If you want to give credit where credit is due, the man who started it all was Werner Von Braun with the support of four presidents starting with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.
Kennedy gets a lot of credit for launching Apollo, but Eisenhower was responsible for starting the space program in the first place, and Von Braun made it possible.
At the risk of injecting politics into this discussion, it seems to me that one point has been missed.
Most hard-core SF was written during and in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War. All of it escapist, much of it focusing on how humanity carries on after the dawn of the 21st century and presumably civilization as we know it has been destroyed.
For people looking beyond the horrifying news on the television, SF was a ray of hope.
Unfortunately (for SF), the Cold War ended and the world as we know it was utterly changed - but not because of world war or nuclear conflict. It was changed largely by the collapse of Communism (outside China and its satellites), removing the immediate threat, and thus the foundation for much of the SF we've all grown to know and enjoy.
Lacking the need for escape from our current situation into the future, and given the high-tech world that has been thrust upon us in the past decade (as has been noted elsewhere), it seems not unreasonable that Fantasy fiction, especially that espoused by Tolkien and Rowling, would take the fore over hard SF, at least for the moment.
Someone will probably point out that 9-11 and its aftermath are in fact World War III (or IV, depending upon how you count it), and this should be driving us to some sort of outlet that frees us from the daily drumbeat in the news.
But instead of Heinlein and Asimov, we're getting Harry Potter and a fish called Nemo... And it works, because these depict simpler themes of good and evil, courage and fear, and the ability of ordinary people (or young wizards or, well, fish) to overcome incredible obstacles placed before them.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened. During the peak of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800's, amid motorcars, steam-powered factories, and crazy folk attempting to fly like birds, there was counter-revolution of sorts where people looked for craftsmanship and simplicity in their homes and furnishings, first in England, later in the U.S. It banished the sameness of mass-production and replaced it with objects that had the appearance of being, or were in fact, unique.
We live in similar times - only now the personal computer and the internet are the invading technology. It should come as no surprise that people have had enough and need an escape to simpler, less stressful things.
But I would also predict that this is only temporary. We're taking a breather as the next phase of technological development gathers itself together. When it will happen, I don't know, but when it comes to Sci-Fi, I would suggest that a gentleman and his team working in the Mojave desert of all places may unleash the next wave. Or maybe not. We'll see.
Why do you suppose Apple has been pitching to the home and graphics communities for so long ? It's because neither cares for Wintel and both can tolerate less-than-spectacular performance to varying degrees. Apple has lacked the resources to attack the enterprise market, and their hardware didn't measure up to the engineering/scientific market sufficiently to compete effectively with Wintel. Neither is the case now.
While I'm not going to jump the gun and suggest that this is It, I do believe we're seeing the first hint of a long-overdue revitalization of the Macintosh product line. If IBM is indeed able to go to 3GHz in 12 months and Apple can produce compelling hardware with the PPC970 and its descendants (both of which seem reasonable at the moment), we might be looking at the beginning of a trend towards the enterprise market.
As for CATIA and Pro/E, if the customers demand it, Dassault and Parametric Technologies will eventually get on board. Both have their primary foundation in Unix hardware and neither will have a difficult time making an X-windows port. Ask Mathworks, Inc. Why do you suppose Apple put out X11? To appeal to Linux geeks?(yes, but only in part)
Sun should indeed be worried about now, especially considering that there's no reason on earth for Apple to neglect its server and laptop lines with this new chip. Add in the overwhelming presence of Microsoft-based server products and you have a hard time seeing where Sun fits in the long term.
Reusable? A tiny fraction of what's launched actually returns in reusable form. The costs for transporting and overhauling the 30 year old shuttles between launches probably costs MORE than building new ones.
Only the External Tank is expended. SRB electronic and mechanical hardware is refurbished after each flight before being returned to service. The SRB casings are good for about 5 flights. Orbiter consumables are RCS and APU propellant, LH2 and LOX for the fuel cells, food for the crew, and lithium hydroxide canisters (used to scrub C02 from the cabin air). Contrary to your contention, most of the non-reactive mass of the vehicle is reused, and by far the majority of the capital value of the vehicle is returned.
Secondly, the vehicles are only 20 some years old now, with the first flight of Columbia occuring in 1981.
And last, IIRC, the vehicles cost about $4B each. Turnaround and launch costs are high, but they're not that high.
The problem is that NASA made them too high-maintenance.
That they did - largely because they didn't know that the Shuttle would be the last vehicle they would build for thirty years. And not much has changed since then. NASA has done a fabulous job keeping these vehicles flying, but they have been totally unable to improve them significantly because of the risk involved in making a change to a proven, if complex vehicle. (except when prodded by catastrophic failures, unfortunately)
Yet not a single SLI concept will ever become reality. Revolutionary change is too difficult unless somone other than NASA does it. An outside agency or corporation could build a brand-new vehicle, but NASA cannot. Not because it is incompetent, but because it is incapable of changing itself as an institution to accommodate the needs of a substantially different vehicle.
