, and why their rockets continue to dominate any price/performance comparisons you'd care to make with the stuff NASA built post 1970.
The Falcon 9, by the way, is capable of launching 28,000kg into LEO, compared to the Shuttle's 24,400kg. Falcon 9 is slated to cost around $94 million a launch. The Shuttles are running somewhere between $200 - $500 million a launch (depending on how you handle the accounting). Ouch.
The Shuttle has been a 30 year disaster for the US space program, and the Ares "replacement" rockets looked to be equally disastrous cash sinkholes. Fortunately, it now looks as though the private sector will prove more than capable of producing safe, reliable, inexpensive alternatives.
NASA proves that it has been capable of (more or less) safe spacegoing for the last 50 years, which the private sector just couldn't do.
NASA "proves" that it can blow $200 billion on a money pit like the Shuttle and "only" incinerate 14 astronauts. Not a great track record, given the human *or* financial cost. Up until recently, few were willing to finance private launch initiatives. Now the government has - finally - turned to independent private sector entities to develop launch capabilities, and (surprise, surprise) one company has already developed a successful launcher for less than it costs NASA to build a freaking launch PAD.
The space shuttle had 25 launches before its first launch failure. That's a record that has never been equalled by any other venture.
The Shuttle got off to a solid start, but given the billions dumped into its development and construction that was hardly some great achievement. The US taxpayer shelled out a fortune for the Shuttle, ultimately to enjoy a mediocre safety record and abysmal performance. Virtually every booster can hoist payloads into orbit for a fraction of what it costs per-pound to launch payloads with the Shuttle, and the other man-rated booster in operation (Soyuz) has proven far safer.
You're citing an "achievement" that's not only proved ultimately useless, but that was also a far less-efficient way of designing, producing and launching safe vehicles. Who cares if boosters fail during their initial test stages, especially if humans aren't onboard? If the boosters are cheap, you just learn from your failures, perfect the technology and then, when it's safe enough, start launching humans. The way the Shuttles were developed was ass-backwards, which is one of the reasons why they've been such a money pit. Lots of boosters developed the way SpaceX is developing Falcon 9 have had way more than 25 launches in a row without a failure. There hasn't been a failure of a manned Soyuz booster in decades, and the last big incident they had (in the early '80s IIRC) didn't result in any casualities.
The Shuttle is probably the best example of how NOT to design a booster, and another demonstration of why NASA should be kept far, far away from the design and construction of launch vehicles. SpaceX proves that the commercial sector is more than capable of doing it better, faster and cheaper than NASA ever could.
You would have a point if the shuttle was only used to support the Hubble.
Right. So what else has the Shuttle done? Sent some fruit flies into orbit. Launched stuff that could have been launched on cheaper disposable heavy boosters, if we hadn't eliminated that capability as part of an attempt to justify the existence of the Shuttle? Sent astronauts to float around in the ISS, keeping that $100 billion white elephant from falling apart and plunging into the Pacific?
Quite a record of "accomplishment".
We could have been more productive with the $300 billion we've pissed away on manned spaceflight over the past three decades by converting it into $1 bills, chucking the money into an incinerator and generating electrical power from the waste heat.
The shuttle provided us with some very valuable advances
You keep claiming this. Name them, and provide cites. Explain to us why these same "advances" couldn't have been developed for a hell of a lot less than $200 billion in pork barrel spending.
and allowed us to to some really cool stuff that expanded what we know we can do in space.
Like what? They haven't done anything fundamentally different with the Shuttles than the stuff we or the Russians were already doing as far back as the early '70s.
The American Government has gotten more money from the industries that manned space flight spawned then to has cost.
Ha! Cite, please. (Good luck with that!)
Almost all innovation from manned space flight has gone on to be mulit-billion dollar industries.
That's also why I oppose any kind of medicine. It's so much more efficient to just make a new human than to fix the ones we have. Where's the benefit? Do you have ANY idea how wasteful it is to train doctors and send them out to treat people?
The average physician sees up to 30 patients per-day, at a cost that represents a minuscule fraction of a given patient's lifetime earnings. It doesn't cost $200 billion to deploy one physician to treat one patient.
Thanks for the stupid analogy, though. At least it's consistent with the rest of your "reasoning".
Space is cheaper it get into then it was when the shuttle started. One of the many ways the Shuttle has advanced space flight.
