One that has no problem changing its beliefs? If you take someone else's word for something its faith so unless you understand why they are saying this is not the Boson they're looking for and how they got the evidence to come to that conclusion its faith for you.
Even if I was fully versed in all the physics, the engineering of the LHC and the detectors involved, and all statistical analysis, I'd still be taking their word that what they were saying actually happened. Without actually reproducing their experiment from the digging of the subterranean chamber on up, I would have to take their word for it.
So sure, it's trivially true to say that anything which you have not personally experienced* you are taking on "faith", but in saying so you have trivialized the meaning of "faith". "Thinking something to probably be true, pending anything contrary showing up" is not what most people mean when they say "faith". It is not what the OP meant.
* And of course even then, perception can be deceiving.
Science is "looking" for the Higgs Boson particle. They THINK (believe) it exists, but have no "Proof" it exists. They are falsifying NOTHING by looking for it.
Nonsense. The Higgs Boson is a predicted particle of the Standard Model, and the same theory which predicts it also constrains the energies over which it could exist. Many parts of this range have already been excluded. If all of this range is excluded, then they have falsified the prediction made by the Standard Model.
If something like the Higgs nevertheless exists, it isn't the one predicted by the Standard Model. That prediction will have been falsified.
But the point I was making was that people BELIEVE it exists, and are looking for it, without any proof that it DOES exist. In fact, we're spending BILLIONS of looking for it, so I actually hope they DO find it. But as of this moment, it makes a perfect example of where FAITH gets applied by those that deny it has any real value.
You're playing a semantic trick by going from "think" to "believe" to "faith", changing definitions at each step so you can use them as synonyms while the meaning you arrive at has no relationship to where we started.
Scientists think the Higgs Boson exists based on the many extensively verified predictions of the Standard Model. It is not faith, it is a guess educated by the very best knowledge available to humanity at this point in time. But because scientists do NOT have "faith" in the existence of the Higgs, they must test it because that is the only way to acquire the evidence they require. Scientists want to change think into know -- even if it's knowing that what they thought before was wrong.
That is not faith.
The only faith a scientist needs, if it can yet be called that, is the faith that the universe operates under rules that can be tested, and that human minds could eventually unravel the mysteries.
What kind of "faith" exposes itself to falsification through experimentation? What kind of "faith" in an entity has all of its greatest practitioners carving out all the places where we can be sure it doesn't exist, and prepared to face the potential truth that it simply doesn't at all? What kind of "faith" is based on making educated guesses at first, but ultimately wanting to know one way or another, of demanding evidence?
Oh right, no kind of faith. That's kinda what "faith" means.
that's just my opinion, but since we first started looking skyward (geocentric solar system debunked, etc.) we always seem to fall for the prejudice we are at the center of things happening. the big bang theory is simple an extension of this prejudice. the march of astronomical progress has always shown we aren't anywhere special, or any TIME special
Except modern cosmological theory, including and especially the Big Bang, are based on the assumption that we aren't at "the center", that we aren't at a special time or place.
Sounds like you just have misunderstood the theory and from that basis believe it to be bunk.
Because you were getting the glossy print for free before? Oh wait, you weren't.
No, you were getting it for the same price as you're paying now to not get it. So "print it yourself" only gives you the same thing you had before if printing is free. Get it? I know it was pretty subtle and complicated. I can maybe draw a diagram for you.
No, it's the case, people just like to get upset over government spending and the bailouts. I can't really say I blame them; no solution to the crisis that didn't end with bankers swinging from ropes would have really satisfied me. But unlike some people, I don't want to see the entire economy implode, so...
In essence, even if I can look through a search space a 1000 times as fast, that doesn't mean I will find a solution that is a 1000 times as good. But with access to both software and hardware improvements, substantial improvement may be possible.
That is in essence the problem with Kurzweil-style Singularity predictions. That exponential growth of computing power is somehow magic that will make everything possible.