It is capable of evolving over time, however. Therein lies hope for the future.
I fully agree with the article's point, that an automated human escape mechanism is required in reusable space flight vehicles. Heck, even Star Trek has escape pods.
This is all well and good, but it's heavy. A crew escape system was envisioned for the shuttle at the outset, but it could not tolerate the additional weight required to implement it. Little has changed in the last twenty years. Certainly physics has not.
The better solution - still heavy - is to develop technologies that increase the overall reliability to the point that a crew escape system is redundant. You have neither ejection seats nor parachutes on a 777. None are needed because the probability of catastrophic failure is infinitesimal (you stand a better chance of getting hit by lightning).
Get rid of the SRBs in favor of almost any liquid-fueled booster and you bump up flight safety considerably. Improve the TPS and you get another improvement. Attack the problem areas - including the ones that aren't as obvious as the above until you increase the reliability to at least that of a jet fighter (that does have ejection seats) or a helicopter (that does not). Making a vehicle as safe as a commercial jet transport would be the ultimate goal, but it is probably a long way off.
IMHO, NASA will build another vehicle, sooner rather than later, and to the disappointment of many, it will more strongly resemble what we have today than any of the SLI pipe dreams you saw in this article. But a new vehicle will happen - that much is assured by the loss of Columbia. We can only hope that NASA applies the lessons of its experience with the current shuttle to future vehicles.
I have. I study economics for a hobby. Keynes and Marx were wrong. Try reading Milton Friedman's works instead. Next ?
At least they [Sweden] know how to put them to work without risking a collapse of emergency rooms
You're an economics expert. Explain to me why emergency rooms collapse when the states offer free health care to illegal immigrants (or anybody). Hint: laws of supply and demand do not go away just because the government passes a law making them illegal.
So let me get this straight, you want the U.S. to tax less than every other industrialized nation?
Absolutely. Why should we burden ourselves with the stupid notions of the rest of the world, Europe in particular? We're not the world's last remaining superpower for nothing, and part of the reason why is because we don't have a strongly progressive tax code that punishes innovation and entrepreneurial activity.
...[you think] we need to ratchet reverse brain-drain to the maximum levels and replace all our IT jobs with H1-B positions?
If you're looking for sympathy for "IT Professionals" try somewhere else. I don't care for illegal immigration, but if legal immigrants can get jobs in this country because they have more talent and education than the locals, so be it. If I lose my job because I don't educate myself and continuously prove that I'm worth what they pay me, it's my fault.
Look, we've veered 'way off topic here. California is the most distressed state in the country because its inane government spends too much and taxes its citizens (with highly progressive taxes) into the ground in a vain attempt to pay the bills. Adopting Swedish taxation methods will not solve their problems. People and businesses are mobile and will find other places to live and work rather than put up with such nonsense. Cutting state spending and cleaning up their tax code will make great improvements in their financial picture and attract people and businesses back into the state.
The recent move to 'enforce' taxes on internet purchases won't raise anywhere near as much as they hope. Anyone who buys in-state is already paying sales taxes. More people will be encouraged to buy from sources outside the state rather than paying the double-whammy of tax and shipping. More likely, revenues from internet purchases will decline as a result.
And yes, I have lived there, suffered their taxes, and am glad that I now live elsewhere. The pleasant weather is not enough to make me want to put up with the hassle of outrageous home prices, miserable taxes, noxious air pollution, and ridiculous traffic.
Me ? Wrong ? All the time, in fact. But not at the moment.
How do you suppose progressive taxation actually helps small business ? As a business makes more money (i.e., they grow and evolve), they are taxed more heavily, thus making it less rewarding to make more income. Small businesses in particular are sensitive to progressivity in the tax code because they are less able to increase their prices to the consumer - who will walk, not run, to their nearest Wal Mart, Home Depot, or ebay to get a better price. Thus, the incentive to grow and produce more is stifled. Multiplied by the thousands of small businesses out there, this effect results in lower economic growth. This has been proven time and time again, and why so many people don't get it is a complete mystery to me.
As for illegals, to my knowledge, no one is brought in against their will. They're coming here for some reason, and not Sweden.
And as far as stupid taxpayers go, Quick question: Did you pay taxes this year ? Or did you get a refund because you outsmarted the IRS ?
Answer: lots of smart people will tell you it was the latter without realizing that what they got back was their own money that they paid to the treasury over and above what they owed.
As to your last comment, I am not jesting. It's not funny, and the continuous popular misunderstanding about the nature of taxation and spending by government boggles my mind.
We need government. It provides a framework that protects us from outside adversaries (...provide for the common defense, U.S. Constitution, preamble) and conduct relations with other nations (...shall have the power...to make treaties, Article II, section 2) , and keeps the peace within, otherwise known as "the rule of law" (...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, preamble). But aside from these vital pursuits, government is a drag on the economy.
