Just trying to play devil's advocate here, but one of the reasons why solid rockets are considered so superior to liquid fueled rockets is based upon the fact that generally there are fewer if any moving parts that can suffer from mechanical failure, while a liquid rocket requires some massive pumps to keep feeding the fuel into the combustion chamber... pumps which can and do suffer failures due to the environment of where they are most efficiently placed in order to function. As a general rule it is true that the more moving parts you have in a mechanical system, the more prone that it will be to mechanical failure as one or more of the parts jam up or wear out. Turbo pump failures do happen on liquid fueled rockets and can lead to catastrophic failure of the rocket as a whole too. Good engineering can mitigate some of that issue, but not all of it.
This as told to me by an ATK employee who worked on the Ares I program (roughly paraphrasing).
I'll also admit that even SpaceX has had problems with turbopump failures including at least one spectacular failure on one of the Falcon 1 launches. The source of that was galvanic corrosion which should have been caught during a design review, but it is an example of the kind of problems facing liquid engines.
Still, I don't buy that argument myself as a major reason for a preference to solid rockets. The best example I can give is more empirical: Every manned space launcher in the history of mankind with the exception of the Shuttle program, as made by any country including those currently being proposed, have all used liquid fueled rockets for propulsion. The Constellation program was therefore a rare exception even in the realm of human spaceflight and the use of solid rockets in that perspective should have been viewed as a highly experimental and untried proposition. I don't know if ATK was able to solve the scaling issues with even putting one more segment on top of the SRB to make the Ares I work, and they certainly had to come up with some rather ingenious solutions to some of those issues including making strong shock absorbers to keep the teeth in the astronauts as the vehicle was launched.
From what I understand on even the Shuttle system, once the SRBs separate the astronauts notice a huge drop in noise and vibrations, where the SSMEs provide a very smooth and pleasant ride into orbit. There are also many other abort modes available to the Shuttle once the SRBs separate too, where even a failure of a turbo pump isn't necessarily a fatal experience.
Orrin Hatch was a freshman junior senator when the SRB was originally proposed. While I'll admit that he has been instrumental at making sure the SRB program remained in Utah (there was an attempt to move the facility to Mississippi in the mid-1990's) and is certainly one of those who pulled strings to get the SRB "technology" put onto the Ares vehicles with the Constellation architecture, I don't think he had anywhere near that kind of pull during the Carter administration or the Nixon administration when he wasn't even a senator at all and the decisions for the shuttle architecture were being developed.
As for the role that Orrin Hatch's predecessor played in getting the SRB program to Utah may be another issue. It would be fun to dig through the newspaper articles on the issue because I'm pretty sure that Orrin Hatch likely used the SRB program as an example of government pork and waste to defeat his predecessor.
Keep in mind that what SpaceX is quoting is not cost but rather price with profit margins put into place. I haven't see anywhere what SpaceX is making for a profit on those suggested prices, but it isn't being given away at a loss and in spite of only flying a few missions SpaceX is already in the black as a company by most accounting methods which can be used. This flight today only helps in that regard.
While Ariane is trying to make money for their respective partner countries in the ESA, I would guess that prices are pretty close to costs. Not so much for the Russians with the Soyuz spacecraft as they seem to have discovered capitalism. Dennis Tito was able to fly on a Soyuz spacecraft for about $20 million before inflation and other factors drove the price up.
It's worth noting, though, that the Falcon 9 / Dragon platform is probably not going to be the one taking us to the moon or elsewhere outside of Earth orbit; it was designed to be cheap and fast to develop, which is exactly why SpaceX was able to fly this mission whilst Orion got cancelled. It would take some really heavy modification to even do a lunar flyby.
For now, though, it seems like exactly what we need. If these flights prove to be reliable and inexpensive, then the supply and personnel lines to the ISS are secured, and it'll probably pave the way for Bigelow's space station to launch in a couple years.
The big thing that Robert Bigelow is hoping for is that he can have a "second source" of transportation to his space stations. Reliance upon just one possible source of supply is always a bad thing. That is one of the reasons why Bigelow is working with Boeing on the CST-100.
As for the Orion, it is still technically under development and in fact there are other options being thrown around to get it flying, including throwing it on top of either an Atlas V or a Delta IV rocket. United Space Alliance has been working out options to be the prime contractor for getting the Orion flying with private or government funds. At the moment, I think the Orion capsule is the only thing getting continued funding in the future for the Constellation project. Ares I is dead as a project and the Ares V is now just a dream, but the Orion capsule is certainly still under development.
As for if the Dragon capsule is better or worse than the Orion, Elon Musk was ask that very question today at the press conference. I'll have to defer to Elon Musk on the technicalities, but he claims that the Dragon is going to have more capabilities than the Orion and perform a wider number of mission. While it is true that the Falcon 9 doesn't have the delta-v necessary to get the Moon and back, that is a criticism of the rocket and not the capsule. As an example, the heat shield of the Dragon capsule is designed to take the velocity of a free return trajectory from Mars and successfully re-enter the Earth's atmosphere without burning up. That is certainly a capability which the Orion capsule doesn't have. In that sense going to the Moon would be trivial in comparison and the Dragon could certainly do an Apollo-8 style circum-lunar orbit then return to the Earth, presuming that some future launcher of a Saturn V class could be put together to get the thing up there in the first place.
The "Dragon Lab" project is designed to keep a Dragon capsule in orbit, pressurized, for up to a full year. In theory it might even serve as a better emergency escape capsule for the ISS than the Soyuz, and in fact is part of its design goal too. As to if NASA will use it in that capacity is irrelevant. By comparison, the Space Shuttle can only stay in orbit for about a month before the systems start to fall apart and it would be incapable of returning back to the Earth. Some extra "precautions" could be taken by astronauts if a Shuttle docked to the ISS, but it still wouldn't last a year even with some very optimistic planning, at least being in a condition to conduct a landing.
I don't think the Dragon capsule is nearly as cheap & dirty as you are making it out to be here.
As if Alliant Techsystems (ATK) is really all that cheap. For the price of simply refurbishing a single SRB, SpaceX can put a satellite up into orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket. For just a little bit more money, you can even put people into space on that same rocket.