The Shuttle has literally nothing to do with any decrease in the cost of spaceflight. You can largely thank the Russians for that, and their relatively inexpensive and highly reliable Soyuz and Proton boosters. Also the ESA and their Ariane boosters. The Shuttle has in contrast proven to be one of the most expensive boosters ever produced, draining $200 billion away from R&D which could have been conducted to dramatically lower the cost of access to space.
That 200 billion isn't burned up. It goes into the economy and gets spent and taxed.
Well by that logic, we should send the police around to break everybody's windows. Think of all the money that would be injected into the economy from repairing all those windows!
Millions, if not 100's of millions, of people get clean drinking water as a result of RnD effort to support the shuttle.
Cite please. And why couldn't that technology have been developed without wasting $200 billion on the Shuttle?
remote control tractors with a margin of error of 1 centimeter are a direct result.
Cite, please. I suspect that has more to do with advances in computer technology, which again have literally nothing to do with the Shuttle.
200billion is a bargain for what we got out of the Space Shuttle., you myopic twit.
Perhaps if folks don't want to hear the "usual talking points" (i.e. facts) they should avoid making silly statements, like, "The reason to have a manned space program, is entirely about the unforeseen." Yeah, our manned space program really "saved" us from unforeseen problems with Hubble, a cost far greater than just building and launching a new scope into orbit. Some "savings".
Beyond that, NASA's greatest problems with "the unforeseen" these past three decades have all come from its manned space program. Challenger and Columbia, anyone?
That's nice. But instead of burning through $200 billion in order to float where lots of other monkeys in tin cans have floated before, why not spend that money developing cheaper methods of getting into space, so that mankind actually stands a snowball's chance in hell of getting offworld in appreciable numbers?
Wasting $200 billion dollars on a money pit like the Shuttle isn't inspiring. It's depressing and stupid. It's money that could have been spent doing something useful in space, or on lowering the cost of access to space.
Without making necessary first steps, humans cannot hope to leave this planet and expand into space.
The "necessary first steps" involve finding much, much cheaper ways to get people, their life support equipment and the environments they require into orbit. The Shuttle and the ISS do exactly zip to solve that very real problem.
Until the issue of transport costs is resolved, humans won't be going anywhere on more than an experimental basis at best. It's too outrageously expensive.
we have canceled the Shuttle program with no other vehicle to replace it, and in the process put a halt to much basic research.
What basic research? The Shuttles have been diverting literally tens of billions of dollars a decade away from basic research since the 1970's. They've proven to be scientific and financial black holes. Pretty much the only thing we learned from the Shuttles is that the Shuttle didn't live up to any of the promises that were made while it was being developed and built. They proved fantastically more expensive to build and operate than existing disposable launch systems and in choosing them over continuing Apollo we completely lost our ability to boost payloads in excess of about 64,000 pounds into LEO. The Shuttle represents a staggering misallocations of resources, one that should have been put out to pasture after the Challenger disaster, by which point it was already obvious that the Shuttles were inferior to the disposable launch systems they were meant to replace.
I'm also not clear on why we "need" a vehicle to "replace" the Shuttle, since pretty much the only thing the Shuttle has done for the past decade is contribute to the construction of that other orbital white elephant, the ISS, another $100 billion drain on money that could have been spent far more productively on "basic research".
Without wasting $200 billion sending men into space, Hubble could have been replaced 79 times over with, presumably, better telescopes. Or we'd have been able to easily afford one or two replacement craft, even better than Hubble, which built on its successes and (hopefully) improved upon its failures.
Instead we've sunk $200 billion into the Shutles and another $100 billion plus into the ISS, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before. Manned spaceflight has proven to be a colossal money sink with virtually no scientific returns. Imagine if we'd spent just a tenth of that money on our unmanned space program? You could quadruple the number of interplanetary probes and space telescopes we've launched and still have money to burn.
You do realize the next generation of telescopes NASA plans to launch won't even be man-serviceable, since they're destined for Lagrange points and other destinations far outside low earth orbit?
It would have been cheaper to launch a fleet of Hubble Space Telescopes than to support the Shuttle program. Hubble cost something in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion. Shuttle missions are somewhere between $500 million and $1.5 billion each, depending on how you handle the accounting. We'll have spent about $200 billion on the Shuttle program by the time it ends. That's around 80 Hubble Space Telescopes.
