Try to actually write a large scale software project and say that again. Some of the worst software coding practices I've ever seen came from people with Electrical or Mechanical Engineering backgrounds. One particular piece of code (about 200k lines for a critical project that was the foundation for the entire company's financial future) had a global variable named "temp" that was used in more places than I can possibly count. Other variables like "ax, bx" and other similar variables were sprinkled throughout as if somehow they were doing assembly programming.... but it was C instead. And then for some reason the software stopped working with the entire software engineering team called in to try and fix the problem... as in people with a real computer science education that knew how to develop software in the first place.
One of the best programmers I ever met was a Biology major. They certainly brought in a fresh perspective and more importantly.... they knew they didn't know a thing about programming so that individual asked a whole lot of questions and read up on the best practices for programming. Rubbing shoulders with CS majors didn't hurt, and essentially they got a CS major "on the job" by doing the work. It is possible, but it takes some discipline and hard work.
I've seen that form of consensus building, and I've even been the target of those kind of attacks which "eliminate" dissenters. All that tends to accomplish is to weaken the organization involved by removing the creative individuals who make things happen.
Consensus means that you work together to arrive at a common solution, and perhaps are willing to even "think outside the box" in terms of finding a 3rd or 4th option if you have a couple of factions in two intractable positions.
If you can design, build, fuel, fly, and safely land an X-15 for under a half million dollars, I would be incredibly impressed too. I don't think the price of an X-15 flight, even in the 1960's, was a half million dollars, much less trying to build one of those vehicles.
It is the cost here, not the bleeding edge achievement that is the big deal. Go ahead and spend the $100-$200 billion that has been projected merely to get a vehicle built that could go to Mars (the current projected cost of completing the Constellation vehicles). Far too long NASA has been about trying to get the best performance and setting records. They certainly haven't been about getting up into space on the cheap.
For myself, I say NASA should be doing more stuff like this.
Armadillo Aerospace is famous for the fact that their budget on rocket fuel is one of their largest expenses. Think about that carefully and note that for most rocket development companies that the office supply budget for their engineering teams is usually higher than their rocket fuel budget. Masten has somehow been able to figure out how to fly their rockets at a cost even cheaper than Armadillo. Seriously, these guys are about as cheap as it gets and still be able to fly up to higher altitudes on a rocket.
A half million dollars? That is what NASA spends on PR materials for each shuttle launch. And in this case there are going to be a whole series of launches done on these rockets for that price.
Blue Origin is especially famous at delivering product without hype... or for that matter any publicity at all. You hear more about stuff happening inside of the National Security Agency than what is going on in Blue Origin. About the only time they show up in the news is when they do something that simply has to be put into the public record, such as purchasing 10k acres in Texas. That you hadn't heard much about this company or that it even exists isn't too surprising.
Having been on both sides of the fence when setting up a specification for a "request for bids" contract and writing up bids in private industry, I can certainly tell you that cutting cost is not the point. If you are genuinely looking at the cheapest option, you want to specify as few requirements as possible and leave the potential bids as broad as possible. On the other hand, if you are trying to scratch the back of a close friend, you specify in as much detail as possible all of the things you want in the bid and set it up in such a way that only one possible contractor can ever really fill the requirements in the bid.
It doesn't matter if this is a government agency or a large company, the process is essentially the same.
BTW, this also applies to "help wanted" advertisements when you see a list of requirements for a job. For those companies who are genuinely trying to cast a wide net of applicants, they will list the job duties very simply and broadly. Those job descriptions that are much more exacting and requirement knowledge of specific tools, software, or skills listing a specific number of years of experience usually are targeting to hire a specific person for the job and are only publicly posting the job because of formal policy or legal requirements.
For government procurement contracts, in almost every case the contract requirements are being set up to pay back a campaign donation or perhaps the bid terms are being written by the very company who is going to make the bid. If you are writing the terms of the bid request for a contract you are eventually going to bid on, don't you think you would write those terms in such a way to keep your competition from bidding on the proposal?
While that may be true, the current U.S. House of Representatives version of the NASA appropriation bill would eliminate this program altogether. Yes, it was something started by the Bush administration, but don't tell the Republicans that fact. They wouldn't believe you.
Since this is a response by an Anonymous Coward, I can't really redirect this response other than to say.... look up the discussion yourself. I've followed deletion discussions in the past, and this particular one smacks as something which stinks real bad even by Wikipedia standards. When multiple deletion discussions (it isn't just one) happen for a particular article or section of these projects, I already start to raise some red flags noting that there is a major deletionist push going on for that particular topic. One discussion was almost all "keep", while a second discussion happened shortly afterward that was more mixed. The previous discussion was not mentioned or noted in subsequent discussions.... to me a major mistake and something that certainly deserves major reconsideration.
