The hard reality is that nobody has recent experience in designing new[ish] large boosters.
Not true. Rocketdyne, developer of the Space Shuttle Main Engines, begin development of the RS-68 in 1998, did the first successful testfire September 11, 2000, and had it's first successful launch on the Medium+(4,2) variant of Boeing's brand new Delta IV. Nasa has decided to use the RS-68 for the Ares V. I suppose you could argue the RS-68 is at least partially based on the SSME's, but the idea that the people who developed it have no "recent experience in designing new[ish] large boosters" is absurd.
According to Wikipedia, not an entirely trustworthy source I know, the US built 22 aircraft carriers during WWII and converted 141 merchant vessels to carry airplanes. How many carriers the US built depends vary much on how you count. 137 sounds a reasonable number of aircraft carriers in WWII. These aircraft carriers were nothing like todays aircraft carriers obviously. The first suppercarrier, which is what we think of as aircraft carriers, was the Forrestal orderded on July 12, 1951 and launched on December 11, 1954 way after the war.
Enemy combatants (i.e. people fighting out of uniform) occupy a gray area that there are no rules for. There is no Geneva Convention rules that describe how to treat these people. There are no rules in general with how to deal with people who fight wearing civilian clothing in general.
Actually the Geneva Convention rules state you must give someone some sort of judicial proceeding to determine if they are or aren't a civilian, pow, diplomat, or some other class of people protected by the Geneva Convention. A military tribunal would do for this. After that then you can shoot them in the head or whatever else you feel like doing, at least under the Geneva Convention. I think we've signed other treaties saying we won't torture people, but under the Geneva Convention it would be just dandy once you give them a judicial proceding that determines they are not in one of the protected classes.
If foam striking the orbiter caused a loss of vehicle on reentry, just think what ice could do.
Actually they discovered in the return to flight investigations that ice hitting the orbiter was much less of a threat than foam hitting the orbiter. The reason for this is that the foam debris has much greater aerodynamic resistance than ice debris so when it breaks off it decelerates much faster than ice debris and hits the orbiter at a much greater relative velocity.
There's no good reason for NASA to launch the shuttle over the July Fourth holiday weekend
Sure there is, the launch window is 10 minutes a day from June 30 to July 19. The two previous sets of launch windows were March 4 to 19 and May 3 to 22. Nasa missed both of those so now they are trying this one. I am not sure why a launch on June 30 was not tried, but that still would have been part of the 4th of July weekend. Generally speaking you want to try launching early in the set of launch windows so if you have a delay you might be able to launch in the next day's window. More info on launch windows here, here, and here.
Do you know if they plan a linux-ppc version? The wine-faq says you need the application source code and winelib to do that. How true is it that you need winelib and not just wine? Also any idea if they plan, and how easy or hard it will be, to port to Intel Mac OS X when wine starts working on that platform in (crosses fingers) third quarter 2006? Also if winelib is going to get ported to ppc Mac OS X, repeat the previous question for ppc Mac OS X. Thank you for your time.
The problem is that over the last 15 years while Nasa's budget has remained relatively constant in inflation adjusted dollars we have given science more of the budget, increasing from 24% to 32% of Nasa's total budget. This extra funding for science has come from the human spaceflight budget and now we don't have enough in the human spaceflight budget for return to flight. Add in hurricane Katrina which severely damaged several shuttle facilities, our commitment to other nations to complete ISS, and the costs of developing a new vehicle and human spaceflight has to take back some of it's budget from science.
Planesdragon named a number of theories that have been outright thrown out, however he missed my favorite, the one formed in response to Big Bang theory, steady state theory. The Big Bang theory was proposed by in 1927 by the Belgian Catholic priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître, who called it hypothesis of the primeval atom. Previous to this scientist had believed the universe had always existed and was in a somewhat static state, that is to say it was neither expanding nor contracting. When Hubble discovered evidence indicating the universe was expanding, Lemaître's hypothesis, which was a set of solutions to Einstien's general theory of relativity, began to gain traction. Einstien had previous to Hubble's discovery accepted the correctness of Lemaître's mathematics, but had rejected the idea of an expanding universe.