Getting humans, their life support equipment and their supplies into space is outrageously expensive using chemical rockets - especially the Shuttle, which has ridiculous per-pound launch costs compared to other boosters. Manned spaceflight is impossible to justify on a cost basis. Robots can do more, cheaper, and that'll continue to be the case unless and until we can develop some better way to get people, their habitats and their supplies into orbit. Which is one of the main things NASA should be focused on.
It's a good thing you didn't waste too much time blowdrying that strawman.
To use your example, there's no reason why several smaller companies couldn't pool their resources to build a chip fab. In fact, large corporations already pool their resources for major projects they'd certainly be capable of undertaking themselves, just to spread the risk among the parties involved.
Beyond that, AMD only has a market cap of a comparatively paltry $5.12 billion. It's already bathtub sized in comparison to, say, BP (with a market cap of $91 billion - it was $180 billion a few years ago).
The world may not "exist in black and white", but it's pretty black and white that enormous multinational corporations have not and cannot be effectively regulated. They need to be broken up in to smaller manageable, responsible entities, ones which are not capable of hijacking national governments and appropriating taxpayer money to pay for their own fraud and/or incompetence.
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That, however, does not give us the right to take that factory job away from someone whose other opportunities are even worse.
I agree. We're taking your job away first. Please report to the nearest underpass. Your cardboard box awaits.
Wages have been rising in China, for those who have a job, but unemployment is off the charts in China's old industrial rust belt (20% or higher - it's hard to get accurate statistics out of the Chinese government). Here's an article from a few years back:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/1101020617/cover.html
It's not clear to me if rising wages in China have offset the loss in jobs. Costs are also rising fast in China. Essential commodities like food and fuel have become much more expensive in the past decade, which is crippling to the poor - especially rural peasants, given that well north of 20% of them don't have a job. If your wages go up by $10 a month but your costs go up by $15, and half your family is unemployed, you aren't exactly better off.
Right now the real urban unemployment rate in China is sitting at around 9.5% (the government figures are closer to 5%, but nobody believes those).
The global free trade bandwagon has been great for the wealthy, especially bankers. A tiny middle class gets to feed off their crumbs, and it's looking more and more like starvation for everybody else. We've seen this story before, and the ending is never pretty, but the free trade "let them eat cake" crowd never learns from its mistakes until their heads start bouncing off the cobblestones.
The US will never be a manufacturing powerhouse again. We're too rich. We dont want dirty factories polluting our lands and more minimum wage jobs in factory conditions.
I call bullshit. Germany is still a manufacturing powerhouse. They're rich. Their government just has an industrial policy that goes beyond "ship all the jobs overseas and bail out the criminal banksters with loot stolen from taxpayers". We should employ policies similar to theirs here.
The protectionist law Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act [wikipedia.org], which became law in 1930, led to the Great Depression
Sorry, that's yet another right wing free trader myth with absolutely no basis in reality. The stock market collapse took place in October, 1929. Banks were already failing and international trade had already plummeted by the time Smoot-Hawley was passed and took effect. And the tariffs imposed by Smoot-Hawley were in general far, far lower than those the US had already employed for much of its history.
Trade almost always collapses during panics and depressions, and tariffs have nothing to do with it. Exchange rates go crazy and credit dries up, which makes it difficult or even impossible (not to mention risky) to engage in international trade. Declining wages at home also means that it doesn't make a lot of sense to go thru the hassle of international trade, when you can probably do about as well manufacturing, growing or mining the same stuff at home (without all the risk).
I'd just add that the US is running such colossal trade deficits that at this point we'd be better off if we blew up every container ship that came into port and cut off trade entirely. That'll effectively happen anyway at some point - eventually Asian government won't be able to finance this enormous trade imbalance anymore, leading to a collapse in the dollar and our inability to afford any imported goods. It would be far wiser for the US to enact tariffs in a series of graduated steps, giving it time to rebuild domestic industry in an orderly fashion instead of waiting around for the inevitable currency collapse and then attempting to rebuild in the midst of total economic (and likely social and political) chaos.
You could get away with an 87% corporate tax in the 1950's, because corporations really had no where else to go.
Taxes in Europe and Japan were even higher. Still are, in most instances. So that argument doesn't hold water.
Try that today, and the only result you're going to get is corporations fleeing overseas as fast as they could go.
Well then, tax the profits their remaining US entity makes at 95%. That should discourage any flight to offshore tax havens. Unless they want to pull out of the US market entirely, which is fine by me. I'm sure US-based companies will have no trouble displacing them.
