How did you come up with that figure and what sorts of hard data can you use to back up that claim? While I'm sure that you can point to some numbers and claim crazy things like the Iraq War as something which perhaps should be paid for with petroleum taxes in America, I challenge you to actually account for the justification of this sort of tax.
The only reason you are suggesting to "gradually" implement a tax of this nature is that you know full well that if it was introduced at once that enough people would be so ticked off that any politician suggesting something this bold would be voted out of office immediately. You also haven't accounted for already existing taxes of close to a dollar a gallon anyway, so you can cut off the first six years of your plan with existing taxes to boot.
While the logic of this line of argument certainly is sound based on the premise and the postulates you have put forth, I question those aspects of your argument.
I fail to see any possible way to quantify what the "cost to the public" might be in terms of the operational cost for a particular mode of transportation, and most attempts to perform that quantification are almost always based upon political considerations that have nothing to do with real quantifiable measurements made from objective instrumentation and unbiased technicians performing those measurements.
More significantly, the "cost to the public" is something that has a span of years, decades, and perhaps even centuries in terms of how long the overall impact will be felt. The "tax rebate" is something that impacts the state and the community immediately when it is applied (timescale on the order of days). Yes, I get the argument that mortgaging the future of our children for the needs of today is a bad principle too, but that is already happening to a large degree anyway. I personally think there are many other things that could be done without having to set up a government bureaucracy to administer funds in this manner.
California is facing some very real problems in the short term that are simply going to be unavoidable. The state simply can't inflate its currency to avoid its debt although the federal government may end up doing just that.... so California might end up being safe in the end. The next fiscal year is going to be a genuine nightmare where what would normally be considered "essential services" like law enforcement and fire protection are going to be cut drastically. "Non-essential services" are most definitely going to be cut and some very hard decisions about what programs really aren't needed is going to be faced too. Concerns about environmental impact of automobiles is going to soon be the very least of concerns for California.
Cold fusion as reported is clearly not real. Either 2 things must be true. That the energy came from D+D->He3+p+T+n in which case the neutron radiation would have killed them both. Or that D+D->He4 +gamma , just about everything in the standard model is completely wrong, observed data from particle physics is wrong, observed data from nuclear testing is wrong, and they would both be dead from gamma radiation.
They claimed that the power was 1 watt. A number so high that detecting the reaction is totally trivial.. for example if you are in the room for a few hours, you die without a decent piece of shielding.
There were other researchers who were experimenting with "cold fusion" before Pons & Fleishman, and the reported detection rates were something that were being measured with neutron counters instead of calorimeters. The rates of detection were above the noise level, but not really at anything resembling a commercial application. Something to look at, but not to go ape over. It is too bad that these researchers killed off an interesting physical science phenomena research area that could have been a source for understanding atomic physics.
I agree that the originally reported experiment was bogus so far as the claims being made. Saying that the whole line of research is "clearly not real" doesn't explain away other experimental results that have happened from that line of research.
The current experiments show some interesting facts too. No one can get any decent signal above the noise, while home built fusors totally destroy cold fusion with easily detectable reaction rates (on the order of 10^6 reaction per second IIRC). Hell even diode tube neutron sources destroy them for reaction rate.
On this I'd have to agree.... other than to refute that "no one can get any decent signal above the noise". They are getting some signal above the noise, but not too much more. The most honest research reports I've read about cold fusion noted reactions several "standard deviations" above the noise level, indicating a statistical likelihood that it has happened, but didn't claim any huge power production capabilities or even commercial applications of the technology. As a tool for research into atomic physics it may have its uses, but not as a commercial power source unless new base materials for the phenomena are ever discovered.
I also agree that other "desktop" fusion devices like the Fusor can produce many more neutrons than most "cold fusion" reactors. This is something that can and should be noted.
The problem with Pons and Fleischmann is the insistence that Cold Fusion could turn out to be anything other than a neutron emitter that can be turned on and off with a switch. BTW, that is something which already happens anyway with a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, and the "Cold Fusion" does it with much lower production rate of neutrons than even a Fusor. Fusors have even "gone commercial" in terms of their use as a neutron emitter, something that no "Cold Fusion" researcher ever claims to have achieved.
In other words, it should have been left alone as an interesting physical science phenomena and something to put a few grad students on from time to time just in case something useful came out of it, but not something to bet the farm upon.
As for the Chinese working on the topic, I hope they aren't spinning their wheels in futility. It is something akin to room-temperature superconducting as the physical science phenomena is something interesting and a lot of room for future growth.
Palladium is an interesting metal so far as it can pack Hydrogen together in close proximity that from time to time may result in some occasional fusion happening. The ability to absorb hydrogen by Palladium is famously noted anyway even as a storage medium for hydrogen-powered automobiles and fuel cells. If a real break-through in Cold Fusion happens in the future, it will be with another material that can perform these tasks in a manner better than Palladium. The trick is finding such a material, and the fact that currently anybody attempting to do this for the purposes of "Cold Fusion" is now openly ridiculed in academia.
But the US didn't go in to enforce the UN's policy of getting rid of WMD, they went in to get rid of Sadaam Hussein using the former as a pretext.
While incredibly off topic in terms of a discussion of room-temperature super-conductor physics, I'd have to agree with this particular sentiment. Then again, the previous "war" against Saddam Hussein had only ended with a cease fire and not a formal peace treaty, and could be presumed to be merely a resumption of hostilities. The same situation technically exists along the North/South Korean border as well (one of the longest "temporary" cease fire situations in world history).
For myself, I think it was wrong for President Bush to go to the UN even to seek approval or justification for war. That was something that should have been done in the United State Congress, and was the only political body he should have had to consult. It should have also been a formal declaration of a state of war, but the globalists and treaties of the sort the George Washington warned against in his farewell address were the causes of what forced a move to the United Nations. If I had been a member of Congress, I likely would have voted "No" on such a war resolution, and that is another reason why Bush didn't go that route. (a lack of votes for going to war)
Getting back on topic, I don't mind that a paper came out of the Asian sub-continent and there certainly are some very talented people who would be capable of at least coming up with some interesting material or some scientific principle that has been previously overlooked. If anything, I expect to be seeing more stuff like this come from that part of the world as the relative wealth of those people continues to improve over time and the American education system keeps falling apart.
What were the objectives for the first launch? Elon Musk essentially said blatantly that he only gave it a 50/50 chance of making it to orbit. It sounds like making it to orbit certainly did meet the objectives of what this particular launch had to make.
I think it is extremely fair to say that for the first launch that the Dragon met and exceeded all test parameters for that particular launch. The bar may be a bit low for you, but that doesn't say anything about if it met those parameters or not. SpaceX hasn't really said what else happened in that vehicle other than to say that it made it to orbit and that it wasn't designed for re-entry and surviving. Certainly any kind of instrumentation, electronics, or other components haven't been mentioned in press releases about it, but I don't know if they weren't in there either.
Tests tend to be done in very small steps, and the primary objectives were to test the launch vehicle itself rather than the thing on the top. This is also no different than was done with the Apollo spacecraft, which also used a broiler plate version on the initial launch (after the Apollo 1 disaster) and it also had at least some internal sensors and minor electronics on board.
But the trouble with space travel is that we're not exactly talking about the Wright Brothers any more. Two guys dinking around in a bike shop can't spearhead space travel like they did air travel.
Armadillo Aerospace is able to prove that somebody with only relatively modest personal resources indeed can come up with something that is both affordable and doesn't require getting into space. I do believe even more modest and "low-cost" approaches to spaceflight can and eventually will happen, but it will take somebody real gutsy to get that to happen.
One area that I think has only been touched lightly is using Hydrogen Peroxide as a propellant, which can make for some extremely cheap rocketry. The only problem isn't really cost, but the Department of Homeland Security in the USA (and similar agencies in other countries) that prohibit all but the most established companies and researchers from experimenting with the stuff. Most companies that manufacture rocket-grade peroxide won't sell peroxide simply because of government regulations and liability insurance reasons... something that wasn't a problem back in the days of the Wright Brothers.
Well, there's no oil up there. No coal, no natural gas. . Nothing valuable that we know of as far as a natural resource. So the mining and energy companies have no incentive to go there. In fact, no industry is going to give a crap about going to the moon unless we find a reason for them to go get stuff that they can't get here.