Part of the problem here too is that I'm sure a great deal of discussion happened on IRC, the Wikipedia mailing lists, and elsewhere as well. Again, these other discussions aren't linked to and decisions were being made that were not to gain consensus but rather to push a certain editorial point of view and ram the issue through.
I've seen stuff like this happen elsewhere, and sometimes it is a big deal but other times it really isn't. In this case it did impact a whole bunch of articles and resulted in a major project policy change.... a change that due to this particular incident is finally going to be revisited again.
I understand full well the process of consensus, and most of the time when cooler heads prevail the results of the process generally work out for the best in the end. Consensus isn't necessarily democracy, but it isn't tyranny either. Consensus also takes some people willing to compromise a little bit on some points and work things out, but in the case of some deletionist binges it isn't an issue of a minor compromise but a complete gutting and removal of whole classes of content.
Which usually means that the person with the largest cajoles is the one who prevails, or the one most well connected with the ArbCom so you don't have fear from wheel warring when mere edit wars aren't sufficient.
While Wikipedia may not be a democracy, there still is the concept of consensus building. What is really bizarre about this particular AfD discussion (technicaly template deletion discussion.... but that is irrelevant) is that the admin/person responsible noted the extreme consensus to keep and even formally declared that the prevailing consensus was overwhelmingly to keep the template, yet it was still deleted anyway. This isn't even a strength of the argument issue, but simply somebody wielding authority arbitrarily and ignoring consensus and Wikipedia policies and traditions entirely. It also appears to be a forum shopping experience where the discussion was consistently raised over and over again until it was finally deleted.
There is definitely somebody with an axe to grind with these discussion.
Before musicians had to deal with recording equipment, they had to deal with a printing press that published the music they wrote in a printed form. Sheet music publishers have been fighting copyright for centuries now and it is something that has been an issue for as long as the printing press has been around.
The earliest "recordings" were the rolls of music on "player pianos" that mechanically played back what somebody did at a "recording" piano. Those were very popular and there was even a "piracy" market that developed to "copy" those recording and make "bootleg" copies for others. If you want to get to the heart of the music copyright business, look back to that technology first. It pre-dates Edison's introduction of recording on wax cylinders.
For ordinary "journeymen" musicians (for whom copyright legislation is supposedly written), they usually don't get any sort of payment once the music has been laid down on the recording media with just a few minor exceptions.
But should the heirs of a recording artist continue to be paid for something that the recording artist did 70 years after they died, which was performed by that artist 50 years before they died? Getting paid for something 120 years after it was done seems a little bit excessive too. There are copyright protections that last even longer than this.
Seriously, do you think that those heirs for a recording in that case is going to possibly encourage any new artist to create new works merely because their great-great grandchildren might get a few extra bucks for something that is otherwise forgotten about by modern culture?
Oil-burning power plants don't use refined gasoline for electrical production, at least power plants that are "main" producers on the grid mixed with other electrical sources. Perhaps as back-up power supplies that are used intermittently during peak power demand, but not something that is intended to be used on a daily basis. In fact, most of what a power plant uses is the left over "sludge" from the refinery that can't be used in other circumstances or has very light refining.
Regardless, what isn't being shown is that it takes several gallons of crude oil to produce a single gallon of gasoline... provided that the refinery is using petroleum at all in the production of its products. Many use electricity, coal, and even natural gas for the energy needed for the refining process. My point is that the refining process consumes an incredible amount of energy and you certainly consume more energy through that process than is even possible to extract from the gasoline when it is finished.
On page 3 of this document it blatantly states that nearly half of the energy stocks produced by a refinery are consumed in the process of refining petroleum. It also states that petroleum refining is currently the largest consumer of energy in American industrial processes. It isn't a trivial amount of energy.
My point is that those who complain about hydrogen being incorrectly compared to gasoline and other "energy" stocks as a fuel source aren't really comparing all of the actual costs involved and that hydrogen as a fuel source may even come out favorable from a pure production viewpoint... or at least not nearly as bad of a source. You also have to separate the notion of an energy source from a fuel source... which is two different things entirely.
Besides, petroleum has too many beneficial uses that sticking it into a furnace of some kind and burning it (speaking broadly including an internal combustion engine) seems to be the most wasteful thing you can do with the stuff.