Oh, and once they pull out, invalidate all of their patents within the US. Hey, you don't operate here, so why should we waste our time and resources enforcing your patents?
If you're going to do it, at least go software RAID so that you don't have to worry about having a back up controller and worrying if that works.
Uh, bad idea. If your array is corrupted and you can't boot into the OS, your software RAID array could become totally inaccessible. I had this happen on an XP box with one of Intel's crappy hardware/software RAID arrays. Box couldn't boot, array was corrupted, and my slipstreamed XP disc didn't have the drivers required to run on my SATA DVD drive. Whoops!
Instead of buying an EIDE DVD drive, which would have worked with my XP disc, I ended up just upgrading to Win 7, which did work with the SATA DVD drive and which recognized and rebuilt the array. Still, it was a huge hassle and about a $100 expense.
Never again. If I ever bother with RAID in the future, it'll be with a (popular) hardware RAID controller. No more Winmodem-esque RAID solutions for me, thank you. But I honestly think RAID is a waste of time for home machines. You'd be better off spending that money on offsite backup solutions like CrashPlan.
It was the episode where they showed you couldn't expel so much methane in your sleep so as to kill yourself
Oh, I bet you could after a dinner at Taco Bell.
And in reality, the difference in track record between one flight and a dozen flights is to some extent meaningless - because every flight of an expendable is a first flight.
No, this isn't accurate. While each vehicle is different - there's always the potential for vehicle-specific manufacturing defects or incidents on launch (a lightning or bird strike, for example) - after a certain number of successful flights you can be pretty certain there aren't any obvious inherent design flaws with the vehicle that'll lead to serious safety issues.
Of course, there could still be some non-obvious stuff that'll bite you in the ass 20 or 40 missions out, but the less complex the vehicle the less likely it is you'll have those kind of issues.
I might add that our "reusable" Shuttle seems especially prone to the very kind of vehicle-specific manufacturing defects and launch incidents that can also wreck expendable boosters. And unfortunately, there was no cost-effective way to alter its . . . unusual . . . design to mitigate its propensity to suffer from those kind of issues. Which is a pity, as the taxpayers sunk a ridiculous fortune into its development and deployment.
There's no reason to have separate launch vehicles for crew and cargo as long as, in the event of an abort, you can get the crew off safely.
Well, yes and no. It doesn't hurt, but producing a man-rated booster is a lot more expensive, especially when it has to be man-rated from the start. And man rating a really big launcher - one capable of boosting large cargo into orbit at once - can add all sorts of unnecessary cost and complexity to an already expensive heavy booster project. The Russians have been running two separate launchers - Soyuz for people and Proton for cargo - for decades, which has been very cost-effective for them.
It would probably be cheaper and simpler to design a booster with the longterm goal of man-rating it, but to not support that in the initial development. I think ESA took that approach with Ariane V, although no work has commenced on man-rating that launcher (yet, anyhow). The Russians intend to man-rate the under-development Proton replacement Angara rocket at some point, once it's been successfully deployed as an unmanned booster.
Yet, when gov't spends as much as necessary to make flight as-safe-as-possible, everyone wails on how expensive and time-consuming it is.
Nobody is complaining about the government making their launchers as safe as possible. The problem with NASA for the past 40 years has been their insistence on spending a fortune trying to make a vehicle that's inherently less-safe than a simple Saturn V or Soyuz-style booster "as-safe-as-possible". Not surprisingly, they wasted a ton of taxpayer cash and were left with a vehicle that wasn't as safe, as reliable, or as capable as its predecessors. It was, however, fantastically more expensive. If they'd performed an accurate cost-benefit analysis, they would have never built the Shuttle in the first place.
Private industry performed the dreaded cost-benefit analysis, and with a comparative pittance in government support one private firm has already successfully launched a new heavy booster - something NASA hasn't been able to accomplish in 30 years, after literally spending tens of billions on failed Shuttle replacements. SpaceX went with a proven form factor and utilized their engineering smarts to simplify their booster as much as possible, further enhancing its inherent reliability and making it far easier to maintain and improve that reliability as development advances. Most of the other private companies have employed a similar strategy, so it wouldn't surprise me if many of them ultimately reap similar results.
NASA's behavior over the past 4 decades is a classic illustration of the famous Sun Tzu statement, "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
Phrasing it slightly differently, the U.S. taxpayers demanded reliability and safety from the very first flight. If you demand reliability starting from the very first fllght, this is going to be expensive.
