Did anyone else watching the video notice the apparent contact between the 2nd stage nozzle and the interstage? I wonder if a TVC actuator was damaged leading to the nutation...
Can you imagine the glorious caucophony if NASA turned its budget into prizes? $1B for the first Mars rock returned to Earth. $2B for the first Mars ground base active for one year. $4B for the first human on Mars. $4B for the first man-year on Mars.
You do realize that SpaceX is part of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program right? NASA has partnered with SpaceX and Rocketplane-Kistler to do exactly what you describe. Milestone award payments based on demonstrations culminating in a resupply demo mission to ISS with a crewed option to follow. NASA already has signed $500M worth of award agreements with these two companies.
Beyond this, NASA has its Centennial Challenge program which also gives cash awards for things like generating Oxygen from lunar regolith or designing a better spacesuit glove.
No offense, but I think part of the problem is the publics lack of understanding how difficult these things are (too much watching Armageddon) combined with ignorance as to what NASA is currently doing.
The services Halliburton is currently providing are the same that the Clinton admin employed - but on a larger scale. If only Halliburton could meet those easier requirements during his presidency, why do you think that other vendors could have been better able to handle this contract?
And no, I am not calling our military incompetent wastrels. The military supply system excels at doing what it has been built up to do - move supplies through war zones. However, despite what you may think, the supplys that Halliburton is moving are not moving through a "war zone". There are no Iraqi insurgent submarines waiting to sink US cargo ships and for the most part land resupply is pretty safe. Moving *huge* quantities of supplies through relatively safe supply lines is not what our military is optimized to do. It is what commercial shipping companies excel at.
A lot of the problems with Halliburton, Halliburton can't really be held responsible, since the problems originated in the fact that we negotiated such crappy contracts with them. If you're contract has holes in it, you're pretty fucked when it comes to trial.
Which crappy contracts are you referring to? The no-bid awards that Halliburton/KBR received? THe fact of the matter is that Halliburton was the only company that could meet the requirements - hence the no-bid contract. Lesser known is that the Clinton administraton did the exact same thing with the same company when they awarded Halliburton/KBR a no-bid contract to provide the exact same services in the Balkans that are currently provided in Iraq. I am not a contracting officer but I'd bet they took the previous agreement and did a find/replace to change the specifics. I guess this brings us back to the definition of "crappy contract"? So the governement does the right thing and realizes that its beaurocracy can not compete with the private sector on supply issues of this scale and awards the contract to Halliburton to save the taxpayer money. Assuming that the services must be performed (and dodging the whole "should we be in Iraq" question) how is this bad for the taxpayer?
If it's based on standardized tests, then you just get teachers teaching kids how to take standardized tests, which is ultimately results in a lousier education.
I have always been baffled by this argument. What makes you think that teaching to the test results in a "lousy" education. If the test reflects the learning objectives - then "teaching to the test" is teaching the objectives. If you have a problem with the way testing is implemented - then fine, fix the test. For the grades where fundamentals are taught - it is not hard at all to match the learning objectives with the test (e.g. "Be able to add fractions." The only way the child can pass the this part of the test is if the teacher taught the child how to add fractions. I don't see how they could "teach to the test" on something this fundamental. Same goes with a spelling list, vocab list, etc...) It *does* get a little more murky when you get into the high school classes when the learning objectives are more difficult to quantify but not impossible. Thats why teachers should always have some portion of a grade be "subjective content".
I'll digress a bit, but my favorite classes in HS, College and Grad School were the ones where the teachers handed out a list of objectives on the first day of class (sometimes with hundreds of them). You *knew* right then and there the set from which all the final exam questions would come from... you just didn't know which ones. Heck even the FAA gives out all the written questions in the question bank for all the pilot rating exams. The question bank is huge - but comprehensive. You can just study the questions and try to game the system, but you will find that in the end - you will have learned the material just from studying the questions! I still call that learning.
you're fixated on the destination - sure they are different. Surface activities are only a small fraction of a mission timeline. The environments during the voyage itself are nearly identical (Earth-Moon and Earth-Mars).