Every mineral resource that you can find on the Earth (gold, silver, copper, uranium, and perhaps even "abiotic oil" or at least some hyrdocarbons of some kind) are on the Moon. If the current lunar formations are correct, it is in fact a part of the Earth in a very intimate manner and some minerals may be easier to get to. We simply don't know what is on the Moon because the six expeditions that went there earlier were certainly not enough to do more than an initial survey of body that big. Six expeditions to the eastern coast of North America where the expedition leaders stayed only over a weekend would have likely painted North America in the 1500's as a bleak place with no natural resources worth grabbing except for some wood.
We don't need a government to set up ground work, other than provide a legal framework so that if anything is found "up there" that somebody can keep it, do something with it, and not tax the enterprise to death before the efforts to make a profit become successful. Government intervention and manipulation in the marketplace is the problem, not the solution.
Using current companies that offer space-based hardware, I can put together a full manned expedition to the Moon that at least duplicates the Apollo 11 flight for under $500 million. Some of that is for some hardware that is still under development, but that is really a high-ball estimate for how much it would cost. As for why it will cost over $15 billion for NASA to do the same thing speaks more about the government procurement process than the real cost of getting into space.
Yes, I can provide a more detailed and itemized accounting of that cost too. I also expect that price to go down, and I think it could go down by at least 90% if not more if some real ingenuity were put behind that effort.
The reason for an entire carrier task force to be assigned for the recovery of astronauts was both for American prestige (to treat the astronauts as heroes hence giving the U.S. Navy an excellent public relations opportunity) and because of the incredibly lousy guidance computers involved in those flights.
Keep in mind that the CPU power of the Apollo Guidance Computer found inside of the Apollo Command Module was roughly the same processing power and nearly the same number of transistors as it typically found in a modern hotel card-key entry system on an ordinary hotel room door. Saying it is comparable to a modern cellphone doesn't do the cell phone justice. A cell phone has the CPU power of almost all of NASA in the mid-1960's including the equipment at Mission Control in Houston. This includes multi-tasking capabilities too.
Basically, back during the Apollo days, NASA was luck to hit a target about the size of the Pacific Ocean, and the astronauts even trained for the potential to be landing in even more exotic and remote locations in case they missed that ocean completely. With modern guidance systems, GPS navigation, and other factors included it is no longer necessary to have a full carrier group for the recovery of a ballistic capsule, if it was really even necessary earlier. Perhaps a ship to perform the recovery, such as the two ships NASA currently has to recover the SRBs after each Shuttle launch.
The sooner you realize that, the less fear that you have of the future of American spaceflight and where things are going. For myself, I've never seen the American presence in space at a better level and more capable of doing some simply amazing things that have never been done before... ever.
Yes, most of this is being done and financed by private individuals. That makes it all that much better because they don't have to worry about which political party is in power or what the current president thinks about spaceflight. They simply "do it" and get into space. The real problem is coming up with a profit motive that will support private industry. There is profit to be made in space, however, and many people already working at trying to make that happen.
There is stuff that NASA could be doing to help out American industry in general, but for the most part they tend to be a negative drag on commercial spaceflight or even out right block commercial efforts from happening. That the efforts of NASA are now going into a total meltdown in terms of manned spaceflight in particular is to me perhaps the best thing that has happened since Alan Sheppard made his first Mercury flight.
The Skylab Rescue Mission had a variant for 5 passengers. That was two for piloting the spacecraft up into orbit to dock with Skylab (or another Apollo spacecraft) and then bringing all 5 back down to the Earth during re-entry. It certainly wasn't large enough for prolonged missions in this configuration, and it wasn't intended to be used for launch.
There was an "Apollo II" capsule that was going to be the next generation vehicle that had been suggested with some very preliminary designing that happened which would have involved 5 astronauts in a normal mission profile and up to seven for emergency situations. That was, however, a completely different spacecraft and even when it was proposed would have required a new guidance computer and other system changes.
What you are suggesting here is more the equivalent of somebody in the 1950's trying to see what the Wright Brothers did back 40 years earlier in the design of an aircraft. Yes, that does happen from time to time (such as taking a look at the wing warping technology the Wright Brothers came up with on their original flier), but a wholesale copying of the aircraft for anything but a museum re-creation is not going to happen.
But this also happens to look like Apollo-derived configurations of many years ago.
The only reason it looks like an Apollo capsule is because it happens to share a common flight profile. Physics such as they are requires certain physical dimensions in order to work, and there really are only two significant configurations for a manned vehicle going to orbit: The Apollo blunt-nosed conical configuration or something like the Soyuz that has two parts (an orbital "habitation" module and a very confined re-entry section). I've heard the same kind of complaints about the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft looking like the Russian Soyuz vehicle, even though it shares absolutely none of the engineering or design other than from a very rough grade-school level equivalence.
Ditto for the Apollo-like profile here, as this shares literally none of the vehicle design characteristics of the Apollo spacecraft, with perhaps the exception of the re-entry shield. Even that I'm not entirely sure about. There is far, far more work that would have to be done to build a new spacecraft, and with the changes in materials, electronics, fuels, and safety factors that have been added since the Apollo capsule was built it really is a clean-sheet design from scratch. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing in the Apollo design even could be used even if you tried.
This is presuming you could even find the filing cabinet that had the Apollo capsule designs, as the company that built that spacecraft no longer even exists at all. In theory North American was through a series of mergers now a part of Boeing and I suppose that the engineering plans are at some place in the Boeing engineering department, but that doesn't mean they have any usefulness for a design in the 21st Century.
This is not a cost-plus contract, and Boeing is certainly putting a whole bunch of their own skin into the game here. Yes, I get that Boeing is also getting some government money, but it is not, I repeat not a cost-plus contract. If costs start to spiral out of control, it is Boeing that has to foot the bill and not the U.S. government. All of the government money is seed money and the amounts you are talking about here in the past would have been grants for paper studies that wouldn't have even had a single piece of metal bent.
Seriously, you think that $68 million dollars is going to get you an orbital spacecraft all by itself? That wouldn't even get you an unmanned spacecraft to the Moon or for that matter even to low-Earth orbit. It couldn't even buy you an unmanned launch on a Soyuz launcher to test the thing, assuming the Russians would want to even try.
For myself, I wouldn't even mind NASA getting out of the spaceflight business entirely, but I don't see that realistically happening. Perhaps building some probes or doing some deep space stuff, but getting to low-Earth orbit is a solved engineering problem and certainly doesn't need additional government resources other than buying a flight from existing launchers that are already very well proven. Not even a "heavy launcher" is really needed even for a manned flight to Mars. It would be "nice" to have such a beast, but it isn't strictly necessary. For the one or two times per year it will be used, it is a luxury that is over the top. Too bad nearly $10-$15 billion are going to be dumped into that fiscal black hole before it is going to be canceled. And it will be canceled... very much likely by the next president (in 2013 or 2017.... it really doesn't matter).
BTW, the TransHab module for the ISS is something I wish had been developed further, and it would be awesome if NASA could schedule a future flight of the Shuttle to get that delivered. Was the module being tested and proofed something that had been fully built, or was that something only partially completed? Yes, I realize it is "illegal" for NASA to put it on the ISS (by explicit law added to one of the NASA appropriation bills). It was a political decision, and the killing of the TransHab module was already an accomplished fact before Bigelow decided to offer to license the technology for himself. I'm glad that somebody is running with it.
Then again, I wish NASA had stuck to its guns with the DC-X program. All of this dickering about not having a manned spaceflight program, complaints about "depending on the Russians", would have been a moot issue had that program simply not been canceled. It was something amazing and could have saved the NASA Astronaut's Office. Instead, it is being developed by Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin instead. I hope that Mr. Bezos has better luck getting it going... and I hope he gets to orbit with it too. That would be the ultimate irony if that ever happened.
What makes this not a dupe is that Boeing released many more details about the spacecraft, including its formal "name" or catalog designation, some much more detailed technical drawings about its construction, and that this information was released at a major spaceflight conference that happened this past week. Yes, it is true that the earlier announcement was about the fact that Boeing was going to build the spacecraft, but there is more new information to be had here.