Many scientists found Lemaître's theory to be unpleasant due to it requiring the universe to have a beginning. This was considered to be too close to Christian dogma. To explain an expanding universe without a beginning scientists like Fred Hoyle came up with the steady state theory in which new matter was created in the universe at an undetectably small rate and began spreading from its point of creation. Despite violating the principle of conservation of mass this theory became popular due to its lack of "In the beginning." It was actually Hoyle who came up with the title Big Bang, which was intended to be derogatory and unscientific sounding, on a radio program. The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 was unexplainable by the steady state theory but had been predicted by the Big Bang theory. This was according to Steven Hawking "the final nail in the coffin of steady state theory."
The Big Bang theory, a glorious triumph of religion over science.;)
Penny-Arcade says ESRB fundamentally unserious
on
The ESRB Gets An 'F'
·
· Score: 1
This is an excerpt from their newspost on the hot coffee controversy.
MATURE Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language.
Or, as the rest of our culture calls it, "Rated R." Check out AO.
ADULTS ONLY Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.
This can't seriously be their distinction. The scenes are longer? I played Resident Evil 4 nearly 26 hours, all told. I'm going to say that maybe nineteen hours of it was spent looking down the iron sights at humanoids. The reality is that once a person is 18, a violent videogame is fairly minor in the spectrum of "adult" content available to that person. Looking over my collection, if the duration of the violence is the distinguishing factor, I'm trying to figure out what purpose Mature serves other than to remove the stigma from otherwise "adult" content and grease the wheels at retail.
I don't like being strident or suggesting that the ESRB is fundamentally unserious about rating content in an effective way that our society recognizes - but they'd better have some fucking answers on-hand to deal with this shit. There's no question that the industry is beset by career opportunists and lazy people willing to outsource their responsibilities as parents, but the pronounced winking and looking the other way on the industry side of the equation won't fly with this level of scrutiny en route.
So there you go, NIMH isn't the only one who thinks the rating system is a joke.
Also, while ICANN isn't a for-profit business itself, it's too similar to the World Bank or IMF, which are mainly representative of big business who also happen to help move people in and out of power in these type of organizations. So while they're declared not-for-profit, they are still run by for profit organizations which use these organizations to exert political power or to advance their financial interests in other ways.
My understanding is that ITU would be administering things if the UN is in charge, and ITU is basically run by the phone companies. This hardly seems like an improvment over the current situation, not that the current situation isn't in need of change but...
The U.N. is not a for-profit organization, and U.N. commitee members cannot profit from such unethical practices. They don't have shareholders whom they are obligated to turn a profit for. As such, it makes them much more suitable for running a global communication infrastructure that's just as important to our global society as other shared public infrastructures such as roads and sewage systems. So if anything, these abuses by ICANN should make us reconsider the legitimacy of their monopolistic control.
ICANN is also not a for-profit organization, and it doesn't seem to have stopped them from screwing things up. At least they can be taken to court for violating anti-trust laws, try that with the UN in control. Devil you know, devil you don't. I can imagine ways in which the UN can do worse, not that I have to since they gave us proposals which were worse. This is why people want to keep the status quo even though people aren't particularly pleased with that either.
I'll never understand why so many people have a problem with poor immigrants moving into their country, but it is an attitude you will find anywhere in the world, and it is usually based on some sort of racial prejudice against the people in question. People say that they're afraid of loosing jobs, but if they really wanted the kind of jobs the immigrants work, they wouldn't be in danger of loosing them. The truth is that people just don't like to see poor immigrants around.
Having poor anyone in your country is for a variety of reasons generally considered a problem whether they are immigrants or not. Presidents are often voted out of office if the economy goes bad during their term for "making people poor". We can control whether immigrants come, but we can't get rid of poor people already here. There are or at least were in recent memory plenty of white people willing to do for instance construction work in this country and could make a living wage doing such work. Having a large number of people entering the country willing to work for much less will obviously bring wages down to perhaps below a living wage. This is especially true if the immigrants have entered the country illegially and are thus afraid to report employers who cheat them. Personally I am supportive of a much more "open" immigration policy with Mexico because I think forcing employers to comply with labor laws will limit downward pressure on wages and lowering the number of people entering the country surreptitiously makes it easier to deal with the troublemakers (drug runners and terrorist). I do not however pretend that there are not rational and non-racist reasons for opposing a more open immigration policy.
