The Shuttle was never 'man rated'. It kiled its crew one time in sixty and had long periods during launch when an abort was not survivable. There's no way in Heck that NASA would put astronauts a SpaceX launcher that was as dangerous as the Shuttle.
Again, SpaceX spent about the same amount of money to build a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launch them into orbit as NASA did to put a fake upper stage onto a Shuttle SRB and launch it into the ocean. They've also probably spent less developing their stage recovery system than NASA has spent over the years on studies of how they might think about recovering rocket stages.
Imagine you go back in time, and you ask Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and friends whether it would be OK if the government was keeping a record of who sent every letter and who they sent it to. Just to protect us, obviously.
Just imagine that for a moment.
Then tell us, with all seriousness, that you really, actually, imagine they would say 'yeah, sure, that's fine, and totally Constitutinal'.
1) Why do my systems require downtime for this kind of thing? I should have better redundancy.
True. Last year we upgraded all our servers to a new OS with a wipe and reinstall, and the only people who noticed were the ones who could see the server monitoring screens. The standby servers took over and handled all customer traffic while we upgraded the others.
The introduction of Javascript was when the Internet began to turn to crap. Many of us pointed out at the time just what a security nightmare it would be.
Here's another idea. How about we create a whole new format which separates content from presentation, and then the display program can figure out the best way to display it on that device.
We could call the format, I don't know, 'HTML'? And the display program, hmm, maybe a 'web browser'?
Oh, crap. We tried that, and then the developers decided they just MUST be able to specify exaclty where everything is displayed on the screen, which is why they're now having to rebuild all their sites to work on mobile devices.
The reason for incremental development is that your engineers and technicians learn their "craft", gradually learn where they can shave off millimetres and where they have to add more.
You do realize that pretty much everyone at NASA who actually designed a rocket or rocket engine has now retired, right?
I think he is confused, that was called the Space Shuttle - The single item that killed space exploration in the US forever.
As bad as the shutte might have been, SLS will be worse. The fixed costs killed the shuttle, not the variable costs; a single shuttle launch cost a couple of hundred million dollars, but the price went up to well over a billion when you added in the fixed costs spread over three or four launches a year. SLS will launch at most every couple of years, so you'll not only have a couple of billion dollars per rocket, but several billion dollars of fixed costs per launch... it could easily end up being the Ten Billion Dollar Booster.
So SRMs are good, and likely to be used in pretty much every first stage from now to the day we invent a beanstalk or something and get rid of rockets.
Hardly. The big problems with SRMs are that you can't reuse them and you can't test them; yes, you can test that SRM #1 worked fine on the ground, but you'll actually be launching with SRM #2, which can only be tested by firing it, which means you can't then use it to launch anything.
You can't build a cheap launcher with SRMs, because a cheap launcher has to be reusable. You can't build a really safe launcher with SRMs, because every flight is the first flight for the SRMs.
Yeah. SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets, and actually launched them into space, for about the same amount of money as NASA spent putting a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launching it into the ocean.
Go NASA R&D!
SLS is a pure pork project, there are no funded missions that need it, and it will cost billions of dollars to launch, which means there will be few, if any, missions that ever do use it. There is no rational justification for it whatsoever.
At the rate they're going, when NASA launches a crew to Mars in an Orion capsule on an SLS booster, there'll already be tourists waiting to greet them, having been flown there by SpaceX for a tiny fraction of the cost of the government option.
Disappointing to see such an important long term research project get shelved by politicians.
Perhaps if they hadn't spent 40+ years promising that fusion would happen soon if we just kept throwing money at them, politicians wouldn't be so eager to stop throwing money at them.
Fusion has been twenty years away for as long as I remember.
You're talking about Britain, where they recently let a man convicted with thirteen life sentences leave jail for a weekend and were surprised that he didn't come back.
When was the last time a shoplifter was jailed in Britain? When was the last time a persistent burglar was banned from the Internet?
It's not self-incrimination in the same way that the intersate commerce clause gives the Federal government the power to regulate absolutlely anything that might have any impact on interstate commerce even if it never leaves your house.
That is, it's clearly a blatant violation of the Constitution, to everyone but lawyers.
So long as you're allowed to leave out everything that's actually going up in price, yes. Like houses, or food, or gas, or... well, pretty much everything you actually need. But if all you buy is Android tablets, wow, inflation is low.
A hundred drones, on the other hand, very much can fall from the sky and cause damage/harm to anything that happens to be below.
Yeah, so?
Road accidents happen all the time, and cause damage/harm to anything that happens to be in the way. The response to a new method of transport shouldn't be 'OMG! NEW STUFF! BAN IT!', it should be 'OK, is this more or less dangerous than delivering stuff by truck?'
Yet another example of a retarded Libertarian with a slashdot account.
So, are you going to explain why a hundred drones delivering packages is magically much more dangerous than a truck-load of Amazon packages crashing into a packed school playground?
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't on the Shuttle's
Yes it was.
The Shuttle was never 'man rated'. It kiled its crew one time in sixty and had long periods during launch when an abort was not survivable. There's no way in Heck that NASA would put astronauts a SpaceX launcher that was as dangerous as the Shuttle.
"Man-rated" is not on SpaceX's advertising brochure. Yet.
It wasn't on the Shuttle's, either. But killing the crew less than one time in sixty can't really be that hard, can it?
Again, SpaceX spent about the same amount of money to build a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launch them into orbit as NASA did to put a fake upper stage onto a Shuttle SRB and launch it into the ocean. They've also probably spent less developing their stage recovery system than NASA has spent over the years on studies of how they might think about recovering rocket stages.