The only reason why ATK is "cheap" is because nobody else would bother with fitting the specifications as required for the SRB contract. See also "Cost-plus contract" for further details.
Water turns out to be an excellent shield against most radiation, including solar flares. Basically if you put about a foot or so of water around your cabin or living space, it would protect you against almost all major forms of radiation you would encounter while in "deep space". The radiation close to Saturn or going through the Van Allen Belts of the Earth are best dealt with by spending as little time in them as possible.
The water would also serve as a source of something to drink and take care of other needs while enroute, including reaction mass for thrusting and other useful purposes as well. It is also something fairly universal throughout the solar system to find and extract.
Keep in mind that astronauts did just fine traveling to the Moon, although it should be pointed out that the Apollo missions did take place during a solar sunspot minimum with unusually calm conditions on the Sun. JFK got lucky on choosing a date ("by the end of this decade" in the 1960's) when this was the case.
Trademark law is much, much weaker than copyright law in terms of enforcement, and the "fair-use" provisions of trademark law are also considerably stronger. Essentially, as long as you don't claim to be the original author or artist or imply some kind of endorsement from the organization represented with the trademark by using that trademark, you are certainly free to use it in creative works.
Having Mickey Mouse drop by in a movie and blow a raspberry at you as a cameo might be tricky with copyright law in force, but if it is just a trademark the claim is much more dubious as a trademark infringement. MAD Magazine for years has been using trademarks as fair-use for parody purposes, and whenever a company sues them for trademark violation they usually win the case... and then make fun of the case in the magazine afterward.
More important, once Micky Mouse goes into public domain, you can play with the original footage and splice it into other movies or make derivative works based off of that original movie and Disney would be unable to have any say at all on how that is used or done. You can't claim such movie is a "Walt Disney movie" because it isn't, but you certainly could use stuff from Steamboat Willie if it ever got out of copyright. Supposedly that movie already is out of copyright due to a technical filing error on the part of Disney staff (Walt himself sort of screwed that one up apparently), but it would be a legal fight with Disney over that issue if you tried to claim that as your rationale for duplicating the film.
That is why the reply put the phrase in quotes. Yeah, it would be nice if some construction worker would get royalties and residuals for having worked on a building by collecting a portion of the rent collected from its use. I'm surprised that nobody has tried to enforce that as a form of "intellectual property law".
BTW, I'm just kidding here in terms of copyright law (although a building might be considered in some sense to be "a work of art"), but it does show the absurdity of where extension to copyright law can really go if you aren't careful. There have been attempts to prevent "derivative" copyright distribution of content from a building (aka insisting on copyright for the Empire State Building and requiring royalties for postcards and stuff using its likeness), but usually courts throw that stuff out when it comes up as "uncopyrightable".
Announcing contact with an alien civilization? There are already protocols established for how that would happen, and there might be an outside chance this is the case, but I would think your are correct that this wouldn't be a bunch of NASA scientists trying to build up their little department but rather something coming straight from the White House, as it would have some strong political implications.
This is a possibility: There might have been a discovery of an Earth-like planet around another star system that is in the "goldilocks zone" with a mass close to that of the Earth (which I put as 0.9x to 1.5x the mass of the Earth) with detection of substantial quantities of oxygen and water vapor in the atmosphere, and perhaps a "glint" of liquid water on its surface. That would be an interesting discovery certainly worth a major announcement, and something that is on the threshold of some of the technology NASA has been putting into space, assuming of course that the planet orbits the star at the right angle to be detected in this manner (for its orbit relative to the tangential direction of observation from the Earth/Solar System in general).
Speculation is fun here, and I don't know what it could be.
Assuming that you have a nuclear fusion reactor that tied with something like a strong ion-thrust engine or something like VASMIR can put out thrust of about 9.8 m/s^2, a trip to Titan would be something similar to a trans-Pacific voyage of 200 years ago. Long, perhaps somewhat dangerous, but certainly well within the scope of physics and something which current technology is getting close to perfecting.
A trip to Titan doesn't hold a candle to a trip to another star system, which to get that accomplished in under a year or two would require finding a way around pretty tough physical theories like Relativity that suggest it can't be done.
You are talking about how ALH84001 was hyped up by the news media? I'm expecting a similar kind of announcement that certainly will be interesting but nothing that is earth moving.
Regardless, I'm sure it will be blown out of proportion by the popular news media and it will likely be a lead story in the evening news as a "groundbreaking discovery".
Unless of course they got a picture of a bipedal alien walking around Spirit or Opportunity. Somehow I strongly doubt that.
NASA has one of the best public relations departments of any federal agency that I know of. Of course that isn't a particularly high bar to meet in terms of standards, but it is pretty good. I suppose that the National Park Service does pretty good as well, and the Department of Defense is learning the hard way on how to get that done. The TSA could certainly learn a few tips from NASA about PR work.
Leak about the US doing evil and you do have the protection of the legal system. In open court your defence team will have your leaks confirmed as true and can then call experts.
The press sit up and facts about methods, wars, funding, drugs, weapons, listening stations, taps, death squads, death lists, legal advice on going to war.... are in the open.
As long as that remains the case, you might enjoy some sort of freedom after a fashion. There certainly are plenty of public examples of people "disappearing" in America too or at least people having unexplained deaths when they got a little too close for comfort to a position of political power. At the very least the death of Vince Foster shows that you can't completely rule out politically motivated killings even within American politics.
We hope that those in a position of political authority are going to go through the judicial system to accomplish their goals, and as long as the judicial system seems to get the "problem solved", they will continue to use that system. So which is better: A corrupt judicial system with mock trials, or a corrupt executive branch that ignores the courts altogether?
The problem with being so raw in America as to simply kill somebody without a trial is that it is too messy and can lead to other questions so long as the facade of free speech still exists.
I'm sure a whole bunch of people know about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but their impact upon computing and information theory is comparatively minor compared to Richard Hamming. There are many such individuals who if you have studied your history of computing that really ought to be much better known but little is really talked about even in computing circles. Usually there is a theorem or algorithm which bears the name of an individual like Dijkstra's algorithm, but who really knows much about Edsger Dijkstra, the guy who came up with the concept in the first place, or for that matter even knows the names behind the LZW compression algorithm?