Anyway, I personally think that the long term implications of this are a world kinda like Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, except the jobs of engineers and managers aren't safe either.
All invention(verb) is a mental process. Not all inventions(noun) are mental processes.
This is the very similar to the difference between something that can be described by math (the parabolic path of a thrown baseball), and things that are math (the actual math of the parabola, as expressed in a symbolic language).
Software is math. Software is a mental process. Software patents are patents on math. Software patents are in fact the problem.
Lousy non-software patents are also a problem, but a different one.
I'd take the kinesthetic experience of the MIG over the balloony visuals any day.
I'll take whatever gets me the closest to seeing the planet earth from space, soonest, and cheapest. I'll worry about other considerations like how exciting the ride itself later when picking my 2nd and subsequent trips. So let's see how it shakes out...
Mig-29: 22km, available today, $25,000 (see the "price list".pdf link, last page).
Bloon: 36 km, 2013-2015, and $150,000.
The Bloon has a significant altitude advantage, but that's irrelevant compared to the price difference! It may get cheaper at some point in the future, but that just means it fails on the 'soonest' criterion. Sure, I may not exactly have $25k (+ travel) lying around to spend on a Mig-29 flight, but it's clearly the best, most feasible option for me in the near future.
The Mig-29 wins! Then the fact that it's a jet fighter is just awesome-icing on the awesome-cake.:)
What about the U-2? (the spyplane, not the awful band)
Wait wait, let's not be hasty. I would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the high-altitude gliding capabilities of these two options. You know, for, uh, science.
Maybe you didn't mean machines (even though you said machines). Maybe you meant missions. 2/135 of them ended with the complete obliteration of the crew.
They meant machines, and the way you evaluate the record of the machines is failures/missions. Not failures/machines.
You wouldn't say the PDP-11 was a bad machine because 99.9% of them are defunct, or that Toyota Tercels were unreliable because 95% of them are in the scrapyard. You'd talk about MTBF, or miles driven. It's the work you get out of the machine before failure that counts. Especially when the chance of failure occurs when you use it, not as a consequence of its existence.
Think about it: If NASA had flown the same missions with the same success rate but did it with fewer orbiters, that would make this failure metric worse. It makes no sense.
Of course 'nearly perfect' is still the wrong word. 'Commensurate with the success rates of other successful vehicles' is. Which is pretty damn amazing given the bizarre design decisions and tradeoffs involved in the shuttle. And the cultural problems in NASA revealed by the Challenger investigation...
That's a stupid and irrelevant way to judge the record of the vehicles, though. The chance of failure is per mission, not per vehicle. Even the best, most reliable vehicle with a 99.999% success rate will eventually fail given enough missions, ergo the failure rate for the best machine ever would still approach 100%. In the case of the shuttle, the same mission record but with fewer orbiters built would mean the failure rate is higher. Clearly this metric is not telling us anything useful.
Then consider how for a vehicle that does not make use of re-usable parts, the 'failures per vehicle' metric would be the same as 'failures per mission', giving numbers very similar to the Shuttle's failures per mission record, and it's clear what the better metric is.
I'd like to know who believes that crap? Those that do should emulate Heavens Gate. I mean Time Cube is probably more believable. Religious Nuts have been predicting the End since before Christianity was a gleam in Zoroaster's eye. How many times has it come true?
Seventeen times, which is pretty awful when you consider how many times it has been predicted throughout history.
From TFA, quoting Don Yeomans, a scientist at NASA JPL:
"So you've got a modest-sized icy dirtball that is getting no closer than 35 million kilometers [about 22 million miles)," said Yeomans. "It will have an immeasurably miniscule influence on our planet. By comparison, my subcompact automobile exerts a greater influence on the ocean's tides than comet Elenin ever will."
ZOMG! That damn scientist's car is changing the earth's tides, and the bastard admits it!
So "these prices are not arbitrary, premised on capturing a dominant share of the market, or âoeteaserâ rates meant to lure in an eager market only to be increased later"; perhaps not, but you already announce that SpaceX will cover any cost overruns and will pay for them "themselves", i.e. the customer after you will pay for them.