Government spending picks winners and losers based on the fiat of legislatures. The free market rewards good ideas and products by buying more of them, it punishes dumb ideas and useless products by ignoring them. A by-product of the free market is that people with good ideas and products often have other good ideas and products which they use their profits to go pursue. This is what we call 'economic growth', as measured by the change in the sum total of goods and services generated known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Government does not produce anything. It is at most a service provider. Anything it does is by definition not included in GDP. At most, government provides a service that costs some amount. That amount over the last century has run at about 18% of GDP. In the last eight years, that percentage has increased to 21% (source: Wall Street Journal), yet we are not fighting a world war, nor are there any other factors at work that should drive that number higher (the Iraqi war is a drop in the bucket compared to the Cold War).
A serious tax cut is overdue, at all levels of government. Taxes at the beginning of the last century were on the order of 3-5%. Taxes on most individuals - sales, income, property, social security and medicare - exceed 50%.
I don't know about you, but if I had a little more of those funds appropriated by the government, I would put it to use, either for purchasing goods and services or investment. Oddly enough, this pays the wages of the people whose goods and services I purchase, or provides working capital for the businesses I invest in. This is how the free market works at its basest level - except on a scale of millions of individuals.
I sure as h*ll would not waste my funds on "Shrimp Aquaculture Research" or "Sweet Potato Research" (source: Citizens Against Government Waste).
Given that the preamble of the contitution also says...promote the general welfare..., it is arguable that too much government is in itself unconstitutional...
Um, no. Sweden is not a model for the United States. Progressive taxes are a drag on small business and productivity. We already have enough of that at the federal level and do not need more.
As for quality of life, what's their immigration rate like ? In the US, we can't keep 'em out - they'll even cross miles of desert, risking their lives to get here. We must have something people want, don't you think ?
What the states need to do is cut taxes and reduce spending. They took advantage of the rapid growth of the late '90s as if that growth rate would last forever. Now that growth has dropped closer to normal levels, the outrageous spending increases aren't being matched by revenues and the legislatures are scared to death that (a) the people will figure out what happened and (b) choose not to re-elect them to their cushy jobs.
There's no state income tax here, but property taxes are a percentage of an annual property appraisal, and because of the recent real estate boom, revenues from property taxes have been rising faster than inflation (to say nothing of income).
I have no problem with using a properly calculated appraisal being used as the basis for taxation, but when taxes are allowed to grow outrageously because of paper value of a property, as opposed to the value at sale, you get all sorts of pernicious effects like senior citizens on fixed incomes getting priced out of their paid-off homes and being forced to sell them to pay off the tax, followed by entering a nursing home.
Income taxes are no better. They confiscate earnings without being as noticeable by the taxpayers, and allow for far greater mischief before the voters catch on.
For the state governments, the only answer is to reduce taxes and cut spending. The former to help growth, the latter to keep the budget in balance. Anything else will result in highly-predictable budget disasters.
Pardon me, I'm stupid. They're taxing entities in-state, not out of state.
Happily, this means they're not likely to make a whole lot more than they do now, since most major retailers (the ones with the volume) operating in CA are already paying sales taxes to the state.
If I understand correctly, the problem with electric utility competition in California was that (1) there are only a limited number of lines into the state which are controlled by a small number of suppliers; (2) there are very few wires connecting areas in the state; (3) the state has prevented construction of new power plants in-state for two or more decades for various reasons. Without significant competition, the power-generators and transporters jacked up the price to all the market would bear - as they should - they're not in business to give away their product.
Gray Davis' solution to this was to buy electricity in large blocks, coinciding with the peak of the market, to essentially subsidize per KWH rates to consumers, rather than allow the market price of electricity to float with the costs. Much the same as price controls on gasoline caused shortages in the 70's. Had the price not been controlled, the users with the highest consumption would have been forced to cut back their consumption or make themselves more efficient.
Granted, price per KWH went up drastically, but it's not just the greedy bastards who own the power generators who were at fault. The self-centered politicians who prevented (with the enthusiastic support of certain pressure groups) construction of new power generating facilities in-state, who refused to permit construction of power lines from out of state, the large industrial users who were getting power at subsidized (rather than real) rates, and so on.
There's plenty of blame to spread around, in other words - but the taxpayers of California are taking it on the chin for the state's malfeasance. Again.
Glad I don't live in CA, though I do live in a state where the 1990's spending hangover in the state legislature is just beginning to rear its ugly head, and both Republicans and Democrats are vying to figure out which tax they ought to raise to solve their problem.
There's an obvious difference. When you buy something mail order from out of state, do you pay local sales tax ?
Of course not. Only if the supplier has a local presence in your state do you have to pay local sales tax.
So why should making the transaction over the internet result in a tax when there is none for mail order ? The only difference is the change in medium for making the order.
