And it's not my job to agree with your delusions. If the world really was going to end from a methane clathrates tipping point, then we would see more now than a slightly elevated rate of natural methane emissions.
Please tell me you have had the courtesy to consider what is at stake if you are wrong: extermination of the human race.
'
Pascal's Wager and argument from ignorance fallacy is not a real argument. Your argument is not due courtesy.
Unless we solve this, this is certain death for me, you and our kids.
By what mechanism? There's not enough carbon available to cause a runaway Venus effect or indeed anything beyond an unpleasant warming of Earth. Even if we choose to assume that a lot of methane will be released in the coming centuries, so what? We still have a very nice place to live. And any real die off of humanity due to war or whatever immediately fixes the main problems.
Please stop sewing disinformation until you know the science for sure.
Science is evidence. Show your evidence. Notice that none of the links you provided support your argument that we're becoming extinct in 2030.
Why do you hate America? You think that we're incapable of having a decent national health system, and I'm completely unrealistic in thinking my country can do what every other developed country has done.
Why didn't you fix this problem 40-50 years ago? These problems didn't magically appear overnight, but have been well known since the beginning. Why should I share your optimism when we have a demonstration that the US didn't fix a number of huge problems over a very long period of time.
I think the US is capable of doing anything positive other countries can do, such as slash health care costs and get good public health.
Why should I agree? What evidence is there that the US can solve such problems any more?
As far as Social Security goes, ending it has major problems. It's been a pay-as-you-go operation, with Social Security taxes used to pay benefits. People rely on it, including people who have paid into it all of their working lives. There have already been changes; my full retirement age is 66, and my wife's is 67. (Frankly, I don't think I can hold this job for five more years. I'm not as good as I was five years ago.) It's also politically impossible, since people my age and up generally vote in elections.
So? I didn't say it would collapse tomorrow or the eventual collapse of the program would be pretty. I didn't say people weren't reliant on it now. And why is doing something about Social Security, "politically impossible", but ignoring the same political resistance to medical care restructuring is "why do you hate America?"
You and I make a deal that if you're wrong and we obviously are in trouble then I can come and put a bullet in the back of your head for fighting people like me who were trying to do something before it's too late.
The thing you ignore here is that KGIII and I are also trying to do something before it's too late. We just disagree on what "do something" means and what the real threats are. IMHO, there are more important problems than panicking over nonexistent problems.
The point of debate is not to piss yourself in public like an unthinking, panicking animal. It's to try to convince others. You aren't doing that. For this, you need to show evidence not an endless stream of YouTube hyperbole that contributes no actual information.
Evidence not bullshit. I thought I was pretty clear on what I wanted here. We would still see hysterical YouTube videos like this in the complete absence of climate change effects.
The problem with that thinking is we shouldn't fight injustices by whatever means are at our disposal if they are illegal.
It depends on the degree of injustice. It's worth noting here that no one has actually demonstrated that injustice is going on with medical research or that it matters to PETA, if it were. Further, minor injustices would not justify the law breaking.
The "stupid" leaders you speak of have succeeded in creating the largest, most expensive, most powerful government AND world empire
There are two problems with your statement. First, you make it sound like a hard thing to do. To start such an empire is hard. But once it reaches a certain level of power and growth, it grows itself. The leaders just need to get out of the way. And that leads to the second problem. The current leaders aren't the ones who built the US as a society or empire. They're riding on past effort by better people and natural tendencies of growth.
That they're auguring this into the ground indicates that they are indeed as stupid as advertised.
There were a bunch of spy satellites which had the same structure, same optics more or less, and same fairing size as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) which were launched on a variety of vehicles (Shuttle, Titan IV, Delta IV Heavy).
Further, you mentioned mass. The HST weighed only 11 tonnes which is well in the range of more than half a dozen launch vehicles operating today as well as many more over the past thirty years. However, it's the physical dimensions which constrains the choice of launch vehicle. The Shuttle simply doesn't offer enough of an increase in fairing size to justify itself, especially given the launch vehicles that were eventually able to handle equivalent spy satellites.
