Jeez, if throwaway is cheaper, throw it away. Giv e the $200 million you save each launch to the Audobon Society if you think that dropping Saturn V stages into the middle of the Atlantic is worse than dropping an external fuel tank.
Technology purely for technology's sake is lousy engineering. Good engineering always takes cost into account. Especially when it's taxpayer money.
And one of the main problems with shuttles are that they're OVER 20 FRIGGIN YEARS OLD. Corrosion and cracking are major problems because of their age. When you have throwaways, you don't have that problem, and you have the opportunity for continuous incremental improvement.
Actually, after the military coup in Pakistan they were on the US shiite list, and were hurting pretty badly because of the resulting sanctions.
The US lifted the sanctions after 9/11 in order to get military access to Afghanistan.
Taking your argument to its obvious conclusion, you probably think the US should have imposed sanctions on the Soviet Union in WWII instead of given them aid. Realpolitik has the word "real" in it for a reason.
The "power on the ground" systems (laser, microwave) have conversion inefficiencies, but that's more than compensated by the much higher specific impulse that is possible. This drastically lowers the amount of fuel needed, especially if they can be air-breathing through most of the trip (you don't have the ignition problems when you're heating air with EM energy).
As far as limiting to one launch system, that's pretty much what we have now with the shuttle, isn't it? Something goes wrong, you don't launch again for a few years?
If they put a tenth of the money into developing laser/microwave launch systems as they've done with rockets, we'd have hotels on the moon in a decade.
Limiting yourself to chemical rockets, you have a hard limit on the mass/fuel ratio. Going with laser/microwave opens up a lot of possibilities.
The main barriers to laser/microwave systems are: 1) People wouldn't want to be near the launch site 2) No military spinoff (except lower satellite launch costs). 3) Most of the design would be on the ground system; the vehicle would be fairly simple. The big aerospace companies would pay their senators good money for a rocket replacement for the shuttle.
And why do people expect me to not mind having my tax dollars wasted on people who spend their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments?
5) Get a decent education so you can get a decent job.
6) Don't get knocked up when you're 15 and decide to keep the baby, and other similarly stupid life decisions.
But I guess since the govt is there to make things all better, there's no need for people to not make an effort to fsck up their own life.
And you don't think that getting rid of a lot of the crap the government wastes money on won't help the poor? Not only will they spend less on taxes, but the goods and services they buy will cost less, too.
Bull. The reason the economy is so bad now is that Clinton and Gore did all they could to keep the bubble from popping before the election. The bigger the bubble got, the worse the aftermath.
Greenspan says there's "irrational exuberance"? Clinton and Gore jump all over him. During one of the debates, Dubya says the US is in a recession. Gore jumps all over him. Turns out later Dubya's right. You'd think the VP would have more access to economic indicators than the governor of Texas, wouldn't you?
Clinton and Gore caused immense economic damage purely for the sake of political gain. If they'd had a shred of responsibility, they'd have talked down the economy in the late 90's.
Re:I didn't volunteer my money to burn up on reent
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It's been illegal for US companies to do business with Iraq since the first Gulf War.
You do know that all that hardware has always been built by private industry, don't you? Along with most of the maintenance? If the govt made the contracts so the company's profit would be based solely on how reliable and inexpensive the launch system is, instead of using it for pork, the space program would be in much better shape.
The federal govt didn't build Apollo. They just paid for it.
Most of what you're describing is paid for out of people's own pockets, not out of taxpayer money. The others, like military and school, perform at a fairly decent level.
There are much cheaper and safer ways to explore space, both manned and unmanned, than the shuttle.
Re:Astronauts were pioneers, not statistics.
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They're brave. But just what exactly did they die for? Studying ant farms?
We need to get rid of the shuttle and get a real space program. That way if someone dies, at least it's for a good reason.
Yeah, you need the heavy lift capacity to put up ISS parts. You'd have a good point if the ISS wasn't even more of a waste of money than the shuttle.
A Saturn V equivalent could put up four times as much as a shuttle for less money, if it was well-designed. There's just no compelling need right now for putting up large payloads.
The shuttle was built to service a space station. The ISS exists solely to justify the shuttle. They can't do science with only three people aboard. The US manned space program is nothing more than a tautology:)
By "successful", he means actually getting something for the money spent. Whether or not you agree on how it's been used, it's pretty obvious that the money spent on the military resulted in something that did what it was supposed to do, and did it extremely well.
You can't say that about NASA. So now we have a space station with three astronauts on it. Whoop-de-doo. We had one of those thirty years ago. It was called Skylab, and it was launched with *one* Saturn V, with a total price far less than the ISS piece of crap currently in orbit. The shuttle and the ISS are white elephants.