If you went to a group of college seniors in computer science, how many of them would have ever heard about Grace Hooper? First classmen in the Naval Academy? (I would sure hope that the U.S. Naval Academy at least would have taught their computer science cadets something about Admiral Hooper, especially if they get assigned to the USS Hooper).
There are a bunch of people you should know in the history of computing, and unless you have a very good professor who doesn't claim to have invented the integrated circuit and every other part of computing, you generally don't know the whys for how most concepts in computer science were ever derived.
I think you may be onto something, but if you are looking at just Cheney and Bush as the reason for these problems, you are thinking far too small and are being perhaps intentionally myopic. If anything, I consider Bush in this case to be more like Zaphod Beeblebrox in terms of being President: He drew attention away from the real people running the show and causing problems.
Keep in mind that neither Bush nor Cheney are in a position of political control at the moment, yet the policies they started (which may be argued as having precedence to even earlier presidential administrations) still are continued even with the "savior of the world, Barack Obama".
Yes, there are problems happening here, and something is certainly wrong. Blaming this on George W. Bush is drawing attention away from those who really are causing the problem. Haliburton may be profiting from this, but I wouldn't put this exclusively on them either.
Al-Queida is being supported, endorsed, and financed by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and significant elements within Pakistan. Those are most definitely nation-states, and the most disturbing is Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden himself is a Saudi subject whose personal finances certainly helped to support Al-Queida.
It is a mistake to think this is something not involving countries and political motives of particular nations. This is where you are flat out wrong.
As for Afghanistan, it is a war zone where various elements are engaged in fighting a protracted war, and a whole bunch of innocent people are caught in the middle. The problem there is that some of the people involved are wearing uniforms and engaged in formal military exercises, but it isn't all one sided and certainly the Geneva Convention isn't being followed... unfortunately ignored by nearly everybody in this particular fight. It isn't just a one-sided problem for just America but literally everybody. A war is going on there, sponsored by several nations.
Somalia simply is a nation without a government, from the perspective of an anarchist it ought to be a paradise. Instead, it is literally a free-for-all of any group that wants to shove their way in will perhaps gain control. Al-Queida is there mainly because they won't get kicked out by the government as there is none to kick them out. Who is going to stop them? Western nations don't care about Somalia, and the other African nations simply are either too weak to do any thing or again simply don't care. In terms of the long-term overall goal of Al-Queida to make Islam the only religion and the mandatory religion for the world, moving into Somalia is a good idea... again financed and supported by at least nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran.
If anything, I consider Al-Queida to be pawns in a much larger global struggle for supremacy, and nobody is necessarily correct, but America is being made out to be the "bad guys" as a deliberate political objective. At the same time, American leaders keep shooting themselves in the foot politically speaking and are largely responsible for many of their own problems. Much of this is cleanup from the wars of the 20th Century that never were effectively resolved so far as the political situation in south-western Asia is concerned, or at least only now getting resolved. France, the UK, and Russia did an abysmally horrible job of chopping up the Ottoman Empire, which is the source of many of these problems.
You have two different kinds of "terrorists" that you need to be worried about:
One is the kind made up of people who get a thrill out of simply killing people. Generally these are lone idiots, typically lack intelligence anyway (not always a given, but pretty high likelihood), and have problems getting along with others. This is an ordinary police problem, and something which has been a part of human society for thousands or even millions of years. This kind of issue is really all that the "security screenings" are taking care of, and really doesn't do the job very well anyway. By far and away the typical response is to let them act, then chase them down, lock them up, and perhaps execute them if you don't want to deal with them. I'm not necessary against a casual screening to keep the really stupid idiots from getting away with mass murder, but there are much more cost-effective and better ways to deal with those kind of people than doing a full body cavity search of everybody boarding a vehicle. You know that is going to be the next step that the TSA is going to insist upon, don't you?
The other kind are essentially "soldiers" who are working on behalf of a nation-state and thus are furthering a political cause of some sort. In most cases they are getting training, support, and other kinds of assistance from governments of some kind. In other words, what is being done is an act of war. No matter how hard you try, no matter what effort is done to stop these guys, they will get the bombs through in some way. It becomes an "arms" race to keep fighting these folks, and indeed a sort of game to be played too. The trick here is that you need to change the game for them, and more importantly get the war to happen back home.. to the home of the terrorists. Make the nation-states who are paying for that war pay dearly for their action, and make the possibility of war so terrible that they will refuse to act.
That may take territorial occupation and flat out military conquest of a people with "war crimes" perhaps being necessary. You can't be gentle when somebody decides to wage war, but certainly a trick is to identify just who is causing the war.
In this current "war on terrorism", the real culprits and people who are financing and supporting this war are not getting hit, and indeed are being protected. A more properly used term is "low intensity conflict", but other terms can be used too. Until you hold the leaders of this kind of activity accountable for their actions, it will continue and indeed "terrorism" will increase. If you run from war, war will follow you. It can only be stopped by standing up and fighting those who would bully you around.
Unfortunately, the TSA officials here are treating warfare as if it is an ordinary law enforcement matter. If you want to understand why this problem is getting worse, you have to realize that these "security experts" really have contempt for ordinary citizens and certainly don't believe in civil rights and a presumption of innocence. It is a presumption of guilt until being proven innocent which is causing all of the problems.
Extending this to trains or other forms of transportation isn't going to solve a single thing.
It should be pointed out that Ted Stevens was acquitted of his charges, although the acquittal didn't happen until well after the election he was running for.... which brings up another point.
Far more often than not "ethics charges" are used for political purposes, mainly to force some "popular" opponent to either leave or drop out of a political race, or to cloud the election process so much that many people will vote against the guy.
I'm not saying that a lawmaker can't do things that are illegal as an individual, but it is much harder to do so and many things which would be illegal for individuals to do are often excepted for political leaders. A good current example is how Nancy Pelosi doesn't have to go through the scanners whenever she has to fly between Washington DC and San Francisco. My, how convenient is that. All it takes is convincing a majority of those in the legislative body that something should be exempted for them and them alone, and it becomes law. I could give a great many other examples that would churn your stomach.
I'm sorry I misspelled the name Charles Rangle. I didn't know I had to bend over so hard to the grammar Nazis here.
What I said was stupid... I'll admit that the Congress of the United States lacks quite a bit in terms of intelligence, especially when it gets to things like this. Wrong? I guess I'm glad I'm not you. Good luck, you'll need it.