BTW, I never said that it was uneconomical to burn two to three gallons of crude oil to produce a gallon of gasoline. I just suggested that the raw energy used in the processing of that fuel is more than can possibly be extracted from it when it is finished.
Hydrogen as the Sun uses it is not really renewable, but it does last on the order of billions of years in the method used within its furnace so it is not really a concern for events on the scale of a human lifetime or even natural selection of multi-cellular organisms to create "intelligent" life.
Petroleum can be created synthetically (aka "manufactured") from a variety of "natural" stocks that can be replenished. The only significant reason why that isn't happening on any large scale at the moment has purely to do with economics and not with the ability to do that. Also, there is an entrenched interest in the oil drilling industry with established economies of scale to those operations that keep significant efforts to look elsewhere for these stocks.
There are these strange things that create long chains of organic chemicals from raw stocks of CO2, H2O, and sunlight that have been known for some time. They are called... plants. Amazing things, really.
Unfortunately it takes somebody with slightly more than an 8th grade understanding of science to realize that gasoline is also nothing more than a storage medium too, and not really an energy source.
Point of fact: Far more energy goes into the processing, refining, and transportation of gasoline than is ever extracted from it in the form of pure heat alone (much less propulsion or "useful work") when it is burned in an internal combustion engine.
Both hydrogen and gasoline are fuel sources that allow "portable" devices to operate independently of a large central energy depot for extended periods of time. For that matter, the same goes for electric batteries. The only difference between these fuels is the delivery method of that energy supply.
So I take it you've never heard of somebody dying in a petroleum refinery explosion. Other than the kind of fuel involved, why is this even newsworthy?
Most of what you describe above in terms of the dangers of hydrogen apply equally well to gasoline, and rocket-grade hydrogen peroxide. Gasoline vapors can and do pool "underneath overhangs" and has the additional nasty ability to self-ignite at "room temperature and pressure".... something that hydrogen typically doesn't do as a gas.
This past couple of decades has certainly been an age of discovery that equals if not surpasses a similar expansion of knowledge about the universe that happened in the 15th-18th Centuries when knowledge about new continents and islands became common place throughout most of the world. Most of us have been doing mundane things and living our lives, but this is certainly something that deserves note. More planets are also being discovered, including asteroid belts in other star systems as well.
What isn't being said here is how big some of these objects that are being discovered now: Most of the new objects being discovered are about the size of a house or sometimes even smaller. They really aren't all that large, even though if one of them hit your house it would make a bad day for you.
In a couple cases, there have been objects "rediscovered" that are suspected of being space junk left over from human exploration of space, such as spent stages from Saturn V rockets in solar orbit or other spacecraft that are not merely orbiting the Earth. What we will find out by doing a closer examination of these objects will be as interesting as anything else in human history, as at the moment most of this is merely discovering that something is there and not really understanding a whole lot about what it is that is moving around in that orbit. I suspect that the next several decades are going to be involved with cataloging and classifying these asteroids to understand what kind of resources are "out there".
At least beat the American government to the punch. Billions of dollars are now going to fund the Russian space program by the U.S. Government, but they don't want to spend any money on private spacecraft developers that happen to be in America... unless those jobs happen to go to their own district/state in a pork fest. On top of that, those in congress really don't care if anything is actually built as long as their constituents are employed on the government gravy train.
I wouldn't call the Democrats the heroes on this either, but at least in this case the Obama administration is supporting private enterprise, entrepreneurial efforts, and self-initiative in order to get something to happen that at least allows all of that money going to launch American astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft to try and launch a private spaceflight industry in America. To me, that is the one thing Obama actually got right the whole time he has been in office. The Republicans are too busy worrying about their lobbyist groups and collecting bribes (*cough* "campaign contributions") to notice how they are destroying the capabilities of American spaceflight.
Democrats can't figure out how to make business work here on Earth, but the Republicans can't figure out how to get it to happen in space either. To me it is surreal to see Democrats promoting smaller government, reduced taxes, and increased privatization of government services. I have to do a reality check to see if these guys really are who they say they are... including the Republicans.
FYI, it is. They've even released the blueprints for this thing under an open source license (I don't know which one... the site is down at the moment) and are also planning on sharing any data they've received from the flights including performance data under similar licenses.
Be careful for what you ask... as you might just get it.
Take those plans and get your own team together to build another one!
What would be the military implications? For those countries who are striving for missiles already have them (North Korea, Iran, Libya, Somalia, etc.) so there is little point in having a "spy" grab plans for a volunteer effort in Denmark and bring it to one of those countries. What counts is the labor and effort happening there to get this whole thing to work.