In other words, the lawyers are lining up to ease the pain of the affected consumers by securing a $2 off coupon for the next DRM'ed CD while collecting $12 million for themselves.
Not anymore, the recent class action lawsuit reform law passed by Congress makes the coupon scheme illegal. They'll have to give customers cash or find a new way to screw them over.
Well, evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a theory.
Why do people keep repeating this? Evolution is a theory. Natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow are major components of said theory. The fossil record, carbon dating, vestigial organs, and many many other such things are facts supporting the theory of evolution.
Don't dumb down the debate by redifining the meaning of words. That's what they do.
They're pretty good about that these days, since they have that whole Galileo fracas to live down.
The Jesuits didn't really have anything to do with that. Members of the Roman Inquisition were drawn from the Dominicans not the Jesuits. The Jesuits were fairly quick to accept some of Galileo's evidence against the conventional wisdom moreso than secular academics in fact. For instance once they managed to get their hands on quality telescopes they quickly accepted the moon had craters and was not a perfect sphere. The Jesuits have pretty much always been known for their educational and intellectual efforts.
Griffin said it answering a question during the NASA news conference announcing the Exploration Systems Architecture Study results. Transcript. Do a find for Berger. He's the one who asked the question. Humans can withstand up around 9 or 10g's and remain conscience. The reason the Space Shuttle only does 3 is to make the engineering easier. We don't have much experience building giant structures with God only knows how many moving parts designed to withstand that kind of acceleration. The reason the CLV only pulls 4g's (source Crew Launch Vehicle Details picture) is probably that it is Shuttle-derived, and they wanted to change as little as possible. Mercury and Gemini pulled many more g's if I recall correctly. The option to put humans on the heavy lifter does exist in the ESAS results though I can't imagine why they would decide to go that way. Like I said before I can't find a source for how many g's the heavy lifter pulls. It could be more, it could be less. Whatever makes the engineering easiest. While humans are more comfortable the closer to 1g they are, they don't go squash until up beyond 10g's.
I'm not sure if they can use the heavy launch vehicle to launch the ISS components or not. The crew launch vehicle has a payload capacity of 25 metric tons which is more than any ISS component, but the CLV experiences 4g's of acceleration during ascent compared to the shuttle's 3g's. The ISS components would have to undergo modification to withstand the higher forces involved. Nasa administrator Griffin has called such modifications a "substantial extra expense." It could be done, but he would much rather use the shuttle if at all possible. I can't find the max g's the heavy launch vehicle experiences.
Why bother finising the ISS if you are not going to use it to increase scientific knowlegde. I guess filling the pockets of the contractors is the real reason for the ISS, not science.
The first reason to finish the ISS is we are under international obligation to finish it. That is to say we promised Europe, Russia, Japan, Canada, and Brazial that we would finish it. The second reason is that scientific research projects will resume once ISS is completed in 2010 or 2012. This is roughly the same time period as the CEV begins operations. Once the CEV begins operations the crew size on the ISS can go up. The current crew size of three is barely able to keep the the station running. The station was suppose to have a crew size of 7, but the cancellation of the CRV means only a 3 person crew can occupy the station safely. An increased crew size will be much better able to maintain the station and conduct experiments.
Hurricanes are powered by the differential in temperature between the water and the atmosphere. Since global warming increases the temperature of both the water and air the affects on hurricanes are small compared to the natural variablity of hurricanes according to NOAA's faq.Here is NOAA's page listing the number of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes going back to 1850. The data from 1944 onwards is considered accurate with data on storms that actually strike the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts considered to be accurate back to 1899. They have graphs of 1944 to near present of the number of named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes. Note that these graphs do not resemble monotonically increasing functions as one would expect if global warming were continously causing more numerous and larger storms, but instead are closer to periodic funcions. Here is the NOAA faq page stating the increase in number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes since 1995 is due to the hurricane cycle. Note that 1991-94 are the quietest four years in the 1944-present record.
The result is that the U.S. owes a lot of money. Sooner or later, the Federal government will either need to raise taxes, cut spending, or both. Even if future administrations support the mission, in that kind of climate, 100 billion (perhaps more, knowing how these things tend to turn out for NASA) is gonna be a tough sell.