Perhaps some IRS agent is going to ignore you on this issue. If so, you got away with this white collar crime and as such, I applaud you. There are many Americans who would love to be able to get away with avoiding taxes.
I'm just stating what the law is, and if you made it through customs coming to America, consider yourself lucky. They do nail people evading taxes... just say'in. There also isn't a statute of limitation on this either. As I said, you are lucky you are hiding behind the AC label too, although I'm sure that Slashdot does record IP addresses and stuff that the IRS can trace anyway if they asked. All it takes is somebody to e-mail a link to this thread to the IRS to give you a hard time.
I got the Secret Service to screw over some kid who thought like you that on-line conversations would give you immunity for a really stupid remark he made. I hope this doesn't come back and haunt you too, or hopefully you are just BS'ing and making all this up as pure fiction. I'm not going to contact the IRS, but somebody might. These posts get read by a whole bunch of people and this is certainly a very public place.
I used to pay utilities, magazine subscriptions, and rent through direct bank transfers while I lived in Brazil. All you needed was the account number, give them your name (mainly so they know you paid), and some cash for the amount you wanted to pay.... you didn't even have to have an account at the bank and most banks would accept payments for other banks too, at least from within Brazil.
I've done that in America where I had my mother make direct bank deposits into my bank account where all she had was my bank account number. Unfortunately it had to be at a branch of the same bank for that to work. No fees were necessary for that to work at all. The money was available that same day for the most part, and large deposits were available in at most seven days if checks were involved to let them clear.
It can be done, the problem is the will to make it happen.
Good luck on ever returning to America or invoking your citizenship rights. And a pretty good job of staying anonymous too.
As long as you put yourself in permanent exile from America and never deal with the U.S. government again, I suppose that would work. This means never renewing your passport, never voting in any American election, or staying away from U.S. Embassies. Calling home from time to time perhaps, but that is about it. Make sure that you never even step into America, even by accident. More importantly, try to stay in countries where extradition treaties haven't been signed with America either... it could help and tax evasion is considered a felony in this case too.
You do get tax credits for income taxes paid to a foreign government, and if the tax rate in that other government is higher than what the American tax rate would be for your income level, you don't have to pay any income taxes to the IRS at all. My father-in-law does this all of the time as he lives in China and the Chinese tax rate is substantially higher than the American rate.
Still, the IRS is going to try to get you if they can, so make sure you stay out of their reach. Many countries will give tax receipts to each other too in terms of fighting tax evasion, so they might just find out that you haven't been sponging off of one of your relatives too.
Even if you renounce your American citizenship and formally become a naturalized citizen of another country, you still have to pay taxes for a number of years. I don't remember the exact amount of time off the top of my head, but I think it is somewhere between 5-10 years. Yeah, it stinks.
There have even been some interesting ideas presented in terms of making Bitcoins much more cash-like, including physical printing of bitcoins, and putting value of bitcoins onto debit cards which could be used in a point of sale system. I don't know how much more cash-like you could get other than a government declaring Bitcoins to be legal tender.
Since law makers are, by definition, the folks who write and make the laws, what they do as long as they get the majority of the chamber that they sit in to support their crazy idea would be by its very definition legal.
In other words, government officials can't do something illegal because they make the laws which define what is legal.
Dishonesty? Yes. That is why Charles Wrangle got into trouble yet was able to keep his seat. Funny thing how that worked out, wasn't it?
Elected officials go before an ethics board, not a courtroom (usually) unless they are so inept that they actually commit a felony that the rest of the members of their chamber or legislative body thinks is blatantly wrong. It is still pretty hard to do and there are a great many immunities for elected officials.
In theory, the U.S. Senate was seen as a sort of continuation of the Continental Congress, where it was a meeting of the states and the House was a meeting of "the people". In that sense, having senators as representatives of the state legislature made a whole lot of sense. In that situation, I think it might be a good idea to go back to that original system.
The problem is that as a matter of practice it really didn't end up as a contest within the state legislatures (even if it there always a formal vote for the Senators in those bodies). Instead, the real political contest was usually at the state convention for the majority political party or within the majority party caucus at the state legislature.
If I would make a change, I would remove terms of service from Senators entirely, with the ability for state legislatures to appoint or recall a senator at the will or whim of that legislature. By state law (not federal) they could decide the terms or conditions which would apply to senators for their terms of service and when they are up for review by that body and that the senator would be quite literally a representative of the state government itself within the U.S. Senate. Essentially the equivalent of an ambassador to the UN or something like that, but on the federal level. Such a move might put a whole lot more accountability on the part of Congress too. Could such a system be subject to bribery and scandal? Yes, but it would sure make a senator pay attention to the leadership of the state government and would make putting a physical office in the state capital something simply required by the senator. They would also simply have to pay attention or even physically be present when the state legislature was in session.
I would be curious about how that would change the nature of the U.S. Senate if a change like that happened.
Having even been a politician running for office, I can't think of any way that campaign contribution != bribe.
It really is the same thing. I would love to learn how to run a political campaign without either stealing taxpayer money (aka "publicly financed elections") or straight out bribery.
On the positive side, most small time elections end up costing so much to run a campaign that the contributions to help run the campaign are incidental and most of it comes out of your own pocket. Then again, that ensures only the wealthy can afford to run for public office and us poor peons don't ever have a prayer of getting "one of our own" into public office.
There are some ways to run a guerrilla political campaign that can substantially minimize the campaign costs with the replacement of a large group of volunteers who are effectively managed to "get the vote out" for a particular candidate. It takes work and effort to do that, however, and a fair bit of luck on the side too. Even with these kind of campaigns, however, I really don't know how to completely eliminate some of the basic costs far and above the simple filing fee. It simply is expensive to run a political campaign.
The sad thing, too, is that expensive political advertisements work too. I wish that fewer people would pay attention to the ads and instead actually take the time to research the candidates, but most people usually aren't that careful about their vote except for perhaps the marquee political office of the day. President of the USA? Yeah, most people know about what brand of toothpaste they are using and their mother's maiden name. But how much do you know about the city councilman that you voted for? Most would be lucky if they've even seen the candidate's name before they got to the voting booth.