Besides, the flight profile for a weapon is quite a bit different than what you want for manned spaceflight. For a weapon, you want to have maximum acceleration (an ICBM can pull as much as 25-30 "G's") for two huge reasons: once the missile is launched you want it in the air for as little time as possible to act as a surprise to "the enemy", and with a high rate of acceleration the missile as a target for counter-battery fire becomes much harder to hit.
On the other hand, for a manned vehicle you want to take your sweet time in terms of going up into space and limit the acceleration forces for what I hope are good reasons. Even if you dismiss human cargo, often for spaceflight activities there are other more "delicate" payloads that you need to be careful with as well. Not only that, but the flight profile for orbital flight (the eventual goal here) is also obvious for anybody tracking the rocket, as would any abort profiles after that. For a good reason, most spaceflight tracks attempt to have their paths or potential "targets" to be in very unpopulated areas too... a military weapon doesn't do that. Still, even if you had a completely working rocket that was designed for use as a manned spaceflight vehicle, what makes it so good for a spacecraft that people can use also makes it a lousy weapon that would only be used as a last resort at best.
If one of these petty dictatorships are really interested in a missile, tell them to buy a Scud... it will be cheaper and do the job better at delivering warheads to the target without getting shot out of the sky first. Please don't use this as an excuse to kill off hobby rocketry and other amateur aerospace projects.
This used to be true. Now the largest expense in the federal government is interest on federal debt, with the #2 largest expense being Social Security payments, and #3 is health care benefits to federal workers (and this was before Obamacare went into effect).
Military spending is now #6 or #7 on the list of top fiscal outlays, and falling. Appropriations for NASA hardly even show up on the pie graphs at all, and this year are down to 0.1% of the federal budget.
You point is well taken, but military spending shouldn't be made out to be the bad guy here even though they still do get a huge hunk of change every year.
The only company I've heard of that spent more on rocket fuel than for the engineering department's office supply budget was Armadillo Aerospace. Even for "established" vehicles like the Space Shuttle, that still is the case.
Or put it more this way: More paperwork is generated for each "routine" launch for most government spacecraft in both volume and weight (and all of this paper work arrives in Washington DC as "paper", not just electronic documents) than the mass which sits on the launch pad before the vehicle lights up. This isn't even the scientific reports or anything fancy, but the safety records and manufacturing sign-offs necessary just to build the thing according to government specifications. Not only is all of that paper work generated, but somebody has to read all of it too, sometimes more than once.
As for Armadillo Aerospace, that says much more about that company and the willingness they are to actually fly hardware, to blow things up or crash them, than it says about their fuel budget. Also note that they don't have to worry about pesky government regulations (for the most part... they are now doing some NASA contract work) which helps keep their engineering to fuel cost ratio more favorable.
Compare that to an automobile too, where you compare the cost of a new car to the amount of fuel you will be pumping into it over its lifetime. I would be surprised if you ended up spending more on fuel costs than the price of the vehicle. For the Space Shuttle, on the other hand, the fuel costs are statistical noise that might even be less than the catering budget for the public relations staff at KSC.
The Saturn V could put more into orbit and do it cheaper than the Shuttle. So why was the Saturn V abandoned again? This time the Shuttle is being abandoned for the Ares I, which puts even fewer astronauts into orbit for more money still, and this time without any cargo capacity at all except for a couple hundred pounds in the "trunk". Yes, an Ares I launch is at least the same cost if not more than a Shuttle lanuch.
I'd like to be dazzled too. And as pointed out by the AC poster, the Shuttle never had a 65k pound payload even in the best of circumstances.
I hope that you are correct and that I am wrong. It isn't just me that has said this, and there are examples such as India and Pakistan who did precisely think kind of back-door nuclear bomb development, as did North Korea. As to if North Korea can sustain a nuclear weapon program may be in question (that is a very expensive proposition for a number of reasons), but I do think Iran has at least the fiscal capability of doing something of that nature.
If it wasn't for historical examples to prove otherwise, I would be much more inclined to accept your proposition and simply ignore Iran altogether. Still, with a country as wealthy with petroleum as Iran, why are they building a nuclear power plant again? Don't tell me it is their concern for the environment.