Unfortunately, the way the slashdot post was written implied that this was the first time it had been talked about. Too bad it didn't say "Boeing has just released more details about their upcoming spacecraft, now named the CST-100." That would have been very useful information and acknowledging the previous story.
It was a broilerplate that exhibited all of the aerodynamic characteristics that would be expected for the real thing. In terms of its launch into orbit, it can be said that the Dragon spacecraft met all of its objectives. Foremost, the #1 objective was not to get blown up before it got to orbit or get plunked into the ocean where it wasn't wanted. Nothing more than broilerplate was necessary to meet that objective.
The next flight is going to have something a bit more sophisticated that sounds like they are going to be testing the Draco thrusters and doing other more significant tests of the Dragon as a spacecraft. It still won't be ready for prime time in terms of delivering cargo to orbit, but it will be something more sophisticated.
As far as the first commercial spacecraft to get into orbit, that would be the Telstar satellite that was put up by none other than AT&T back when it was the monster Ma Bell.... with a great deal of assistance and development work by the old time Bell Labs back when that meant something. The story of how AT&T got screwed out of the commercial market ought to be legendary, including how Ma Bell was explicitly excluded by law from launching any more satellites even if it was on their own dime.
Nope. This is a winner-take-all fight to the finish. The market, absent subsidies, isn't big enough to support more than one supplier.
The market for commercial manned spaceflight is essentially non-existent. There is Space Adventures that has put some real paying customers into orbit, and there were a few private commercial "passengers" in various capacities that flew on the Space Shuttle. All in all, there certainly is a market for about 3-4 people to orbit per year (more or less) when the price point is between $20-$30 million per seat and the participant is willing to give up about six months of their life (or more) to essentially become a fully certified astronaut and become flight-qualified to fly the spacecraft as at least a back-up pilot.
That to me sounds like somebody who wants to take a trip on an airplane on a trans-Atlantic flight having to become FAA certified with a commercial multi-engine & instrument landing certifications on their pilot's license. How many people do you think would take a flight in commercial aviation if that was the minimum qualification for merely being a passenger? There were some people willing to do that back in the 1930's, but not a whole lot of them.
What the market may be for flights into space with a price point under $10 million with people merely being "passengers" and not having to go through any sort of "astronaut training" other than perhaps an hour long class on how to cope with microgravity and an extended pre-flight discussion similar to what most passengers on commercial aviation get in terms of safety equipment (seats as a flotation device and how to use the oxygen masks).... I have no idea at all what that market may be. I think it could be more than what Space Adventures has been able to dig up so far for their Soyuz flights. The question is how much more.
As for subsidies... I understand the reluctance on the part of Boeing to stick out their neck on an unproven business model. For the sake of their shareholders, they simply must have at least some other customer besides Bigelow to pay for the R&D alone that is going to go into this spacecraft, much less setting up an assembly line to put this vehicle into production. Robert Bigelow is a nice guy and has some personal wealth that is useful, but even he can't personally afford to keep Boeing afloat fiscally on this particular vehicle by himself.
As for if more than one company will be successful with orbital commercial manned spaceflight, it will be interesting to see how that works out too. There are about a dozen different companies that are trying to get something to happen in that arena, and it will be interesting to see how many of them will either be acquired in mergers, go bankrupt (like Kistler), or simply stay in the sub-orbital niche and not move on. Scaled Composites has already been acquired by one of the "big boys", and others may follow in that path too.
Did anyone notice that they don't say where they are going in this capsule? Where are the senators who called Obama's proposed budget a mission to nowhere? This new NASA program doesn't have a destination, either, but at least the dollars keep flowing to the same interests.
Note that Boeing is developing this on their own dime, not as a part of a cost-plus contract where the government takes all of the risk in terms of costs involved in developing the vehicle. That is a huge deal. This is also not a NASA project either, and it almost entirely done with private funds.
Still, Boeing would really like to get some additional customers besides Bigelow Aerospace, and the only real game in town for the past several decades has been the U.S. government. The executives at Boeing are trying to be realistic here in terms of thinking that commercial spaceflight customers aren't going to be sufficient to justify the engineering expense for building this vehicle, so they are trying to sweet talk some of their fairy god-senators for some extra money to ensure that they can make a profit off of this design.
One of the things that has kept Boeing in business when many other aircraft building companies have gone under is an insistence that whatever they make has customers before they start the major engineering designs and the ability to at least break even if not make a profit when that happens. It does make them risk-averse and keeps them from creating very innovative designs, but it does make the company profitable and ensures that they will be around for another hundred years. Sometimes it doesn't help to create a wild and crazy new design if nobody is interested in using it afterward.
As for the manned NASA spaceflight program.... it is going to be stuck on the Earth for at least a decade, with the exception of going up on Russian Soyuz rockets. Oh the irony in that thought where Soviet-era and designed equipment is keeping astronauts in orbit. Khrushchev would have been proud.
Getting to the Moon is very expensive, and at the moment it isn't even an objective for NASA to work on reducing that cost. In fact, with the latest appropriations bill NASA is being ordered by the U.S. Congress to build the safest possible spacecraft and explicitly mentions that cost savings or other factors specifically have to be excluded from any sort of consideration when building those vehicles.
To get a Moon base built with that kind of attitude, it will take a trillion dollars... and even then I wonder how safe it can possibly be when safety is the #1 overriding criteria for development. The U.S. government doesn't have a trillion dollars to give to NASA either, even if it was spread out over 20 years.
Thankfully there are folks like SpaceX who are showing you can safely get to space cheaper.... as long as cost savings is a major objective. There are other companies even that think they can get even cheaper to space than SpaceX, and I wish them well. Unfortunately any likelihood of NASA using those cheaper rockets (like say even a Boeing Delta IV rocket) are getting tossed out the window and being flat out ignored. Since NASA wasn't involved in the development of those vehicles, they don't want anything to do with them.
Yes, the Delta IV would be an order of magnitude cheaper than all of the proposed vehicles that NASA has on the drawing boards, and now they are going to throw a ton of money down another project black hole that is going to churn out a whole bunch of paper, fly a couple "demonstrators" and get canceled in about 4-5 years. I'm talking the "shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle" that Congress is trying to approve with the latest appropriations bill.
Thankfully, people like Boeing are realizing that if they want to keep their engineers, they also have to put some hardware into orbit. NASA isn't doing that any more, at least with any sort of new hardware.
The challenge of what was delivered as a birth certificate is that supposedly Obama was issued a delayed birth certificate.... something that is typically issued for a home birth or something that doesn't happen in a hospital. Such birth certificates were very common in America for at least the first half of the 20th Century, although they are now extremely uncommon with standards for filing such certificates significantly improved. It is a case of understanding history and how things used to work rather than how they currently work, so most people alive today aren't really familiar with these kind of things and especially most slashdotters.
Mind you, I'm not completely convinced that Obama was born somewhere else and he was certainly raised as an American, but there really is a kernel of truth to the whole thing. Back when I was born (and when Obama was born.... he is about my age) most people received a hospital certificate that had a stronger claim of birth documentation than a birth certificate. I used mine to receive my Social Security card originally. Now they aren't even recognized. Obama doesn't have a hospital certificate.
The best fitting story I've heard is that Obama was born in Kenya and his birth witnessed by his grandmother, but with his dad worried about the future of young Barack flew to Hawaii and filed for a delayed brith certificate when Barack was just a few days or weeks old. That is what the hubub is all about demanding to see the "original" birth certificate, as those trying to "prove" that Barack Obama doesn't qualify as a native born citizen want to see if it was with data that originated from a hospital or if it was something merely certified by his parents. The laws at the time would not recognize children born abroad of mixed nationality parents as citizens and Barack Obama would have been required to go through a naturalization process. That is the claim and yes I've seen the refutation.
Some historian is eventually going to get to the bottom of the whole thing, but I don't think it will ever happen while Obama remains in office. For myself, I don't care about the whole thing and there is about zero chance of anything happening that would get Obama kicked out of office over this issue. I don't think it is insanity, however, to at least question the issue and wonder "what if?"
As for claiming anything in the Tea Party..... please at least define what it is that you are talking about and note that there is no monolithic group of people involved in that organization, if you can even call it an organization. It is made up of a bunch of people (mainly Gen X-ers who are finally old enough to have money and wanting to get involved politically for the first time) who are fed up with "the establishment" and trying to get their voice heard. I do think it is a generational thing, and many slashdotters are actually younger than the typical folks getting involved in the Tea Party movement.