I've been a member of the National Space Society for fifteen years. I didn't renew my membership this year. Unless NASA is completely restructured or eliminated, America is going nowhere in space. We'd be better off just giving the $15 billion dollars a year to the Russians and let them go at it. We'd have a moon base and footprints on Mars in 10 years.
Re:I didn't volunteer my money to burn up on reent
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I think you mean France (profits off oil-for-food) China (arms sales) Russia (both of the above).
They were waving white flags? News to me. They were trying to get the USSR to intervene to get a negotiated peace, where they could remain in power, with no occupation. In return, the Soviets would get the Kiril Islands and a whole lot of fishing rights.
They knew our terms. Unconditional surrender had been the terms since the beginning of the war. They could have surrendered unconditionally at any time. In their secret negotiations with the Soviets, they never came close to acceptable terms. They refused to even consider anything remotely near our terms until after Nagasaki.
A bad peace can be worse than war. The main reason for WWII (at least in Europe) was the messed-up conditions of the WWI Armistice. The cease-fire at the end of the Korean War has cost countless lives (though there was not much that could have been done differently there). FDR, Churchill, and Truman had brains enough to realize that the Nazis and the Japanese had to be defeated unconditionally.
Maybe we should have sued for peace right after Pearl Harbor. I'm sure that the Japanese would have agreed to not attack Hawaii, Alaska, or the West Coast if we agreed to let them run rampant in Asia. Then there would be no blood on our hands. Too bad you weren't President back then.
Useful heat energy? The efficiency of a heat engine is related to the temperature difference; using human bodies pretty much implies a temperature gradient of say 50 degrees F to 99 degrees F.; maybe 50 degrees total. That ain't good.
They'd get much more energy out of those "waste products" by burning them in a furnace at a considerably higher temperature. Then they also wouldn't have to expend the resources needed for keeping the Matrix going.
And you keep saying they were willing to surrender when what they were willing to do was negotiate a peace. You know, like the peace negotiated at the end of the Korean War and at the end of the first Gulf War, where the fighting stopped but the psychos stayed in control. Those worked out reeaall well for the citizens of North Korea and Iraq.
The Japanese were not willing to accept a surrender that involved occupation until after Nagasaki. We *know* that because we had their diplomatic codes broken. What reason do *you* have to believe otherwise?
We had already demonstrated our ability to kill them by the millions, to no effect. The reason they surrendered was because the US had "begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization." That is what it took for them to surrender.
And of course *you* have completely ignored the 100,000 Chinese and Koreans, the vast majority of them civilians, that the Japanese were butchering every month. I'll save my tears for them.
200,000 people died in the invasion of Okinawa. I have a real hard time believing less than 300,000 people would die in the invasion of the home islands.
You really should check out the "Downfall" book. We had the Japanese diplomatic codes broken. We knew what they wanted out of a negotiated peace. Initially their plan was to make an invasion of the home islands so bloody that we would accept terms where they would withdraw from Manchuria and Korea, and there would be no occupation of Japan. The military would remain in control of Japan. That would have been unacceptable in a world with nuclear weapons. It was only after Nagasaki that they began to seriously consider terms acceptable to the US (in their communications to the USSR and amongst themselves).
The US wasn't going to accept conditional surrender, not without occupation and "regime change". The fscked up Armistice at the end of WWI, which the US thought was a really bad idea, was a direct cause of WWII. The truly evil people running Japan had to be rooted out.
Do you know where they built the torpedoes used against the US fleet at Pearl Harbor?
Nagasaki. At the Mitsubishi plant.
The problem with military targets, especially in a country with little usable land like Japan, is that they're right next to cities.
And if we'd dropped a nuke in the middle of the ocean, they'd have just thought we were a bunch of pussies. Or lousy shots.;)
After Nagasaki, Japanese officers tried to kidnap the Emperor to keep him from surrendering. We're lucky we didn't have to bomb *three* cities. They didn't even start discussing surrender seriously until after the Nagasaki bomb (and not discussions with us; we broke their diplomatic codes so we knew what their true intentions were).
China appears to be slowly making the transition to a capitalist democracy. The current leader of China has stated that, while he doesn't think that China will become a democracy under his leadership, it probably will under his successor's.
I don't think you can say the same thing about North Korea. Engagement will work with China; we'll probably have to contain North Korea until it collapses.
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The only reason progress was made 30 years ago was competition between USSR and US. The manned space program now is pure pork, both in US and ESA.
You don't need a manned program to put up satellites.
Yeah, especially when you only launch five times a year.
Jeez, if throwaway is cheaper, throw it away. Giv e the $200 million you save each launch to the Audobon Society if you think that dropping Saturn V stages into the middle of the Atlantic is worse than dropping an external fuel tank.