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Try to actually write a large scale software project and say that again. Some of the worst software coding practices I've ever seen came from people with Electrical or Mechanical Engineering backgrounds. One particular piece of code (about 200k lines for a critical project that was the foundation for the entire company's financial future) had a global variable named "temp" that was used in more places than I can possibly count. Other variables like "ax, bx" and other similar variables were sprinkled throughout as if somehow they were doing assembly programming.... but it was C instead. And then for some reason the software stopped working with the entire software engineering team called in to try and fix the problem... as in people with a real computer science education that knew how to develop software in the first place.
One of the best programmers I ever met was a Biology major. They certainly brought in a fresh perspective and more importantly.... they knew they didn't know a thing about programming so that individual asked a whole lot of questions and read up on the best practices for programming. Rubbing shoulders with CS majors didn't hurt, and essentially they got a CS major "on the job" by doing the work. It is possible, but it takes some discipline and hard work.
I've seen that form of consensus building, and I've even been the target of those kind of attacks which "eliminate" dissenters. All that tends to accomplish is to weaken the organization involved by removing the creative individuals who make things happen.
Consensus means that you work together to arrive at a common solution, and perhaps are willing to even "think outside the box" in terms of finding a 3rd or 4th option if you have a couple of factions in two intractable positions.
If you can design, build, fuel, fly, and safely land an X-15 for under a half million dollars, I would be incredibly impressed too. I don't think the price of an X-15 flight, even in the 1960's, was a half million dollars, much less trying to build one of those vehicles.
It is the cost here, not the bleeding edge achievement that is the big deal. Go ahead and spend the $100-$200 billion that has been projected merely to get a vehicle built that could go to Mars (the current projected cost of completing the Constellation vehicles). Far too long NASA has been about trying to get the best performance and setting records. They certainly haven't been about getting up into space on the cheap.
For myself, I say NASA should be doing more stuff like this.
Armadillo Aerospace is famous for the fact that their budget on rocket fuel is one of their largest expenses. Think about that carefully and note that for most rocket development companies that the office supply budget for their engineering teams is usually higher than their rocket fuel budget. Masten has somehow been able to figure out how to fly their rockets at a cost even cheaper than Armadillo. Seriously, these guys are about as cheap as it gets and still be able to fly up to higher altitudes on a rocket.
A half million dollars? That is what NASA spends on PR materials for each shuttle launch. And in this case there are going to be a whole series of launches done on these rockets for that price.
Blue Origin is especially famous at delivering product without hype... or for that matter any publicity at all. You hear more about stuff happening inside of the National Security Agency than what is going on in Blue Origin. About the only time they show up in the news is when they do something that simply has to be put into the public record, such as purchasing 10k acres in Texas. That you hadn't heard much about this company or that it even exists isn't too surprising.
Having been on both sides of the fence when setting up a specification for a "request for bids" contract and writing up bids in private industry, I can certainly tell you that cutting cost is not the point. If you are genuinely looking at the cheapest option, you want to specify as few requirements as possible and leave the potential bids as broad as possible. On the other hand, if you are trying to scratch the back of a close friend, you specify in as much detail as possible all of the things you want in the bid and set it up in such a way that only one possible contractor can ever really fill the requirements in the bid.
It doesn't matter if this is a government agency or a large company, the process is essentially the same.
BTW, this also applies to "help wanted" advertisements when you see a list of requirements for a job. For those companies who are genuinely trying to cast a wide net of applicants, they will list the job duties very simply and broadly. Those job descriptions that are much more exacting and requirement knowledge of specific tools, software, or skills listing a specific number of years of experience usually are targeting to hire a specific person for the job and are only publicly posting the job because of formal policy or legal requirements.
For government procurement contracts, in almost every case the contract requirements are being set up to pay back a campaign donation or perhaps the bid terms are being written by the very company who is going to make the bid. If you are writing the terms of the bid request for a contract you are eventually going to bid on, don't you think you would write those terms in such a way to keep your competition from bidding on the proposal?
While that may be true, the current U.S. House of Representatives version of the NASA appropriation bill would eliminate this program altogether. Yes, it was something started by the Bush administration, but don't tell the Republicans that fact. They wouldn't believe you.
Since this is a response by an Anonymous Coward, I can't really redirect this response other than to say.... look up the discussion yourself. I've followed deletion discussions in the past, and this particular one smacks as something which stinks real bad even by Wikipedia standards. When multiple deletion discussions (it isn't just one) happen for a particular article or section of these projects, I already start to raise some red flags noting that there is a major deletionist push going on for that particular topic. One discussion was almost all "keep", while a second discussion happened shortly afterward that was more mixed. The previous discussion was not mentioned or noted in subsequent discussions.... to me a major mistake and something that certainly deserves major reconsideration.