Essentially, it was a one day event flash mob that some other folks have been hijacking ever sense to turn it into a formal political movement. It would be about the same as if somebody tried to make a political movement out of Woodstock in the early 1970's. Arguably some actually did try so far as anti-establishment movements against Nixon. There is some frustration about what the government is doing and some anger that the "hope and change" is changing too much too quickly and in ways that many folks don't like. Beyond that, how can you claim that you know anything about a typical "Tea Party" participant or what they believe, as those involved are united only in their hatred of what is happening in the government.
Yes, I consider Sarah Palin to be an opportunist and hardly represents what was going on at those events. The Tea Party certainly isn't a Republican related activity although some of the more politically motivated that participated in those parties seem to be getting more traction within the Republican Party in terms of winning delegate spots and taking over the leadership positions of precinct-level party organizations. What that means for the long term of the American Republic still remains to be seen.... if it means anything at all in the long run.
Neither the orbital fuel depots, private space stations, nor a moon base has ever been built, so I would dare say that all of that is indeed new science and engineering. I would dare say that the comparison between the Kremer prize and something like the Ansari X-Prize is a very apt comparison.
As far as getting to the Moon and building a base there, I have huge doubts that any such prize could be privately funded, and the notion of public funding for such an endeavor has not ever been done on that scale. Would I appreciate the effort to do that? Absolutely!
I just don't think that such prizes are really all that different, and if you want something done sooner, you should simply offer a contract to somebody who already makes related hardware. That won't necessarily be cheaper, but it at least would get done. We know we can get things done if you write a blank check and follow the motto "waste anything but time".
If you want the money guys to jump into the effort, it is important to offer a 2nd, 3rd, and perhaps even a 4th place "consolation prize" so that somebody making a business investment into a company knows that there is at least some money that can be obtained even if somehow they don't make it first. The issue that an investor wants to have is predictability that there will be some return on their investment, which secondary prizes could offer.
I think if you are insisting on having prizes decrease over time, you add "Go Fever" to the effort where safety is cut simply to get the extra money before the deadline expires. That isn't healthy, especially in space. It was NASA's concern over launching now instead of later (due to funding issues) that was part of the problem with the Challenger blowing up. The Shuttle managers were trying to show they were "efficient" so they could get more money or that future flights wouldn't get cut.
While I get the reasoning you are suggesting here for reducing the prize over time (which inflation does on its own anyway, so a fixed prize essentially does the same thing), I'm not convinced that this is necessarily something good for scientific research to have some sort of time-limited option on a prize.
The Kremer prize is an example of something that has at least been partially claimed that took nearly twenty years and some basic materials science advancement in order for it to happen. That kind of basic research is something that simply can't be anticipated. Some prizes have taken even longer before they have been awarded.
Mind you, I like the idea of prizes and it is something that should be done more for advancement of technology. It is also a way to get "more bang for your buck" if you are of a philanthropic mood and want to encourage the development of something. Likely the worst possible place to throw money is at a research university, at least in terms of actual research conducted for the money spent. More often than not it is being done by grad students at slave wages if the university official aren't being honest about its cost or saying it is cost effective.
The sad thing is that Jerry Pournelle was able to convince Newt Gingrich to try and offer some of these spaceflight prizes while Gingrich was still the Speaker of the House. Unfortunately due to a case of horrible historic timing, this happened about a little bit before the scandal came out that eventually drove Mr. Gingrich from office. After hearing about that, I've always wondered in a "what if" alternate history timeline what might have been had that happened and the Republican's didn't throw Gingrich under the bus.
Of course the dissent between the "blue bloods" and the "Reaganites" is still going on within the ranks of the Republican Party. That feud keeps shooting the Republicans in the foot each time they get anywhere near some sort of political power.
In spite of the trappings, George W. Bush was a blue blood and Newt Gingrich was (and still is I guess) one of the "Reganites".
The problems in medicine in regards to spiraling costs getting out of control have to do with the fact medical patients are no longer the customers (from the perspective of the doctors and hospital administration). That instead is the health insurance companies, which are increasingly consolidating or even becoming a part of the government in various forms, so you have less competition due to fewer potential customers that will demand anything different. Market principles that keep costs down simply don't work any more when monopolies take over, and it doesn't matter if that is a monopoly on supply or demand.
What is frustrating to many pundits who poke at SpaceX is that they presume the same situation exists for orbital rocketry, where the only customer (supposedly) is government contracts. The American spaceflight industry is currently built around that model, and the price structures are set at levels where only the government is going to be involved. SpaceX is placing a huge bet that the market for customers other than the government is going to be huge, if only they can get the price down low enough.
For myself, I would say that the jury is still out on that point. Oh, there is no doubt that if you can really get the price of launches down real low that some sort of market will kick in that hasn't been previously tapped into. The question being raised is if there are going to be enough new customers that a company like SpaceX can make up the difference with volume production of their vehicles.
For example, if a company sells a rocket for $300 million each, but only flies about ten of them each year (to give an example). The question is if that company drops the price (through reduced costs in building the rocket and perhaps other approaches) to be $30 million each, can that company find enough customers to fly over a hundred missions? That is presuming that the rockets are produced for free (no capital costs involved at all) and it is pure profit.
So far, all SpaceX has been able to get in terms of increased customers is only a dozen or so more missions that otherwise wouldn't have been launched at the higher cost. I'm not convinced that those few additional customers makes up the difference in terms of allowing SpaceX to do anything other than to break into the market and supplant one of the existing launcher companies.... with an eventual rise in prices again after time by SpaceX once the market as re-established equilibrium with this new entrant.
If instead SpaceX is able to drum up a whole bunch more business, such as that example I gave with the $30 million rocket that has a thousand customers per year instead of merely ten, there may be something to whatever it is that SpaceX is doing. If that market for potential customers can get into the millions of flights with a $3 million rocket, there certainly would be further incentives to drive the cost down even more.
That is called price elasticity, and something most businesses are hoping for. There was some skepticism in the computer industry back in the 1950's and 1960's that such economies could happen, with one commentator famously suggesting that the world-wide market for computers was precisely five. With the market for microprocessors now being made (and sold) by the billions, those kind of economies of scale and market forces to drive down costs have made computers with incredible computing power and capabilities also very cheap. You can name other devices where this has also happened, so it isn't isolated to just computers. The question is if such a situation can happen in rocketry.
I've never understood why NASA has abandoned the shuttle concept completely and instead went back to the Apollo architecture. Certainly there could have been an incremental improvement of the concept (perhaps reducing/separating the cargo section or other "tweak") and eliminating some of the compromises made in the 1970's to make it the one and only vehicle for everything, but there is some value to the concept of what there is to the Shuttle, and having 100+ flights as a record is something most launch systems would love to have. It may have its problems, but it certainly has been a workhorse. I hope in time somebody builds a true successor to the Shuttle.
Ares I, if it is ever built, is really only a successor to the SRB.... a part of the Shuttle design that perhaps could even be abandoned in a future rev.
One of the reasons why SpaceX isn't "breaking any scientific ground" is also because getting into orbit isn't exactly something new to accomplish either. It should be a solved engineering problem, similar to trying to figure out how to span a large distance (under 1 km) with a bridge. That doesn't necessarily make it cheap by itself, but you can build a structure or examine designs that have been used in the past and see what works and what doesn't. It also means that you don't have to repeat the same mistakes of the past all over again.
Elon Musk has also been pushing hard for vertical integration within his company as a means to control product quality and cost. If his company make the part, Mr. Musk doesn't have to worry about losing a supplier or having the cost of that part start to soar if they become the only customer for that part.
Still, as you are saying here, if there is a common part that can be purchased "off the shelf" from a general industrial supply catalog or supplier, SpaceX is tending to use a part like that and intends to incorporate such items into its design. Under a cost-plus contract there is a disincentive on the part the government contractors to buy such parts unless it is an absolutely ordinary thing like a bolt or rivet.
The origins of the Shuttle program, including the first drafts for the basic concepts, happened when James Webb was the NASA admin and Johnson was President. Yes, I'll admit that it was under the Nixon administration that the final design was settled upon and it was Nixon that signed the original authorization bill in terms of laying down actual hardware.