Technology purely for technology's sake is lousy engineering. Good engineering always takes cost into account. Especially when it's taxpayer money.
And one of the main problems with shuttles are that they're OVER 20 FRIGGIN YEARS OLD. Corrosion and cracking are major problems because of their age. When you have throwaways, you don't have that problem, and you have the opportunity for continuous incremental improvement.
Actually, after the military coup in Pakistan they were on the US shiite list, and were hurting pretty badly because of the resulting sanctions.
The US lifted the sanctions after 9/11 in order to get military access to Afghanistan.
Taking your argument to its obvious conclusion, you probably think the US should have imposed sanctions on the Soviet Union in WWII instead of given them aid. Realpolitik has the word "real" in it for a reason.
The "power on the ground" systems (laser, microwave) have conversion inefficiencies, but that's more than compensated by the much higher specific impulse that is possible. This drastically lowers the amount of fuel needed, especially if they can be air-breathing through most of the trip (you don't have the ignition problems when you're heating air with EM energy).
As far as limiting to one launch system, that's pretty much what we have now with the shuttle, isn't it? Something goes wrong, you don't launch again for a few years?
If they put a tenth of the money into developing laser/microwave launch systems as they've done with rockets, we'd have hotels on the moon in a decade.
Limiting yourself to chemical rockets, you have a hard limit on the mass/fuel ratio. Going with laser/microwave opens up a lot of possibilities.
The main barriers to laser/microwave systems are:
1) People wouldn't want to be near the launch site
2) No military spinoff (except lower satellite launch costs).
3) Most of the design would be on the ground system; the vehicle would be fairly simple. The big aerospace companies would pay their senators good money for a rocket replacement for the shuttle.
I'd say that his relativity equation that reduces to e=mc**2 when v=0 has had some small effect on the world.
And why do people expect me to not mind having my tax dollars wasted on people who spend their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments?
You forgot:
5) Get a decent education so you can get a decent job.
6) Don't get knocked up when you're 15 and decide to keep the baby, and other similarly stupid life decisions.
But I guess since the govt is there to make things all better, there's no need for people to not make an effort to fsck up their own life.
And you don't think that getting rid of a lot of the crap the government wastes money on won't help the poor? Not only will they spend less on taxes, but the goods and services they buy will cost less, too.
Bull. The reason the economy is so bad now is that Clinton and Gore did all they could to keep the bubble from popping before the election. The bigger the bubble got, the worse the aftermath.
Greenspan says there's "irrational exuberance"? Clinton and Gore jump all over him. During one of the debates, Dubya says the US is in a recession. Gore jumps all over him. Turns out later Dubya's right. You'd think the VP would have more access to economic indicators than the governor of Texas, wouldn't you?
Clinton and Gore caused immense economic damage purely for the sake of political gain. If they'd had a shred of responsibility, they'd have talked down the economy in the late 90's.
It's been illegal for US companies to do business with Iraq since the first Gulf War.
You do know that all that hardware has always been built by private industry, don't you? Along with most of the maintenance? If the govt made the contracts so the company's profit would be based solely on how reliable and inexpensive the launch system is, instead of using it for pork, the space program would be in much better shape.
The federal govt didn't build Apollo. They just paid for it.
Most of what you're describing is paid for out of people's own pockets, not out of taxpayer money. The others, like military and school, perform at a fairly decent level.
There are much cheaper and safer ways to explore space, both manned and unmanned, than the shuttle.
They're brave. But just what exactly did they die for? Studying ant farms?
We need to get rid of the shuttle and get a real space program. That way if someone dies, at least it's for a good reason.
Yeah, you need the heavy lift capacity to put up ISS parts. You'd have a good point if the ISS wasn't even more of a waste of money than the shuttle.
:)
A Saturn V equivalent could put up four times as much as a shuttle for less money, if it was well-designed. There's just no compelling need right now for putting up large payloads.
The shuttle was built to service a space station. The ISS exists solely to justify the shuttle. They can't do science with only three people aboard. The US manned space program is nothing more than a tautology
By "successful", he means actually getting something for the money spent. Whether or not you agree on how it's been used, it's pretty obvious that the money spent on the military resulted in something that did what it was supposed to do, and did it extremely well.
You can't say that about NASA. So now we have a space station with three astronauts on it. Whoop-de-doo. We had one of those thirty years ago. It was called Skylab, and it was launched with *one* Saturn V, with a total price far less than the ISS piece of crap currently in orbit. The shuttle and the ISS are white elephants.
I've been a member of the National Space Society for fifteen years. I didn't renew my membership this year. Unless NASA is completely restructured or eliminated, America is going nowhere in space. We'd be better off just giving the $15 billion dollars a year to the Russians and let them go at it. We'd have a moon base and footprints on Mars in 10 years.