All true - but there is one advantage the moon has that Mars doesn't... the moon is only a few day trip back to the safety of Earth if something should go wrong. We still have a lot to learn before we undertake 2.5 year Mars missions. There will be problems. When they occur, it will be nice to know that a safe-haven is nearby.
just curious - do you really believe all that? I am serious - I am trying to understand the "left" and it is starting to finally make sense. If I *actually* believed half of what you say - I'd probably hate this admin to. Back to my question... do your really believe these things or do they just help you rationalize your anger? Or - do you know it isn't true and just hope that by repeating it - it will become true (at least to the mainstream)? I'm serious - I'd love to have an honest discussion on this.
Odd... this chart shows the price of oil (adjusted) decreasing during the Reagan years, more or less constant during Bush I through about 1997 before shooting upin about 1998. Damn that Bush (and his bio oil buddies) and their infernal time machines!
Amazing - someone must have broken into your ISP and blocked: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ [nasa.gov], because it shows exactly the opposite effect (strong increases in surface air temps, offset by cooling in the stratosphere). Of course those silly NASA scientists are morons compared with some cold-fusion type cranks in a Danish basement producing unpublicable results. And as has been explained here countless times (though sadly without use of Occam's Crazy Straw), the word "global" next to "warming" means "averaging all over the globe", and therefore local cooling is not only permitted, it's often expected.
I am not positive but I am pretty sure that we didn't have weather satellites in 1880. The GP's claim was that the best source of temp data (US Weather Sats) show the temp to be fluctuting about a constant mean. Your rebuttal links to NASA networks of land wx survey sites. A staple claim by the anti-GW crowd is that the measured temp increases are an artifact of wx data being taken in urban areas which are warming due to "heat island" effects independent of a constant temp outside of the urban area.
Assuming that were true, that would only account for those politicians who are taking the money. I think what the GP was asking is why conservatives in the populace tend to be so anti-global warming. I am a conservative and don't believe that human activity is playing a significant role in global warming. I don't get a check or any other form of compensation from "big oil". So try again... why do we believe in global warming?
I can only speak for myself. I am a scientist and engineer - a lot of my resistance comes from my disdain for the fact that this debate is being conducted using the uninformed masses as pawns rather than within the scientific community. I don't like setting a prescident that we do science by consensus. I suspect that many of the advocates for global warming are really just environmentalists frustrated that their previous conservation messages have failed to resonate and that this is their new banner. I also know full well that the earth has regularly undergone significantly greater temperature deltas over its history so find it hard to believe that this recent very small warming period is anything other than statistical noise (i.e. warming but within naturally occurring bounds). Show me plots with error bars on them and maybe I'll pay attention. Of course, the assumption there is that I trust your error analysis which I probably won't . Finally, I don't believe in scientists with agendas - it interferes with the scientific process. I don't trust an environmental activist's research on global warming any more than I would big oil's or trust the tobacco companies to do unbiased research on second-hand smoke. I don't like that activist groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists use the name of their organization to neutralize their radical messages. There may be some very good research at sites like RealClimate but I don't like having science shouted at me. Honestly, if the fanatiscism and zealotry were taken out of the equation, I'd be much more likely to look at their research.
There have been much more severe warming and cooling periods in this planet's history. If you think you can "look outside" and "see the difference in the weather" then you are part of the uninformed masses that are being manipulated like sheep. Hey, I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening - just that you might want to base your opinion on something with a little more scientific rigor.
Let me get this straight... you are forming an opinion on Vista based on the performance of a demo at Best Buy that you began mucking with. Do you think by chance that someone before you might have also played with system settings and messed things up? Would you let a 12 year old kid play with your system settings on your home computer?
No... flares are rather useless by themselves - to be effective the aircraft must deploy the flare while executing a rather aggressive maneuver. The flare momentarily presents a larger target, "distracting" the missile guidance unit long enough for the actual aircraft to escapt the FOV of the sensor. Without such a maneuver, the seeker would simply reacquire the aircraft.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Historically, exit polls have been amazingly accurate. Only in the last two elections have there been a wide disparity between the exit polling numbers and the official vote count.
That is not even close to a true statement. I know you really want to believe it because it is good ammo that the election must have been stolen "this time" but it is simply not true. Go to one of the referenced studies. Flip to page 32. Starting there - polling data is compared with actual returns from every state from 1988-2004. The negative numbers are when the polls overestimated Democratic turnout. There are a lot of negative numbers. Skip down to page 34 (second table). In every election the democratic position has been overstated. It just so happens that in 2004 it was overstated by the largest margin (6.5% error). However, the error in 2000 was only 1.5%. Interstingly, the next largest bias in the polling after 2004 was in 1992 at 5% (so you will obviously say it runs in the family...) which doesn't make the 6.5% value such a stretch. If you skip down another page they show the correlation between voter "paying attention to the election" and poll bias. Interestingly, the more interest the voting public has in the election, the greater the turnuout and the bias against the republicans in the polls.
