The Wikimedia Foundation isn't pissing people off? I take it you have never read much of the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list (sometimes called Foundation-l), where regularly there are people who do air issues and grievances... including pointed attacks against much of the leadership of the organization.
Some people try to take the issues up the food chain, and on occasion some of those issues do get resolved, but there are some endemic issues that seem to be regularly put off from time to time. One of the issues that seems to still eat at my craw is how the majority of the Wikimedia Foundation is still under the direct control of Jimmy Wales, as he appointed those board members personally and put them into that position. There are "elected" members of the board who as a matter of practice do most of the real heavy lifting work, but they still hold a minority position on the main governing board.
Jimmy Wales himself has sort of stirred the pot from time to time, most notably with his intervention into the governance of Wikiversity and the Wikimedia Commons.... both of which met with some extreme resistance from the respective communities where he was even "uninvited" due to his meddling and forced him to essentially lose his "founder's flag" as a matter of principle with his account. Wikiversity is still a fractured mess, and the Wikimedia Commons community (those who do most of the regular maintenance of that resource) has all but ignored the advise of Jimmy Wales... particularly as it applies to "obscene images".
There are indeed some reasons why there is some complaints about the governance of the Wikimedia projects, and some of it well founded. Perhaps the most current issue is mainly a complaint that the funds are somehow being managed inappropriately. The Foundation headquarters was moved from St. Petersberg, Florida to San Francisco. Perhaps there may have been some merit to that move for several reasons, but it certainly has ended up costing the Foundation much more to hire and keep support staff through financial incentives. Also, the number of staff members has grown considerable over the past couple of years, and there is also some questioning what exactly they are doing other than becoming a bloated bureaucracy of their own which is mainly busy trying to justify their jobs to donors. Most of the new jobs have little to do with the infrastructure of the Wikimedia projects (running the server farm, maintaining the network backbone connection, providing professional software development to the development of the MediaWiki software, etc.) but rather more to "public outreach" efforts or "community relations" issues. In other words, what exactly are those people doing that are spending the donations to the Wikimedia Foundation? In some cases they are duplicating volunteer positions, and those volunteers still exist.
If any of this is new, I hope you are somewhat enlightened. There are some complaints, and for me well founded complaints too. Some of the administrators do get rough from time to time when dealing with new contributors to Wikipedia and the other projects too. An "admin" really is just a volunteer position, which also brings in the problems with volunteer leadership and how to keep that under control. There really isn't an effective way to reign in admins unless they are being blatantly abusive, so for the most part the process to become an admin is usually set at a pretty high bar to begin with. Most of the time what happens when somebody gets upset with Wikipedia is that those new contributors usually have a different viewpoint about what Wikipedia is really all about, and if those new contributions go "out of scope" for what a typical administrator is looking for there are usually conflicts with those new contributors and the admins. Some admins are very blunt about the issues too and don't do a very good job of working with these new contributors either.... which is also why some people occasionally get a bad first impression about Wikipedia. Enough of those with a bad first impression exist where it is a negative factor for new contributors as well.
To evidence that there is a problem, the number of new contributors to Wikipedia has all but stopped. It is a fairly large number, but as I've also pointed out that there are many countries of the world who have more people involved with the development of Wikipedia in their native languages as a proportion of their overall population (Germany in particular comes to mind) than is the case for English language development on Wikipedia. The only reason why English is so dominate is mainly due to the overall dominance around the world of that language.
There certainly are untapped "markets" of people who have the potential to contribute to Wikipedia and simply are not choosing to do so. Some of that is due to the fact that there aren't large blocks of people who are discovering Wikipedia, but mostly individuals one at a time. It is easy to dismiss their contributions, especially as it take effort to train and develop some of these mostly non-writers into encyclopedia article writers. If anything the desire of many on Wikipedia, at least the "active" editors who are also developing and setting policies for Wikipedia governance, also are at least proposing in some cases and certainly by unofficial actions are throwing efforts by new editors away and driving out new contributors. Doing so I argue that those same editors are also driving away the potential growth of Wikipedia as well.
There are also abusive administrators, and little that can be done to stop them other than to stand up to them and call them a bully to their face... setting up the potential for a wheel war and other sorts of nasty actions where admins thump their chests and try to carve out alliances among other admins to support their actions. Ordinary users sort of get lost in the shuffle when that happens too, not to mention imagined "consensus" when "minority" viewpoints are simply blocked or kicked out of the discussion forums for various reasons.
The Wikilawyering going on from time to time is particularly bad, especially when it ends up driving away potential contributors and browbeating opposing points of view to leave. Some of that is admins and the Wikipedia "governance", but a great portion of it also has to do with simply "fellow editors" who may be more knowledgeable about policies and therefore get an edit to stick strictly because of that knowledge... thus pushing their point of view.
On the contrary. These airmen are indeed being told explicitly that they are not allowed to read these newspapers at home. I've read the general memos and talked with people being impacted here, and that is precisely what they are being told.
As a matter of fact, if they read some of these Wikileaks documents, they have to go to a security officer and go through a debriefing process. Furthermore if their computer, their home computer, receives these "classfied" materials they are also being instructed that they need to "sanitize" their computers.... at home... to erase these document from their own computers.
RTFA before you appear as a bigger prick than I think you may be, but then again you may be worse yet. Then again you were a gutless wonder to be posting as an AC to boot.
That perhaps some of the other service branches may not be as idiotic as the Air Force may be true, and hopefully there will break out some common sense here.
How does one determine classification? Only the originator or an uninterested third party is allowed to even VIEW the document, as need-to-know disallows even the highest information security officer (going by Army reg, at least) from even looking at the contents. When a content or perimeter scanner catches a file based on SECRET markings, it doesnt automatically tell us what the file is and if its on WikiLeaks or not. it needs to go through a formal identification, classification, and possible necessary sanitizing procedure.
You know the "classification" of a document because it comes through the military classification system to restrict access to that document. If you happen to pick up a document that doesn't go through that system, by its very definition it is "unclassified".
If somebody happens to extract a document from the classification system and "release it to the wild", they can and should receive appropriate punishment for that act. I can accept that and think that is a good thing to do as well. There are officials who do have the authority and the ability to "declassify" a document either by "downgrading" the classification level or simply releasing it to the public domain, and there are often good reasons for doing that too. It is a political question to decide who should have that authority or how often it should occur. As a political question, that obviously gets under the scope of review by Congress, even if the documents themselves aren't necessarily under their review.
The question being raised here is for documents that are outside of the scope of the classification system, and if a previous state of classification still applies to military personnel. The "laughter and ridicule" is very much appropriate in my opinion being directed at those who insist that the classification still applies. It is sort of like a picture of a sunset at the Grand Canyon: multiple people can take the same photo if they happen to be in the same place. One person may have a high-end camera and decide to slap a copyright on it for sale at high prices as a professional print. Another person simply snapped the picture with their cell phone and posts the picture on twitter where it is seen around the world. Finally an airman snaps the picture and discovers that there is a Chinese fighter flying over the Colorado River and takes that photo to a superior officer suggesting there is something important to national security in the photo. That photo becomes "classified" when the airman or somebody else looking at the photo realizes that the Chinese pilot should have not been flying in Arizona and that it was an intrusion into American airspace... wondering just how the plane got there.