Moving on, development of the Hubble was very expensive, estimated to be over $1.4 billion of $2.5 billion (with much of the development cost due to the launch delay from the Challenger accident). This is a one time cost. Thus, construction costs of the HST and of any additional telescopes would be on the order of $0.5-1 billion, depending on whether launch costs were included.
Since we have also five repair missions, which dependent on how you account for them, range from roughly $2.5 billion to $12.5 billion (reflecting the marginal cost of an additional mission $0.5 billion to marginal plus annual costs of $1.5 billion). Assuming that the Shuttle would have operated anyway, one gets $2.5 billion as roughly the launch costs of the additional missions. In addition, there are development costs with the original repair mission and additional equipment installed. So right here, we're looking at at least two telescopes. There are development (among other things to address optical and gyroscope issues found with the original HST) and launch costs which would still be several hundred million. So at least two telescopes in cost, possibly three once you including the higher development costs from the original launch delay due to dependence on the Shuttle.
If the HST actually had $0.5 in construction costs, then you might be look at 4 or 5 HST-equivalent telescopes which could be built and launched for the cost of the original HST's dependence on the Shuttle and subsequent repair missions.
All I need to show was how a non-zero amount of necks could be slit. I did that. Having to give one of your 50 vacation villas is still a loss.
The use of these terms does not imply a minor financial setback. Words have meaning. I think it's a retarded argument to say that you'll do all sorts of terrible things to the greedy rich and then we find out that your idea of terrible things is to burn down their summer mansion or a factory that they had written off a decade ago, and then say bad things about them.
But they're still rich and you're still poor.
My argument remains unchanged. A class war against the imaginary "greedy" and the mobile rich is just going to turn the hole you're in into a grave. In the end, you'll still have that lower standard of living. It's time to make choices that work in the long run.
1. Schedule: SLS is only a few months behind schedule (was due to fly by end of 2017 now planned for mid 2018) - and only because the Obama admin keeps choking it for cash and slow-walking the entire effort because the President is thin-skinned and hates that congress (including many democrats) ordered him to build it. Falcon9H on the other hand is several YEARS behind schedule and currently has a less-certain first-launch date.
Odds are good that Falcon Heavy launches in 2016 and can maintain a price point an order of magnitude before that of SLS. I think it's sick how the politicians can massively fund a competitor to the Falcon Heavy (while SpaceX funds development of the Falcon Heavy on its own dime) over the objections of NASA at vastly greater cost to the US and then have people like you gloss over those economic issues.
But if we just completely halt development of SLS, we would have over the next three years enough money (around $10 billion) to fund some serious deep space projects.
2. Class: SLS is a monster rocket, larger and much more capable than the Saturn V that put men on the moon. Falcon9H will struggle to carry as much as a Delta4H to the same orbits. In lifting capacity, the Falcon9H is a fraction of even the early version of SLS. In VOLUME, the Falcon9H is even worse. An SLS could replace the entire manned part of the ISS in just 2 launches.
First, that greater capacity comes in 2023 or later. It also comes at a vast cost.
The argument by spacex fanboys is that you can just divide the mass of what you want to launch and launch on a bunch of smaller rockets. This is a variation on the "mythical man month".
But it is true. You can do that. You don't need huge fairing size or payload size for most of the schemes that NASA wants to do. For a manned mission to Mars, the biggest indivisible payload is the human body. Even the heat shield can be assembled from smaller pieces in orbit. And the vast majority of payload is propellant which can be put up on the many 20-25 tons rockets out there.
Orbital assemble and fueling are technologies we need to develop further, whether or not we have the huge rocket. The huge rocket is not needed on the other hand.
2. Class: SLS is a monster rocket, larger and much more capable than the Saturn V that put men on the moon. Falcon9H will struggle to carry as much as a Delta4H to the same orbits. In lifting capacity, the Falcon9H is a fraction of even the early version of SLS. In VOLUME, the Falcon9H is even worse. An SLS could replace the entire manned part of the ISS in just 2 launches.
Falcon Heavy puts 50 tons to LEO. That's double what Delta IV Heavy does. And it looks like Falcon Heavy will do it at a lower total cost than Delta IV Heavy.