But, yeah, it's all Reagan's fault. Or something.
Here's an idea.
Imagine you go back in time, and you ask Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and friends whether it would be OK if the government was keeping a record of who sent every letter and who they sent it to. Just to protect us, obviously.
Just imagine that for a moment.
Then tell us, with all seriousness, that you really, actually, imagine they would say 'yeah, sure, that's fine, and totally Constitutinal'.
The FEDERAL Aviation Authority has any Constitutional basis for telling people they can't fly a drone around a house that doesn't cross state lines?
1) Why do my systems require downtime for this kind of thing? I should have better redundancy.
True. Last year we upgraded all our servers to a new OS with a wipe and reinstall, and the only people who noticed were the ones who could see the server monitoring screens. The standby servers took over and handled all customer traffic while we upgraded the others.
I promise you that at some point, something will fail, and you will have failed by not being there to fix it immediately.
Yeah, but this way, you won't be the one who has to fix it :).
Of course, you might have to start looking at job ads the next day...
Uh, yes. Wasn't that the entire point of the treaty? The US government just signed it to appease the Commies in the Apollo era, didn't they?
If every program ran in its own sandbox there wouldn't be any scary warning and there wouldn't be any malware.
Yeah, because who cares wehther the bad guys are capturing everything you type into your web browser?
Someone doesn't know shit about the web here...
The introduction of Javascript was when the Internet began to turn to crap. Many of us pointed out at the time just what a security nightmare it would be.
Here's another idea. How about we create a whole new format which separates content from presentation, and then the display program can figure out the best way to display it on that device.
We could call the format, I don't know, 'HTML'? And the display program, hmm, maybe a 'web browser'?
Oh, crap. We tried that, and then the developers decided they just MUST be able to specify exaclty where everything is displayed on the screen, which is why they're now having to rebuild all their sites to work on mobile devices.
Good way to ensure job security, I guess.
The reason for incremental development is that your engineers and technicians learn their "craft", gradually learn where they can shave off millimetres and where they have to add more.
You do realize that pretty much everyone at NASA who actually designed a rocket or rocket engine has now retired, right?
I think he is confused, that was called the Space Shuttle - The single item that killed space exploration in the US forever.
As bad as the shutte might have been, SLS will be worse. The fixed costs killed the shuttle, not the variable costs; a single shuttle launch cost a couple of hundred million dollars, but the price went up to well over a billion when you added in the fixed costs spread over three or four launches a year. SLS will launch at most every couple of years, so you'll not only have a couple of billion dollars per rocket, but several billion dollars of fixed costs per launch... it could easily end up being the Ten Billion Dollar Booster.
So SRMs are good, and likely to be used in pretty much every first stage from now to the day we invent a beanstalk or something and get rid of rockets.
Hardly. The big problems with SRMs are that you can't reuse them and you can't test them; yes, you can test that SRM #1 worked fine on the ground, but you'll actually be launching with SRM #2, which can only be tested by firing it, which means you can't then use it to launch anything.
You can't build a cheap launcher with SRMs, because a cheap launcher has to be reusable. You can't build a really safe launcher with SRMs, because every flight is the first flight for the SRMs.
Yeah. SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets, and actually launched them into space, for about the same amount of money as NASA spent putting a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launching it into the ocean.
Go NASA R&D!
SLS is a pure pork project, there are no funded missions that need it, and it will cost billions of dollars to launch, which means there will be few, if any, missions that ever do use it. There is no rational justification for it whatsoever.
At the rate they're going, when NASA launches a crew to Mars in an Orion capsule on an SLS booster, there'll already be tourists waiting to greet them, having been flown there by SpaceX for a tiny fraction of the cost of the government option.
Disappointing to see such an important long term research project get shelved by politicians.
Perhaps if they hadn't spent 40+ years promising that fusion would happen soon if we just kept throwing money at them, politicians wouldn't be so eager to stop throwing money at them.
Fusion has been twenty years away for as long as I remember.
Obama is far too smart to waste time dealing with the tedious business of actually doing anything.
Besides, he has a Peace Prize.
Except that it's not human rated.
Nor is Onion.
Heck, nor was the Space Shuttle, unless you consider killing the crew one time in sixty to be 'human rated'.
You're talking about Britain, where they recently let a man convicted with thirteen life sentences leave jail for a weekend and were surprised that he didn't come back.
When was the last time a shoplifter was jailed in Britain? When was the last time a persistent burglar was banned from the Internet?
It's not self-incrimination in the same way that the intersate commerce clause gives the Federal government the power to regulate absolutlely anything that might have any impact on interstate commerce even if it never leaves your house.
That is, it's clearly a blatant violation of the Constitution, to everyone but lawyers.
So long as you're allowed to leave out everything that's actually going up in price, yes. Like houses, or food, or gas, or... well, pretty much everything you actually need. But if all you buy is Android tablets, wow, inflation is low.
He's the reason compiler writes invented pragmas to turn off warnings...
You forgot the explosions. And the time travel.
A hundred drones, on the other hand, very much can fall from the sky and cause damage/harm to anything that happens to be below.
Yeah, so?
Road accidents happen all the time, and cause damage/harm to anything that happens to be in the way. The response to a new method of transport shouldn't be 'OMG! NEW STUFF! BAN IT!', it should be 'OK, is this more or less dangerous than delivering stuff by truck?'
Yet another example of a retarded Libertarian with a slashdot account.
So, are you going to explain why a hundred drones delivering packages is magically much more dangerous than a truck-load of Amazon packages crashing into a packed school playground?