The design authorization, however, happened under the Johnson administration.
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How did you come up with that figure and what sorts of hard data can you use to back up that claim? While I'm sure that you can point to some numbers and claim crazy things like the Iraq War as something which perhaps should be paid for with petroleum taxes in America, I challenge you to actually account for the justification of this sort of tax.
The only reason you are suggesting to "gradually" implement a tax of this nature is that you know full well that if it was introduced at once that enough people would be so ticked off that any politician suggesting something this bold would be voted out of office immediately. You also haven't accounted for already existing taxes of close to a dollar a gallon anyway, so you can cut off the first six years of your plan with existing taxes to boot.
While the logic of this line of argument certainly is sound based on the premise and the postulates you have put forth, I question those aspects of your argument.
I fail to see any possible way to quantify what the "cost to the public" might be in terms of the operational cost for a particular mode of transportation, and most attempts to perform that quantification are almost always based upon political considerations that have nothing to do with real quantifiable measurements made from objective instrumentation and unbiased technicians performing those measurements.
More significantly, the "cost to the public" is something that has a span of years, decades, and perhaps even centuries in terms of how long the overall impact will be felt. The "tax rebate" is something that impacts the state and the community immediately when it is applied (timescale on the order of days). Yes, I get the argument that mortgaging the future of our children for the needs of today is a bad principle too, but that is already happening to a large degree anyway. I personally think there are many other things that could be done without having to set up a government bureaucracy to administer funds in this manner.
California is facing some very real problems in the short term that are simply going to be unavoidable. The state simply can't inflate its currency to avoid its debt although the federal government may end up doing just that.... so California might end up being safe in the end. The next fiscal year is going to be a genuine nightmare where what would normally be considered "essential services" like law enforcement and fire protection are going to be cut drastically. "Non-essential services" are most definitely going to be cut and some very hard decisions about what programs really aren't needed is going to be faced too. Concerns about environmental impact of automobiles is going to soon be the very least of concerns for California.
Cold fusion as reported is clearly not real. Either 2 things must be true. That the energy came from D+D->He3+p+T+n in which case the neutron radiation would have killed them both. Or that D+D->He4 +gamma , just about everything in the standard model is completely wrong, observed data from particle physics is wrong, observed data from nuclear testing is wrong, and they would both be dead from gamma radiation.
They claimed that the power was 1 watt. A number so high that detecting the reaction is totally trivial.. for example if you are in the room for a few hours, you die without a decent piece of shielding.
There were other researchers who were experimenting with "cold fusion" before Pons & Fleishman, and the reported detection rates were something that were being measured with neutron counters instead of calorimeters. The rates of detection were above the noise level, but not really at anything resembling a commercial application. Something to look at, but not to go ape over. It is too bad that these researchers killed off an interesting physical science phenomena research area that could have been a source for understanding atomic physics.
I agree that the originally reported experiment was bogus so far as the claims being made. Saying that the whole line of research is "clearly not real" doesn't explain away other experimental results that have happened from that line of research.
The current experiments show some interesting facts too. No one can get any decent signal above the noise, while home built fusors totally destroy cold fusion with easily detectable reaction rates (on the order of 10^6 reaction per second IIRC). Hell even diode tube neutron sources destroy them for reaction rate.
On this I'd have to agree.... other than to refute that "no one can get any decent signal above the noise". They are getting some signal above the noise, but not too much more. The most honest research reports I've read about cold fusion noted reactions several "standard deviations" above the noise level, indicating a statistical likelihood that it has happened, but didn't claim any huge power production capabilities or even commercial applications of the technology. As a tool for research into atomic physics it may have its uses, but not as a commercial power source unless new base materials for the phenomena are ever discovered.
I also agree that other "desktop" fusion devices like the Fusor can produce many more neutrons than most "cold fusion" reactors. This is something that can and should be noted.
The problem with Pons and Fleischmann is the insistence that Cold Fusion could turn out to be anything other than a neutron emitter that can be turned on and off with a switch. BTW, that is something which already happens anyway with a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, and the "Cold Fusion" does it with much lower production rate of neutrons than even a Fusor. Fusors have even "gone commercial" in terms of their use as a neutron emitter, something that no "Cold Fusion" researcher ever claims to have achieved.
In other words, it should have been left alone as an interesting physical science phenomena and something to put a few grad students on from time to time just in case something useful came out of it, but not something to bet the farm upon.
As for the Chinese working on the topic, I hope they aren't spinning their wheels in futility. It is something akin to room-temperature superconducting as the physical science phenomena is something interesting and a lot of room for future growth.
Palladium is an interesting metal so far as it can pack Hydrogen together in close proximity that from time to time may result in some occasional fusion happening. The ability to absorb hydrogen by Palladium is famously noted anyway even as a storage medium for hydrogen-powered automobiles and fuel cells. If a real break-through in Cold Fusion happens in the future, it will be with another material that can perform these tasks in a manner better than Palladium. The trick is finding such a material, and the fact that currently anybody attempting to do this for the purposes of "Cold Fusion" is now openly ridiculed in academia.
But the US didn't go in to enforce the UN's policy of getting rid of WMD, they went in to get rid of Sadaam Hussein using the former as a pretext.
While incredibly off topic in terms of a discussion of room-temperature super-conductor physics, I'd have to agree with this particular sentiment. Then again, the previous "war" against Saddam Hussein had only ended with a cease fire and not a formal peace treaty, and could be presumed to be merely a resumption of hostilities. The same situation technically exists along the North/South Korean border as well (one of the longest "temporary" cease fire situations in world history).
For myself, I think it was wrong for President Bush to go to the UN even to seek approval or justification for war. That was something that should have been done in the United State Congress, and was the only political body he should have had to consult. It should have also been a formal declaration of a state of war, but the globalists and treaties of the sort the George Washington warned against in his farewell address were the causes of what forced a move to the United Nations. If I had been a member of Congress, I likely would have voted "No" on such a war resolution, and that is another reason why Bush didn't go that route. (a lack of votes for going to war)
Getting back on topic, I don't mind that a paper came out of the Asian sub-continent and there certainly are some very talented people who would be capable of at least coming up with some interesting material or some scientific principle that has been previously overlooked. If anything, I expect to be seeing more stuff like this come from that part of the world as the relative wealth of those people continues to improve over time and the American education system keeps falling apart.
What were the objectives for the first launch? Elon Musk essentially said blatantly that he only gave it a 50/50 chance of making it to orbit. It sounds like making it to orbit certainly did meet the objectives of what this particular launch had to make.
I think it is extremely fair to say that for the first launch that the Dragon met and exceeded all test parameters for that particular launch. The bar may be a bit low for you, but that doesn't say anything about if it met those parameters or not. SpaceX hasn't really said what else happened in that vehicle other than to say that it made it to orbit and that it wasn't designed for re-entry and surviving. Certainly any kind of instrumentation, electronics, or other components haven't been mentioned in press releases about it, but I don't know if they weren't in there either.
Tests tend to be done in very small steps, and the primary objectives were to test the launch vehicle itself rather than the thing on the top. This is also no different than was done with the Apollo spacecraft, which also used a broiler plate version on the initial launch (after the Apollo 1 disaster) and it also had at least some internal sensors and minor electronics on board.
But the trouble with space travel is that we're not exactly talking about the Wright Brothers any more. Two guys dinking around in a bike shop can't spearhead space travel like they did air travel.
Armadillo Aerospace is able to prove that somebody with only relatively modest personal resources indeed can come up with something that is both affordable and doesn't require getting into space. I do believe even more modest and "low-cost" approaches to spaceflight can and eventually will happen, but it will take somebody real gutsy to get that to happen.
One area that I think has only been touched lightly is using Hydrogen Peroxide as a propellant, which can make for some extremely cheap rocketry. The only problem isn't really cost, but the Department of Homeland Security in the USA (and similar agencies in other countries) that prohibit all but the most established companies and researchers from experimenting with the stuff. Most companies that manufacture rocket-grade peroxide won't sell peroxide simply because of government regulations and liability insurance reasons... something that wasn't a problem back in the days of the Wright Brothers.
Well, there's no oil up there. No coal, no natural gas. . Nothing valuable that we know of as far as a natural resource. So the mining and energy companies have no incentive to go there. In fact, no industry is going to give a crap about going to the moon unless we find a reason for them to go get stuff that they can't get here.