Further, you are making the half century old mistake of assuming capability is more important than utility. It doesn't matter how wonderful your rocket is, if you don't use those capabilities.
I'm not anti-spacex, just trying to knock some of the pot residue off the fanboy arguments. Truth is: we're gonna likely end-up with a mutant version of Constellation: Instead of a 10-meter diameter super-monster Ares V unmanned cargo launch vehicle partnered with crews on the skinny pencil Ares I, we are likely to see missions involving the sortof-monster 8.5-meter diameter SLS partnered with crews flying on Falcon (some missions can optimise SLS by flying unmanned and maxing-out the up-mass then having the crew and their capsule meet the SLS payload on-orbit as was the plan for Constellation)
I don't think we will end up with any part of the SLS. Due to those lower funding levels, the SLS is a bit more resistant to being scuttled, but I believe that will happen anyway. There's just too much money being squandered to do the SLS and have a viable space program. When in addition, we see vastly lower costs from Falcon Heavy, then I think the political support for SLS will evaporate.
It's unfortunate, it really is. I can still think of justification for a space-bus, regardless of costs.
But you can't disregard cost. Economics is key to understanding why we no longer launch the Space Shuttle or have a replacement reusable vehicle. In order for a reusable launch vehicle (RLV) to be competitive per launch with an expendable launch vehicle (ELV), the RLV needs to launch several dozen times a year.
With a small RLV, NASA probably could have afforded to maintain that high launch rate. But for the much larger Shuttle it just wasn't possible.
As to revisionist history, by 1990, it was clearly demonstrated that the Space Shuttle would not live up to its billing. It couldn't maintain the desired flight rate; it wasn't going to carry the desired payloads; and it didn't have the desired customers (the DOD stopped using the Shuttle shortly thereafter). Yet here we are 25 years later and NASA still doesn't have a replacement for the Shuttle.
With NASA's flat funding (for about four decades!), the money that would have gone into developing a Shuttle replacement and in running deep space manned missions instead went into Shuttle operations and the International Space Station (ISS) a remarkably expensive boondoggle.
NASA is again duplicating that failure mode with vast funding going to the Space Launch System even though there is no viable plan or funding for using the vehicle.
I dunno... The astronauts that repaired the Hubble might not have been able to do so on any other platform that was available at the time.
NASA could have launched two or three replacement space telescopes for the price of the Hubble repair missions. Even if your sole interest is in more scientific output, there were significant opportunity costs to using the Space Shuttle.
US aerospace is notorious for using regulation and bureaucracy to obstruct space activities. I have heard, for example, that one of the last Atlas II (operated by Lockheed Martin (LM)) launches in 2004 had been delayed for a few days by a bogus concern about battery issues. Apparently, the same company then proceeded to interfere with two Atlas III launches by expressing recycled concerns about the RD-180 rocket engines used on that rocket.
SpaceX has also had some of their earliest launches delayed due to games played by LM (story discusses a SpaceX Vandenberg launch first getting delayed in turn by a delay in a Titan IV launch operated by LM and then being kicked out of their launch facilities because LM was occupying a nearby launch facility).
No, Australia was founded by criminals. The USA was founded by people sick of being persecuted for their religious beliefs - who then turned around and persecuted people for their religious beliefs once they got some power.
Well, Georgia (of the US) was founded as a sort of prototype for Australia as a dumping ground for the "poor subjects" of the UK which included a few criminals. Maryland was also another big destination for exiled criminals.
And the degree of persecution depended on the state. Massachusetts was the most notorious, though there was religious persecution of one sort or another in the early decades of most of the original colonies. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island on the other hand were very liberal with explicit laws against religious persecution.
It's sad you are too hysterical to think about this. There is no evidence to support this empty bit of theater - a situation which won't change in 2030.
Methane has already been documented as flooding up from the Artic.
No, it hasn't. The rate of methane emissions have increased to some degree, but that's not the same as your alleged "flooding".
If you had actually watched the video, you would see that the Chicken Little in question merely said that he couldn't imagine anyone alive in 2030. I can imagine the things this guy isn't capable of imagining which solves the actual problem stated in the video.