Which is why it's being sold now. Nasa's yearly budget is $16 billion. $5 billion of that is the space shuttle scheduled for EOL in 2010. The CEV and its launch vehicle have a development cost of $10 billion and are expected to launch in 2011. Development of the heavy-lift vehicle will then cost another $5-10 billion. We are talking about $100 billion spread out over 12 years. The way federal goverment program budgets work it's hard to stop though it might later be possible to slow down.
Because they still have to use the Shuttle until 2010. In 2005 the Space Shuttle's operational budget was $5 billion or 30% of Nasa's budget. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is expected to cost $5.5 billion to develop. The Crew Launch Vehicle, which is a Space Shuttle 4-segment Solid Rocket Boster (SRB) with the addition of an upper stage composed of a modified Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), is expected to cost another $4.5 billion. Why the development of something which is a reconfiguration of parts we mostly already have is expected to cost $4.5 billion I'm not quite sure. Probably to be able to eject at any time, a redesign of the nose cone so the SRB can have an upper stage and still not sink in the ocean, and recertification of the new system as man rated. The combined CEV and launch vehicle is expected to be first launched in 2011.
2011 also begins the development of the heavy-lift launcher, lunar lander, and Earth departure stage. The development of the heavy-lift launcher is expected to cost between $5 to $10 billion. The heavy-lift launcher is composed of 5 modified SSME's and 2 5-segment SRB's and should be able to lift 125 metric tons of payload to an unspecified orbit. The article doesn't say if this is an in-line vehicle (ILV) or side mounted cargo (SMC) vehicle . It does appear to match the description of the ILV-2 design in a spaceref article. Also of interest is a previous spaceref article on the topic. An ILV would require extensive changes to existing shuttle and launch facilities. A SMC vehicle requires less changes to existing shuttle facilites and could be used to launch previously designed (ISS component) cargoes in a near identical manner to the shuttle. The advantage to the ILV is that once the changes to existing facilites are made the ability to upgrade into larger more powerful ILV's is much more easily obtained. These larger more powerful ILV's would allow a manned mission to Mars for which the mission to the moon is a dress rehearsal.
Not only are they not lost, they were considered (search for J2S) for the new CEV and the upper stage of it's launcher. They seem to be rejected because the SSME's are more efficient and currently in production.
Slashdot Mirror
The RS-68 is the engine. The Delta IV is the booster. They're both new.
According to Wikipedia, not an entirely trustworthy source I know, the US built 22 aircraft carriers during WWII and converted 141 merchant vessels to carry airplanes. How many carriers the US built depends vary much on how you count. 137 sounds a reasonable number of aircraft carriers in WWII. These aircraft carriers were nothing like todays aircraft carriers obviously. The first suppercarrier, which is what we think of as aircraft carriers, was the Forrestal orderded on July 12, 1951 and launched on December 11, 1954 way after the war.
Sure there is, the launch window is 10 minutes a day from June 30 to July 19. The two previous sets of launch windows were March 4 to 19 and May 3 to 22. Nasa missed both of those so now they are trying this one. I am not sure why a launch on June 30 was not tried, but that still would have been part of the 4th of July weekend. Generally speaking you want to try launching early in the set of launch windows so if you have a delay you might be able to launch in the next day's window. More info on launch windows here, here, and here.
You do realize the tax being discussed is highly regressive in nature?
Do you know if they plan a linux-ppc version? The wine-faq says you need the application source code and winelib to do that. How true is it that you need winelib and not just wine? Also any idea if they plan, and how easy or hard it will be, to port to Intel Mac OS X when wine starts working on that platform in (crosses fingers) third quarter 2006? Also if winelib is going to get ported to ppc Mac OS X, repeat the previous question for ppc Mac OS X.
Thank you for your time.
The problem is that over the last 15 years while Nasa's budget has remained relatively constant in inflation adjusted dollars we have given science more of the budget, increasing from 24% to 32% of Nasa's total budget. This extra funding for science has come from the human spaceflight budget and now we don't have enough in the human spaceflight budget for return to flight. Add in hurricane Katrina which severely damaged several shuttle facilities, our commitment to other nations to complete ISS, and the costs of developing a new vehicle and human spaceflight has to take back some of it's budget from science.