Not that the states haven't tried, mind you - but they were handed their hat by the Supreme Court some years back over mail order taxation because it interferes with the federal power under the constitution to regulate interstate commerce (section 8, Clause 3: [The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce [...] among the several States). Such a tax is essentially a tarriff as goods cross the border into the state - which is specifically prohibited by the Constitution (article 1, section 10, clause 2: No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports.). Source: U.S. Constitution
In short, California is attempting to get around the Constitution of the United States in order (it thinks) to solve its fiscal problem. Unfortunately, they might just get away with it.
Since the shuttle completely failed to achieve its primary goal (reducing the cost of putting payload into orbit), how can it be judged as anything other than a failure?
The goal of the shuttle was to construct a reusable, manned spacecraft.
There is no question that it accomplished that goal. It's the only reusable space vehicle flying, and one of very few ever built.
It was hoped it would be less costly than vehicles capable of launching similar payloads. And if the flight rate was higher, it could well have met some of its advertising. If there were more vehicles and more payloads, this might have been possible since the fixed costs of shuttle processing don't vary much with flight rate.
The problem was and is that there aren't enough payloads to make a manned vehicle competitive. Expendable launch systems with similar lifting capability cost as much per pound but don't risk the lives of a crew.
So instead, the shuttle is used for missions that nothing else can do. The population of such missions is a minority of the payloads out there, and now is almost entirely the domain of the International Space Station - which is what it was designed to do in the first place, but took another twenty years to get into orbit.
So no, the shuttle didn't fail. It's reusable, it's manned, and it has an excellent safety record compared to every other launch system out there, STS-51L and STS-107 included.
This does not mean it can't be better. Far from it. But for its time, and for the task it was given, the Shuttle has been a resounding success.
Re:Scrap the Shuttle! NOT!
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Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The Shuttle is a first-generation product and we could do much better! It is apparent that a far safer, more efficient, cheaper system could be built without too much effort. Why can't NASA and the rest of the country forget the flying dinosaur from the 70's and move on?
When you have to keep applying band-aid after band-aid to a system to get it to work, and it comes nowhere near fulfilling its original goals, it is time to go back to the drawing board. Stop wasting effort trying to patch up a bad design.
For its time, and even for now, the Space Shuttle is a fairly good design. Perfect, it isn't, but within the limits of materials available and propulsion systems based on chemical reactions, it's not bad.
The safety of any spacecraft is dominated by the propulsion system (the same is true of terrestrial aircraft). What has changed since 1975? Unfortunately, not much. The most recent innovation in large-scale rocket engines, Rocketdyne's RS-68, can provide more thrust than the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine), but was designed as a single-use engine on expendable boosters. It might be adapted, perhaps, to be used on a manned vehicle, but improving the SSMEs would cost less and they perform adequately.
If you were to design a functional replacement for the shuttle, you might be surprised to discover that it looks a lot like... The Shuttle...
Some things might be different. You might consider designing liquid-fueled flyback boosters to replace the SRBs. You might eliminate the toxic propellants used in the reaction jets and the APU to ease servicing the orbiter. You might eliminate the external tank, enlarge the orbiter and eliminate the cost of replacing the tank. You might even find something better than RCC and silica tiles for thermal protection.
But any new vehicle would probably be remarkably similar to what we already have if it accomplishes the same mission. The Russians, themselves not fools, virtually copied the Shuttle in their Buran vehicle. Do you suppose there might be some reason for this ?
The fundamental design decisions and engineering trade-offs that resulted in the shuttle design have not been changed by new technology. So long as that remains the case, and requirements placed on the designers remain unchanged, new vehicles will not be much different.
I hope John Carmack, Burt Rutan, XCOR and the others are successful. But their immediate goals are far less lofty than those placed before the designers of the Shuttle.
Is a new vehicle needed ? Absolutely. Hundreds of them. But not one will perform the task the Shuttle has done for the last twenty years. And more than a few will crash, explode, and otherwise fail, taking their crews and passengers with them. And there will be calls from the news media, caterwauling on/., and the banshee cries of plaintiff's attorneys demanding payment for the after-the-fact ineptitude of everyone involved. How is this different from loss of the crew of Columbia?
The Shuttle has many limitations, but if the task was easy, it would have been repeated and improved upon long ago.
The recent run-up in prices is most likely profiteering on the part of Big Oil. The people in charge of the oil companies might want to recall that during WWII, profiteering was a capital offense...
Hogwash.
The price of oil is set by the current market price, traded on the major commodities exchanges in the form of the price of a contract for some quantity of crude oil. Those prices have been spiking in the run-up to the invasion as fear that Saddam will blow up his oil fields, reducing the volume of oil available to be refined.
When you have a constraint on the supply of something against a fixed or growing demand for it, the price will rise until it reaches an equilibrium point. Constrain that price, and you get shortages; constrain the demand (e.g., with excise taxes) and you get surpluses.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the price of oil spiked over $30/bbl until the beginning of the air war, then sank back to $13/bbl.