Of course... but that still represents what NASA "wants" to do as a matter of policy...regardless of whether or not it was passed. Here is the 2006 budget request.
First, the NASA science budget is increasing, not decreasing as the article would make you think... it just isn't increasing as fast it had been promised.
Second, the NASA budget is essentially fixed. There are 4 directorates within NASA:
Space Operations (funding to maintain shuttle and station)
Exploration
COTS (Funding commercial space to provide space transportation capability (non-exploratory)
Constellation (Ares/Orion/LSAM - the vehicles that will both replace shuttle as well as comprise the lunar architecture)
The problem is that over the next couple years, the Exploration budget starts ramping up as the development costs begin to really add up in advance of a 2014 first (crewed) flight. Meanwhile, until the shuttle is retired in 2010, the SOMD budget must remain relatively constant since the cost of operating the shuttle fleet doesn't dip until its retirement. So what are your choices?
A) Cut shuttle off early and leave ISS unfinished and have an 6-7 gap in manned space flight?
B) Delay Exploration development until the shuttle is retired (similar gap in manned space flight since you are just pushing development to the right)?
C) Or do you delay science missions for only a few years until NASA is "over the hump years" (2008-2010) in which they are trying to maintain old vehicles and develop new ones?
If you ask me - the obvious solution is:
D) Increase NASA funding to maintain all of the above until Ares/Orion enters an operations phase.
Keep in mind - the NASA budget is about half of one percent of the federal budget...
Note: you can mock the lunar outpost and Mars missions all you want - but those costs aren't even in the budget yet (and won't be for some 10 years or more) and are not driving this "problem" despite the misleading claims in the article.
I agree - outside of the medical profession and endurance atheletes, this is not well known. I am in the military and have been told pretty much to "keep drinking water" my whole career. It wasn't until I started competing in triathlons that I learned of Hypoatremia (within a week of a DC police officer dying from it). At any rate - if you are going to be out sweating a lot (i.e. marathon training in heat and humidity) make sure you have a soure of electrolytes with your fluids. Personally I use watered-down gatorade but sometimes I'll do water+salt pills in a race if they are only serving poweraid (can't stand the stuff).
I am also curious what the nurse told the radio station - I wonder if it would have made a difference. There is a difference between saying "you can hurt yourself" and "you can get hypoatremia and die. If you get a headache, stop and go to a doctor immediately."
Sad.
Re:Scientists Incorrectly Though To Be Perfect
on
The Trouble with Physics
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Excellent points... funny how when I raise the same points in a global warming discussion (not that it isn't occurring, just that scientists are human and have biases)... I get modded down...
What a relief... Apple has made a press release that an internal Apple investigation found no wrongdoing by its CEO. I am sure that is worth a lot to the SEC and is in no way damage control against the investor jitters since it was leaked that the SEC was investigating...
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else watching the video notice the apparent contact between the 2nd stage nozzle and the interstage? I wonder if a TVC actuator was damaged leading to the nutation...
You do realize that SpaceX is part of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program right? NASA has partnered with SpaceX and Rocketplane-Kistler to do exactly what you describe. Milestone award payments based on demonstrations culminating in a resupply demo mission to ISS with a crewed option to follow. NASA already has signed $500M worth of award agreements with these two companies.
Beyond this, NASA has its Centennial Challenge program which also gives cash awards for things like generating Oxygen from lunar regolith or designing a better spacesuit glove.
No offense, but I think part of the problem is the publics lack of understanding how difficult these things are (too much watching Armageddon) combined with ignorance as to what NASA is currently doing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_on_Fractalus!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Cities_of_G old_(video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_III:_Exodus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montezuma's_Revenge_( video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Hall_of_Volta
And no, I am not calling our military incompetent wastrels. The military supply system excels at doing what it has been built up to do - move supplies through war zones. However, despite what you may think, the supplys that Halliburton is moving are not moving through a "war zone". There are no Iraqi insurgent submarines waiting to sink US cargo ships and for the most part land resupply is pretty safe. Moving *huge* quantities of supplies through relatively safe supply lines is not what our military is optimized to do. It is what commercial shipping companies excel at.