And given that an elevated level of methane is not actually an existential threat (it just makes things a little warming, sea level a little higher, and interiors of continents a little drier), then not only is it not an existential threat, but there is a ready solution to the problem (namely, we can just move our climate sensitive species a few hundred km closer to the poles to compensate for the alleged extra global warming and maybe irrigate a little more) that doesn't require a lot of brain power to implement.
Obama resigned the US to defeat when he cancelled Project Constellation without extending the Space Shuttle program..
That's pretty clueless. Here's why. The Space Shuttle went nowhere after it demonstrated the conditional viability of reusable launch vehicles in the 80s. There's nothing that flew on the Shuttle that couldn't have been more cheaply flown on some other launch system. Further, the money spent on the Shuttle prevented the US from doing a lot of manned and unmanned work.
Constellation was no better for the same reasons. It's also worth noting that Constellation would not have survived competiton with the ULA launch vehicles (Atlas V and Delta IV), if the same cost and safety criteria had been applied to them as were applied to the ULA vehicles. However, the report that supposedly decided things in favor of the Constellation configurations (Shuttle-like stack), did so by deliberately understating risk of solid rocket motors, ignoring thrust oscillation of Ares I, and a few other deep problems of the configuration they chose. Then they came up with a completely bogus risk analysis to justify the choice they made.
We also ignore here that Bush did all the heavy lifting. By the time Obama came in, Shuttle and Constellation were both already walking dead.
SLS is a pale congressional substitute that is still being actively impeded and slow-walked by is cronies at NASA.
Crying shame really since we really need another dead end program to consume all that funding we could have used on real space projects. And it doesn't help that SLS is also underfunded by Congress, the only ones who claim to want it.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's not my job to agree with your delusions. If the world really was going to end from a methane clathrates tipping point, then we would see more now than a slightly elevated rate of natural methane emissions.
You yet again provide nothing to think about except some cowardly hand wringing. Look at the actual evidence. Don't continue to be a fool.
Please tell me you have had the courtesy to consider what is at stake if you are wrong: extermination of the human race.
' Pascal's Wager and argument from ignorance fallacy is not a real argument. Your argument is not due courtesy.
Unless we solve this, this is certain death for me, you and our kids.
By what mechanism? There's not enough carbon available to cause a runaway Venus effect or indeed anything beyond an unpleasant warming of Earth. Even if we choose to assume that a lot of methane will be released in the coming centuries, so what? We still have a very nice place to live. And any real die off of humanity due to war or whatever immediately fixes the main problems.
Please stop sewing disinformation until you know the science for sure.
Science is evidence. Show your evidence. Notice that none of the links you provided support your argument that we're becoming extinct in 2030.
Why do you hate America? You think that we're incapable of having a decent national health system, and I'm completely unrealistic in thinking my country can do what every other developed country has done.
Why didn't you fix this problem 40-50 years ago? These problems didn't magically appear overnight, but have been well known since the beginning. Why should I share your optimism when we have a demonstration that the US didn't fix a number of huge problems over a very long period of time.
I think the US is capable of doing anything positive other countries can do, such as slash health care costs and get good public health.
Why should I agree? What evidence is there that the US can solve such problems any more?
As far as Social Security goes, ending it has major problems. It's been a pay-as-you-go operation, with Social Security taxes used to pay benefits. People rely on it, including people who have paid into it all of their working lives. There have already been changes; my full retirement age is 66, and my wife's is 67. (Frankly, I don't think I can hold this job for five more years. I'm not as good as I was five years ago.) It's also politically impossible, since people my age and up generally vote in elections.
So? I didn't say it would collapse tomorrow or the eventual collapse of the program would be pretty. I didn't say people weren't reliant on it now. And why is doing something about Social Security, "politically impossible", but ignoring the same political resistance to medical care restructuring is "why do you hate America?"
You and I make a deal that if you're wrong and we obviously are in trouble then I can come and put a bullet in the back of your head for fighting people like me who were trying to do something before it's too late.
The thing you ignore here is that KGIII and I are also trying to do something before it's too late. We just disagree on what "do something" means and what the real threats are. IMHO, there are more important problems than panicking over nonexistent problems.