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Just trying to play devil's advocate here, but one of the reasons why solid rockets are considered so superior to liquid fueled rockets is based upon the fact that generally there are fewer if any moving parts that can suffer from mechanical failure, while a liquid rocket requires some massive pumps to keep feeding the fuel into the combustion chamber... pumps which can and do suffer failures due to the environment of where they are most efficiently placed in order to function. As a general rule it is true that the more moving parts you have in a mechanical system, the more prone that it will be to mechanical failure as one or more of the parts jam up or wear out. Turbo pump failures do happen on liquid fueled rockets and can lead to catastrophic failure of the rocket as a whole too. Good engineering can mitigate some of that issue, but not all of it.
This as told to me by an ATK employee who worked on the Ares I program (roughly paraphrasing).
I'll also admit that even SpaceX has had problems with turbopump failures including at least one spectacular failure on one of the Falcon 1 launches. The source of that was galvanic corrosion which should have been caught during a design review, but it is an example of the kind of problems facing liquid engines.
Still, I don't buy that argument myself as a major reason for a preference to solid rockets. The best example I can give is more empirical: Every manned space launcher in the history of mankind with the exception of the Shuttle program, as made by any country including those currently being proposed, have all used liquid fueled rockets for propulsion. The Constellation program was therefore a rare exception even in the realm of human spaceflight and the use of solid rockets in that perspective should have been viewed as a highly experimental and untried proposition. I don't know if ATK was able to solve the scaling issues with even putting one more segment on top of the SRB to make the Ares I work, and they certainly had to come up with some rather ingenious solutions to some of those issues including making strong shock absorbers to keep the teeth in the astronauts as the vehicle was launched.
From what I understand on even the Shuttle system, once the SRBs separate the astronauts notice a huge drop in noise and vibrations, where the SSMEs provide a very smooth and pleasant ride into orbit. There are also many other abort modes available to the Shuttle once the SRBs separate too, where even a failure of a turbo pump isn't necessarily a fatal experience.
Orrin Hatch was a freshman junior senator when the SRB was originally proposed. While I'll admit that he has been instrumental at making sure the SRB program remained in Utah (there was an attempt to move the facility to Mississippi in the mid-1990's) and is certainly one of those who pulled strings to get the SRB "technology" put onto the Ares vehicles with the Constellation architecture, I don't think he had anywhere near that kind of pull during the Carter administration or the Nixon administration when he wasn't even a senator at all and the decisions for the shuttle architecture were being developed.
As for the role that Orrin Hatch's predecessor played in getting the SRB program to Utah may be another issue. It would be fun to dig through the newspaper articles on the issue because I'm pretty sure that Orrin Hatch likely used the SRB program as an example of government pork and waste to defeat his predecessor.
Keep in mind that what SpaceX is quoting is not cost but rather price with profit margins put into place. I haven't see anywhere what SpaceX is making for a profit on those suggested prices, but it isn't being given away at a loss and in spite of only flying a few missions SpaceX is already in the black as a company by most accounting methods which can be used. This flight today only helps in that regard.
While Ariane is trying to make money for their respective partner countries in the ESA, I would guess that prices are pretty close to costs. Not so much for the Russians with the Soyuz spacecraft as they seem to have discovered capitalism. Dennis Tito was able to fly on a Soyuz spacecraft for about $20 million before inflation and other factors drove the price up.
It's worth noting, though, that the Falcon 9 / Dragon platform is probably not going to be the one taking us to the moon or elsewhere outside of Earth orbit; it was designed to be cheap and fast to develop, which is exactly why SpaceX was able to fly this mission whilst Orion got cancelled. It would take some really heavy modification to even do a lunar flyby.
For now, though, it seems like exactly what we need. If these flights prove to be reliable and inexpensive, then the supply and personnel lines to the ISS are secured, and it'll probably pave the way for Bigelow's space station to launch in a couple years.
The big thing that Robert Bigelow is hoping for is that he can have a "second source" of transportation to his space stations. Reliance upon just one possible source of supply is always a bad thing. That is one of the reasons why Bigelow is working with Boeing on the CST-100.
As for the Orion, it is still technically under development and in fact there are other options being thrown around to get it flying, including throwing it on top of either an Atlas V or a Delta IV rocket. United Space Alliance has been working out options to be the prime contractor for getting the Orion flying with private or government funds. At the moment, I think the Orion capsule is the only thing getting continued funding in the future for the Constellation project. Ares I is dead as a project and the Ares V is now just a dream, but the Orion capsule is certainly still under development.
As for if the Dragon capsule is better or worse than the Orion, Elon Musk was ask that very question today at the press conference. I'll have to defer to Elon Musk on the technicalities, but he claims that the Dragon is going to have more capabilities than the Orion and perform a wider number of mission. While it is true that the Falcon 9 doesn't have the delta-v necessary to get the Moon and back, that is a criticism of the rocket and not the capsule. As an example, the heat shield of the Dragon capsule is designed to take the velocity of a free return trajectory from Mars and successfully re-enter the Earth's atmosphere without burning up. That is certainly a capability which the Orion capsule doesn't have. In that sense going to the Moon would be trivial in comparison and the Dragon could certainly do an Apollo-8 style circum-lunar orbit then return to the Earth, presuming that some future launcher of a Saturn V class could be put together to get the thing up there in the first place.
The "Dragon Lab" project is designed to keep a Dragon capsule in orbit, pressurized, for up to a full year. In theory it might even serve as a better emergency escape capsule for the ISS than the Soyuz, and in fact is part of its design goal too. As to if NASA will use it in that capacity is irrelevant. By comparison, the Space Shuttle can only stay in orbit for about a month before the systems start to fall apart and it would be incapable of returning back to the Earth. Some extra "precautions" could be taken by astronauts if a Shuttle docked to the ISS, but it still wouldn't last a year even with some very optimistic planning, at least being in a condition to conduct a landing.
I don't think the Dragon capsule is nearly as cheap & dirty as you are making it out to be here.
As if Alliant Techsystems (ATK) is really all that cheap. For the price of simply refurbishing a single SRB, SpaceX can put a satellite up into orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket. For just a little bit more money, you can even put people into space on that same rocket.