Every mineral resource that you can find on the Earth (gold, silver, copper, uranium, and perhaps even "abiotic oil" or at least some hyrdocarbons of some kind) are on the Moon. If the current lunar formations are correct, it is in fact a part of the Earth in a very intimate manner and some minerals may be easier to get to. We simply don't know what is on the Moon because the six expeditions that went there earlier were certainly not enough to do more than an initial survey of body that big. Six expeditions to the eastern coast of North America where the expedition leaders stayed only over a weekend would have likely painted North America in the 1500's as a bleak place with no natural resources worth grabbing except for some wood.
We don't need a government to set up ground work, other than provide a legal framework so that if anything is found "up there" that somebody can keep it, do something with it, and not tax the enterprise to death before the efforts to make a profit become successful. Government intervention and manipulation in the marketplace is the problem, not the solution.
Using current companies that offer space-based hardware, I can put together a full manned expedition to the Moon that at least duplicates the Apollo 11 flight for under $500 million. Some of that is for some hardware that is still under development, but that is really a high-ball estimate for how much it would cost. As for why it will cost over $15 billion for NASA to do the same thing speaks more about the government procurement process than the real cost of getting into space.
Yes, I can provide a more detailed and itemized accounting of that cost too. I also expect that price to go down, and I think it could go down by at least 90% if not more if some real ingenuity were put behind that effort.
The reason for an entire carrier task force to be assigned for the recovery of astronauts was both for American prestige (to treat the astronauts as heroes hence giving the U.S. Navy an excellent public relations opportunity) and because of the incredibly lousy guidance computers involved in those flights.
Keep in mind that the CPU power of the Apollo Guidance Computer found inside of the Apollo Command Module was roughly the same processing power and nearly the same number of transistors as it typically found in a modern hotel card-key entry system on an ordinary hotel room door. Saying it is comparable to a modern cellphone doesn't do the cell phone justice. A cell phone has the CPU power of almost all of NASA in the mid-1960's including the equipment at Mission Control in Houston. This includes multi-tasking capabilities too.
Basically, back during the Apollo days, NASA was luck to hit a target about the size of the Pacific Ocean, and the astronauts even trained for the potential to be landing in even more exotic and remote locations in case they missed that ocean completely. With modern guidance systems, GPS navigation, and other factors included it is no longer necessary to have a full carrier group for the recovery of a ballistic capsule, if it was really even necessary earlier. Perhaps a ship to perform the recovery, such as the two ships NASA currently has to recover the SRBs after each Shuttle launch.
NASA != American spaceflight industry
The sooner you realize that, the less fear that you have of the future of American spaceflight and where things are going. For myself, I've never seen the American presence in space at a better level and more capable of doing some simply amazing things that have never been done before... ever.
Yes, most of this is being done and financed by private individuals. That makes it all that much better because they don't have to worry about which political party is in power or what the current president thinks about spaceflight. They simply "do it" and get into space. The real problem is coming up with a profit motive that will support private industry. There is profit to be made in space, however, and many people already working at trying to make that happen.
There is stuff that NASA could be doing to help out American industry in general, but for the most part they tend to be a negative drag on commercial spaceflight or even out right block commercial efforts from happening. That the efforts of NASA are now going into a total meltdown in terms of manned spaceflight in particular is to me perhaps the best thing that has happened since Alan Sheppard made his first Mercury flight.
The Skylab Rescue Mission had a variant for 5 passengers. That was two for piloting the spacecraft up into orbit to dock with Skylab (or another Apollo spacecraft) and then bringing all 5 back down to the Earth during re-entry. It certainly wasn't large enough for prolonged missions in this configuration, and it wasn't intended to be used for launch.
There was an "Apollo II" capsule that was going to be the next generation vehicle that had been suggested with some very preliminary designing that happened which would have involved 5 astronauts in a normal mission profile and up to seven for emergency situations. That was, however, a completely different spacecraft and even when it was proposed would have required a new guidance computer and other system changes.
What you are suggesting here is more the equivalent of somebody in the 1950's trying to see what the Wright Brothers did back 40 years earlier in the design of an aircraft. Yes, that does happen from time to time (such as taking a look at the wing warping technology the Wright Brothers came up with on their original flier), but a wholesale copying of the aircraft for anything but a museum re-creation is not going to happen.
But this also happens to look like Apollo-derived configurations of many years ago.
The only reason it looks like an Apollo capsule is because it happens to share a common flight profile. Physics such as they are requires certain physical dimensions in order to work, and there really are only two significant configurations for a manned vehicle going to orbit: The Apollo blunt-nosed conical configuration or something like the Soyuz that has two parts (an orbital "habitation" module and a very confined re-entry section). I've heard the same kind of complaints about the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft looking like the Russian Soyuz vehicle, even though it shares absolutely none of the engineering or design other than from a very rough grade-school level equivalence.
Ditto for the Apollo-like profile here, as this shares literally none of the vehicle design characteristics of the Apollo spacecraft, with perhaps the exception of the re-entry shield. Even that I'm not entirely sure about. There is far, far more work that would have to be done to build a new spacecraft, and with the changes in materials, electronics, fuels, and safety factors that have been added since the Apollo capsule was built it really is a clean-sheet design from scratch. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing in the Apollo design even could be used even if you tried.
This is presuming you could even find the filing cabinet that had the Apollo capsule designs, as the company that built that spacecraft no longer even exists at all. In theory North American was through a series of mergers now a part of Boeing and I suppose that the engineering plans are at some place in the Boeing engineering department, but that doesn't mean they have any usefulness for a design in the 21st Century.
This is not a cost-plus contract, and Boeing is certainly putting a whole bunch of their own skin into the game here. Yes, I get that Boeing is also getting some government money, but it is not, I repeat not a cost-plus contract. If costs start to spiral out of control, it is Boeing that has to foot the bill and not the U.S. government. All of the government money is seed money and the amounts you are talking about here in the past would have been grants for paper studies that wouldn't have even had a single piece of metal bent.
Seriously, you think that $68 million dollars is going to get you an orbital spacecraft all by itself? That wouldn't even get you an unmanned spacecraft to the Moon or for that matter even to low-Earth orbit. It couldn't even buy you an unmanned launch on a Soyuz launcher to test the thing, assuming the Russians would want to even try.
For myself, I wouldn't even mind NASA getting out of the spaceflight business entirely, but I don't see that realistically happening. Perhaps building some probes or doing some deep space stuff, but getting to low-Earth orbit is a solved engineering problem and certainly doesn't need additional government resources other than buying a flight from existing launchers that are already very well proven. Not even a "heavy launcher" is really needed even for a manned flight to Mars. It would be "nice" to have such a beast, but it isn't strictly necessary. For the one or two times per year it will be used, it is a luxury that is over the top. Too bad nearly $10-$15 billion are going to be dumped into that fiscal black hole before it is going to be canceled. And it will be canceled... very much likely by the next president (in 2013 or 2017.... it really doesn't matter).
BTW, the TransHab module for the ISS is something I wish had been developed further, and it would be awesome if NASA could schedule a future flight of the Shuttle to get that delivered. Was the module being tested and proofed something that had been fully built, or was that something only partially completed? Yes, I realize it is "illegal" for NASA to put it on the ISS (by explicit law added to one of the NASA appropriation bills). It was a political decision, and the killing of the TransHab module was already an accomplished fact before Bigelow decided to offer to license the technology for himself. I'm glad that somebody is running with it.
Then again, I wish NASA had stuck to its guns with the DC-X program. All of this dickering about not having a manned spaceflight program, complaints about "depending on the Russians", would have been a moot issue had that program simply not been canceled. It was something amazing and could have saved the NASA Astronaut's Office. Instead, it is being developed by Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin instead. I hope that Mr. Bezos has better luck getting it going... and I hope he gets to orbit with it too. That would be the ultimate irony if that ever happened.
What makes this not a dupe is that Boeing released many more details about the spacecraft, including its formal "name" or catalog designation, some much more detailed technical drawings about its construction, and that this information was released at a major spaceflight conference that happened this past week. Yes, it is true that the earlier announcement was about the fact that Boeing was going to build the spacecraft, but there is more new information to be had here.