Or by taking less profits (or more loss), like most companies do when their cost to provide a service is not aligned with what they are able to sell the service for.
This notion that if a company's costs increase for any reason, that cost will necessarily be passed on to the customer makes the illogical un-capitalistic assumption that the company is not already charging as much as they can without reducing sales such that they make less money.
In other words, it assumes that the company has not already tried to optimize their price structure in order to maximize revenue.
If costs increase such that that optimized revenue is less than the costs, then the company just takes a loss. Jacking up prices to try to cover the cost will just mean they end up taking in less revenue, for a greater loss.
So the only way it makes sense to charge one price now but increase it later if there are cost overruns is if the current price is a "teaser", and they planned to increase costs to what the market will actually bear later. If you believe them when they say that's not the case, if you believe that they think the price they are planning to charge is the price they believe will get them the most revenue (i.e. you believe their accountants and business planners know what they are doing), then no, you should not expect them to jack up prices just because they take a loss on some missions.
But if the great evil were unleashed, surely Nintendo could just release a plumber, a green-kitted blonde kid and a few small animals with superpowers to go and deal with it? Should sort out the issue in a couple of days, I reckon.
Yeah, but things often don't work out so well in the meantime, like the kid has to travel to the future to defeat the evil, so we're all stuck under the Ultimate Evil's thumb for a decade. Or the whole world gets flooded and the kid doesn't show up to save us for a thousand years or something.
Smaller rockets probably won't shorten the time line because smaller rockets don't address the issue of doing all the engineering and development of the spacecraft, lander, etc...
Right, but you also don't have to engineer a new ultra-heavy lift launcher, which demands a massive amount of attention and resources, and essentially gates off the development of the other components, as in Constellation where because they were useless until the Big Rocket was built, capsule development was in its early stages while the Big Rocket continued to lag behind schedule.
So yes, total development time will likely be less since work can start immediately on the actual mission, not on escaping our gravity well.
if you're just talking "light" versus "heavy", where both are rockets that actually exist, and in the context of using LEO as a staging area, then fine, but either way those will be "smaller" than the non-existent ultra-heavy rocket needed for a single-launch direct-to-Mars mission. And it is that difference, not the particulars of exactly what rocket you use to assemble your mission in LEO, where the time savings and vastly increased scope come from.
Smaller rockets will however make the mission more complicated and heavier because things that can be done simply on the ground now have to be done in orbit. Smaller rockets also considerably increase mission risk - because the chance of loss increases with each launch added to the manifest.
Not all loss is the same, and not all missions are the same. The loss of a single component is less disastrous than losing the entire mission stack and the astronauts. Oh sure you might miss your launch window, but with only one component to replace the odds of getting back on schedule in time for the next one are increased, and the impetus to do so more likely to remain. Especially if the loss occurs on a launch that is only carrying fuel, water, or other supplies. Lose the whole mission -- and human lives -- to a failure and the odds of getting ready in time for the next window are nil, and the odds of the mission continuing at all rather slim.
And as far as the actual trip itself, you've increased the chance of success for the final step because you've decoupled it from the hardest part, the trip out of LEO.
Then there's the fact that the missions just aren't the same at all. You can have a lower probability of complete failure for a tiny "Yes we technically set foot on Mars" mission, or you can have a higher probability of partial failure for a mission of vastly expanded scope.
No, they aren't. If you don't have a clear goal and a clear timetable to accomplish it by, then you're not going to achieve the goal, or if you do it'll take far longer than it should.
Oh yes they are, because they cripple the goal in the name of clarity of scope and timetable. These kinds of goals by necessity require an expedient and practical solution that gets us from point A to point B, where point B is much less ambitious than it could be if you bothered to increase your capabilities.