Part of the problem here too is that I'm sure a great deal of discussion happened on IRC, the Wikipedia mailing lists, and elsewhere as well. Again, these other discussions aren't linked to and decisions were being made that were not to gain consensus but rather to push a certain editorial point of view and ram the issue through.
I've seen stuff like this happen elsewhere, and sometimes it is a big deal but other times it really isn't. In this case it did impact a whole bunch of articles and resulted in a major project policy change.... a change that due to this particular incident is finally going to be revisited again.
I understand full well the process of consensus, and most of the time when cooler heads prevail the results of the process generally work out for the best in the end. Consensus isn't necessarily democracy, but it isn't tyranny either. Consensus also takes some people willing to compromise a little bit on some points and work things out, but in the case of some deletionist binges it isn't an issue of a minor compromise but a complete gutting and removal of whole classes of content.
Which usually means that the person with the largest cajoles is the one who prevails, or the one most well connected with the ArbCom so you don't have fear from wheel warring when mere edit wars aren't sufficient.
While Wikipedia may not be a democracy, there still is the concept of consensus building. What is really bizarre about this particular AfD discussion (technicaly template deletion discussion.... but that is irrelevant) is that the admin/person responsible noted the extreme consensus to keep and even formally declared that the prevailing consensus was overwhelmingly to keep the template, yet it was still deleted anyway. This isn't even a strength of the argument issue, but simply somebody wielding authority arbitrarily and ignoring consensus and Wikipedia policies and traditions entirely. It also appears to be a forum shopping experience where the discussion was consistently raised over and over again until it was finally deleted.
There is definitely somebody with an axe to grind with these discussion.
Before musicians had to deal with recording equipment, they had to deal with a printing press that published the music they wrote in a printed form. Sheet music publishers have been fighting copyright for centuries now and it is something that has been an issue for as long as the printing press has been around.
The earliest "recordings" were the rolls of music on "player pianos" that mechanically played back what somebody did at a "recording" piano. Those were very popular and there was even a "piracy" market that developed to "copy" those recording and make "bootleg" copies for others. If you want to get to the heart of the music copyright business, look back to that technology first. It pre-dates Edison's introduction of recording on wax cylinders.
For ordinary "journeymen" musicians (for whom copyright legislation is supposedly written), they usually don't get any sort of payment once the music has been laid down on the recording media with just a few minor exceptions.
But should the heirs of a recording artist continue to be paid for something that the recording artist did 70 years after they died, which was performed by that artist 50 years before they died? Getting paid for something 120 years after it was done seems a little bit excessive too. There are copyright protections that last even longer than this.
Seriously, do you think that those heirs for a recording in that case is going to possibly encourage any new artist to create new works merely because their great-great grandchildren might get a few extra bucks for something that is otherwise forgotten about by modern culture?
Oil-burning power plants don't use refined gasoline for electrical production, at least power plants that are "main" producers on the grid mixed with other electrical sources. Perhaps as back-up power supplies that are used intermittently during peak power demand, but not something that is intended to be used on a daily basis. In fact, most of what a power plant uses is the left over "sludge" from the refinery that can't be used in other circumstances or has very light refining.
Refineries use a variety of energy sources to power their facilities as can be seen on this chart: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mecs/iab98/petroleum/fuel.html
Regardless, what isn't being shown is that it takes several gallons of crude oil to produce a single gallon of gasoline... provided that the refinery is using petroleum at all in the production of its products. Many use electricity, coal, and even natural gas for the energy needed for the refining process. My point is that the refining process consumes an incredible amount of energy and you certainly consume more energy through that process than is even possible to extract from the gasoline when it is finished.
Another chart that I can show you is here: http://www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/IntInfo/ConsI.pdf
On page 3 of this document it blatantly states that nearly half of the energy stocks produced by a refinery are consumed in the process of refining petroleum. It also states that petroleum refining is currently the largest consumer of energy in American industrial processes. It isn't a trivial amount of energy.
My point is that those who complain about hydrogen being incorrectly compared to gasoline and other "energy" stocks as a fuel source aren't really comparing all of the actual costs involved and that hydrogen as a fuel source may even come out favorable from a pure production viewpoint... or at least not nearly as bad of a source. You also have to separate the notion of an energy source from a fuel source... which is two different things entirely.
Besides, petroleum has too many beneficial uses that sticking it into a furnace of some kind and burning it (speaking broadly including an internal combustion engine) seems to be the most wasteful thing you can do with the stuff.