The point of debate is not to piss yourself in public like an unthinking, panicking animal. It's to try to convince others. You aren't doing that. For this, you need to show evidence not an endless stream of YouTube hyperbole that contributes no actual information.
No more YouTube videos. I'm done with that bullshit. Written words only.
You know, idiot, I don't need to prove this to you.
When 2030 comes, you just need to watch and learn.'
The proof will be coming and then you will feel like an idiot, which you are.
When the proof comes, then get back to me. Don't waste my time otherwise.
Are you looking for concrete scientific information on the evidence or are you just looking to be convinced?
Yes. Now put up or shut up.
Evidence not bullshit. I thought I was pretty clear on what I wanted here. We would still see hysterical YouTube videos like this in the complete absence of climate change effects.
(You can still work, but work on things you care about, not what someone will pay you for).
That's the point of the paycheck. To pay me to care enough about what my employer wants that I'll work for it.
The problem with that thinking is we shouldn't fight injustices by whatever means are at our disposal if they are illegal.
It depends on the degree of injustice. It's worth noting here that no one has actually demonstrated that injustice is going on with medical research or that it matters to PETA, if it were. Further, minor injustices would not justify the law breaking.
Come back when you have evidence.
Alright, and now the craft to get the astronauts there and keep them sustained while doing the repairs?
Don't bother. Launch more space telescopes instead.
The "stupid" leaders you speak of have succeeded in creating the largest, most expensive, most powerful government AND world empire
There are two problems with your statement. First, you make it sound like a hard thing to do. To start such an empire is hard. But once it reaches a certain level of power and growth, it grows itself. The leaders just need to get out of the way. And that leads to the second problem. The current leaders aren't the ones who built the US as a society or empire. They're riding on past effort by better people and natural tendencies of growth.
That they're auguring this into the ground indicates that they are indeed as stupid as advertised.
There were a bunch of spy satellites which had the same structure, same optics more or less, and same fairing size as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) which were launched on a variety of vehicles (Shuttle, Titan IV, Delta IV Heavy).
Further, you mentioned mass. The HST weighed only 11 tonnes which is well in the range of more than half a dozen launch vehicles operating today as well as many more over the past thirty years. However, it's the physical dimensions which constrains the choice of launch vehicle. The Shuttle simply doesn't offer enough of an increase in fairing size to justify itself, especially given the launch vehicles that were eventually able to handle equivalent spy satellites.
Moving on, development of the Hubble was very expensive, estimated to be over $1.4 billion of $2.5 billion (with much of the development cost due to the launch delay from the Challenger accident). This is a one time cost. Thus, construction costs of the HST and of any additional telescopes would be on the order of $0.5-1 billion, depending on whether launch costs were included.
Since we have also five repair missions, which dependent on how you account for them, range from roughly $2.5 billion to $12.5 billion (reflecting the marginal cost of an additional mission $0.5 billion to marginal plus annual costs of $1.5 billion). Assuming that the Shuttle would have operated anyway, one gets $2.5 billion as roughly the launch costs of the additional missions. In addition, there are development costs with the original repair mission and additional equipment installed. So right here, we're looking at at least two telescopes. There are development (among other things to address optical and gyroscope issues found with the original HST) and launch costs which would still be several hundred million. So at least two telescopes in cost, possibly three once you including the higher development costs from the original launch delay due to dependence on the Shuttle.
If the HST actually had $0.5 in construction costs, then you might be look at 4 or 5 HST-equivalent telescopes which could be built and launched for the cost of the original HST's dependence on the Shuttle and subsequent repair missions.
All I need to show was how a non-zero amount of necks could be slit. I did that. Having to give one of your 50 vacation villas is still a loss.
The use of these terms does not imply a minor financial setback. Words have meaning. I think it's a retarded argument to say that you'll do all sorts of terrible things to the greedy rich and then we find out that your idea of terrible things is to burn down their summer mansion or a factory that they had written off a decade ago, and then say bad things about them.
But they're still rich and you're still poor.
My argument remains unchanged. A class war against the imaginary "greedy" and the mobile rich is just going to turn the hole you're in into a grave. In the end, you'll still have that lower standard of living. It's time to make choices that work in the long run.