The only reason why ATK is "cheap" is because nobody else would bother with fitting the specifications as required for the SRB contract. See also "Cost-plus contract" for further details.
Water turns out to be an excellent shield against most radiation, including solar flares. Basically if you put about a foot or so of water around your cabin or living space, it would protect you against almost all major forms of radiation you would encounter while in "deep space". The radiation close to Saturn or going through the Van Allen Belts of the Earth are best dealt with by spending as little time in them as possible.
The water would also serve as a source of something to drink and take care of other needs while enroute, including reaction mass for thrusting and other useful purposes as well. It is also something fairly universal throughout the solar system to find and extract.
Keep in mind that astronauts did just fine traveling to the Moon, although it should be pointed out that the Apollo missions did take place during a solar sunspot minimum with unusually calm conditions on the Sun. JFK got lucky on choosing a date ("by the end of this decade" in the 1960's) when this was the case.
Trademark law is much, much weaker than copyright law in terms of enforcement, and the "fair-use" provisions of trademark law are also considerably stronger. Essentially, as long as you don't claim to be the original author or artist or imply some kind of endorsement from the organization represented with the trademark by using that trademark, you are certainly free to use it in creative works.
Having Mickey Mouse drop by in a movie and blow a raspberry at you as a cameo might be tricky with copyright law in force, but if it is just a trademark the claim is much more dubious as a trademark infringement. MAD Magazine for years has been using trademarks as fair-use for parody purposes, and whenever a company sues them for trademark violation they usually win the case... and then make fun of the case in the magazine afterward.
More important, once Micky Mouse goes into public domain, you can play with the original footage and splice it into other movies or make derivative works based off of that original movie and Disney would be unable to have any say at all on how that is used or done. You can't claim such movie is a "Walt Disney movie" because it isn't, but you certainly could use stuff from Steamboat Willie if it ever got out of copyright. Supposedly that movie already is out of copyright due to a technical filing error on the part of Disney staff (Walt himself sort of screwed that one up apparently), but it would be a legal fight with Disney over that issue if you tried to claim that as your rationale for duplicating the film.
That is why the reply put the phrase in quotes. Yeah, it would be nice if some construction worker would get royalties and residuals for having worked on a building by collecting a portion of the rent collected from its use. I'm surprised that nobody has tried to enforce that as a form of "intellectual property law".
BTW, I'm just kidding here in terms of copyright law (although a building might be considered in some sense to be "a work of art"), but it does show the absurdity of where extension to copyright law can really go if you aren't careful. There have been attempts to prevent "derivative" copyright distribution of content from a building (aka insisting on copyright for the Empire State Building and requiring royalties for postcards and stuff using its likeness), but usually courts throw that stuff out when it comes up as "uncopyrightable".
Announcing contact with an alien civilization? There are already protocols established for how that would happen, and there might be an outside chance this is the case, but I would think your are correct that this wouldn't be a bunch of NASA scientists trying to build up their little department but rather something coming straight from the White House, as it would have some strong political implications.
This is a possibility: There might have been a discovery of an Earth-like planet around another star system that is in the "goldilocks zone" with a mass close to that of the Earth (which I put as 0.9x to 1.5x the mass of the Earth) with detection of substantial quantities of oxygen and water vapor in the atmosphere, and perhaps a "glint" of liquid water on its surface. That would be an interesting discovery certainly worth a major announcement, and something that is on the threshold of some of the technology NASA has been putting into space, assuming of course that the planet orbits the star at the right angle to be detected in this manner (for its orbit relative to the tangential direction of observation from the Earth/Solar System in general).
Speculation is fun here, and I don't know what it could be.
Assuming that you have a nuclear fusion reactor that tied with something like a strong ion-thrust engine or something like VASMIR can put out thrust of about 9.8 m/s^2, a trip to Titan would be something similar to a trans-Pacific voyage of 200 years ago. Long, perhaps somewhat dangerous, but certainly well within the scope of physics and something which current technology is getting close to perfecting.
A trip to Titan doesn't hold a candle to a trip to another star system, which to get that accomplished in under a year or two would require finding a way around pretty tough physical theories like Relativity that suggest it can't be done.
You are talking about how ALH84001 was hyped up by the news media? I'm expecting a similar kind of announcement that certainly will be interesting but nothing that is earth moving.
Regardless, I'm sure it will be blown out of proportion by the popular news media and it will likely be a lead story in the evening news as a "groundbreaking discovery".
Unless of course they got a picture of a bipedal alien walking around Spirit or Opportunity. Somehow I strongly doubt that.
NASA has one of the best public relations departments of any federal agency that I know of. Of course that isn't a particularly high bar to meet in terms of standards, but it is pretty good. I suppose that the National Park Service does pretty good as well, and the Department of Defense is learning the hard way on how to get that done. The TSA could certainly learn a few tips from NASA about PR work.
Leak about the US doing evil and you do have the protection of the legal system. In open court your defence team will have your leaks confirmed as true and can then call experts.
The press sit up and facts about methods, wars, funding, drugs, weapons, listening stations, taps, death squads, death lists, legal advice on going to war .... are in the open.
As long as that remains the case, you might enjoy some sort of freedom after a fashion. There certainly are plenty of public examples of people "disappearing" in America too or at least people having unexplained deaths when they got a little too close for comfort to a position of political power. At the very least the death of Vince Foster shows that you can't completely rule out politically motivated killings even within American politics.
We hope that those in a position of political authority are going to go through the judicial system to accomplish their goals, and as long as the judicial system seems to get the "problem solved", they will continue to use that system. So which is better: A corrupt judicial system with mock trials, or a corrupt executive branch that ignores the courts altogether?
The problem with being so raw in America as to simply kill somebody without a trial is that it is too messy and can lead to other questions so long as the facade of free speech still exists.
I'm sure a whole bunch of people know about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but their impact upon computing and information theory is comparatively minor compared to Richard Hamming. There are many such individuals who if you have studied your history of computing that really ought to be much better known but little is really talked about even in computing circles. Usually there is a theorem or algorithm which bears the name of an individual like Dijkstra's algorithm, but who really knows much about Edsger Dijkstra, the guy who came up with the concept in the first place, or for that matter even knows the names behind the LZW compression algorithm?