In this case, is the snapshot posted on Twitter classified too? Really, I want to have that explained with a straight face, especially if it was taken about the same time. From a legal perspective, I think it is absurd that it should be considered classified material, particularly as it was used outside of the classification system. How is that different from Wikileaks material?
It may have been possible to set up a system of declassifying documents one at a time when you still had to shuffle paper, and when a document ended up on the front page of the New York Times (which happened in the past and will continue in the future) it was possible for a single bureaucrat to simply declassify that document as it had entered "the public domain".
I've had people tell me about classification systems and document classification levels, but really this is simply getting absurd and needs to be rethought on a basic level. Of course that is a political question and not a military order.
If you get into the military, people's lives depend upon people following orders, no matter how absurd those orders get. You have to be willing to hold your ground and to do so literally even if you may end up dead as a result of following those orders. In that sense, I totally understand the mindset that many in the military have, including defending absurd policies to their political death too if that may be the case, as this is a political bomb that is blowing up in the laps of a whole bunch of general officers. When generals get pissed, the privates start to move. Wikileaks is pissing off a whole bunch of generals.
At the same time, as citizens we have the obligation to question these orders and policies. Those in the military get the mindset that they don't make policy, but rather they must follow policy. Of course ask the soldiers who were involved with the fiasco at Mai Lai, Vietnam if the concept that "I was just following orders" was sufficient to get themselves out of trouble. At some point those in the military also need to start questioning orders before it becomes a disaster of that nature, and this whole thing with Wikileaks is quickly becoming a similar kind of disaster where these orders must be questioned as well. The main problem is one of trying to see just how do you question orders of this nature and through what channels can somebody in the military communicate when they see something that in their gut they know is simply wrong.
I'll also try to repeat what I said above: The role of the information classification system is to set up a method of restricting the flow of "sensitive" information from those in the military to the civilian world. The idea here is that those members of the military who have this extra information are able to make much better informed decisions because they have access to everything in the civilian world plus some extra information gathered through intelligence services that an ordinary civilian doesn't have, therefore they can use that extra information on the behalf of the civilians they are sworn to protect in a positive way. This is something I support, and a reason I think classified material should remain classified when possible.
The problem here is that now the information is in the public domain and those same soldiers (airmen, sailors, marines, coasties, etc.) are no longer operating on the best information which is available, and more importantly they are also missing the public discourse about the use of this information. It is denying those members of the military the ability to exercise their rights as citizens and participate in this discussion as citizens too. Since these members of the military are also operating on weaker information, they are also making inferior decisions based on incomplete knowledge and thus unable to effectively do their jobs. Being isolated from the rest of their fellow citizens also sets up an unhealthy barrier of distrust that may also end up backfiring against the military or the civilians and is something that in the long run may lead to a clash, both politically and hopefully not literally at the point of a gun, with the civilian population. Still, I think it is the fact that information to permit these people in the military from doing their jobs is the most important issue. Something published in the New York Times should not be considered classified material and should have automatic declassification.
The one problem with this viewpoint is that publicly available documents that may contain "classified material" like Jane's Guides (how do you think they get some of that data?) are generally made available to those in the intelligence community... because those public sources of information are still pretty good. Many in the CIA watch CNN and MS-NBC, because those news agencies sometimes get stuff that the official guys don't get to see.
For me, all of this is just sort of making a mockery of the entire concept of classified information, where those with clearance are being prohibited from seeing what a civilian can see or read. The whole point of the classification system of information is to restrict the flow of information from trusted of sensitive sources to the general public, where those who are receiving this information should actually know more than an average civilian and thus be in a better position to make intelligent judgment calls based upon that increased understanding and knowledge. In normal circumstances that is indeed the case, but apparently that isn't going to happen anymore for the military... at least not without an executive order that starts to bang some heads together to straighten this whole situation out.
Barack Obama is in way over his head on an issue like this. The whole episode is spinning out of control into absurdity and must be something deliberate in terms of isolating the military from civilians. That is dangerous for both civilians and the military and may turn the legions of America against its own citizens eventually. To fix this situation and to clean up this sort of absurdity only needs the President of the USA to sit down with a secretary, write up an executive order, and give back to the members of the military basic civil rights that they ought to enjoy as simply being citizens as well as members of the military. It needs no congressional action, no hearings, nothing other than perhaps a "consultation" with the Pentagon, but even that isn't strictly necessary. Being able to read the New York Times (not being forced, but at least having the option) is something that I think is something basic and a fundamental right related to 1st amendment privileges and ought to be interpreted as such.
Essentially, this person sitting in the oval office is in direct violation of his oath of office and is refusing to defend the constitution of the United States. Since he is permitting people to speak out against Wikileaks and refuses to uphold the right to publish and speak your opinion or to freely "operate a press" (which is a hard stretch to say that a website doesn't qualify as a press in a modern interpretation of the concept), Mr. Obama is also violating his oath as well. If he is willing to violate such a basic oath fundamental to his job, what else is this person therefore without ethics willing to do? It is his duty and obligation to defend the constitution, and that includes defending the right for people both in America and elsewhere to exercise these basic rights as outlined in the Constitution.
I guess playing basketball with members of the secret service is more important.
The launch escape system being used for the Dragon is really something interesting, as it will be integral to the capsule and even be used for orbital corrections once the spacecraft gets into orbit. Apparently the current plan is to bring the LES to orbit and then "use the fuel" once it gets up there to attempt rendezvous with the ISS or other spacecraft. In other words, it won't be like the LES system used on the Apollo rockets. By using the LES engines and fuel when in orbit, the weight penalty isn't nearly so big of a deal either as it really isn't dead weight.
Note that in the press conference Elon Musk pointed out that after the release of the Dragon capsule (admittedly quite empty except for a wheel of cheese and some engineering test instruments), the 2nd stage of the Falcon 9 continued on with a 2nd burn going up to 1000 km where it released a couple of nanosats for the U.S. Army. I've never heard of a rocket being used with a mission profile to reach multiple destinations that would include potentially a man-rated vehicle, and certainly indicates a substantial safety margin in terms of delta-v reserve.
The vehicle has to be "man-rated" anyway because it will be docking with the ISS... where by definition all things connected to the ISS must be man-rated and capable of at least containing a full 1 ATM pressure. The difference really is more of some extra life support, adding a few seats to carry the astronauts, a command control console for the pilot, and adding the LES system that is already under development. I think Elon is hoping that NASA will foot the bill for its development, but there are other customers if they won't take him up on the offer. None of the changes really are that big and other than the LES system itself really all that expensive either.