That's not really what taxpayers demanded, though. The need for flawless reliability from the first flight was driven primarily by the Shuttle's form factor, it's "re-usability" and outrageous cost. The damn thing was so expensive NASA literally couldn't afford a failure simply from a price perspective (forget the astronauts), so a ton of expensive testing and engineering had to be baked into the program as a result.
When the Shuttle was originally conceived as a much smaller manned glider to ride piggyback on a Saturn booster it was a much cheaper and simpler affair, and the Saturns had already been tested and deployed. Nixon nixed that plan due to the cost, and directed NASA to build an independent Shuttle with its own - supposedly cheaper - launch system, based around the reusable craft itself. Huge mistake, especially when the military got involved and bloated up the size and capabilities of the craft (abilities they pretty much never used).
NASA tried to justify the exploding cost of the Shuttles by making utterly unrealistic plans to fly dozens of missions a year in an attempt to recoup their development costs. Never happened. They never even came close. But the annual program costs never came down, in spite of only running a handful of flights a year. In fact I read somewhere recently that launch costs are up to around $1 billion a flight, simply because so few Shuttles get launched each year, yet it costs NASA billions just to keep the program's lights on.
Of course, all that pork made the Shuttles a sacred pig in Washington, so the program lived on like a cash eating zombie decades after it was obvious the Shuttle had failed to provide any kind of improvement over the Saturn V launcher it replaced. Not only was it not an improvement, it ultimately proved far more costly to run, and it totally eliminated our heavy launch abilities. The Shuttle was a catastrophic failure long before Challenger blew, and the taxpayers are probably the only people not to blame for that (apart from continuing to elect morons year after year, anyhow).
Shuttle flew more times than all other manned systems combined.
Yes, at a tremendous cost in money and lives.
In other words, Shuttle's safety record isn't mediocre. It's better than Apollo, better than Soyuz.
The Shuttle's safety record is abysmal given its cost. Worse, there's little indication the craft is any safer now than it was the day it first launched - if anything, age seems to be making the Shuttle less reliable (or at least, increasingly expensive to maintain at a safe level). Whereas Soyuz has clearly improved over the decades, both in terms of performance as well as reliability, and hasn't suffered a fatality since the earliest missions of the 1970's. In no way is the Shuttle's safety record "better" than that of today's Soyuz.
I won't go into "abysmal performance" beyond noting that 30 ton cargo capacity. When you find another manned space vehicle that can carry as much as five tons of cargo, let me know....
Shuttle defenders always cite some useless capability the Shuttle possesses in their attempts to justify this enormous white elephant. "But it can haul 30 tons of cargo!" "But it has more tiles than the average public restroom!" "But it can cook 7 astronauts at once!". The Saturn V could boost 120 tons into orbit. We gave that up in order to build a launcher that could only lob 30 tons into orbit, yet ended up costing around as much per-launch. Some deal!
As if humans need to ride along with cargo, anyhow. You can boost a bunch of humans into orbit cheaper and safer with smaller boosters, and save the heavy lifters for cargo runs. The Soviets figured this out early on, which is why their program was able to accomplish a lot without spending a lot of money, and why their rockets continue to dominate any price/performance comparisons you'd care to make with the stuff NASA built post 1970.
The Falcon 9, by the way, is capable of launching 28,000kg into LEO, compared to the Shuttle's 24,400kg. Falcon 9 is slated to cost around $94 million a launch. The Shuttles are running somewhere between $200 - $500 million a launch (depending on how you handle the accounting). Ouch.
The Shuttle has been a 30 year disaster for the US space program, and the Ares "replacement" rockets looked to be equally disastrous cash sinkholes. Fortunately, it now looks as though the private sector will prove more than capable of producing safe, reliable, inexpensive alternatives.
NASA proves that it has been capable of (more or less) safe spacegoing for the last 50 years, which the private sector just couldn't do.
NASA "proves" that it can blow $200 billion on a money pit like the Shuttle and "only" incinerate 14 astronauts. Not a great track record, given the human *or* financial cost. Up until recently, few were willing to finance private launch initiatives. Now the government has - finally - turned to independent private sector entities to develop launch capabilities, and (surprise, surprise) one company has already developed a successful launcher for less than it costs NASA to build a freaking launch PAD.
The space shuttle had 25 launches before its first launch failure. That's a record that has never been equalled by any other venture.