If you went to a group of college seniors in computer science, how many of them would have ever heard about Grace Hooper? First classmen in the Naval Academy? (I would sure hope that the U.S. Naval Academy at least would have taught their computer science cadets something about Admiral Hooper, especially if they get assigned to the USS Hooper).
There are a bunch of people you should know in the history of computing, and unless you have a very good professor who doesn't claim to have invented the integrated circuit and every other part of computing, you generally don't know the whys for how most concepts in computer science were ever derived.
I think you may be onto something, but if you are looking at just Cheney and Bush as the reason for these problems, you are thinking far too small and are being perhaps intentionally myopic. If anything, I consider Bush in this case to be more like Zaphod Beeblebrox in terms of being President: He drew attention away from the real people running the show and causing problems.
Keep in mind that neither Bush nor Cheney are in a position of political control at the moment, yet the policies they started (which may be argued as having precedence to even earlier presidential administrations) still are continued even with the "savior of the world, Barack Obama".
Yes, there are problems happening here, and something is certainly wrong. Blaming this on George W. Bush is drawing attention away from those who really are causing the problem. Haliburton may be profiting from this, but I wouldn't put this exclusively on them either.
Al-Queida is being supported, endorsed, and financed by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and significant elements within Pakistan. Those are most definitely nation-states, and the most disturbing is Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden himself is a Saudi subject whose personal finances certainly helped to support Al-Queida.
It is a mistake to think this is something not involving countries and political motives of particular nations. This is where you are flat out wrong.
As for Afghanistan, it is a war zone where various elements are engaged in fighting a protracted war, and a whole bunch of innocent people are caught in the middle. The problem there is that some of the people involved are wearing uniforms and engaged in formal military exercises, but it isn't all one sided and certainly the Geneva Convention isn't being followed... unfortunately ignored by nearly everybody in this particular fight. It isn't just a one-sided problem for just America but literally everybody. A war is going on there, sponsored by several nations.
Somalia simply is a nation without a government, from the perspective of an anarchist it ought to be a paradise. Instead, it is literally a free-for-all of any group that wants to shove their way in will perhaps gain control. Al-Queida is there mainly because they won't get kicked out by the government as there is none to kick them out. Who is going to stop them? Western nations don't care about Somalia, and the other African nations simply are either too weak to do any thing or again simply don't care. In terms of the long-term overall goal of Al-Queida to make Islam the only religion and the mandatory religion for the world, moving into Somalia is a good idea... again financed and supported by at least nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran.
If anything, I consider Al-Queida to be pawns in a much larger global struggle for supremacy, and nobody is necessarily correct, but America is being made out to be the "bad guys" as a deliberate political objective. At the same time, American leaders keep shooting themselves in the foot politically speaking and are largely responsible for many of their own problems. Much of this is cleanup from the wars of the 20th Century that never were effectively resolved so far as the political situation in south-western Asia is concerned, or at least only now getting resolved. France, the UK, and Russia did an abysmally horrible job of chopping up the Ottoman Empire, which is the source of many of these problems.
You have two different kinds of "terrorists" that you need to be worried about:
One is the kind made up of people who get a thrill out of simply killing people. Generally these are lone idiots, typically lack intelligence anyway (not always a given, but pretty high likelihood), and have problems getting along with others. This is an ordinary police problem, and something which has been a part of human society for thousands or even millions of years. This kind of issue is really all that the "security screenings" are taking care of, and really doesn't do the job very well anyway. By far and away the typical response is to let them act, then chase them down, lock them up, and perhaps execute them if you don't want to deal with them. I'm not necessary against a casual screening to keep the really stupid idiots from getting away with mass murder, but there are much more cost-effective and better ways to deal with those kind of people than doing a full body cavity search of everybody boarding a vehicle. You know that is going to be the next step that the TSA is going to insist upon, don't you?
The other kind are essentially "soldiers" who are working on behalf of a nation-state and thus are furthering a political cause of some sort. In most cases they are getting training, support, and other kinds of assistance from governments of some kind. In other words, what is being done is an act of war. No matter how hard you try, no matter what effort is done to stop these guys, they will get the bombs through in some way. It becomes an "arms" race to keep fighting these folks, and indeed a sort of game to be played too. The trick here is that you need to change the game for them, and more importantly get the war to happen back home.. to the home of the terrorists. Make the nation-states who are paying for that war pay dearly for their action, and make the possibility of war so terrible that they will refuse to act.
That may take territorial occupation and flat out military conquest of a people with "war crimes" perhaps being necessary. You can't be gentle when somebody decides to wage war, but certainly a trick is to identify just who is causing the war.
In this current "war on terrorism", the real culprits and people who are financing and supporting this war are not getting hit, and indeed are being protected. A more properly used term is "low intensity conflict", but other terms can be used too. Until you hold the leaders of this kind of activity accountable for their actions, it will continue and indeed "terrorism" will increase. If you run from war, war will follow you. It can only be stopped by standing up and fighting those who would bully you around.
Unfortunately, the TSA officials here are treating warfare as if it is an ordinary law enforcement matter. If you want to understand why this problem is getting worse, you have to realize that these "security experts" really have contempt for ordinary citizens and certainly don't believe in civil rights and a presumption of innocence. It is a presumption of guilt until being proven innocent which is causing all of the problems.
Extending this to trains or other forms of transportation isn't going to solve a single thing.
It should be pointed out that Ted Stevens was acquitted of his charges, although the acquittal didn't happen until well after the election he was running for.... which brings up another point.
Far more often than not "ethics charges" are used for political purposes, mainly to force some "popular" opponent to either leave or drop out of a political race, or to cloud the election process so much that many people will vote against the guy.
I'm not saying that a lawmaker can't do things that are illegal as an individual, but it is much harder to do so and many things which would be illegal for individuals to do are often excepted for political leaders. A good current example is how Nancy Pelosi doesn't have to go through the scanners whenever she has to fly between Washington DC and San Francisco. My, how convenient is that. All it takes is convincing a majority of those in the legislative body that something should be exempted for them and them alone, and it becomes law. I could give a great many other examples that would churn your stomach.
I'm sorry I misspelled the name Charles Rangle. I didn't know I had to bend over so hard to the grammar Nazis here.
What I said was stupid... I'll admit that the Congress of the United States lacks quite a bit in terms of intelligence, especially when it gets to things like this. Wrong? I guess I'm glad I'm not you. Good luck, you'll need it.