I could see Elon Musk buying up Armadillo Aerospace and making John Carmack a VP of engineering. I'm not sure if Mr. Carmack would be interested in selling the company even if the price was real good, but a chance to go to the Moon might just tip the balance. A chance to personally go to the Moon might really tip the balance. SpaceX has bought up a few smaller aerospace companies along a similar vein and brought that production "in-house" as a way to reduce costs, and I could certainly see an Armadillo lander being used for expeditions to the Moon.
If not Armadillo, Masten Systems might also be a ripe target ready for picking up. Paul Breed with Unreasonable Rocket would have a hard time telling his wife "no" to such an offer.
Adding to this, by having a professionally trained and competent geologist actually there on the Moon, able to hand pick samples, putting them into geological context with other rocks, and to literally run his fingers through the regolith, and to even smell and taste the samples (something video doesn't do a really good job of)... I don't see how that is possible to duplicate something of that nature with a robotic probe. The proposal to have a tele-operated humanoid robot on the Moon does sound like something which may be able to approximate the experience, but I don't think even that is going to have the same impact as having somebody who knows what they are doing "up there."
The sad part is that the geologist was the last person to actually step onto the surface of the Moon and that any other followup studies to do another field survey were not completed. I'm sure Dr. Schmitt would have loved to guide any other follow through on the samples he recovered. Having that trained eye being able to pick out those samples really did make some of those "380 kg" of samples collected even more valuable as they were samples that had specific meaning rather than simply stepping outside of the lander and shoveling up enough rocks within immediate reach of the landing site. That is called real science instead of a random sample/return mission by a robot.
It isn't as if the concept of a business venture to explore and develop new lands is necessarily a new concept that has never been tried before. Adding in about 400 years of inflation and relative economic strength of England in the early 17th Century to what America has for resources and capability for raising funds now in the 21st Century I think the ability to raise billions of dollars could certainly happen with a private venture with government backing. Mining Platinum metals group and other valuable metals in space might at least break-even and possibly get a profit if you could reduce the price of spaceflight another order of magnitude cheaper than SpaceX has achieved. There could be other sources of income as well, depending on the composition of the minerals or other materials that can be developed or used in space.
I could give other examples for potential products that could be developed in space that take advantage of the unique environment that exists "up there" that would be incredibly useful. So far it isn't happening mainly because of government interference and a lack of ability to even get into space in the first place. The cost of spaceflight has also been an issue, which clearly is something that SpaceX has been working on as have a whole bunch of other companies that may be following behind with even cheaper solutions for getting to orbit than even SpaceX.
I agree that there are many problems going to other places, but nothing that is insurmountable.
Not only that, but it will also be important to extract resources from where you are at and to "recycle" the things that you have to make them last longer. This can include things like Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, and Nitrogen. Apparently the only element really missing from the Moon is a reasonable quantity of Nitrogen, and the presence of some ammonia from the various probes that have gone to the Moon recently suggest even that isn't a major obstacle. Yes, it takes putting some equipment on the Moon to be able to process those materials and make them useful, but it isn't impossible either.
There is a huge difference between the initial pioneering expeditions, which will be rough, compared to making the trip afterward. Those initial pioneering efforts, particularly those which are intended to make permanent "bases" of operation, will certainly be rather complicated.
My point I was making is that once you have people who are firmly established at certain points in space, that moving beyond those points is a much lower threshold than simply getting into space in the first place. The reason why you don't see more exploration done is that government bureaucracies are lead by stubborn bunches of technologically illiterate folks from several generations back that often aren't familiar with what could be rather than simply focusing on what has been. Furthermore, private enterprise hasn't even been given the opportunity to even try and do any sort of exploration.
The cool thing here is that while you and I might have differences of opinions on the topic, it really is more of "let's wait and see what happens". I certainly don't have the money for myself to make the financial risks to go to the Moon or anywhere else in space on my own dime, but I am supporting those who do and would love to have that opportunity in the future if it somehow presents itself. I don't think I'm alone in that regard.
NASA has had over 40 years to return to the Moon. I strongly suspect that private enterprise will beat them back there in terms of landing astronauts on a weekend campout expedition.
Elon has already said he would turn down the chance. The argument he made is that as CEO and the primary financier for the company that if he died making an attempt going to orbit that it would put a whole bunch of people that he cares about into the unemployment lines.
He also made a further comment that once this company and the other enterprises are a little better established (Solar City and Tesla Motors) that he might consider making a trip, but certainly not as the first person up in the spacecraft. While I think Elon Musk has a big ego, he does have some brains too.
I have heard some people talk about trying to put some more direct EU involvement into the ESA, as there are projects which can benefit the European Union as a whole which involve spaceflight. Nothing serious and I do understand where the confusion comes from.
Like almost all pan-European organizations, not everything is nearly as clear as it would seem and most European organizations are not nearly as tightly run from a central bureaucracy like is the case in America... which is certainly where much of the source of confusion is coming from. That makes it all the more interesting when I see people in America wanting the government here to be more like Europe, but being so selective about what they like about Europe.
That's right: Investors voluntarily invest their money in SpaceX. But they do it mainly based on the expectation that SpaceX will win fat government contracts, so they can repay these same investors with a larger amount of money involuntarily extracted from the taxpayers.
On the contrary, prior to SpaceX winning the COTS contracts the development of the Falcon 9 was well underway and being developed for other markets besides trying to win government contracts. Simply put, SpaceX built the rocket and then said to the government: "do you want to come along for a ride?"
Folks like ATK and even Boeing and Lockheed-Martin all send out what are called "cost-plus" contracts where they don't even have an engineer look at the proposal until after there is an RFP "out there", and then in turn charge the government for the "cost" of making the vehicle including all engineering costs up front. The Falcon 9 was not built with that business model at all.
Furthermore, because of the structure of the contracts that SpaceX has made with NASA, they still own all of the equipment and merely "lease" it to the government. The Dragon capsule from this flight is property of SpaceX, not NASA.
Compare this flight with the Ares I-X flight that cost nearly the same as the entire development costs of the Falcon/Dragon capsule so far from SpaceX, and the Ares I-X only made a sub-orbital flight. The quoted "$450 million" for this flight did not include the development work on the Ares I project itself, which was between $2-$5 billion.
I'd say that the taxpayers are getting a real bargain for this flight. Even if full funding for the Ares I was still in the federal budget, the first flight with an Orion capsule would still be several years away, and the Ares I was started before SpaceX had even formed as a company. Talk about getting results for money spent.
"Oh yeah, and you need a reactor to burn it in too."
Funny how that never seems to get mentioned when helium-3 is used as a rational to go to the moon....
On Slashdot, it almost always gets brought up. I do agree that the He-3 fanbois tend to forget that the technology to use the stuff on the Earth has yet to be invented.
There is a market for He-3 right now, but it is an incredibly small and niche market that would be flooded by any attempt to mine the stuff on the Moon. It has some interesting applications in the field of cryogenics as it liquefies at a lower temperature than He-4 (about the coldest boiling point for any substance in the universe) See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3_refrigerator
If you need to cool something to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, that is something to seriously examine. Still, if you are talking niche applications that is about as specialized as you can get.