If you look at the makeup of the cost of a gallon of gas, you will find that the cost of the oil feedstock is the only real variable - the refineries and gas stations have fixed, and mostly unchanging costs, with very small, highly competitive profit margins.
The only entity to make a significant amount of money in all this was the U.S. and state governments, whose taxes are not indexed to the cost of oil and thus remain constant, no matter how outrageous the cost to the consumer. If you want to accuse someone of gouging you, speak to your congressional or state representatives about gasoline taxes.
It's not that simple. A 1GHz databus does not translate into 1Gbps of data being transmitted.
Depending upon the encoding and the overhead it could easily be substantially less than 1Gbps in real throughput.
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Kennedy gets a lot of credit for launching Apollo, but Eisenhower was responsible for starting the space program in the first place, and Von Braun made it possible.
Most hard-core SF was written during and in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War. All of it escapist, much of it focusing on how humanity carries on after the dawn of the 21st century and presumably civilization as we know it has been destroyed.
For people looking beyond the horrifying news on the television, SF was a ray of hope.
Unfortunately (for SF), the Cold War ended and the world as we know it was utterly changed - but not because of world war or nuclear conflict. It was changed largely by the collapse of Communism (outside China and its satellites), removing the immediate threat, and thus the foundation for much of the SF we've all grown to know and enjoy.
Lacking the need for escape from our current situation into the future, and given the high-tech world that has been thrust upon us in the past decade (as has been noted elsewhere), it seems not unreasonable that Fantasy fiction, especially that espoused by Tolkien and Rowling, would take the fore over hard SF, at least for the moment.
Someone will probably point out that 9-11 and its aftermath are in fact World War III (or IV, depending upon how you count it), and this should be driving us to some sort of outlet that frees us from the daily drumbeat in the news.
But instead of Heinlein and Asimov, we're getting Harry Potter and a fish called Nemo... And it works, because these depict simpler themes of good and evil, courage and fear, and the ability of ordinary people (or young wizards or, well, fish) to overcome incredible obstacles placed before them.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened. During the peak of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800's, amid motorcars, steam-powered factories, and crazy folk attempting to fly like birds, there was counter-revolution of sorts where people looked for craftsmanship and simplicity in their homes and furnishings, first in England, later in the U.S. It banished the sameness of mass-production and replaced it with objects that had the appearance of being, or were in fact, unique.
We live in similar times - only now the personal computer and the internet are the invading technology. It should come as no surprise that people have had enough and need an escape to simpler, less stressful things.
But I would also predict that this is only temporary. We're taking a breather as the next phase of technological development gathers itself together. When it will happen, I don't know, but when it comes to Sci-Fi, I would suggest that a gentleman and his team working in the Mojave desert of all places may unleash the next wave. Or maybe not. We'll see.
Except it wasn't. Vehicles over 6000 lbs GVW area not subject to the gas guzzler tax, which long predates the Bush admin.
They are ? Are you sure?
Why do you suppose Apple has been pitching to the home and graphics communities for so long ? It's because neither cares for Wintel and both can tolerate less-than-spectacular performance to varying degrees. Apple has lacked the resources to attack the enterprise market, and their hardware didn't measure up to the engineering/scientific market sufficiently to compete effectively with Wintel. Neither is the case now.
While I'm not going to jump the gun and suggest that this is It, I do believe we're seeing the first hint of a long-overdue revitalization of the Macintosh product line. If IBM is indeed able to go to 3GHz in 12 months and Apple can produce compelling hardware with the PPC970 and its descendants (both of which seem reasonable at the moment), we might be looking at the beginning of a trend towards the enterprise market.
As for CATIA and Pro/E, if the customers demand it, Dassault and Parametric Technologies will eventually get on board. Both have their primary foundation in Unix hardware and neither will have a difficult time making an X-windows port. Ask Mathworks, Inc. Why do you suppose Apple put out X11? To appeal to Linux geeks?(yes, but only in part)
Sun should indeed be worried about now, especially considering that there's no reason on earth for Apple to neglect its server and laptop lines with this new chip. Add in the overwhelming presence of Microsoft-based server products and you have a hard time seeing where Sun fits in the long term.
Only the External Tank is expended. SRB electronic and mechanical hardware is refurbished after each flight before being returned to service. The SRB casings are good for about 5 flights. Orbiter consumables are RCS and APU propellant, LH2 and LOX for the fuel cells, food for the crew, and lithium hydroxide canisters (used to scrub C02 from the cabin air). Contrary to your contention, most of the non-reactive mass of the vehicle is reused, and by far the majority of the capital value of the vehicle is returned.
Secondly, the vehicles are only 20 some years old now, with the first flight of Columbia occuring in 1981.
And last, IIRC, the vehicles cost about $4B each. Turnaround and launch costs are high, but they're not that high.