Planesdragon named a number of theories that have been outright thrown out, however he missed my favorite, the one formed in response to Big Bang theory, steady state theory. The Big Bang theory was proposed by in 1927 by the Belgian Catholic priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître, who called it hypothesis of the primeval atom. Previous to this scientist had believed the universe had always existed and was in a somewhat static state, that is to say it was neither expanding nor contracting. When Hubble discovered evidence indicating the universe was expanding, Lemaître's hypothesis, which was a set of solutions to Einstien's general theory of relativity, began to gain traction. Einstien had previous to Hubble's discovery accepted the correctness of Lemaître's mathematics, but had rejected the idea of an expanding universe.
;)
Many scientists found Lemaître's theory to be unpleasant due to it requiring the universe to have a beginning. This was considered to be too close to Christian dogma. To explain an expanding universe without a beginning scientists like Fred Hoyle came up with the steady state theory in which new matter was created in the universe at an undetectably small rate and began spreading from its point of creation. Despite violating the principle of conservation of mass this theory became popular due to its lack of "In the beginning." It was actually Hoyle who came up with the title Big Bang, which was intended to be derogatory and unscientific sounding, on a radio program. The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 was unexplainable by the steady state theory but had been predicted by the Big Bang theory. This was according to Steven Hawking "the final nail in the coffin of steady state theory."
The Big Bang theory, a glorious triumph of religion over science.
So there you go, NIMH isn't the only one who thinks the rating system is a joke.
My understanding is that ITU would be administering things if the UN is in charge, and ITU is basically run by the phone companies. This hardly seems like an improvment over the current situation, not that the current situation isn't in need of change but
ICANN is also not a for-profit organization, and it doesn't seem to have stopped them from screwing things up. At least they can be taken to court for violating anti-trust laws, try that with the UN in control. Devil you know, devil you don't. I can imagine ways in which the UN can do worse, not that I have to since they gave us proposals which were worse. This is why people want to keep the status quo even though people aren't particularly pleased with that either.
Having poor anyone in your country is for a variety of reasons generally considered a problem whether they are immigrants or not. Presidents are often voted out of office if the economy goes bad during their term for "making people poor". We can control whether immigrants come, but we can't get rid of poor people already here. There are or at least were in recent memory plenty of white people willing to do for instance construction work in this country and could make a living wage doing such work. Having a large number of people entering the country willing to work for much less will obviously bring wages down to perhaps below a living wage. This is especially true if the immigrants have entered the country illegially and are thus afraid to report employers who cheat them. Personally I am supportive of a much more "open" immigration policy with Mexico because I think forcing employers to comply with labor laws will limit downward pressure on wages and lowering the number of people entering the country surreptitiously makes it easier to deal with the troublemakers (drug runners and terrorist). I do not however pretend that there are not rational and non-racist reasons for opposing a more open immigration policy.
Not anymore, the recent class action lawsuit reform law passed by Congress makes the coupon scheme illegal. They'll have to give customers cash or find a new way to screw them over.
Why do people keep repeating this? Evolution is a theory. Natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow are major components of said theory. The fossil record, carbon dating, vestigial organs, and many many other such things are facts supporting the theory of evolution.
Don't dumb down the debate by redifining the meaning of words. That's what they do.
The Jesuits didn't really have anything to do with that. Members of the Roman Inquisition were drawn from the Dominicans not the Jesuits. The Jesuits were fairly quick to accept some of Galileo's evidence against the conventional wisdom moreso than secular academics in fact. For instance once they managed to get their hands on quality telescopes they quickly accepted the moon had craters and was not a perfect sphere. The Jesuits have pretty much always been known for their educational and intellectual efforts.
Griffin said it answering a question during the NASA news conference announcing the Exploration Systems Architecture Study results. Transcript. Do a find for Berger. He's the one who asked the question. Humans can withstand up around 9 or 10g's and remain conscience. The reason the Space Shuttle only does 3 is to make the engineering easier. We don't have much experience building giant structures with God only knows how many moving parts designed to withstand that kind of acceleration. The reason the CLV only pulls 4g's (source Crew Launch Vehicle Details picture) is probably that it is Shuttle-derived, and they wanted to change as little as possible. Mercury and Gemini pulled many more g's if I recall correctly. The option to put humans on the heavy lifter does exist in the ESAS results though I can't imagine why they would decide to go that way. Like I said before I can't find a source for how many g's the heavy lifter pulls. It could be more, it could be less. Whatever makes the engineering easiest. While humans are more comfortable the closer to 1g they are, they don't go squash until up beyond 10g's.