The problem with the heavy lift market is mainly the fixed costs of the infrastructure tend to eat up whatever cost savings come from the larger rockets. If you could launch a heavy lift vehicle on a regular schedule and put them into a huge mass production line, the advantage of sending up larger vehicles certainly has a huge impact in terms of sending stuff up in terms of recurring costs per kilo delivered to orbit. Larger vehicles certainly seem to do a much better job, but you have to get past those fixed costs first. Launching only one or twice per year is going to eat away a the budget for any such large vehicle.
Until now the only place you could throw money down on the table to buy a ride into space was with RKK Energia and flying out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. That was especially sad as it seems the former communists are the only ones who seem to understand capitalism and trying to fill a market demand.
SpaceX is the first American company to do so, as none of the other spacecraft manufacturers were even permitted, as a matter of law, to be able to sell their spacecraft except to government agencies where only those who were government employees or direct contractors employed by the government were permitted to fly into space. Christa McAuliffe was the one exception, and unfortunately her trip into space was rather short. She also didn't pay for her flight into space either.
The truth is that the market for flying in space with a private entity has not been demonstrated at all, and unfortunately even with the Soyuz spacecraft those going up had to be fully certified to fly all systems. That is like trying to take a trans-atlantic flight where the qualifications to even be a passenger is to be multi-engine and IFR certified with a commercial pilot's license. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. SpaceX is trying to change that, where only one "pilot" is going to be needed to fly the Dragon into space and back... when passengers are going to be on board as well. In theory even the pilot isn't going to be needed in the most strict of a sense but will likely be there when it happens (aka a SpaceX professional astronaut doing the flying).
The market for people who want to fly into space but don't have six months or more to train for that flight has not even been established yet... and there are people willing to take that six months to train and are still being turned down for a flight with the bucks in hand.
On the contrary, the leap from LEO to elsewhere is relatively benign. Also, there are places like the Lunar-Earth Lagragian points and GEO which offer some in-between stages from which you can build space stations or other kinds of facilities that would be useful in their own ways. Yes, those places do have their own challenges, but they can be overcome.
The delta-v budgetsimply getting from the surface of the Earth to LEO is actually more than getting from the LEO to Phobos. Fusion power simply gets you there faster and with fewer problems like having to worry about microgravity related health issues. Even 1 m/s^s acceleration would hold most things down and make a huge difference for getting somewhere relatively fast rather than a Hohmann transfer orbit.
It was Robert Heinlein who pointed out that getting to LEO was getting halfway to just about the rest of the solar system in terms of energy costs. The leap from sub-orbital flights like what Spaceship Two is going to be doing to LEO is much, much larger in terms of energy costs than going from LEO to Mars.
Once you get people regularly going to the Moon and back, I don't see how you are going to stop them from heading off to Mars except with a really big gun and a space navy that will shoot down anybody making the attempt. Landing on Mars and then returning is a big deal, but getting there isn't so much of the problem, at least into low-orbit around Mars. That could have been accomplished with Apollo-era technology. The rest of the solar system really is much closer than you would think. The trick is to simply get into space in the first place and to do so cheaply.
Any software developer should know this as for decades the output of any compiler can have copyright asserted by the compiler developer for any software produced by that compiler. There are a few hard-nosed compiler developers that demand special royalties or much more expensive"versions" of their software in order to be "licensed" to redistribute the software under more liberal terms.
It doesn't become much of an issue if you use a compiler like GCC, but if you use commercial compilers, you should read through the fine print or to be extra sure make sure a competent attorney reads through the fine print if you or your company depends upon a substantial source of your income from the output of commercial compilers. Surprisingly, this has been one of the few areas of copyright law that Microsoft hasn't been too anal about, even if you get screwed in other ways. Then again I think Microsoft is a pretty good compiler development company even if I think the rest of their software products aren't worth a damn.
Bigelow Aerospace was going to put up a full-sized demo version into space, but they got enough data off of the other two vehicles (still up in orbit BTW) that they don't see the necessity of bothering with another test before putting something up which can be used for human habitation. That the next module going up will undergo some major tests is true, but they want to make is something they can start to make some money from.
Bigelow is betting huge that they will be able to get it all to work, as they are currently doing a major expansion on their manufacturing facility including a huge water facility where they will be testing equipment and EVA procedures for their own in-house astronaut corps. The water tank is simply enormous, where they plan on putting the BA-330 into that tank fully inflated.
The BA-2100 is the module that I think is going to be genuinely groundbreaking, as by itself will offer more interior volume than the entire International Space Station.
As for SpaceX, Bigelow has already purchased at least one Falcon 9 flight, scheduled for some time in either 2014 or 2015. There isn't any hint as to what Bigelow plans on putting on top of that rocket, however.
Ditto for the Dragon capsule, at least in terms of long-term sustainability in space. It certainly is designed for much longer missions than the Apollo Command capsule was capable of doing and the engineers designing the Dragon capsule essentially took the published specifications for Orion and used them to design the Dragon... improving where necessary or possible.
In both cases the issue isn't that the vehicles can travel beyond LEO, but rather how they will get there if that is the goal. I openly admit that a Falcon 9 is not capable of providing enough thrust to get out of LEO. The Ares V doesn't have enough thrust to get out of committee in Washington DC.
The current plan is to make a high power version of the Merlin engine (Merlin II) that essentially replaces the current cluster of 9 Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 and replaces it with but a single engine producing slightly more thrust (from the current design goals). This would have roughly the same thrust capacity as one of the F1 engines that were used on the Saturn V.
The Falcon 1e is mainly a second generation Merlin engine (having more thrust capacity) with some of the tank structure reworked and extended making it essentially a new rocket with slightly more payload capacity than a stock Falcon 1 as flown earlier.
It is that "Merlin II" engine that is to me far more interesting, where one design is for a "Falcon XX" rocket that would have twice the payload capacity as a Saturn V. I can only presume that is the "Mars rocket" which Elon Musk is hoping to build eventually. Launching something the size of Skylab with a 3rd stage engine capable of pushing something with that mass to escape velocity would certainly be a neat thing to see. That SpaceX claims to be able to launch one of those things for the current cost of a typical shuttle mission really puts things into perspective too.
In term of man rating a vehicle, it will be very interesting to see what the FAA-AST has to say about that issue. So far they generally do deference to NASA on the issue of manned spaceflight, although NASA doesn't have regulatory authority over non-government astronauts or manned spaceflight missions. If NASA decides to be a jerk about manned spaceflight requirements, Elon Musk could simply say "screw 'em" and simply sell flights to Robert Bigelow instead or to Space Adventures. There will be other customers for the Dragon capsule than just NASA... something I don't think at least some within NASA have quite figured out yet.
None of those hold a candle to the 119,000 kg to LEO capacity of the Saturn V. A Saturn IB could put 20,800 kg into LEO. Why the Shuttle was considered a "replacement" for those vehicles I will never know.
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The Wikimedia Foundation isn't pissing people off? I take it you have never read much of the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list (sometimes called Foundation-l), where regularly there are people who do air issues and grievances... including pointed attacks against much of the leadership of the organization.