Goals are great. "Functional LEO assembly/refueling stations" is a clear goal, and you can have clear timetables and success criterion. "Go to Mars" is great as a general goal, something you have in mind when building the LEO shipyard, but yes it is stupid to get specific with time and scope until you've developed the capabilities because those parameters will drastically change.
There's a big difference between "a goal" as in a purpose, and this kind of goal. It seems like throughout your post you aren't distinguishing between them. If this is my fault I apologize, but let me be absolutely clear that I am distinguishing.
Just look at the Apollo missions. JFK says we'll go to the moon within the decade, and sure enough, with plenty of money and effort, they got to the moon when a decade before human spaceflight was a fantasy.
Extremely impressive for its time, yet because we're still limited to launching things as a whole out of the deepest gravity well of any rocky body in the solar system, we aren't going to get much past it. Looking at Apollo is exactly what you'll think you're doing when you see astronauts leave bootprints, plant a flag, and leave because that's all the mission scope that could be launched in a monolithic rocket.
To build up capabilities, you need to have a clear mission. What's the mission for "assemble craft in orbit"? That's not a mission, there's no goal there. No non-technical person is going to see the need for that, or why it's even useful. What are these craft for? Where are they going?
But it's the technical people actually doing the work who are hamstrung by this "clear goal"! They're the ones who have to look at what they have, where they have to be, and the time they have to do it and decide what they have to do to meet the demand. Hint: It's never going to be running off and developing general-purpose capabilities even if they would eventually make the mission much easier, because to the ones watching the clock and purse strings they will always seem like an unnecessary distraction from the clear A-to-B goal.
As for everyone else, how hard is it to explain that the purpose of the orbiting shipyard is to enable a Mars mission with broader scope than would be possible otherwise? Oh wait, I just did!
A vague "We're doing it to go to Mars!" goal should be fine for the public, but having a specific goal is crippling to the people who actually have to work toward it!
Basically, to make an analogy, you're talking about building a ship before you've come up with any ideas about where to sail it. Or building a car when there's no roads to drive it on.
Noooooo, there's plenty of ideas for where to sail it, and the possibilities are vast. This mandate, on the other hand, is like suggesting that we sail to one specific island on a specific date before we've invented the ocean-worthy sailing vessel, and since there's no time to do that and meet the timetable we're going to have to use a canoe.
So yes, better LEO (or other orbital) capabilities are important, but you're not going to sell the public, or really anyone outside of NASA, on "building capabilities". "Let's go to Mars!" however, has a much better chance of getting popular support, and then the details of the mission (e.g. developing the capabilities you talk of) can be ha
So at what point do we say "okay, enough has advanced -- now let's start doing something"?
When we've established LEO as the starting point it should be: the gateway to the solar system. Not before.
Once any such "let's go to the moon" or "let's go to Mars" mandate can start with the assumption that the actual mission will begin from LEO, with all components and fuel lifted by as many commercial rockets as necessary, so we aren't constricted by the exponential bottleneck of what we can lift out of our gravity well in one shot.
That's when.
To put it in technology terms, it's like trying to build a modern microprocessor before you've invented CMOS. If you broke the bank, you might be able to pull it off, but the result is necessarily going to be vastly under-performing compared to what you could have done if you did things in the right order. Oh and because in this analogy Intel is run by Congress, it also gets canceled long before you even get to see even that mediocre result.
The right time to do all of these things is when we have the correct capabilities to be able to do them easier, faster, cheaper, and with a snowball's chance in hell of sneaking past the Congressional ADD.
Of course one should never underestimate Congress' ability to screw things up, as they demonstrate by mandating the Heavy Pork Distributor at the expense of developing these essential capabilities.
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One that has no problem changing its beliefs? If you take someone else's word for something its faith so unless you understand why they are saying this is not the Boson they're looking for and how they got the evidence to come to that conclusion its faith for you.
Even if I was fully versed in all the physics, the engineering of the LHC and the detectors involved, and all statistical analysis, I'd still be taking their word that what they were saying actually happened. Without actually reproducing their experiment from the digging of the subterranean chamber on up, I would have to take their word for it.