BTW, I never said that it was uneconomical to burn two to three gallons of crude oil to produce a gallon of gasoline. I just suggested that the raw energy used in the processing of that fuel is more than can possibly be extracted from it when it is finished.
Hydrogen as the Sun uses it is not really renewable, but it does last on the order of billions of years in the method used within its furnace so it is not really a concern for events on the scale of a human lifetime or even natural selection of multi-cellular organisms to create "intelligent" life.
Petroleum can be created synthetically (aka "manufactured") from a variety of "natural" stocks that can be replenished. The only significant reason why that isn't happening on any large scale at the moment has purely to do with economics and not with the ability to do that. Also, there is an entrenched interest in the oil drilling industry with established economies of scale to those operations that keep significant efforts to look elsewhere for these stocks.
There are these strange things that create long chains of organic chemicals from raw stocks of CO2, H2O, and sunlight that have been known for some time. They are called... plants. Amazing things, really.
Unfortunately it takes somebody with slightly more than an 8th grade understanding of science to realize that gasoline is also nothing more than a storage medium too, and not really an energy source.
Point of fact: Far more energy goes into the processing, refining, and transportation of gasoline than is ever extracted from it in the form of pure heat alone (much less propulsion or "useful work") when it is burned in an internal combustion engine.
Both hydrogen and gasoline are fuel sources that allow "portable" devices to operate independently of a large central energy depot for extended periods of time. For that matter, the same goes for electric batteries. The only difference between these fuels is the delivery method of that energy supply.
So I take it you've never heard of somebody dying in a petroleum refinery explosion. Other than the kind of fuel involved, why is this even newsworthy?
Most of what you describe above in terms of the dangers of hydrogen apply equally well to gasoline, and rocket-grade hydrogen peroxide. Gasoline vapors can and do pool "underneath overhangs" and has the additional nasty ability to self-ignite at "room temperature and pressure".... something that hydrogen typically doesn't do as a gas.
This past couple of decades has certainly been an age of discovery that equals if not surpasses a similar expansion of knowledge about the universe that happened in the 15th-18th Centuries when knowledge about new continents and islands became common place throughout most of the world. Most of us have been doing mundane things and living our lives, but this is certainly something that deserves note. More planets are also being discovered, including asteroid belts in other star systems as well.
What isn't being said here is how big some of these objects that are being discovered now: Most of the new objects being discovered are about the size of a house or sometimes even smaller. They really aren't all that large, even though if one of them hit your house it would make a bad day for you.
In a couple cases, there have been objects "rediscovered" that are suspected of being space junk left over from human exploration of space, such as spent stages from Saturn V rockets in solar orbit or other spacecraft that are not merely orbiting the Earth. What we will find out by doing a closer examination of these objects will be as interesting as anything else in human history, as at the moment most of this is merely discovering that something is there and not really understanding a whole lot about what it is that is moving around in that orbit. I suspect that the next several decades are going to be involved with cataloging and classifying these asteroids to understand what kind of resources are "out there".
At least beat the American government to the punch. Billions of dollars are now going to fund the Russian space program by the U.S. Government, but they don't want to spend any money on private spacecraft developers that happen to be in America... unless those jobs happen to go to their own district/state in a pork fest. On top of that, those in congress really don't care if anything is actually built as long as their constituents are employed on the government gravy train.
I wouldn't call the Democrats the heroes on this either, but at least in this case the Obama administration is supporting private enterprise, entrepreneurial efforts, and self-initiative in order to get something to happen that at least allows all of that money going to launch American astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft to try and launch a private spaceflight industry in America. To me, that is the one thing Obama actually got right the whole time he has been in office. The Republicans are too busy worrying about their lobbyist groups and collecting bribes (*cough* "campaign contributions") to notice how they are destroying the capabilities of American spaceflight.
Democrats can't figure out how to make business work here on Earth, but the Republicans can't figure out how to get it to happen in space either. To me it is surreal to see Democrats promoting smaller government, reduced taxes, and increased privatization of government services. I have to do a reality check to see if these guys really are who they say they are... including the Republicans.
FYI, it is. They've even released the blueprints for this thing under an open source license (I don't know which one... the site is down at the moment) and are also planning on sharing any data they've received from the flights including performance data under similar licenses.
Be careful for what you ask... as you might just get it.
Take those plans and get your own team together to build another one!
What would be the military implications? For those countries who are striving for missiles already have them (North Korea, Iran, Libya, Somalia, etc.) so there is little point in having a "spy" grab plans for a volunteer effort in Denmark and bring it to one of those countries. What counts is the labor and effort happening there to get this whole thing to work.