Some people try to take the issues up the food chain, and on occasion some of those issues do get resolved, but there are some endemic issues that seem to be regularly put off from time to time. One of the issues that seems to still eat at my craw is how the majority of the Wikimedia Foundation is still under the direct control of Jimmy Wales, as he appointed those board members personally and put them into that position. There are "elected" members of the board who as a matter of practice do most of the real heavy lifting work, but they still hold a minority position on the main governing board.
Jimmy Wales himself has sort of stirred the pot from time to time, most notably with his intervention into the governance of Wikiversity and the Wikimedia Commons.... both of which met with some extreme resistance from the respective communities where he was even "uninvited" due to his meddling and forced him to essentially lose his "founder's flag" as a matter of principle with his account. Wikiversity is still a fractured mess, and the Wikimedia Commons community (those who do most of the regular maintenance of that resource) has all but ignored the advise of Jimmy Wales... particularly as it applies to "obscene images".
There are indeed some reasons why there is some complaints about the governance of the Wikimedia projects, and some of it well founded. Perhaps the most current issue is mainly a complaint that the funds are somehow being managed inappropriately. The Foundation headquarters was moved from St. Petersberg, Florida to San Francisco. Perhaps there may have been some merit to that move for several reasons, but it certainly has ended up costing the Foundation much more to hire and keep support staff through financial incentives. Also, the number of staff members has grown considerable over the past couple of years, and there is also some questioning what exactly they are doing other than becoming a bloated bureaucracy of their own which is mainly busy trying to justify their jobs to donors. Most of the new jobs have little to do with the infrastructure of the Wikimedia projects (running the server farm, maintaining the network backbone connection, providing professional software development to the development of the MediaWiki software, etc.) but rather more to "public outreach" efforts or "community relations" issues. In other words, what exactly are those people doing that are spending the donations to the Wikimedia Foundation? In some cases they are duplicating volunteer positions, and those volunteers still exist.
If any of this is new, I hope you are somewhat enlightened. There are some complaints, and for me well founded complaints too. Some of the administrators do get rough from time to time when dealing with new contributors to Wikipedia and the other projects too. An "admin" really is just a volunteer position, which also brings in the problems with volunteer leadership and how to keep that under control. There really isn't an effective way to reign in admins unless they are being blatantly abusive, so for the most part the process to become an admin is usually set at a pretty high bar to begin with. Most of the time what happens when somebody gets upset with Wikipedia is that those new contributors usually have a different viewpoint about what Wikipedia is really all about, and if those new contributions go "out of scope" for what a typical administrator is looking for there are usually conflicts with those new contributors and the admins. Some admins are very blunt about the issues too and don't do a very good job of working with these new contributors either.... which is also why some people occasionally get a bad first impression about Wikipedia. Enough of those with a bad first impression exist where it is a negative factor for new contributors as well.
To evidence that there is a problem, the number of new contributors to Wikipedia has all but stopped. It is a fairly large number, but as I've also pointed out that there are many countries of the world who have more people involved with the development of Wikipedia in their native languages as a proportion of their overall population (Germany in particular comes to mind) than is the case for English language development on Wikipedia. The only reason why English is so dominate is mainly due to the overall dominance around the world of that language.
There certainly are untapped "markets" of people who have the potential to contribute to Wikipedia and simply are not choosing to do so. Some of that is due to the fact that there aren't large blocks of people who are discovering Wikipedia, but mostly individuals one at a time. It is easy to dismiss their contributions, especially as it take effort to train and develop some of these mostly non-writers into encyclopedia article writers. If anything the desire of many on Wikipedia, at least the "active" editors who are also developing and setting policies for Wikipedia governance, also are at least proposing in some cases and certainly by unofficial actions are throwing efforts by new editors away and driving out new contributors. Doing so I argue that those same editors are also driving away the potential growth of Wikipedia as well.
There are also abusive administrators, and little that can be done to stop them other than to stand up to them and call them a bully to their face... setting up the potential for a wheel war and other sorts of nasty actions where admins thump their chests and try to carve out alliances among other admins to support their actions. Ordinary users sort of get lost in the shuffle when that happens too, not to mention imagined "consensus" when "minority" viewpoints are simply blocked or kicked out of the discussion forums for various reasons.
The Wikilawyering going on from time to time is particularly bad, especially when it ends up driving away potential contributors and browbeating opposing points of view to leave. Some of that is admins and the Wikipedia "governance", but a great portion of it also has to do with simply "fellow editors" who may be more knowledgeable about policies and therefore get an edit to stick strictly because of that knowledge... thus pushing their point of view.
On the contrary. These airmen are indeed being told explicitly that they are not allowed to read these newspapers at home. I've read the general memos and talked with people being impacted here, and that is precisely what they are being told.
As a matter of fact, if they read some of these Wikileaks documents, they have to go to a security officer and go through a debriefing process. Furthermore if their computer, their home computer, receives these "classfied" materials they are also being instructed that they need to "sanitize" their computers.... at home... to erase these document from their own computers.
RTFA before you appear as a bigger prick than I think you may be, but then again you may be worse yet. Then again you were a gutless wonder to be posting as an AC to boot.
That perhaps some of the other service branches may not be as idiotic as the Air Force may be true, and hopefully there will break out some common sense here.
No. is not.
How does one determine classification? Only the originator or an uninterested third party is allowed to even VIEW the document, as need-to-know disallows even the highest information security officer (going by Army reg, at least) from even looking at the contents.
When a content or perimeter scanner catches a file based on SECRET markings, it doesnt automatically tell us what the file is and if its on WikiLeaks or not. it needs to go through a formal identification, classification, and possible necessary sanitizing procedure.
You know the "classification" of a document because it comes through the military classification system to restrict access to that document. If you happen to pick up a document that doesn't go through that system, by its very definition it is "unclassified".
If somebody happens to extract a document from the classification system and "release it to the wild", they can and should receive appropriate punishment for that act. I can accept that and think that is a good thing to do as well. There are officials who do have the authority and the ability to "declassify" a document either by "downgrading" the classification level or simply releasing it to the public domain, and there are often good reasons for doing that too. It is a political question to decide who should have that authority or how often it should occur. As a political question, that obviously gets under the scope of review by Congress, even if the documents themselves aren't necessarily under their review.
The question being raised here is for documents that are outside of the scope of the classification system, and if a previous state of classification still applies to military personnel. The "laughter and ridicule" is very much appropriate in my opinion being directed at those who insist that the classification still applies. It is sort of like a picture of a sunset at the Grand Canyon: multiple people can take the same photo if they happen to be in the same place. One person may have a high-end camera and decide to slap a copyright on it for sale at high prices as a professional print. Another person simply snapped the picture with their cell phone and posts the picture on twitter where it is seen around the world. Finally an airman snaps the picture and discovers that there is a Chinese fighter flying over the Colorado River and takes that photo to a superior officer suggesting there is something important to national security in the photo. That photo becomes "classified" when the airman or somebody else looking at the photo realizes that the Chinese pilot should have not been flying in Arizona and that it was an intrusion into American airspace... wondering just how the plane got there.