Perhaps some IRS agent is going to ignore you on this issue. If so, you got away with this white collar crime and as such, I applaud you. There are many Americans who would love to be able to get away with avoiding taxes.
I'm just stating what the law is, and if you made it through customs coming to America, consider yourself lucky. They do nail people evading taxes... just say'in. There also isn't a statute of limitation on this either. As I said, you are lucky you are hiding behind the AC label too, although I'm sure that Slashdot does record IP addresses and stuff that the IRS can trace anyway if they asked. All it takes is somebody to e-mail a link to this thread to the IRS to give you a hard time.
I got the Secret Service to screw over some kid who thought like you that on-line conversations would give you immunity for a really stupid remark he made. I hope this doesn't come back and haunt you too, or hopefully you are just BS'ing and making all this up as pure fiction. I'm not going to contact the IRS, but somebody might. These posts get read by a whole bunch of people and this is certainly a very public place.
I used to pay utilities, magazine subscriptions, and rent through direct bank transfers while I lived in Brazil. All you needed was the account number, give them your name (mainly so they know you paid), and some cash for the amount you wanted to pay.... you didn't even have to have an account at the bank and most banks would accept payments for other banks too, at least from within Brazil.
I've done that in America where I had my mother make direct bank deposits into my bank account where all she had was my bank account number. Unfortunately it had to be at a branch of the same bank for that to work. No fees were necessary for that to work at all. The money was available that same day for the most part, and large deposits were available in at most seven days if checks were involved to let them clear.
It can be done, the problem is the will to make it happen.
Good luck on ever returning to America or invoking your citizenship rights. And a pretty good job of staying anonymous too.
As long as you put yourself in permanent exile from America and never deal with the U.S. government again, I suppose that would work. This means never renewing your passport, never voting in any American election, or staying away from U.S. Embassies. Calling home from time to time perhaps, but that is about it. Make sure that you never even step into America, even by accident. More importantly, try to stay in countries where extradition treaties haven't been signed with America either... it could help and tax evasion is considered a felony in this case too.
You do get tax credits for income taxes paid to a foreign government, and if the tax rate in that other government is higher than what the American tax rate would be for your income level, you don't have to pay any income taxes to the IRS at all. My father-in-law does this all of the time as he lives in China and the Chinese tax rate is substantially higher than the American rate.
Still, the IRS is going to try to get you if they can, so make sure you stay out of their reach. Many countries will give tax receipts to each other too in terms of fighting tax evasion, so they might just find out that you haven't been sponging off of one of your relatives too.
Even if you renounce your American citizenship and formally become a naturalized citizen of another country, you still have to pay taxes for a number of years. I don't remember the exact amount of time off the top of my head, but I think it is somewhere between 5-10 years. Yeah, it stinks.
There have even been some interesting ideas presented in terms of making Bitcoins much more cash-like, including physical printing of bitcoins, and putting value of bitcoins onto debit cards which could be used in a point of sale system. I don't know how much more cash-like you could get other than a government declaring Bitcoins to be legal tender.
Since law makers are, by definition, the folks who write and make the laws, what they do as long as they get the majority of the chamber that they sit in to support their crazy idea would be by its very definition legal.
In other words, government officials can't do something illegal because they make the laws which define what is legal.
Dishonesty? Yes. That is why Charles Wrangle got into trouble yet was able to keep his seat. Funny thing how that worked out, wasn't it?
Elected officials go before an ethics board, not a courtroom (usually) unless they are so inept that they actually commit a felony that the rest of the members of their chamber or legislative body thinks is blatantly wrong. It is still pretty hard to do and there are a great many immunities for elected officials.
In theory, the U.S. Senate was seen as a sort of continuation of the Continental Congress, where it was a meeting of the states and the House was a meeting of "the people". In that sense, having senators as representatives of the state legislature made a whole lot of sense. In that situation, I think it might be a good idea to go back to that original system.
The problem is that as a matter of practice it really didn't end up as a contest within the state legislatures (even if it there always a formal vote for the Senators in those bodies). Instead, the real political contest was usually at the state convention for the majority political party or within the majority party caucus at the state legislature.
If I would make a change, I would remove terms of service from Senators entirely, with the ability for state legislatures to appoint or recall a senator at the will or whim of that legislature. By state law (not federal) they could decide the terms or conditions which would apply to senators for their terms of service and when they are up for review by that body and that the senator would be quite literally a representative of the state government itself within the U.S. Senate. Essentially the equivalent of an ambassador to the UN or something like that, but on the federal level. Such a move might put a whole lot more accountability on the part of Congress too. Could such a system be subject to bribery and scandal? Yes, but it would sure make a senator pay attention to the leadership of the state government and would make putting a physical office in the state capital something simply required by the senator. They would also simply have to pay attention or even physically be present when the state legislature was in session.
I would be curious about how that would change the nature of the U.S. Senate if a change like that happened.
Having even been a politician running for office, I can't think of any way that campaign contribution != bribe.
It really is the same thing. I would love to learn how to run a political campaign without either stealing taxpayer money (aka "publicly financed elections") or straight out bribery.
On the positive side, most small time elections end up costing so much to run a campaign that the contributions to help run the campaign are incidental and most of it comes out of your own pocket. Then again, that ensures only the wealthy can afford to run for public office and us poor peons don't ever have a prayer of getting "one of our own" into public office.
There are some ways to run a guerrilla political campaign that can substantially minimize the campaign costs with the replacement of a large group of volunteers who are effectively managed to "get the vote out" for a particular candidate. It takes work and effort to do that, however, and a fair bit of luck on the side too. Even with these kind of campaigns, however, I really don't know how to completely eliminate some of the basic costs far and above the simple filing fee. It simply is expensive to run a political campaign.
The sad thing, too, is that expensive political advertisements work too. I wish that fewer people would pay attention to the ads and instead actually take the time to research the candidates, but most people usually aren't that careful about their vote except for perhaps the marquee political office of the day. President of the USA? Yeah, most people know about what brand of toothpaste they are using and their mother's maiden name. But how much do you know about the city councilman that you voted for? Most would be lucky if they've even seen the candidate's name before they got to the voting booth.