Besides, the flight profile for a weapon is quite a bit different than what you want for manned spaceflight. For a weapon, you want to have maximum acceleration (an ICBM can pull as much as 25-30 "G's") for two huge reasons: once the missile is launched you want it in the air for as little time as possible to act as a surprise to "the enemy", and with a high rate of acceleration the missile as a target for counter-battery fire becomes much harder to hit.
On the other hand, for a manned vehicle you want to take your sweet time in terms of going up into space and limit the acceleration forces for what I hope are good reasons. Even if you dismiss human cargo, often for spaceflight activities there are other more "delicate" payloads that you need to be careful with as well. Not only that, but the flight profile for orbital flight (the eventual goal here) is also obvious for anybody tracking the rocket, as would any abort profiles after that. For a good reason, most spaceflight tracks attempt to have their paths or potential "targets" to be in very unpopulated areas too... a military weapon doesn't do that. Still, even if you had a completely working rocket that was designed for use as a manned spaceflight vehicle, what makes it so good for a spacecraft that people can use also makes it a lousy weapon that would only be used as a last resort at best.
If one of these petty dictatorships are really interested in a missile, tell them to buy a Scud... it will be cheaper and do the job better at delivering warheads to the target without getting shot out of the sky first. Please don't use this as an excuse to kill off hobby rocketry and other amateur aerospace projects.
The biggest expense for the US is military.
This used to be true. Now the largest expense in the federal government is interest on federal debt, with the #2 largest expense being Social Security payments, and #3 is health care benefits to federal workers (and this was before Obamacare went into effect).
Military spending is now #6 or #7 on the list of top fiscal outlays, and falling. Appropriations for NASA hardly even show up on the pie graphs at all, and this year are down to 0.1% of the federal budget.
You point is well taken, but military spending shouldn't be made out to be the bad guy here even though they still do get a huge hunk of change every year.
The only company I've heard of that spent more on rocket fuel than for the engineering department's office supply budget was Armadillo Aerospace. Even for "established" vehicles like the Space Shuttle, that still is the case.
Or put it more this way: More paperwork is generated for each "routine" launch for most government spacecraft in both volume and weight (and all of this paper work arrives in Washington DC as "paper", not just electronic documents) than the mass which sits on the launch pad before the vehicle lights up. This isn't even the scientific reports or anything fancy, but the safety records and manufacturing sign-offs necessary just to build the thing according to government specifications. Not only is all of that paper work generated, but somebody has to read all of it too, sometimes more than once.
As for Armadillo Aerospace, that says much more about that company and the willingness they are to actually fly hardware, to blow things up or crash them, than it says about their fuel budget. Also note that they don't have to worry about pesky government regulations (for the most part... they are now doing some NASA contract work) which helps keep their engineering to fuel cost ratio more favorable.
Compare that to an automobile too, where you compare the cost of a new car to the amount of fuel you will be pumping into it over its lifetime. I would be surprised if you ended up spending more on fuel costs than the price of the vehicle. For the Space Shuttle, on the other hand, the fuel costs are statistical noise that might even be less than the catering budget for the public relations staff at KSC.
The Saturn V could put more into orbit and do it cheaper than the Shuttle. So why was the Saturn V abandoned again? This time the Shuttle is being abandoned for the Ares I, which puts even fewer astronauts into orbit for more money still, and this time without any cargo capacity at all except for a couple hundred pounds in the "trunk". Yes, an Ares I launch is at least the same cost if not more than a Shuttle lanuch.
I'd like to be dazzled too. And as pointed out by the AC poster, the Shuttle never had a 65k pound payload even in the best of circumstances.
KSC == Klondike Spicy Cheese
Korn Sugar Calories
Kennebunkport Salad Condiments
Yeah, I thought of all of that, including the Colonel's spicy chicken recipe too.
Now about that "S". There is a word there that I'm missing too.
I hope that you are correct and that I am wrong. It isn't just me that has said this, and there are examples such as India and Pakistan who did precisely think kind of back-door nuclear bomb development, as did North Korea. As to if North Korea can sustain a nuclear weapon program may be in question (that is a very expensive proposition for a number of reasons), but I do think Iran has at least the fiscal capability of doing something of that nature.
If it wasn't for historical examples to prove otherwise, I would be much more inclined to accept your proposition and simply ignore Iran altogether. Still, with a country as wealthy with petroleum as Iran, why are they building a nuclear power plant again? Don't tell me it is their concern for the environment.