So sure, it's trivially true to say that anything which you have not personally experienced* you are taking on "faith", but in saying so you have trivialized the meaning of "faith". "Thinking something to probably be true, pending anything contrary showing up" is not what most people mean when they say "faith". It is not what the OP meant.
* And of course even then, perception can be deceiving.
Read their other replies; they aren't joking.
Science is "looking" for the Higgs Boson particle. They THINK (believe) it exists, but have no "Proof" it exists. They are falsifying NOTHING by looking for it.
Nonsense. The Higgs Boson is a predicted particle of the Standard Model, and the same theory which predicts it also constrains the energies over which it could exist. Many parts of this range have already been excluded. If all of this range is excluded, then they have falsified the prediction made by the Standard Model.
If something like the Higgs nevertheless exists, it isn't the one predicted by the Standard Model. That prediction will have been falsified.
But the point I was making was that people BELIEVE it exists, and are looking for it, without any proof that it DOES exist. In fact, we're spending BILLIONS of looking for it, so I actually hope they DO find it. But as of this moment, it makes a perfect example of where FAITH gets applied by those that deny it has any real value.
You're playing a semantic trick by going from "think" to "believe" to "faith", changing definitions at each step so you can use them as synonyms while the meaning you arrive at has no relationship to where we started.
Scientists think the Higgs Boson exists based on the many extensively verified predictions of the Standard Model. It is not faith, it is a guess educated by the very best knowledge available to humanity at this point in time. But because scientists do NOT have "faith" in the existence of the Higgs, they must test it because that is the only way to acquire the evidence they require. Scientists want to change think into know -- even if it's knowing that what they thought before was wrong.
That is not faith.
The only faith a scientist needs, if it can yet be called that, is the faith that the universe operates under rules that can be tested, and that human minds could eventually unravel the mysteries.
What kind of "faith" exposes itself to falsification through experimentation? What kind of "faith" in an entity has all of its greatest practitioners carving out all the places where we can be sure it doesn't exist, and prepared to face the potential truth that it simply doesn't at all? What kind of "faith" is based on making educated guesses at first, but ultimately wanting to know one way or another, of demanding evidence?
Oh right, no kind of faith. That's kinda what "faith" means.
But go ahead and keep on projecting.
that's just my opinion, but since we first started looking skyward (geocentric solar system debunked, etc.) we always seem to fall for the prejudice we are at the center of things happening. the big bang theory is simple an extension of this prejudice. the march of astronomical progress has always shown we aren't anywhere special, or any TIME special
Except modern cosmological theory, including and especially the Big Bang, are based on the assumption that we aren't at "the center", that we aren't at a special time or place.
Sounds like you just have misunderstood the theory and from that basis believe it to be bunk.
Because you were getting the glossy print for free before? Oh wait, you weren't.
No, you were getting it for the same price as you're paying now to not get it. So "print it yourself" only gives you the same thing you had before if printing is free. Get it? I know it was pretty subtle and complicated. I can maybe draw a diagram for you.
Many of the problems we face as a society will not be solved by buying a solution from the local supermarket
Oh, don't I know it! The hypersonic jet I bought from H.E.B. didn't even make it off the ground!
No, it's the case, people just like to get upset over government spending and the bailouts. I can't really say I blame them; no solution to the crisis that didn't end with bankers swinging from ropes would have really satisfied me. But unlike some people, I don't want to see the entire economy implode, so...
In essence, even if I can look through a search space a 1000 times as fast, that doesn't mean I will find a solution that is a 1000 times as good. But with access to both software and hardware improvements, substantial improvement may be possible.
That is in essence the problem with Kurzweil-style Singularity predictions. That exponential growth of computing power is somehow magic that will make everything possible.
Anyway, I personally think that the long term implications of this are a world kinda like Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, except the jobs of engineers and managers aren't safe either.
All invention is a mental process.