Unfortunately, the way the slashdot post was written implied that this was the first time it had been talked about. Too bad it didn't say "Boeing has just released more details about their upcoming spacecraft, now named the CST-100." That would have been very useful information and acknowledging the previous story.
It was a broilerplate that exhibited all of the aerodynamic characteristics that would be expected for the real thing. In terms of its launch into orbit, it can be said that the Dragon spacecraft met all of its objectives. Foremost, the #1 objective was not to get blown up before it got to orbit or get plunked into the ocean where it wasn't wanted. Nothing more than broilerplate was necessary to meet that objective.
The next flight is going to have something a bit more sophisticated that sounds like they are going to be testing the Draco thrusters and doing other more significant tests of the Dragon as a spacecraft. It still won't be ready for prime time in terms of delivering cargo to orbit, but it will be something more sophisticated.
As far as the first commercial spacecraft to get into orbit, that would be the Telstar satellite that was put up by none other than AT&T back when it was the monster Ma Bell.... with a great deal of assistance and development work by the old time Bell Labs back when that meant something. The story of how AT&T got screwed out of the commercial market ought to be legendary, including how Ma Bell was explicitly excluded by law from launching any more satellites even if it was on their own dime.
Nope. This is a winner-take-all fight to the finish. The market, absent subsidies, isn't big enough to support more than one supplier.
The market for commercial manned spaceflight is essentially non-existent. There is Space Adventures that has put some real paying customers into orbit, and there were a few private commercial "passengers" in various capacities that flew on the Space Shuttle. All in all, there certainly is a market for about 3-4 people to orbit per year (more or less) when the price point is between $20-$30 million per seat and the participant is willing to give up about six months of their life (or more) to essentially become a fully certified astronaut and become flight-qualified to fly the spacecraft as at least a back-up pilot.
That to me sounds like somebody who wants to take a trip on an airplane on a trans-Atlantic flight having to become FAA certified with a commercial multi-engine & instrument landing certifications on their pilot's license. How many people do you think would take a flight in commercial aviation if that was the minimum qualification for merely being a passenger? There were some people willing to do that back in the 1930's, but not a whole lot of them.
What the market may be for flights into space with a price point under $10 million with people merely being "passengers" and not having to go through any sort of "astronaut training" other than perhaps an hour long class on how to cope with microgravity and an extended pre-flight discussion similar to what most passengers on commercial aviation get in terms of safety equipment (seats as a flotation device and how to use the oxygen masks).... I have no idea at all what that market may be. I think it could be more than what Space Adventures has been able to dig up so far for their Soyuz flights. The question is how much more.
As for subsidies... I understand the reluctance on the part of Boeing to stick out their neck on an unproven business model. For the sake of their shareholders, they simply must have at least some other customer besides Bigelow to pay for the R&D alone that is going to go into this spacecraft, much less setting up an assembly line to put this vehicle into production. Robert Bigelow is a nice guy and has some personal wealth that is useful, but even he can't personally afford to keep Boeing afloat fiscally on this particular vehicle by himself.
As for if more than one company will be successful with orbital commercial manned spaceflight, it will be interesting to see how that works out too. There are about a dozen different companies that are trying to get something to happen in that arena, and it will be interesting to see how many of them will either be acquired in mergers, go bankrupt (like Kistler), or simply stay in the sub-orbital niche and not move on. Scaled Composites has already been acquired by one of the "big boys", and others may follow in that path too.
Note that Boeing is developing this on their own dime, not as a part of a cost-plus contract where the government takes all of the risk in terms of costs involved in developing the vehicle. That is a huge deal. This is also not a NASA project either, and it almost entirely done with private funds.
Still, Boeing would really like to get some additional customers besides Bigelow Aerospace, and the only real game in town for the past several decades has been the U.S. government. The executives at Boeing are trying to be realistic here in terms of thinking that commercial spaceflight customers aren't going to be sufficient to justify the engineering expense for building this vehicle, so they are trying to sweet talk some of their fairy god-senators for some extra money to ensure that they can make a profit off of this design.
One of the things that has kept Boeing in business when many other aircraft building companies have gone under is an insistence that whatever they make has customers before they start the major engineering designs and the ability to at least break even if not make a profit when that happens. It does make them risk-averse and keeps them from creating very innovative designs, but it does make the company profitable and ensures that they will be around for another hundred years. Sometimes it doesn't help to create a wild and crazy new design if nobody is interested in using it afterward.
As for the manned NASA spaceflight program.... it is going to be stuck on the Earth for at least a decade, with the exception of going up on Russian Soyuz rockets. Oh the irony in that thought where Soviet-era and designed equipment is keeping astronauts in orbit. Khrushchev would have been proud.
Getting to the Moon is very expensive, and at the moment it isn't even an objective for NASA to work on reducing that cost. In fact, with the latest appropriations bill NASA is being ordered by the U.S. Congress to build the safest possible spacecraft and explicitly mentions that cost savings or other factors specifically have to be excluded from any sort of consideration when building those vehicles.
To get a Moon base built with that kind of attitude, it will take a trillion dollars... and even then I wonder how safe it can possibly be when safety is the #1 overriding criteria for development. The U.S. government doesn't have a trillion dollars to give to NASA either, even if it was spread out over 20 years.
Thankfully there are folks like SpaceX who are showing you can safely get to space cheaper.... as long as cost savings is a major objective. There are other companies even that think they can get even cheaper to space than SpaceX, and I wish them well. Unfortunately any likelihood of NASA using those cheaper rockets (like say even a Boeing Delta IV rocket) are getting tossed out the window and being flat out ignored. Since NASA wasn't involved in the development of those vehicles, they don't want anything to do with them.
Yes, the Delta IV would be an order of magnitude cheaper than all of the proposed vehicles that NASA has on the drawing boards, and now they are going to throw a ton of money down another project black hole that is going to churn out a whole bunch of paper, fly a couple "demonstrators" and get canceled in about 4-5 years. I'm talking the "shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle" that Congress is trying to approve with the latest appropriations bill.
Thankfully, people like Boeing are realizing that if they want to keep their engineers, they also have to put some hardware into orbit. NASA isn't doing that any more, at least with any sort of new hardware.
The challenge of what was delivered as a birth certificate is that supposedly Obama was issued a delayed birth certificate.... something that is typically issued for a home birth or something that doesn't happen in a hospital. Such birth certificates were very common in America for at least the first half of the 20th Century, although they are now extremely uncommon with standards for filing such certificates significantly improved. It is a case of understanding history and how things used to work rather than how they currently work, so most people alive today aren't really familiar with these kind of things and especially most slashdotters.
Mind you, I'm not completely convinced that Obama was born somewhere else and he was certainly raised as an American, but there really is a kernel of truth to the whole thing. Back when I was born (and when Obama was born.... he is about my age) most people received a hospital certificate that had a stronger claim of birth documentation than a birth certificate. I used mine to receive my Social Security card originally. Now they aren't even recognized. Obama doesn't have a hospital certificate.
The best fitting story I've heard is that Obama was born in Kenya and his birth witnessed by his grandmother, but with his dad worried about the future of young Barack flew to Hawaii and filed for a delayed brith certificate when Barack was just a few days or weeks old. That is what the hubub is all about demanding to see the "original" birth certificate, as those trying to "prove" that Barack Obama doesn't qualify as a native born citizen want to see if it was with data that originated from a hospital or if it was something merely certified by his parents. The laws at the time would not recognize children born abroad of mixed nationality parents as citizens and Barack Obama would have been required to go through a naturalization process. That is the claim and yes I've seen the refutation.
Some historian is eventually going to get to the bottom of the whole thing, but I don't think it will ever happen while Obama remains in office. For myself, I don't care about the whole thing and there is about zero chance of anything happening that would get Obama kicked out of office over this issue. I don't think it is insanity, however, to at least question the issue and wonder "what if?"
As for claiming anything in the Tea Party..... please at least define what it is that you are talking about and note that there is no monolithic group of people involved in that organization, if you can even call it an organization. It is made up of a bunch of people (mainly Gen X-ers who are finally old enough to have money and wanting to get involved politically for the first time) who are fed up with "the establishment" and trying to get their voice heard. I do think it is a generational thing, and many slashdotters are actually younger than the typical folks getting involved in the Tea Party movement.