That they did - largely because they didn't know that the Shuttle would be the last vehicle they would build for thirty years. And not much has changed since then. NASA has done a fabulous job keeping these vehicles flying, but they have been totally unable to improve them significantly because of the risk involved in making a change to a proven, if complex vehicle. (except when prodded by catastrophic failures, unfortunately)
Yet not a single SLI concept will ever become reality. Revolutionary change is too difficult unless somone other than NASA does it. An outside agency or corporation could build a brand-new vehicle, but NASA cannot. Not because it is incompetent, but because it is incapable of changing itself as an institution to accommodate the needs of a substantially different vehicle.
It is capable of evolving over time, however. Therein lies hope for the future.
I fully agree with the article's point, that an automated human escape mechanism is required in reusable space flight vehicles. Heck, even Star Trek has escape pods.
This is all well and good, but it's heavy. A crew escape system was envisioned for the shuttle at the outset, but it could not tolerate the additional weight required to implement it. Little has changed in the last twenty years. Certainly physics has not.
The better solution - still heavy - is to develop technologies that increase the overall reliability to the point that a crew escape system is redundant. You have neither ejection seats nor parachutes on a 777. None are needed because the probability of catastrophic failure is infinitesimal (you stand a better chance of getting hit by lightning).
Get rid of the SRBs in favor of almost any liquid-fueled booster and you bump up flight safety considerably. Improve the TPS and you get another improvement. Attack the problem areas - including the ones that aren't as obvious as the above until you increase the reliability to at least that of a jet fighter (that does have ejection seats) or a helicopter (that does not). Making a vehicle as safe as a commercial jet transport would be the ultimate goal, but it is probably a long way off.
IMHO, NASA will build another vehicle, sooner rather than later, and to the disappointment of many, it will more strongly resemble what we have today than any of the SLI pipe dreams you saw in this article. But a new vehicle will happen - that much is assured by the loss of Columbia. We can only hope that NASA applies the lessons of its experience with the current shuttle to future vehicles.
I have. I study economics for a hobby. Keynes and Marx were wrong. Try reading Milton Friedman's works instead. Next ?
At least they [Sweden] know how to put them to work without risking a collapse of emergency rooms
You're an economics expert. Explain to me why emergency rooms collapse when the states offer free health care to illegal immigrants (or anybody). Hint: laws of supply and demand do not go away just because the government passes a law making them illegal.
So let me get this straight, you want the U.S. to tax less than every other industrialized nation?
Absolutely. Why should we burden ourselves with the stupid notions of the rest of the world, Europe in particular? We're not the world's last remaining superpower for nothing, and part of the reason why is because we don't have a strongly progressive tax code that punishes innovation and entrepreneurial activity.
If you're looking for sympathy for "IT Professionals" try somewhere else. I don't care for illegal immigration, but if legal immigrants can get jobs in this country because they have more talent and education than the locals, so be it. If I lose my job because I don't educate myself and continuously prove that I'm worth what they pay me, it's my fault.
Look, we've veered 'way off topic here. California is the most distressed state in the country because its inane government spends too much and taxes its citizens (with highly progressive taxes) into the ground in a vain attempt to pay the bills. Adopting Swedish taxation methods will not solve their problems. People and businesses are mobile and will find other places to live and work rather than put up with such nonsense. Cutting state spending and cleaning up their tax code will make great improvements in their financial picture and attract people and businesses back into the state.
The recent move to 'enforce' taxes on internet purchases won't raise anywhere near as much as they hope. Anyone who buys in-state is already paying sales taxes. More people will be encouraged to buy from sources outside the state rather than paying the double-whammy of tax and shipping. More likely, revenues from internet purchases will decline as a result.
And yes, I have lived there, suffered their taxes, and am glad that I now live elsewhere. The pleasant weather is not enough to make me want to put up with the hassle of outrageous home prices, miserable taxes, noxious air pollution, and ridiculous traffic.
How do you suppose progressive taxation actually helps small business ? As a business makes more money (i.e., they grow and evolve), they are taxed more heavily, thus making it less rewarding to make more income. Small businesses in particular are sensitive to progressivity in the tax code because they are less able to increase their prices to the consumer - who will walk, not run, to their nearest Wal Mart, Home Depot, or ebay to get a better price. Thus, the incentive to grow and produce more is stifled. Multiplied by the thousands of small businesses out there, this effect results in lower economic growth. This has been proven time and time again, and why so many people don't get it is a complete mystery to me.
As for illegals, to my knowledge, no one is brought in against their will. They're coming here for some reason, and not Sweden.
And as far as stupid taxpayers go, Quick question: Did you pay taxes this year ? Or did you get a refund because you outsmarted the IRS ?
Answer: lots of smart people will tell you it was the latter without realizing that what they got back was their own money that they paid to the treasury over and above what they owed.