All invention(verb) is a mental process. Not all inventions(noun) are mental processes.
This is the very similar to the difference between something that can be described by math (the parabolic path of a thrown baseball), and things that are math (the actual math of the parabola, as expressed in a symbolic language).
Software is math. Software is a mental process. Software patents are patents on math. Software patents are in fact the problem.
Lousy non-software patents are also a problem, but a different one.
Oh they're supposed to be Standfor and Hardvar? I've been saying them wrong all these years!
You use space ponies. Duh.
I'd take the kinesthetic experience of the MIG over the balloony visuals any day.
I'll take whatever gets me the closest to seeing the planet earth from space, soonest, and cheapest. I'll worry about other considerations like how exciting the ride itself later when picking my 2nd and subsequent trips. So let's see how it shakes out...
Mig-29: 22km, available today, $25,000 (see the "price list" .pdf link, last page).
Bloon: 36 km, 2013-2015, and $150,000.
The Bloon has a significant altitude advantage, but that's irrelevant compared to the price difference! It may get cheaper at some point in the future, but that just means it fails on the 'soonest' criterion. Sure, I may not exactly have $25k (+ travel) lying around to spend on a Mig-29 flight, but it's clearly the best, most feasible option for me in the near future.
The Mig-29 wins! Then the fact that it's a jet fighter is just awesome-icing on the awesome-cake. :)
What about the U-2? (the spyplane, not the awful band)
Wait wait, let's not be hasty. I would like to see a side-by-side comparison of the high-altitude gliding capabilities of these two options. You know, for, uh, science.
Maybe you didn't mean machines (even though you said machines). Maybe you meant missions. 2/135 of them ended with the complete obliteration of the crew.
They meant machines, and the way you evaluate the record of the machines is failures/missions. Not failures/machines.
You wouldn't say the PDP-11 was a bad machine because 99.9% of them are defunct, or that Toyota Tercels were unreliable because 95% of them are in the scrapyard. You'd talk about MTBF, or miles driven. It's the work you get out of the machine before failure that counts. Especially when the chance of failure occurs when you use it, not as a consequence of its existence.
Think about it: If NASA had flown the same missions with the same success rate but did it with fewer orbiters, that would make this failure metric worse. It makes no sense.
Of course 'nearly perfect' is still the wrong word. 'Commensurate with the success rates of other successful vehicles' is. Which is pretty damn amazing given the bizarre design decisions and tradeoffs involved in the shuttle. And the cultural problems in NASA revealed by the Challenger investigation...
That's a stupid and irrelevant way to judge the record of the vehicles, though. The chance of failure is per mission, not per vehicle. Even the best, most reliable vehicle with a 99.999% success rate will eventually fail given enough missions, ergo the failure rate for the best machine ever would still approach 100%. In the case of the shuttle, the same mission record but with fewer orbiters built would mean the failure rate is higher. Clearly this metric is not telling us anything useful.
Then consider how for a vehicle that does not make use of re-usable parts, the 'failures per vehicle' metric would be the same as 'failures per mission', giving numbers very similar to the Shuttle's failures per mission record, and it's clear what the better metric is.
I'd like to know who believes that crap? Those that do should emulate Heavens Gate. I mean Time Cube is probably more believable. Religious Nuts have been predicting the End since before Christianity was a gleam in Zoroaster's eye. How many times has it come true?
Seventeen times, which is pretty awful when you consider how many times it has been predicted throughout history.
From TFA, quoting Don Yeomans, a scientist at NASA JPL:
"So you've got a modest-sized icy dirtball that is getting no closer than 35 million kilometers [about 22 million miles)," said Yeomans. "It will have an immeasurably miniscule influence on our planet. By comparison, my subcompact automobile exerts a greater influence on the ocean's tides than comet Elenin ever will."
ZOMG! That damn scientist's car is changing the earth's tides, and the bastard admits it!