Essentially, it was a one day event flash mob that some other folks have been hijacking ever sense to turn it into a formal political movement. It would be about the same as if somebody tried to make a political movement out of Woodstock in the early 1970's. Arguably some actually did try so far as anti-establishment movements against Nixon. There is some frustration about what the government is doing and some anger that the "hope and change" is changing too much too quickly and in ways that many folks don't like. Beyond that, how can you claim that you know anything about a typical "Tea Party" participant or what they believe, as those involved are united only in their hatred of what is happening in the government.
Yes, I consider Sarah Palin to be an opportunist and hardly represents what was going on at those events. The Tea Party certainly isn't a Republican related activity although some of the more politically motivated that participated in those parties seem to be getting more traction within the Republican Party in terms of winning delegate spots and taking over the leadership positions of precinct-level party organizations. What that means for the long term of the American Republic still remains to be seen.... if it means anything at all in the long run.
Neither the orbital fuel depots, private space stations, nor a moon base has ever been built, so I would dare say that all of that is indeed new science and engineering. I would dare say that the comparison between the Kremer prize and something like the Ansari X-Prize is a very apt comparison.
As far as getting to the Moon and building a base there, I have huge doubts that any such prize could be privately funded, and the notion of public funding for such an endeavor has not ever been done on that scale. Would I appreciate the effort to do that? Absolutely!
I just don't think that such prizes are really all that different, and if you want something done sooner, you should simply offer a contract to somebody who already makes related hardware. That won't necessarily be cheaper, but it at least would get done. We know we can get things done if you write a blank check and follow the motto "waste anything but time".
If you want the money guys to jump into the effort, it is important to offer a 2nd, 3rd, and perhaps even a 4th place "consolation prize" so that somebody making a business investment into a company knows that there is at least some money that can be obtained even if somehow they don't make it first. The issue that an investor wants to have is predictability that there will be some return on their investment, which secondary prizes could offer.
I think if you are insisting on having prizes decrease over time, you add "Go Fever" to the effort where safety is cut simply to get the extra money before the deadline expires. That isn't healthy, especially in space. It was NASA's concern over launching now instead of later (due to funding issues) that was part of the problem with the Challenger blowing up. The Shuttle managers were trying to show they were "efficient" so they could get more money or that future flights wouldn't get cut.
While I get the reasoning you are suggesting here for reducing the prize over time (which inflation does on its own anyway, so a fixed prize essentially does the same thing), I'm not convinced that this is necessarily something good for scientific research to have some sort of time-limited option on a prize.
The Kremer prize is an example of something that has at least been partially claimed that took nearly twenty years and some basic materials science advancement in order for it to happen. That kind of basic research is something that simply can't be anticipated. Some prizes have taken even longer before they have been awarded.
Mind you, I like the idea of prizes and it is something that should be done more for advancement of technology. It is also a way to get "more bang for your buck" if you are of a philanthropic mood and want to encourage the development of something. Likely the worst possible place to throw money is at a research university, at least in terms of actual research conducted for the money spent. More often than not it is being done by grad students at slave wages if the university official aren't being honest about its cost or saying it is cost effective.
The sad thing is that Jerry Pournelle was able to convince Newt Gingrich to try and offer some of these spaceflight prizes while Gingrich was still the Speaker of the House. Unfortunately due to a case of horrible historic timing, this happened about a little bit before the scandal came out that eventually drove Mr. Gingrich from office. After hearing about that, I've always wondered in a "what if" alternate history timeline what might have been had that happened and the Republican's didn't throw Gingrich under the bus.
Of course the dissent between the "blue bloods" and the "Reaganites" is still going on within the ranks of the Republican Party. That feud keeps shooting the Republicans in the foot each time they get anywhere near some sort of political power.
In spite of the trappings, George W. Bush was a blue blood and Newt Gingrich was (and still is I guess) one of the "Reganites".
The problems in medicine in regards to spiraling costs getting out of control have to do with the fact medical patients are no longer the customers (from the perspective of the doctors and hospital administration). That instead is the health insurance companies, which are increasingly consolidating or even becoming a part of the government in various forms, so you have less competition due to fewer potential customers that will demand anything different. Market principles that keep costs down simply don't work any more when monopolies take over, and it doesn't matter if that is a monopoly on supply or demand.
What is frustrating to many pundits who poke at SpaceX is that they presume the same situation exists for orbital rocketry, where the only customer (supposedly) is government contracts. The American spaceflight industry is currently built around that model, and the price structures are set at levels where only the government is going to be involved. SpaceX is placing a huge bet that the market for customers other than the government is going to be huge, if only they can get the price down low enough.
For myself, I would say that the jury is still out on that point. Oh, there is no doubt that if you can really get the price of launches down real low that some sort of market will kick in that hasn't been previously tapped into. The question being raised is if there are going to be enough new customers that a company like SpaceX can make up the difference with volume production of their vehicles.
For example, if a company sells a rocket for $300 million each, but only flies about ten of them each year (to give an example). The question is if that company drops the price (through reduced costs in building the rocket and perhaps other approaches) to be $30 million each, can that company find enough customers to fly over a hundred missions? That is presuming that the rockets are produced for free (no capital costs involved at all) and it is pure profit.
So far, all SpaceX has been able to get in terms of increased customers is only a dozen or so more missions that otherwise wouldn't have been launched at the higher cost. I'm not convinced that those few additional customers makes up the difference in terms of allowing SpaceX to do anything other than to break into the market and supplant one of the existing launcher companies.... with an eventual rise in prices again after time by SpaceX once the market as re-established equilibrium with this new entrant.
If instead SpaceX is able to drum up a whole bunch more business, such as that example I gave with the $30 million rocket that has a thousand customers per year instead of merely ten, there may be something to whatever it is that SpaceX is doing. If that market for potential customers can get into the millions of flights with a $3 million rocket, there certainly would be further incentives to drive the cost down even more.
That is called price elasticity, and something most businesses are hoping for. There was some skepticism in the computer industry back in the 1950's and 1960's that such economies could happen, with one commentator famously suggesting that the world-wide market for computers was precisely five. With the market for microprocessors now being made (and sold) by the billions, those kind of economies of scale and market forces to drive down costs have made computers with incredible computing power and capabilities also very cheap. You can name other devices where this has also happened, so it isn't isolated to just computers. The question is if such a situation can happen in rocketry.
I've never understood why NASA has abandoned the shuttle concept completely and instead went back to the Apollo architecture. Certainly there could have been an incremental improvement of the concept (perhaps reducing/separating the cargo section or other "tweak") and eliminating some of the compromises made in the 1970's to make it the one and only vehicle for everything, but there is some value to the concept of what there is to the Shuttle, and having 100+ flights as a record is something most launch systems would love to have. It may have its problems, but it certainly has been a workhorse. I hope in time somebody builds a true successor to the Shuttle.
Ares I, if it is ever built, is really only a successor to the SRB.... a part of the Shuttle design that perhaps could even be abandoned in a future rev.
One of the reasons why SpaceX isn't "breaking any scientific ground" is also because getting into orbit isn't exactly something new to accomplish either. It should be a solved engineering problem, similar to trying to figure out how to span a large distance (under 1 km) with a bridge. That doesn't necessarily make it cheap by itself, but you can build a structure or examine designs that have been used in the past and see what works and what doesn't. It also means that you don't have to repeat the same mistakes of the past all over again.
Elon Musk has also been pushing hard for vertical integration within his company as a means to control product quality and cost. If his company make the part, Mr. Musk doesn't have to worry about losing a supplier or having the cost of that part start to soar if they become the only customer for that part.
Still, as you are saying here, if there is a common part that can be purchased "off the shelf" from a general industrial supply catalog or supplier, SpaceX is tending to use a part like that and intends to incorporate such items into its design. Under a cost-plus contract there is a disincentive on the part the government contractors to buy such parts unless it is an absolutely ordinary thing like a bolt or rivet.
The origins of the Shuttle program, including the first drafts for the basic concepts, happened when James Webb was the NASA admin and Johnson was President. Yes, I'll admit that it was under the Nixon administration that the final design was settled upon and it was Nixon that signed the original authorization bill in terms of laying down actual hardware.
The design authorization, however, happened under the Johnson administration.