As to your last comment, I am not jesting. It's not funny, and the continuous popular misunderstanding about the nature of taxation and spending by government boggles my mind.
We need government. It provides a framework that protects us from outside adversaries (...provide for the common defense, U.S. Constitution, preamble) and conduct relations with other nations (...shall have the power...to make treaties, Article II, section 2) , and keeps the peace within, otherwise known as "the rule of law" (...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, preamble). But aside from these vital pursuits, government is a drag on the economy.
Government spending picks winners and losers based on the fiat of legislatures. The free market rewards good ideas and products by buying more of them, it punishes dumb ideas and useless products by ignoring them. A by-product of the free market is that people with good ideas and products often have other good ideas and products which they use their profits to go pursue. This is what we call 'economic growth', as measured by the change in the sum total of goods and services generated known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Government does not produce anything. It is at most a service provider. Anything it does is by definition not included in GDP. At most, government provides a service that costs some amount. That amount over the last century has run at about 18% of GDP. In the last eight years, that percentage has increased to 21% (source: Wall Street Journal), yet we are not fighting a world war, nor are there any other factors at work that should drive that number higher (the Iraqi war is a drop in the bucket compared to the Cold War).
A serious tax cut is overdue, at all levels of government. Taxes at the beginning of the last century were on the order of 3-5%. Taxes on most individuals - sales, income, property, social security and medicare - exceed 50%.
I don't know about you, but if I had a little more of those funds appropriated by the government, I would put it to use, either for purchasing goods and services or investment. Oddly enough, this pays the wages of the people whose goods and services I purchase, or provides working capital for the businesses I invest in. This is how the free market works at its basest level - except on a scale of millions of individuals.
I sure as h*ll would not waste my funds on "Shrimp Aquaculture Research" or "Sweet Potato Research" (source: Citizens Against Government Waste).
Given that the preamble of the contitution also says ...promote the general welfare..., it is arguable that too much government is in itself unconstitutional...
As for quality of life, what's their immigration rate like ? In the US, we can't keep 'em out - they'll even cross miles of desert, risking their lives to get here. We must have something people want, don't you think ?
What the states need to do is cut taxes and reduce spending. They took advantage of the rapid growth of the late '90s as if that growth rate would last forever. Now that growth has dropped closer to normal levels, the outrageous spending increases aren't being matched by revenues and the legislatures are scared to death that (a) the people will figure out what happened and (b) choose not to re-elect them to their cushy jobs.
There's no state income tax here, but property taxes are a percentage of an annual property appraisal, and because of the recent real estate boom, revenues from property taxes have been rising faster than inflation (to say nothing of income).
I have no problem with using a properly calculated appraisal being used as the basis for taxation, but when taxes are allowed to grow outrageously because of paper value of a property, as opposed to the value at sale, you get all sorts of pernicious effects like senior citizens on fixed incomes getting priced out of their paid-off homes and being forced to sell them to pay off the tax, followed by entering a nursing home.
Income taxes are no better. They confiscate earnings without being as noticeable by the taxpayers, and allow for far greater mischief before the voters catch on.
For the state governments, the only answer is to reduce taxes and cut spending. The former to help growth, the latter to keep the budget in balance. Anything else will result in highly-predictable budget disasters.
I thought of that, but kicking them when they're down isn't sporting.
Happily, this means they're not likely to make a whole lot more than they do now, since most major retailers (the ones with the volume) operating in CA are already paying sales taxes to the state.
Oh well.
Gray Davis' solution to this was to buy electricity in large blocks, coinciding with the peak of the market, to essentially subsidize per KWH rates to consumers, rather than allow the market price of electricity to float with the costs. Much the same as price controls on gasoline caused shortages in the 70's. Had the price not been controlled, the users with the highest consumption would have been forced to cut back their consumption or make themselves more efficient.
Granted, price per KWH went up drastically, but it's not just the greedy bastards who own the power generators who were at fault. The self-centered politicians who prevented (with the enthusiastic support of certain pressure groups) construction of new power generating facilities in-state, who refused to permit construction of power lines from out of state, the large industrial users who were getting power at subsidized (rather than real) rates, and so on.
There's plenty of blame to spread around, in other words - but the taxpayers of California are taking it on the chin for the state's malfeasance. Again.
Glad I don't live in CA, though I do live in a state where the 1990's spending hangover in the state legislature is just beginning to rear its ugly head, and both Republicans and Democrats are vying to figure out which tax they ought to raise to solve their problem.
Of course not. Only if the supplier has a local presence in your state do you have to pay local sales tax.
So why should making the transaction over the internet result in a tax when there is none for mail order ? The only difference is the change in medium for making the order.