Which crappy contracts are you referring to? The no-bid awards that Halliburton/KBR received? THe fact of the matter is that Halliburton was the only company that could meet the requirements - hence the no-bid contract. Lesser known is that the Clinton administraton did the exact same thing with the same company when they awarded Halliburton/KBR a no-bid contract to provide the exact same services in the Balkans that are currently provided in Iraq. I am not a contracting officer but I'd bet they took the previous agreement and did a find/replace to change the specifics. I guess this brings us back to the definition of "crappy contract"? So the governement does the right thing and realizes that its beaurocracy can not compete with the private sector on supply issues of this scale and awards the contract to Halliburton to save the taxpayer money. Assuming that the services must be performed (and dodging the whole "should we be in Iraq" question) how is this bad for the taxpayer?
If it's based on standardized tests, then you just get teachers teaching kids how to take standardized tests, which is ultimately results in a lousier education.
I have always been baffled by this argument. What makes you think that teaching to the test results in a "lousy" education. If the test reflects the learning objectives - then "teaching to the test" is teaching the objectives. If you have a problem with the way testing is implemented - then fine, fix the test. For the grades where fundamentals are taught - it is not hard at all to match the learning objectives with the test (e.g. "Be able to add fractions." The only way the child can pass the this part of the test is if the teacher taught the child how to add fractions. I don't see how they could "teach to the test" on something this fundamental. Same goes with a spelling list, vocab list, etc...) It *does* get a little more murky when you get into the high school classes when the learning objectives are more difficult to quantify but not impossible. Thats why teachers should always have some portion of a grade be "subjective content".
I'll digress a bit, but my favorite classes in HS, College and Grad School were the ones where the teachers handed out a list of objectives on the first day of class (sometimes with hundreds of them). You *knew* right then and there the set from which all the final exam questions would come from... you just didn't know which ones. Heck even the FAA gives out all the written questions in the question bank for all the pilot rating exams. The question bank is huge - but comprehensive. You can just study the questions and try to game the system, but you will find that in the end - you will have learned the material just from studying the questions! I still call that learning.
If the bill didn't pass the senate 99-0 and pass the house by a voice vote (most likely near-unanimous)... then you might have a point.
you're fixated on the destination - sure they are different. Surface activities are only a small fraction of a mission timeline. The environments during the voyage itself are nearly identical (Earth-Moon and Earth-Mars).
All true - but there is one advantage the moon has that Mars doesn't... the moon is only a few day trip back to the safety of Earth if something should go wrong. We still have a lot to learn before we undertake 2.5 year Mars missions. There will be problems. When they occur, it will be nice to know that a safe-haven is nearby.
Mikey: Heh, if you hit the wrong note, we'll all "B flat!"
just curious - do you really believe all that? I am serious - I am trying to understand the "left" and it is starting to finally make sense. If I *actually* believed half of what you say - I'd probably hate this admin to. Back to my question ... do your really believe these things or do they just help you rationalize your anger? Or - do you know it isn't true and just hope that by repeating it - it will become true (at least to the mainstream)? I'm serious - I'd love to have an honest discussion on this.
Odd... this chart shows the price of oil (adjusted) decreasing during the Reagan years, more or less constant during Bush I through about 1997 before shooting upin about 1998. Damn that Bush (and his bio oil buddies) and their infernal time machines!
I am not positive but I am pretty sure that we didn't have weather satellites in 1880. The GP's claim was that the best source of temp data (US Weather Sats) show the temp to be fluctuting about a constant mean. Your rebuttal links to NASA networks of land wx survey sites. A staple claim by the anti-GW crowd is that the measured temp increases are an artifact of wx data being taken in urban areas which are warming due to "heat island" effects independent of a constant temp outside of the urban area.