So "these prices are not arbitrary, premised on capturing a dominant share of the market, or âoeteaserâ rates meant to lure in an eager market only to be increased later"; perhaps not, but you already announce that SpaceX will cover any cost overruns and will pay for them "themselves", i.e. the customer after you will pay for them.
Or by taking less profits (or more loss), like most companies do when their cost to provide a service is not aligned with what they are able to sell the service for.
This notion that if a company's costs increase for any reason, that cost will necessarily be passed on to the customer makes the illogical un-capitalistic assumption that the company is not already charging as much as they can without reducing sales such that they make less money.
In other words, it assumes that the company has not already tried to optimize their price structure in order to maximize revenue.
If costs increase such that that optimized revenue is less than the costs, then the company just takes a loss. Jacking up prices to try to cover the cost will just mean they end up taking in less revenue, for a greater loss.
So the only way it makes sense to charge one price now but increase it later if there are cost overruns is if the current price is a "teaser", and they planned to increase costs to what the market will actually bear later. If you believe them when they say that's not the case, if you believe that they think the price they are planning to charge is the price they believe will get them the most revenue (i.e. you believe their accountants and business planners know what they are doing), then no, you should not expect them to jack up prices just because they take a loss on some missions.
People will argue about nearly anything, or brutally shoehorn [politically-charged-topic] into any discussion.
No, we won't! That's exactly the kind of stupidity I'd expect from the pro-offshore-drilling astroturfers, though.
Did they seriously adapt "Well if I'm such a dummy and you're talking to me then what does that make you?" to the courtroom?
But if the great evil were unleashed, surely Nintendo could just release a plumber, a green-kitted blonde kid and a few small animals with superpowers to go and deal with it? Should sort out the issue in a couple of days, I reckon.
Yeah, but things often don't work out so well in the meantime, like the kid has to travel to the future to defeat the evil, so we're all stuck under the Ultimate Evil's thumb for a decade. Or the whole world gets flooded and the kid doesn't show up to save us for a thousand years or something.
Smaller rockets probably won't shorten the time line because smaller rockets don't address the issue of doing all the engineering and development of the spacecraft, lander, etc...
Right, but you also don't have to engineer a new ultra-heavy lift launcher, which demands a massive amount of attention and resources, and essentially gates off the development of the other components, as in Constellation where because they were useless until the Big Rocket was built, capsule development was in its early stages while the Big Rocket continued to lag behind schedule.
So yes, total development time will likely be less since work can start immediately on the actual mission, not on escaping our gravity well.
if you're just talking "light" versus "heavy", where both are rockets that actually exist, and in the context of using LEO as a staging area, then fine, but either way those will be "smaller" than the non-existent ultra-heavy rocket needed for a single-launch direct-to-Mars mission. And it is that difference, not the particulars of exactly what rocket you use to assemble your mission in LEO, where the time savings and vastly increased scope come from.
Smaller rockets will however make the mission more complicated and heavier because things that can be done simply on the ground now have to be done in orbit. Smaller rockets also considerably increase mission risk - because the chance of loss increases with each launch added to the manifest.
Not all loss is the same, and not all missions are the same. The loss of a single component is less disastrous than losing the entire mission stack and the astronauts. Oh sure you might miss your launch window, but with only one component to replace the odds of getting back on schedule in time for the next one are increased, and the impetus to do so more likely to remain. Especially if the loss occurs on a launch that is only carrying fuel, water, or other supplies. Lose the whole mission -- and human lives -- to a failure and the odds of getting ready in time for the next window are nil, and the odds of the mission continuing at all rather slim.
And as far as the actual trip itself, you've increased the chance of success for the final step because you've decoupled it from the hardest part, the trip out of LEO.
Then there's the fact that the missions just aren't the same at all. You can have a lower probability of complete failure for a tiny "Yes we technically set foot on Mars" mission, or you can have a higher probability of partial failure for a mission of vastly expanded scope.
No, they aren't. If you don't have a clear goal and a clear timetable to accomplish it by, then you're not going to achieve the goal, or if you do it'll take far longer than it should.