Not that the states haven't tried, mind you - but they were handed their hat by the Supreme Court some years back over mail order taxation because it interferes with the federal power under the constitution to regulate interstate commerce (section 8, Clause 3: [The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce [...] among the several States). Such a tax is essentially a tarriff as goods cross the border into the state - which is specifically prohibited by the Constitution (article 1, section 10, clause 2: No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports.). Source: U.S. Constitution
In short, California is attempting to get around the Constitution of the United States in order (it thinks) to solve its fiscal problem. Unfortunately, they might just get away with it.
The goal of the shuttle was to construct a reusable, manned spacecraft.
There is no question that it accomplished that goal. It's the only reusable space vehicle flying, and one of very few ever built.
It was hoped it would be less costly than vehicles capable of launching similar payloads. And if the flight rate was higher, it could well have met some of its advertising. If there were more vehicles and more payloads, this might have been possible since the fixed costs of shuttle processing don't vary much with flight rate.
The problem was and is that there aren't enough payloads to make a manned vehicle competitive. Expendable launch systems with similar lifting capability cost as much per pound but don't risk the lives of a crew. So instead, the shuttle is used for missions that nothing else can do. The population of such missions is a minority of the payloads out there, and now is almost entirely the domain of the International Space Station - which is what it was designed to do in the first place, but took another twenty years to get into orbit.
So no, the shuttle didn't fail. It's reusable, it's manned, and it has an excellent safety record compared to every other launch system out there, STS-51L and STS-107 included.
This does not mean it can't be better. Far from it. But for its time, and for the task it was given, the Shuttle has been a resounding success.
When you have to keep applying band-aid after band-aid to a system to get it to work, and it comes nowhere near fulfilling its original goals, it is time to go back to the drawing board. Stop wasting effort trying to patch up a bad design.
For its time, and even for now, the Space Shuttle is a fairly good design. Perfect, it isn't, but within the limits of materials available and propulsion systems based on chemical reactions, it's not bad.
The safety of any spacecraft is dominated by the propulsion system (the same is true of terrestrial aircraft). What has changed since 1975? Unfortunately, not much. The most recent innovation in large-scale rocket engines, Rocketdyne's RS-68, can provide more thrust than the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine), but was designed as a single-use engine on expendable boosters. It might be adapted, perhaps, to be used on a manned vehicle, but improving the SSMEs would cost less and they perform adequately.
If you were to design a functional replacement for the shuttle, you might be surprised to discover that it looks a lot like... The Shuttle...
Some things might be different. You might consider designing liquid-fueled flyback boosters to replace the SRBs. You might eliminate the toxic propellants used in the reaction jets and the APU to ease servicing the orbiter. You might eliminate the external tank, enlarge the orbiter and eliminate the cost of replacing the tank. You might even find something better than RCC and silica tiles for thermal protection.
But any new vehicle would probably be remarkably similar to what we already have if it accomplishes the same mission. The Russians, themselves not fools, virtually copied the Shuttle in their Buran vehicle. Do you suppose there might be some reason for this ?
The fundamental design decisions and engineering trade-offs that resulted in the shuttle design have not been changed by new technology. So long as that remains the case, and requirements placed on the designers remain unchanged, new vehicles will not be much different.
I hope John Carmack, Burt Rutan, XCOR and the others are successful. But their immediate goals are far less lofty than those placed before the designers of the Shuttle.
Is a new vehicle needed ? Absolutely. Hundreds of them. But not one will perform the task the Shuttle has done for the last twenty years. And more than a few will crash, explode, and otherwise fail, taking their crews and passengers with them. And there will be calls from the news media, caterwauling on /., and the banshee cries of plaintiff's attorneys demanding payment for the after-the-fact ineptitude of everyone involved. How is this different from loss of the crew of Columbia?
The Shuttle has many limitations, but if the task was easy, it would have been repeated and improved upon long ago.
Um, ever heard of OpenOffice ???
Hogwash.
The price of oil is set by the current market price, traded on the major commodities exchanges in the form of the price of a contract for some quantity of crude oil. Those prices have been spiking in the run-up to the invasion as fear that Saddam will blow up his oil fields, reducing the volume of oil available to be refined.
When you have a constraint on the supply of something against a fixed or growing demand for it, the price will rise until it reaches an equilibrium point. Constrain that price, and you get shortages; constrain the demand (e.g., with excise taxes) and you get surpluses.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the price of oil spiked over $30/bbl until the beginning of the air war, then sank back to $13/bbl.
If you look at the makeup of the cost of a gallon of gas, you will find that the cost of the oil feedstock is the only real variable - the refineries and gas stations have fixed, and mostly unchanging costs, with very small, highly competitive profit margins. The only entity to make a significant amount of money in all this was the U.S. and state governments, whose taxes are not indexed to the cost of oil and thus remain constant, no matter how outrageous the cost to the consumer. If you want to accuse someone of gouging you, speak to your congressional or state representatives about gasoline taxes.
It's not that simple. A 1GHz databus does not translate into 1Gbps of data being transmitted. Depending upon the encoding and the overhead it could easily be substantially less than 1Gbps in real throughput.