I think you mean France (profits off oil-for-food) China (arms sales) Russia (both of the above).
They were waving white flags? News to me. They were trying to get the USSR to intervene to get a negotiated peace, where they could remain in power, with no occupation. In return, the Soviets would get the Kiril Islands and a whole lot of fishing rights.
They knew our terms. Unconditional surrender had been the terms since the beginning of the war. They could have surrendered unconditionally at any time. In their secret negotiations with the Soviets, they never came close to acceptable terms. They refused to even consider anything remotely near our terms until after Nagasaki.
A bad peace can be worse than war. The main reason for WWII (at least in Europe) was the messed-up conditions of the WWI Armistice. The cease-fire at the end of the Korean War has cost countless lives (though there was not much that could have been done differently there). FDR, Churchill, and Truman had brains enough to realize that the Nazis and the Japanese had to be defeated unconditionally.
Maybe we should have sued for peace right after Pearl Harbor. I'm sure that the Japanese would have agreed to not attack Hawaii, Alaska, or the West Coast if we agreed to let them run rampant in Asia. Then there would be no blood on our hands. Too bad you weren't President back then.
Useful heat energy? The efficiency of a heat engine is related to the temperature difference; using human bodies pretty much implies a temperature gradient of say 50 degrees F to 99 degrees F.; maybe 50 degrees total. That ain't good.
They'd get much more energy out of those "waste products" by burning them in a furnace at a considerably higher temperature. Then they also wouldn't have to expend the resources needed for keeping the Matrix going.
And you keep saying they were willing to surrender when what they were willing to do was negotiate a peace. You know, like the peace negotiated at the end of the Korean War and at the end of the first Gulf War, where the fighting stopped but the psychos stayed in control. Those worked out reeaall well for the citizens of North Korea and Iraq.
The Japanese were not willing to accept a surrender that involved occupation until after Nagasaki. We *know* that because we had their diplomatic codes broken. What reason do *you* have to believe otherwise?
We had already demonstrated our ability to kill them by the millions, to no effect. The reason they surrendered was because the US had "begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization." That is what it took for them to surrender.
And of course *you* have completely ignored the 100,000 Chinese and Koreans, the vast majority of them civilians, that the Japanese were butchering every month. I'll save my tears for them.
200,000 people died in the invasion of Okinawa. I have a real hard time believing less than 300,000 people would die in the invasion of the home islands.
You really should check out the "Downfall" book. We had the Japanese diplomatic codes broken. We knew what they wanted out of a negotiated peace. Initially their plan was to make an invasion of the home islands so bloody that we would accept terms where they would withdraw from Manchuria and Korea, and there would be no occupation of Japan. The military would remain in control of Japan. That would have been unacceptable in a world with nuclear weapons. It was only after Nagasaki that they began to seriously consider terms acceptable to the US (in their communications to the USSR and amongst themselves).
The US wasn't going to accept conditional surrender, not without occupation and "regime change". The fscked up Armistice at the end of WWI, which the US thought was a really bad idea, was a direct cause of WWII. The truly evil people running Japan had to be rooted out.
I forget, is it Libya or Syria that's on the UN Committee on Human Rights.
I'll take Thomas Jefferson over Kadafi any day.
And welfare is the state's responsibilities. You know, the 10th Amendment. If you want to be a welfare queen, move to Wisconsin. Or Massachusetts.
Do you know where they built the torpedoes used against the US fleet at Pearl Harbor?
;)
Nagasaki. At the Mitsubishi plant.
The problem with military targets, especially in a country with little usable land like Japan, is that they're right next to cities.
And if we'd dropped a nuke in the middle of the ocean, they'd have just thought we were a bunch of pussies. Or lousy shots.
After Nagasaki, Japanese officers tried to kidnap the Emperor to keep him from surrendering. We're lucky we didn't have to bomb *three* cities. They didn't even start discussing surrender seriously until after the Nagasaki bomb (and not discussions with us; we broke their diplomatic codes so we knew what their true intentions were).
Over 200,000 died at Okinawa.
And the 140,000 dead in the firebombing of Tokyo was on the first night. Not total.
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand how the cheating welfare bums are catching terrorists. Or overrunning Iraq in three weeks.
We got to the moon because of public money and private industry.
Welfare tax money is going towards giving $1000 a month rent payments to slumlords in NYC for property that isn't fit to raise livestock in.
National defense is listed as a function of government in the Constitution. Welfare isn't.
China appears to be slowly making the transition to a capitalist democracy. The current leader of China has stated that, while he doesn't think that China will become a democracy under his leadership, it probably will under his successor's.
I don't think you can say the same thing about North Korea. Engagement will work with China; we'll probably have to contain North Korea until it collapses.