1. Schedule: SLS is only a few months behind schedule (was due to fly by end of 2017 now planned for mid 2018) - and only because the Obama admin keeps choking it for cash and slow-walking the entire effort because the President is thin-skinned and hates that congress (including many democrats) ordered him to build it. Falcon9H on the other hand is several YEARS behind schedule and currently has a less-certain first-launch date.
Odds are good that Falcon Heavy launches in 2016 and can maintain a price point an order of magnitude before that of SLS. I think it's sick how the politicians can massively fund a competitor to the Falcon Heavy (while SpaceX funds development of the Falcon Heavy on its own dime) over the objections of NASA at vastly greater cost to the US and then have people like you gloss over those economic issues.
But if we just completely halt development of SLS, we would have over the next three years enough money (around $10 billion) to fund some serious deep space projects.
2. Class: SLS is a monster rocket, larger and much more capable than the Saturn V that put men on the moon. Falcon9H will struggle to carry as much as a Delta4H to the same orbits. In lifting capacity, the Falcon9H is a fraction of even the early version of SLS. In VOLUME, the Falcon9H is even worse. An SLS could replace the entire manned part of the ISS in just 2 launches.
First, that greater capacity comes in 2023 or later. It also comes at a vast cost.
The argument by spacex fanboys is that you can just divide the mass of what you want to launch and launch on a bunch of smaller rockets. This is a variation on the "mythical man month".
But it is true. You can do that. You don't need huge fairing size or payload size for most of the schemes that NASA wants to do. For a manned mission to Mars, the biggest indivisible payload is the human body. Even the heat shield can be assembled from smaller pieces in orbit. And the vast majority of payload is propellant which can be put up on the many 20-25 tons rockets out there.
Orbital assemble and fueling are technologies we need to develop further, whether or not we have the huge rocket. The huge rocket is not needed on the other hand.
2. Class: SLS is a monster rocket, larger and much more capable than the Saturn V that put men on the moon. Falcon9H will struggle to carry as much as a Delta4H to the same orbits. In lifting capacity, the Falcon9H is a fraction of even the early version of SLS. In VOLUME, the Falcon9H is even worse. An SLS could replace the entire manned part of the ISS in just 2 launches.
Falcon Heavy puts 50 tons to LEO. That's double what Delta IV Heavy does. And it looks like Falcon Heavy will do it at a lower total cost than Delta IV Heavy.
Further, you are making the half century old mistake of assuming capability is more important than utility. It doesn't matter how wonderful your rocket is, if you don't use those capabilities.
I'm not anti-spacex, just trying to knock some of the pot residue off the fanboy arguments. Truth is: we're gonna likely end-up with a mutant version of Constellation: Instead of a 10-meter diameter super-monster Ares V unmanned cargo launch vehicle partnered with crews on the skinny pencil Ares I, we are likely to see missions involving the sortof-monster 8.5-meter diameter SLS partnered with crews flying on Falcon (some missions can optimise SLS by flying unmanned and maxing-out the up-mass then having the crew and their capsule meet the SLS payload on-orbit as was the plan for Constellation)
I don't think we will end up with any part of the SLS. Due to those lower funding levels, the SLS is a bit more resistant to being scuttled, but I believe that will happen anyway. There's just too much money being squandered to do the SLS and have a viable space program. When in addition, we see vastly lower costs from Falcon Heavy, then I think the political support for SLS will evaporate.
It's unfortunate, it really is. I can still think of justification for a space-bus, regardless of costs.
But you can't disregard cost. Economics is key to understanding why we no longer launch the Space Shuttle or have a replacement reusable vehicle. In order for a reusable launch vehicle (RLV) to be competitive per launch with an expendable launch vehicle (ELV), the RLV needs to launch several dozen times a year.
With a small RLV, NASA probably could have afforded to maintain that high launch rate. But for the much larger Shuttle it just wasn't possible.