I'm not sure if they can use the heavy launch vehicle to launch the ISS components or not. The crew launch vehicle has a payload capacity of 25 metric tons which is more than any ISS component, but the CLV experiences 4g's of acceleration during ascent compared to the shuttle's 3g's. The ISS components would have to undergo modification to withstand the higher forces involved. Nasa administrator Griffin has called such modifications a "substantial extra expense." It could be done, but he would much rather use the shuttle if at all possible. I can't find the max g's the heavy launch vehicle experiences.
The first reason to finish the ISS is we are under international obligation to finish it. That is to say we promised Europe, Russia, Japan, Canada, and Brazial that we would finish it.
The second reason is that scientific research projects will resume once ISS is completed in 2010 or 2012. This is roughly the same time period as the CEV begins operations. Once the CEV begins operations the crew size on the ISS can go up. The current crew size of three is barely able to keep the the station running. The station was suppose to have a crew size of 7, but the cancellation of the CRV means only a 3 person crew can occupy the station safely. An increased crew size will be much better able to maintain the station and conduct experiments.
I've always wondered exactly how many people believe in creationism. Where do these statistics come from?
Hurricanes are powered by the differential in temperature between the water and the atmosphere. Since global warming increases the temperature of both the water and air the affects on hurricanes are small compared to the natural variablity of hurricanes according to NOAA's faq. Here is NOAA's page listing the number of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes going back to 1850. The data from 1944 onwards is considered accurate with data on storms that actually strike the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts considered to be accurate back to 1899. They have graphs of 1944 to near present of the number of named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes. Note that these graphs do not resemble monotonically increasing functions as one would expect if global warming were continously causing more numerous and larger storms, but instead are closer to periodic funcions. Here is the NOAA faq page stating the increase in number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes since 1995 is due to the hurricane cycle. Note that 1991-94 are the quietest four years in the 1944-present record.
Which is why it's being sold now. Nasa's yearly budget is $16 billion. $5 billion of that is the space shuttle scheduled for EOL in 2010. The CEV and its launch vehicle have a development cost of $10 billion and are expected to launch in 2011. Development of the heavy-lift vehicle will then cost another $5-10 billion. We are talking about $100 billion spread out over 12 years. The way federal goverment program budgets work it's hard to stop though it might later be possible to slow down.
Because they still have to use the Shuttle until 2010. In 2005 the Space Shuttle's operational budget was $5 billion or 30% of Nasa's budget. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is expected to cost $5.5 billion to develop. The Crew Launch Vehicle, which is a Space Shuttle 4-segment Solid Rocket Boster (SRB) with the addition of an upper stage composed of a modified Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), is expected to cost another $4.5 billion. Why the development of something which is a reconfiguration of parts we mostly already have is expected to cost $4.5 billion I'm not quite sure. Probably to be able to eject at any time, a redesign of the nose cone so the SRB can have an upper stage and still not sink in the ocean, and recertification of the new system as man rated. The combined CEV and launch vehicle is expected to be first launched in 2011.
2011 also begins the development of the heavy-lift launcher, lunar lander, and Earth departure stage. The development of the heavy-lift launcher is expected to cost between $5 to $10 billion. The heavy-lift launcher is composed of 5 modified SSME's and 2 5-segment SRB's and should be able to lift 125 metric tons of payload to an unspecified orbit. The article doesn't say if this is an in-line vehicle (ILV) or side mounted cargo (SMC) vehicle . It does appear to match the description of the ILV-2 design in a spaceref article. Also of interest is a previous spaceref article on the topic. An ILV would require extensive changes to existing shuttle and launch facilities. A SMC vehicle requires less changes to existing shuttle facilites and could be used to launch previously designed (ISS component) cargoes in a near identical manner to the shuttle. The advantage to the ILV is that once the changes to existing facilites are made the ability to upgrade into larger more powerful ILV's is much more easily obtained. These larger more powerful ILV's would allow a manned mission to Mars for which the mission to the moon is a dress rehearsal.
Not only are they not lost, they were considered (search for J2S) for the new CEV and the upper stage of it's launcher. They seem to be rejected because the SSME's are more efficient and currently in production.