The Shuttle got off to a solid start, but given the billions dumped into its development and construction that was hardly some great achievement. The US taxpayer shelled out a fortune for the Shuttle, ultimately to enjoy a mediocre safety record and abysmal performance. Virtually every booster can hoist payloads into orbit for a fraction of what it costs per-pound to launch payloads with the Shuttle, and the other man-rated booster in operation (Soyuz) has proven far safer.
You're citing an "achievement" that's not only proved ultimately useless, but that was also a far less-efficient way of designing, producing and launching safe vehicles. Who cares if boosters fail during their initial test stages, especially if humans aren't onboard? If the boosters are cheap, you just learn from your failures, perfect the technology and then, when it's safe enough, start launching humans. The way the Shuttles were developed was ass-backwards, which is one of the reasons why they've been such a money pit. Lots of boosters developed the way SpaceX is developing Falcon 9 have had way more than 25 launches in a row without a failure. There hasn't been a failure of a manned Soyuz booster in decades, and the last big incident they had (in the early '80s IIRC) didn't result in any casualities.
The Shuttle is probably the best example of how NOT to design a booster, and another demonstration of why NASA should be kept far, far away from the design and construction of launch vehicles. SpaceX proves that the commercial sector is more than capable of doing it better, faster and cheaper than NASA ever could.
You would have a point if the shuttle was only used to support the Hubble.
Right. So what else has the Shuttle done? Sent some fruit flies into orbit. Launched stuff that could have been launched on cheaper disposable heavy boosters, if we hadn't eliminated that capability as part of an attempt to justify the existence of the Shuttle? Sent astronauts to float around in the ISS, keeping that $100 billion white elephant from falling apart and plunging into the Pacific?
Quite a record of "accomplishment".
We could have been more productive with the $300 billion we've pissed away on manned spaceflight over the past three decades by converting it into $1 bills, chucking the money into an incinerator and generating electrical power from the waste heat.
The shuttle provided us with some very valuable advances
You keep claiming this. Name them, and provide cites. Explain to us why these same "advances" couldn't have been developed for a hell of a lot less than $200 billion in pork barrel spending.
and allowed us to to some really cool stuff that expanded what we know we can do in space.
Like what? They haven't done anything fundamentally different with the Shuttles than the stuff we or the Russians were already doing as far back as the early '70s.
The American Government has gotten more money from the industries that manned space flight spawned then to has cost.
Ha! Cite, please. (Good luck with that!)
Almost all innovation from manned space flight has gone on to be mulit-billion dollar industries.
Right. "Almost all"?!? Again, how about a cite.
That's also why I oppose any kind of medicine. It's so much more efficient to just make a new human than to fix the ones we have. Where's the benefit? Do you have ANY idea how wasteful it is to train doctors and send them out to treat people?
The average physician sees up to 30 patients per-day, at a cost that represents a minuscule fraction of a given patient's lifetime earnings. It doesn't cost $200 billion to deploy one physician to treat one patient.
Thanks for the stupid analogy, though. At least it's consistent with the rest of your "reasoning".
Space is cheaper it get into then it was when the shuttle started. One of the many ways the Shuttle has advanced space flight.
The Shuttle has literally nothing to do with any decrease in the cost of spaceflight. You can largely thank the Russians for that, and their relatively inexpensive and highly reliable Soyuz and Proton boosters. Also the ESA and their Ariane boosters. The Shuttle has in contrast proven to be one of the most expensive boosters ever produced, draining $200 billion away from R&D which could have been conducted to dramatically lower the cost of access to space.
That 200 billion isn't burned up. It goes into the economy and gets spent and taxed.
Well by that logic, we should send the police around to break everybody's windows. Think of all the money that would be injected into the economy from repairing all those windows!
Millions, if not 100's of millions, of people get clean drinking water as a result of RnD effort to support the shuttle.
Cite please. And why couldn't that technology have been developed without wasting $200 billion on the Shuttle?
remote control tractors with a margin of error of 1 centimeter are a direct result.
Cite, please. I suspect that has more to do with advances in computer technology, which again have literally nothing to do with the Shuttle.
200billion is a bargain for what we got out of the Space Shuttle., you myopic twit.
Christ you're an idiot. Please don't breed.
Perhaps if folks don't want to hear the "usual talking points" (i.e. facts) they should avoid making silly statements, like, "The reason to have a manned space program, is entirely about the unforeseen." Yeah, our manned space program really "saved" us from unforeseen problems with Hubble, a cost far greater than just building and launching a new scope into orbit. Some "savings".