As to revisionist history, by 1990, it was clearly demonstrated that the Space Shuttle would not live up to its billing. It couldn't maintain the desired flight rate; it wasn't going to carry the desired payloads; and it didn't have the desired customers (the DOD stopped using the Shuttle shortly thereafter). Yet here we are 25 years later and NASA still doesn't have a replacement for the Shuttle.
With NASA's flat funding (for about four decades!), the money that would have gone into developing a Shuttle replacement and in running deep space manned missions instead went into Shuttle operations and the International Space Station (ISS) a remarkably expensive boondoggle.
NASA is again duplicating that failure mode with vast funding going to the Space Launch System even though there is no viable plan or funding for using the vehicle.
I dunno... The astronauts that repaired the Hubble might not have been able to do so on any other platform that was available at the time.
NASA could have launched two or three replacement space telescopes for the price of the Hubble repair missions. Even if your sole interest is in more scientific output, there were significant opportunity costs to using the Space Shuttle.
US aerospace is notorious for using regulation and bureaucracy to obstruct space activities. I have heard, for example, that one of the last Atlas II (operated by Lockheed Martin (LM)) launches in 2004 had been delayed for a few days by a bogus concern about battery issues. Apparently, the same company then proceeded to interfere with two Atlas III launches by expressing recycled concerns about the RD-180 rocket engines used on that rocket.
SpaceX has also had some of their earliest launches delayed due to games played by LM (story discusses a SpaceX Vandenberg launch first getting delayed in turn by a delay in a Titan IV launch operated by LM and then being kicked out of their launch facilities because LM was occupying a nearby launch facility).
No, Australia was founded by criminals. The USA was founded by people sick of being persecuted for their religious beliefs - who then turned around and persecuted people for their religious beliefs once they got some power.
Well, Georgia (of the US) was founded as a sort of prototype for Australia as a dumping ground for the "poor subjects" of the UK which included a few criminals. Maryland was also another big destination for exiled criminals.
And the degree of persecution depended on the state. Massachusetts was the most notorious, though there was religious persecution of one sort or another in the early decades of most of the original colonies. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island on the other hand were very liberal with explicit laws against religious persecution.
Methane has already been documented as flooding up from the Artic.
No, it hasn't. The rate of methane emissions have increased to some degree, but that's not the same as your alleged "flooding".
If you had actually watched the video, you would see that the Chicken Little in question merely said that he couldn't imagine anyone alive in 2030. I can imagine the things this guy isn't capable of imagining which solves the actual problem stated in the video.
And given that an elevated level of methane is not actually an existential threat (it just makes things a little warming, sea level a little higher, and interiors of continents a little drier), then not only is it not an existential threat, but there is a ready solution to the problem (namely, we can just move our climate sensitive species a few hundred km closer to the poles to compensate for the alleged extra global warming and maybe irrigate a little more) that doesn't require a lot of brain power to implement.
In summary, grow a backbone.
Obama resigned the US to defeat when he cancelled Project Constellation without extending the Space Shuttle program..
That's pretty clueless. Here's why. The Space Shuttle went nowhere after it demonstrated the conditional viability of reusable launch vehicles in the 80s. There's nothing that flew on the Shuttle that couldn't have been more cheaply flown on some other launch system. Further, the money spent on the Shuttle prevented the US from doing a lot of manned and unmanned work.
Constellation was no better for the same reasons. It's also worth noting that Constellation would not have survived competiton with the ULA launch vehicles (Atlas V and Delta IV), if the same cost and safety criteria had been applied to them as were applied to the ULA vehicles. However, the report that supposedly decided things in favor of the Constellation configurations (Shuttle-like stack), did so by deliberately understating risk of solid rocket motors, ignoring thrust oscillation of Ares I, and a few other deep problems of the configuration they chose. Then they came up with a completely bogus risk analysis to justify the choice they made.
We also ignore here that Bush did all the heavy lifting. By the time Obama came in, Shuttle and Constellation were both already walking dead.
SLS is a pale congressional substitute that is still being actively impeded and slow-walked by is cronies at NASA.
Crying shame really since we really need another dead end program to consume all that funding we could have used on real space projects. And it doesn't help that SLS is also underfunded by Congress, the only ones who claim to want it.
Actually, it was HAL. He was relaying a message, but he did radio that.