In this case, is the snapshot posted on Twitter classified too? Really, I want to have that explained with a straight face, especially if it was taken about the same time. From a legal perspective, I think it is absurd that it should be considered classified material, particularly as it was used outside of the classification system. How is that different from Wikileaks material?
Welcome to the 21st Century.
It may have been possible to set up a system of declassifying documents one at a time when you still had to shuffle paper, and when a document ended up on the front page of the New York Times (which happened in the past and will continue in the future) it was possible for a single bureaucrat to simply declassify that document as it had entered "the public domain".
I've had people tell me about classification systems and document classification levels, but really this is simply getting absurd and needs to be rethought on a basic level. Of course that is a political question and not a military order.
If you get into the military, people's lives depend upon people following orders, no matter how absurd those orders get. You have to be willing to hold your ground and to do so literally even if you may end up dead as a result of following those orders. In that sense, I totally understand the mindset that many in the military have, including defending absurd policies to their political death too if that may be the case, as this is a political bomb that is blowing up in the laps of a whole bunch of general officers. When generals get pissed, the privates start to move. Wikileaks is pissing off a whole bunch of generals.
At the same time, as citizens we have the obligation to question these orders and policies. Those in the military get the mindset that they don't make policy, but rather they must follow policy. Of course ask the soldiers who were involved with the fiasco at Mai Lai, Vietnam if the concept that "I was just following orders" was sufficient to get themselves out of trouble. At some point those in the military also need to start questioning orders before it becomes a disaster of that nature, and this whole thing with Wikileaks is quickly becoming a similar kind of disaster where these orders must be questioned as well. The main problem is one of trying to see just how do you question orders of this nature and through what channels can somebody in the military communicate when they see something that in their gut they know is simply wrong.
I'll also try to repeat what I said above: The role of the information classification system is to set up a method of restricting the flow of "sensitive" information from those in the military to the civilian world. The idea here is that those members of the military who have this extra information are able to make much better informed decisions because they have access to everything in the civilian world plus some extra information gathered through intelligence services that an ordinary civilian doesn't have, therefore they can use that extra information on the behalf of the civilians they are sworn to protect in a positive way. This is something I support, and a reason I think classified material should remain classified when possible.
The problem here is that now the information is in the public domain and those same soldiers (airmen, sailors, marines, coasties, etc.) are no longer operating on the best information which is available, and more importantly they are also missing the public discourse about the use of this information. It is denying those members of the military the ability to exercise their rights as citizens and participate in this discussion as citizens too. Since these members of the military are also operating on weaker information, they are also making inferior decisions based on incomplete knowledge and thus unable to effectively do their jobs. Being isolated from the rest of their fellow citizens also sets up an unhealthy barrier of distrust that may also end up backfiring against the military or the civilians and is something that in the long run may lead to a clash, both politically and hopefully not literally at the point of a gun, with the civilian population. Still, I think it is the fact that information to permit these people in the military from doing their jobs is the most important issue. Something published in the New York Times should not be considered classified material and should have automatic declassification.
The one problem with this viewpoint is that publicly available documents that may contain "classified material" like Jane's Guides (how do you think they get some of that data?) are generally made available to those in the intelligence community... because those public sources of information are still pretty good. Many in the CIA watch CNN and MS-NBC, because those news agencies sometimes get stuff that the official guys don't get to see.
For me, all of this is just sort of making a mockery of the entire concept of classified information, where those with clearance are being prohibited from seeing what a civilian can see or read. The whole point of the classification system of information is to restrict the flow of information from trusted of sensitive sources to the general public, where those who are receiving this information should actually know more than an average civilian and thus be in a better position to make intelligent judgment calls based upon that increased understanding and knowledge. In normal circumstances that is indeed the case, but apparently that isn't going to happen anymore for the military... at least not without an executive order that starts to bang some heads together to straighten this whole situation out.
Barack Obama is in way over his head on an issue like this. The whole episode is spinning out of control into absurdity and must be something deliberate in terms of isolating the military from civilians. That is dangerous for both civilians and the military and may turn the legions of America against its own citizens eventually. To fix this situation and to clean up this sort of absurdity only needs the President of the USA to sit down with a secretary, write up an executive order, and give back to the members of the military basic civil rights that they ought to enjoy as simply being citizens as well as members of the military. It needs no congressional action, no hearings, nothing other than perhaps a "consultation" with the Pentagon, but even that isn't strictly necessary. Being able to read the New York Times (not being forced, but at least having the option) is something that I think is something basic and a fundamental right related to 1st amendment privileges and ought to be interpreted as such.
Essentially, this person sitting in the oval office is in direct violation of his oath of office and is refusing to defend the constitution of the United States. Since he is permitting people to speak out against Wikileaks and refuses to uphold the right to publish and speak your opinion or to freely "operate a press" (which is a hard stretch to say that a website doesn't qualify as a press in a modern interpretation of the concept), Mr. Obama is also violating his oath as well. If he is willing to violate such a basic oath fundamental to his job, what else is this person therefore without ethics willing to do? It is his duty and obligation to defend the constitution, and that includes defending the right for people both in America and elsewhere to exercise these basic rights as outlined in the Constitution.
I guess playing basketball with members of the secret service is more important.
The launch escape system being used for the Dragon is really something interesting, as it will be integral to the capsule and even be used for orbital corrections once the spacecraft gets into orbit. Apparently the current plan is to bring the LES to orbit and then "use the fuel" once it gets up there to attempt rendezvous with the ISS or other spacecraft. In other words, it won't be like the LES system used on the Apollo rockets. By using the LES engines and fuel when in orbit, the weight penalty isn't nearly so big of a deal either as it really isn't dead weight.
Note that in the press conference Elon Musk pointed out that after the release of the Dragon capsule (admittedly quite empty except for a wheel of cheese and some engineering test instruments), the 2nd stage of the Falcon 9 continued on with a 2nd burn going up to 1000 km where it released a couple of nanosats for the U.S. Army. I've never heard of a rocket being used with a mission profile to reach multiple destinations that would include potentially a man-rated vehicle, and certainly indicates a substantial safety margin in terms of delta-v reserve.
The vehicle has to be "man-rated" anyway because it will be docking with the ISS... where by definition all things connected to the ISS must be man-rated and capable of at least containing a full 1 ATM pressure. The difference really is more of some extra life support, adding a few seats to carry the astronauts, a command control console for the pilot, and adding the LES system that is already under development. I think Elon is hoping that NASA will foot the bill for its development, but there are other customers if they won't take him up on the offer. None of the changes really are that big and other than the LES system itself really all that expensive either.
I could see Elon Musk buying up Armadillo Aerospace and making John Carmack a VP of engineering. I'm not sure if Mr. Carmack would be interested in selling the company even if the price was real good, but a chance to go to the Moon might just tip the balance. A chance to personally go to the Moon might really tip the balance. SpaceX has bought up a few smaller aerospace companies along a similar vein and brought that production "in-house" as a way to reduce costs, and I could certainly see an Armadillo lander being used for expeditions to the Moon.