I can only speak for myself. I am a scientist and engineer - a lot of my resistance comes from my disdain for the fact that this debate is being conducted using the uninformed masses as pawns rather than within the scientific community. I don't like setting a prescident that we do science by consensus. I suspect that many of the advocates for global warming are really just environmentalists frustrated that their previous conservation messages have failed to resonate and that this is their new banner. I also know full well that the earth has regularly undergone significantly greater temperature deltas over its history so find it hard to believe that this recent very small warming period is anything other than statistical noise (i.e. warming but within naturally occurring bounds). Show me plots with error bars on them and maybe I'll pay attention. Of course, the assumption there is that I trust your error analysis which I probably won't . Finally, I don't believe in scientists with agendas - it interferes with the scientific process. I don't trust an environmental activist's research on global warming any more than I would big oil's or trust the tobacco companies to do unbiased research on second-hand smoke. I don't like that activist groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists use the name of their organization to neutralize their radical messages. There may be some very good research at sites like RealClimate but I don't like having science shouted at me. Honestly, if the fanatiscism and zealotry were taken out of the equation, I'd be much more likely to look at their research.
But that's just me.
There have been much more severe warming and cooling periods in this planet's history. If you think you can "look outside" and "see the difference in the weather" then you are part of the uninformed masses that are being manipulated like sheep. Hey, I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening - just that you might want to base your opinion on something with a little more scientific rigor.
Let me get this straight... you are forming an opinion on Vista based on the performance of a demo at Best Buy that you began mucking with. Do you think by chance that someone before you might have also played with system settings and messed things up? Would you let a 12 year old kid play with your system settings on your home computer?
No... flares are rather useless by themselves - to be effective the aircraft must deploy the flare while executing a rather aggressive maneuver. The flare momentarily presents a larger target, "distracting" the missile guidance unit long enough for the actual aircraft to escapt the FOV of the sensor. Without such a maneuver, the seeker would simply reacquire the aircraft.
That is not even close to a true statement. I know you really want to believe it because it is good ammo that the election must have been stolen "this time" but it is simply not true. Go to one of the referenced studies. Flip to page 32. Starting there - polling data is compared with actual returns from every state from 1988-2004. The negative numbers are when the polls overestimated Democratic turnout. There are a lot of negative numbers. Skip down to page 34 (second table). In every election the democratic position has been overstated. It just so happens that in 2004 it was overstated by the largest margin (6.5% error). However, the error in 2000 was only 1.5%. Interstingly, the next largest bias in the polling after 2004 was in 1992 at 5% (so you will obviously say it runs in the family...) which doesn't make the 6.5% value such a stretch. If you skip down another page they show the correlation between voter "paying attention to the election" and poll bias. Interestingly, the more interest the voting public has in the election, the greater the turnuout and the bias against the republicans in the polls.
Of course... but that still represents what NASA "wants" to do as a matter of policy ...regardless of whether or not it was passed. Here is the 2006 budget request.
Second, the NASA budget is essentially fixed. There are 4 directorates within NASA:
- Aeronautics (conventional aircraft-related research)
- Science (satellites and probes)
- Space Operations (funding to maintain shuttle and station)
- Exploration
- COTS (Funding commercial space to provide space transportation capability (non-exploratory)
- Constellation (Ares/Orion/LSAM - the vehicles that will both replace shuttle as well as comprise the lunar architecture)
The problem is that over the next couple years, the Exploration budget starts ramping up as the development costs begin to really add up in advance of a 2014 first (crewed) flight. Meanwhile, until the shuttle is retired in 2010, the SOMD budget must remain relatively constant since the cost of operating the shuttle fleet doesn't dip until its retirement. So what are your choices?If you ask me - the obvious solution is:
D) Increase NASA funding to maintain all of the above until Ares/Orion enters an operations phase.
Keep in mind - the NASA budget is about half of one percent of the federal budget...
Note: you can mock the lunar outpost and Mars missions all you want - but those costs aren't even in the budget yet (and won't be for some 10 years or more) and are not driving this "problem" despite the misleading claims in the article.
We already know... they made it into a Movie. And yes,... we should be very concerned.
I am also curious what the nurse told the radio station - I wonder if it would have made a difference. There is a difference between saying "you can hurt yourself" and "you can get hypoatremia and die. If you get a headache, stop and go to a doctor immediately."
Sad.
Excellent points... funny how when I raise the same points in a global warming discussion (not that it isn't occurring, just that scientists are human and have biases) ... I get modded down...
I just did a quick alt-f for "PS3" in the Constitution but didn't find anything... sorry.
What a relief... Apple has made a press release that an internal Apple investigation found no wrongdoing by its CEO. I am sure that is worth a lot to the SEC and is in no way damage control against the investor jitters since it was leaked that the SEC was investigating...