Beyond that, NASA's greatest problems with "the unforeseen" these past three decades have all come from its manned space program. Challenger and Columbia, anyone?
That's nice. But instead of burning through $200 billion in order to float where lots of other monkeys in tin cans have floated before, why not spend that money developing cheaper methods of getting into space, so that mankind actually stands a snowball's chance in hell of getting offworld in appreciable numbers?
Wasting $200 billion dollars on a money pit like the Shuttle isn't inspiring. It's depressing and stupid. It's money that could have been spent doing something useful in space, or on lowering the cost of access to space.
Without making necessary first steps, humans cannot hope to leave this planet and expand into space.
The "necessary first steps" involve finding much, much cheaper ways to get people, their life support equipment and the environments they require into orbit. The Shuttle and the ISS do exactly zip to solve that very real problem.
Until the issue of transport costs is resolved, humans won't be going anywhere on more than an experimental basis at best. It's too outrageously expensive.
we have canceled the Shuttle program with no other vehicle to replace it, and in the process put a halt to much basic research.
What basic research? The Shuttles have been diverting literally tens of billions of dollars a decade away from basic research since the 1970's. They've proven to be scientific and financial black holes. Pretty much the only thing we learned from the Shuttles is that the Shuttle didn't live up to any of the promises that were made while it was being developed and built. They proved fantastically more expensive to build and operate than existing disposable launch systems and in choosing them over continuing Apollo we completely lost our ability to boost payloads in excess of about 64,000 pounds into LEO. The Shuttle represents a staggering misallocations of resources, one that should have been put out to pasture after the Challenger disaster, by which point it was already obvious that the Shuttles were inferior to the disposable launch systems they were meant to replace.
I'm also not clear on why we "need" a vehicle to "replace" the Shuttle, since pretty much the only thing the Shuttle has done for the past decade is contribute to the construction of that other orbital white elephant, the ISS, another $100 billion drain on money that could have been spent far more productively on "basic research".
Without wasting $200 billion sending men into space, Hubble could have been replaced 79 times over with, presumably, better telescopes. Or we'd have been able to easily afford one or two replacement craft, even better than Hubble, which built on its successes and (hopefully) improved upon its failures.
Instead we've sunk $200 billion into the Shutles and another $100 billion plus into the ISS, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before. Manned spaceflight has proven to be a colossal money sink with virtually no scientific returns. Imagine if we'd spent just a tenth of that money on our unmanned space program? You could quadruple the number of interplanetary probes and space telescopes we've launched and still have money to burn.
You do realize the next generation of telescopes NASA plans to launch won't even be man-serviceable, since they're destined for Lagrange points and other destinations far outside low earth orbit?
It would have been cheaper to launch a fleet of Hubble Space Telescopes than to support the Shuttle program. Hubble cost something in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion. Shuttle missions are somewhere between $500 million and $1.5 billion each, depending on how you handle the accounting. We'll have spent about $200 billion on the Shuttle program by the time it ends. That's around 80 Hubble Space Telescopes.
Getting humans, their life support equipment and their supplies into space is outrageously expensive using chemical rockets - especially the Shuttle, which has ridiculous per-pound launch costs compared to other boosters. Manned spaceflight is impossible to justify on a cost basis. Robots can do more, cheaper, and that'll continue to be the case unless and until we can develop some better way to get people, their habitats and their supplies into orbit. Which is one of the main things NASA should be focused on.
It's a good thing you didn't waste too much time blowdrying that strawman.
To use your example, there's no reason why several smaller companies couldn't pool their resources to build a chip fab. In fact, large corporations already pool their resources for major projects they'd certainly be capable of undertaking themselves, just to spread the risk among the parties involved.
Beyond that, AMD only has a market cap of a comparatively paltry $5.12 billion. It's already bathtub sized in comparison to, say, BP (with a market cap of $91 billion - it was $180 billion a few years ago).
The world may not "exist in black and white", but it's pretty black and white that enormous multinational corporations have not and cannot be effectively regulated. They need to be broken up in to smaller manageable, responsible entities, ones which are not capable of hijacking national governments and appropriating taxpayer money to pay for their own fraud and/or incompetence.
Flamebait? Maybe. True? You betcha!
No corporation should be allowed to grow large enough that it can't be drowned in a bathtub.