If not Armadillo, Masten Systems might also be a ripe target ready for picking up. Paul Breed with Unreasonable Rocket would have a hard time telling his wife "no" to such an offer.
Adding to this, by having a professionally trained and competent geologist actually there on the Moon, able to hand pick samples, putting them into geological context with other rocks, and to literally run his fingers through the regolith, and to even smell and taste the samples (something video doesn't do a really good job of)... I don't see how that is possible to duplicate something of that nature with a robotic probe. The proposal to have a tele-operated humanoid robot on the Moon does sound like something which may be able to approximate the experience, but I don't think even that is going to have the same impact as having somebody who knows what they are doing "up there."
The sad part is that the geologist was the last person to actually step onto the surface of the Moon and that any other followup studies to do another field survey were not completed. I'm sure Dr. Schmitt would have loved to guide any other follow through on the samples he recovered. Having that trained eye being able to pick out those samples really did make some of those "380 kg" of samples collected even more valuable as they were samples that had specific meaning rather than simply stepping outside of the lander and shoveling up enough rocks within immediate reach of the landing site. That is called real science instead of a random sample/return mission by a robot.
It isn't as if the concept of a business venture to explore and develop new lands is necessarily a new concept that has never been tried before. Adding in about 400 years of inflation and relative economic strength of England in the early 17th Century to what America has for resources and capability for raising funds now in the 21st Century I think the ability to raise billions of dollars could certainly happen with a private venture with government backing. Mining Platinum metals group and other valuable metals in space might at least break-even and possibly get a profit if you could reduce the price of spaceflight another order of magnitude cheaper than SpaceX has achieved. There could be other sources of income as well, depending on the composition of the minerals or other materials that can be developed or used in space.
I could give other examples for potential products that could be developed in space that take advantage of the unique environment that exists "up there" that would be incredibly useful. So far it isn't happening mainly because of government interference and a lack of ability to even get into space in the first place. The cost of spaceflight has also been an issue, which clearly is something that SpaceX has been working on as have a whole bunch of other companies that may be following behind with even cheaper solutions for getting to orbit than even SpaceX.
I was hoping for a couple cans of Spam. It would have been very fitting. I wonder why they didn't try to do that?
I agree that there are many problems going to other places, but nothing that is insurmountable.
Not only that, but it will also be important to extract resources from where you are at and to "recycle" the things that you have to make them last longer. This can include things like Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, and Nitrogen. Apparently the only element really missing from the Moon is a reasonable quantity of Nitrogen, and the presence of some ammonia from the various probes that have gone to the Moon recently suggest even that isn't a major obstacle. Yes, it takes putting some equipment on the Moon to be able to process those materials and make them useful, but it isn't impossible either.
There is a huge difference between the initial pioneering expeditions, which will be rough, compared to making the trip afterward. Those initial pioneering efforts, particularly those which are intended to make permanent "bases" of operation, will certainly be rather complicated.
My point I was making is that once you have people who are firmly established at certain points in space, that moving beyond those points is a much lower threshold than simply getting into space in the first place. The reason why you don't see more exploration done is that government bureaucracies are lead by stubborn bunches of technologically illiterate folks from several generations back that often aren't familiar with what could be rather than simply focusing on what has been. Furthermore, private enterprise hasn't even been given the opportunity to even try and do any sort of exploration.
The cool thing here is that while you and I might have differences of opinions on the topic, it really is more of "let's wait and see what happens". I certainly don't have the money for myself to make the financial risks to go to the Moon or anywhere else in space on my own dime, but I am supporting those who do and would love to have that opportunity in the future if it somehow presents itself. I don't think I'm alone in that regard.
NASA has had over 40 years to return to the Moon. I strongly suspect that private enterprise will beat them back there in terms of landing astronauts on a weekend campout expedition.
Elon has already said he would turn down the chance. The argument he made is that as CEO and the primary financier for the company that if he died making an attempt going to orbit that it would put a whole bunch of people that he cares about into the unemployment lines.
He also made a further comment that once this company and the other enterprises are a little better established (Solar City and Tesla Motors) that he might consider making a trip, but certainly not as the first person up in the spacecraft. While I think Elon Musk has a big ego, he does have some brains too.
I have heard some people talk about trying to put some more direct EU involvement into the ESA, as there are projects which can benefit the European Union as a whole which involve spaceflight. Nothing serious and I do understand where the confusion comes from.
Like almost all pan-European organizations, not everything is nearly as clear as it would seem and most European organizations are not nearly as tightly run from a central bureaucracy like is the case in America... which is certainly where much of the source of confusion is coming from. That makes it all the more interesting when I see people in America wanting the government here to be more like Europe, but being so selective about what they like about Europe.
I'd gladly hold down anybody making such a statement while Buzz goes and punches his lights out.
That's right: Investors voluntarily invest their money in SpaceX. But they do it mainly based on the expectation that SpaceX will win fat government contracts, so they can repay these same investors with a larger amount of money involuntarily extracted from the taxpayers.
On the contrary, prior to SpaceX winning the COTS contracts the development of the Falcon 9 was well underway and being developed for other markets besides trying to win government contracts. Simply put, SpaceX built the rocket and then said to the government: "do you want to come along for a ride?"
Folks like ATK and even Boeing and Lockheed-Martin all send out what are called "cost-plus" contracts where they don't even have an engineer look at the proposal until after there is an RFP "out there", and then in turn charge the government for the "cost" of making the vehicle including all engineering costs up front. The Falcon 9 was not built with that business model at all.
Furthermore, because of the structure of the contracts that SpaceX has made with NASA, they still own all of the equipment and merely "lease" it to the government. The Dragon capsule from this flight is property of SpaceX, not NASA.
Compare this flight with the Ares I-X flight that cost nearly the same as the entire development costs of the Falcon/Dragon capsule so far from SpaceX, and the Ares I-X only made a sub-orbital flight. The quoted "$450 million" for this flight did not include the development work on the Ares I project itself, which was between $2-$5 billion.
I'd say that the taxpayers are getting a real bargain for this flight. Even if full funding for the Ares I was still in the federal budget, the first flight with an Orion capsule would still be several years away, and the Ares I was started before SpaceX had even formed as a company. Talk about getting results for money spent.
"Oh yeah, and you need a reactor to burn it in too."
Funny how that never seems to get mentioned when helium-3 is used as a rational to go to the moon....
On Slashdot, it almost always gets brought up. I do agree that the He-3 fanbois tend to forget that the technology to use the stuff on the Earth has yet to be invented.
There is a market for He-3 right now, but it is an incredibly small and niche market that would be flooded by any attempt to mine the stuff on the Moon. It has some interesting applications in the field of cryogenics as it liquefies at a lower temperature than He-4 (about the coldest boiling point for any substance in the universe) See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3_refrigerator
If you need to cool something to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, that is something to seriously examine. Still, if you are talking niche applications that is about as specialized as you can get.