Oh yes they are, because they cripple the goal in the name of clarity of scope and timetable. These kinds of goals by necessity require an expedient and practical solution that gets us from point A to point B, where point B is much less ambitious than it could be if you bothered to increase your capabilities.
Goals are great. "Functional LEO assembly/refueling stations" is a clear goal, and you can have clear timetables and success criterion. "Go to Mars" is great as a general goal, something you have in mind when building the LEO shipyard, but yes it is stupid to get specific with time and scope until you've developed the capabilities because those parameters will drastically change.
There's a big difference between "a goal" as in a purpose, and this kind of goal. It seems like throughout your post you aren't distinguishing between them. If this is my fault I apologize, but let me be absolutely clear that I am distinguishing.
Just look at the Apollo missions. JFK says we'll go to the moon within the decade, and sure enough, with plenty of money and effort, they got to the moon when a decade before human spaceflight was a fantasy.
Extremely impressive for its time, yet because we're still limited to launching things as a whole out of the deepest gravity well of any rocky body in the solar system, we aren't going to get much past it. Looking at Apollo is exactly what you'll think you're doing when you see astronauts leave bootprints, plant a flag, and leave because that's all the mission scope that could be launched in a monolithic rocket.
To build up capabilities, you need to have a clear mission. What's the mission for "assemble craft in orbit"? That's not a mission, there's no goal there. No non-technical person is going to see the need for that, or why it's even useful. What are these craft for? Where are they going?
But it's the technical people actually doing the work who are hamstrung by this "clear goal"! They're the ones who have to look at what they have, where they have to be, and the time they have to do it and decide what they have to do to meet the demand. Hint: It's never going to be running off and developing general-purpose capabilities even if they would eventually make the mission much easier, because to the ones watching the clock and purse strings they will always seem like an unnecessary distraction from the clear A-to-B goal.
As for everyone else, how hard is it to explain that the purpose of the orbiting shipyard is to enable a Mars mission with broader scope than would be possible otherwise? Oh wait, I just did!
A vague "We're doing it to go to Mars!" goal should be fine for the public, but having a specific goal is crippling to the people who actually have to work toward it!
Basically, to make an analogy, you're talking about building a ship before you've come up with any ideas about where to sail it. Or building a car when there's no roads to drive it on.
Noooooo, there's plenty of ideas for where to sail it, and the possibilities are vast. This mandate, on the other hand, is like suggesting that we sail to one specific island on a specific date before we've invented the ocean-worthy sailing vessel, and since there's no time to do that and meet the timetable we're going to have to use a canoe.
So yes, better LEO (or other orbital) capabilities are important, but you're not going to sell the public, or really anyone outside of NASA, on "building capabilities". "Let's go to Mars!" however, has a much better chance of getting popular support, and then the details of the mission (e.g. developing the capabilities you talk of) can be ha
So at what point do we say "okay, enough has advanced -- now let's start doing something"?
When we've established LEO as the starting point it should be: the gateway to the solar system. Not before.
Once any such "let's go to the moon" or "let's go to Mars" mandate can start with the assumption that the actual mission will begin from LEO, with all components and fuel lifted by as many commercial rockets as necessary, so we aren't constricted by the exponential bottleneck of what we can lift out of our gravity well in one shot.
That's when.
To put it in technology terms, it's like trying to build a modern microprocessor before you've invented CMOS. If you broke the bank, you might be able to pull it off, but the result is necessarily going to be vastly under-performing compared to what you could have done if you did things in the right order. Oh and because in this analogy Intel is run by Congress, it also gets canceled long before you even get to see even that mediocre result.
The right time to do all of these things is when we have the correct capabilities to be able to do them easier, faster, cheaper, and with a snowball's chance in hell of sneaking past the Congressional ADD.
Of course one should never underestimate Congress' ability to screw things up, as they demonstrate by mandating the Heavy Pork Distributor at the expense of developing these essential capabilities.