The problem with the heavy lift market is mainly the fixed costs of the infrastructure tend to eat up whatever cost savings come from the larger rockets. If you could launch a heavy lift vehicle on a regular schedule and put them into a huge mass production line, the advantage of sending up larger vehicles certainly has a huge impact in terms of sending stuff up in terms of recurring costs per kilo delivered to orbit. Larger vehicles certainly seem to do a much better job, but you have to get past those fixed costs first. Launching only one or twice per year is going to eat away a the budget for any such large vehicle.
Until now the only place you could throw money down on the table to buy a ride into space was with RKK Energia and flying out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. That was especially sad as it seems the former communists are the only ones who seem to understand capitalism and trying to fill a market demand.
SpaceX is the first American company to do so, as none of the other spacecraft manufacturers were even permitted, as a matter of law, to be able to sell their spacecraft except to government agencies where only those who were government employees or direct contractors employed by the government were permitted to fly into space. Christa McAuliffe was the one exception, and unfortunately her trip into space was rather short. She also didn't pay for her flight into space either.
The truth is that the market for flying in space with a private entity has not been demonstrated at all, and unfortunately even with the Soyuz spacecraft those going up had to be fully certified to fly all systems. That is like trying to take a trans-atlantic flight where the qualifications to even be a passenger is to be multi-engine and IFR certified with a commercial pilot's license. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. SpaceX is trying to change that, where only one "pilot" is going to be needed to fly the Dragon into space and back... when passengers are going to be on board as well. In theory even the pilot isn't going to be needed in the most strict of a sense but will likely be there when it happens (aka a SpaceX professional astronaut doing the flying).
The market for people who want to fly into space but don't have six months or more to train for that flight has not even been established yet... and there are people willing to take that six months to train and are still being turned down for a flight with the bucks in hand.
On the contrary, the leap from LEO to elsewhere is relatively benign. Also, there are places like the Lunar-Earth Lagragian points and GEO which offer some in-between stages from which you can build space stations or other kinds of facilities that would be useful in their own ways. Yes, those places do have their own challenges, but they can be overcome.
The delta-v budgetsimply getting from the surface of the Earth to LEO is actually more than getting from the LEO to Phobos. Fusion power simply gets you there faster and with fewer problems like having to worry about microgravity related health issues. Even 1 m/s^s acceleration would hold most things down and make a huge difference for getting somewhere relatively fast rather than a Hohmann transfer orbit.
It was Robert Heinlein who pointed out that getting to LEO was getting halfway to just about the rest of the solar system in terms of energy costs. The leap from sub-orbital flights like what Spaceship Two is going to be doing to LEO is much, much larger in terms of energy costs than going from LEO to Mars.
Once you get people regularly going to the Moon and back, I don't see how you are going to stop them from heading off to Mars except with a really big gun and a space navy that will shoot down anybody making the attempt. Landing on Mars and then returning is a big deal, but getting there isn't so much of the problem, at least into low-orbit around Mars. That could have been accomplished with Apollo-era technology. The rest of the solar system really is much closer than you would think. The trick is to simply get into space in the first place and to do so cheaply.
Any software developer should know this as for decades the output of any compiler can have copyright asserted by the compiler developer for any software produced by that compiler. There are a few hard-nosed compiler developers that demand special royalties or much more expensive"versions" of their software in order to be "licensed" to redistribute the software under more liberal terms.
It doesn't become much of an issue if you use a compiler like GCC, but if you use commercial compilers, you should read through the fine print or to be extra sure make sure a competent attorney reads through the fine print if you or your company depends upon a substantial source of your income from the output of commercial compilers. Surprisingly, this has been one of the few areas of copyright law that Microsoft hasn't been too anal about, even if you get screwed in other ways. Then again I think Microsoft is a pretty good compiler development company even if I think the rest of their software products aren't worth a damn.
Bigelow Aerospace was going to put up a full-sized demo version into space, but they got enough data off of the other two vehicles (still up in orbit BTW) that they don't see the necessity of bothering with another test before putting something up which can be used for human habitation. That the next module going up will undergo some major tests is true, but they want to make is something they can start to make some money from.
Bigelow is betting huge that they will be able to get it all to work, as they are currently doing a major expansion on their manufacturing facility including a huge water facility where they will be testing equipment and EVA procedures for their own in-house astronaut corps. The water tank is simply enormous, where they plan on putting the BA-330 into that tank fully inflated.
The BA-2100 is the module that I think is going to be genuinely groundbreaking, as by itself will offer more interior volume than the entire International Space Station.
As for SpaceX, Bigelow has already purchased at least one Falcon 9 flight, scheduled for some time in either 2014 or 2015. There isn't any hint as to what Bigelow plans on putting on top of that rocket, however.
Orion's design spec is for travel beyond orbit.>
Ditto for the Dragon capsule, at least in terms of long-term sustainability in space. It certainly is designed for much longer missions than the Apollo Command capsule was capable of doing and the engineers designing the Dragon capsule essentially took the published specifications for Orion and used them to design the Dragon... improving where necessary or possible.
In both cases the issue isn't that the vehicles can travel beyond LEO, but rather how they will get there if that is the goal. I openly admit that a Falcon 9 is not capable of providing enough thrust to get out of LEO. The Ares V doesn't have enough thrust to get out of committee in Washington DC.
The current plan is to make a high power version of the Merlin engine (Merlin II) that essentially replaces the current cluster of 9 Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 and replaces it with but a single engine producing slightly more thrust (from the current design goals). This would have roughly the same thrust capacity as one of the F1 engines that were used on the Saturn V.
The Falcon 1e is mainly a second generation Merlin engine (having more thrust capacity) with some of the tank structure reworked and extended making it essentially a new rocket with slightly more payload capacity than a stock Falcon 1 as flown earlier.
It is that "Merlin II" engine that is to me far more interesting, where one design is for a "Falcon XX" rocket that would have twice the payload capacity as a Saturn V. I can only presume that is the "Mars rocket" which Elon Musk is hoping to build eventually. Launching something the size of Skylab with a 3rd stage engine capable of pushing something with that mass to escape velocity would certainly be a neat thing to see. That SpaceX claims to be able to launch one of those things for the current cost of a typical shuttle mission really puts things into perspective too.
In term of man rating a vehicle, it will be very interesting to see what the FAA-AST has to say about that issue. So far they generally do deference to NASA on the issue of manned spaceflight, although NASA doesn't have regulatory authority over non-government astronauts or manned spaceflight missions. If NASA decides to be a jerk about manned spaceflight requirements, Elon Musk could simply say "screw 'em" and simply sell flights to Robert Bigelow instead or to Space Adventures. There will be other customers for the Dragon capsule than just NASA... something I don't think at least some within NASA have quite figured out yet.
None of those hold a candle to the 119,000 kg to LEO capacity of the Saturn V. A Saturn IB could put 20,800 kg into LEO. Why the Shuttle was considered a "replacement" for those vehicles I will never know.
Isn't 20/20 hindsight grand!