I'm not suggesting that it is something which would be done in the next century with chemical rockets.
Yes, I'd agree, it would have to be either a fusion rocket or something powered with anti-matter as fuel for energy density, and if it is using a reaction mass that the "exhaust" is moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light with an ISP that is incredible.
That said, collecting Voyager at some point in the future is something that I believe will be possible. Records are currently kept both on its current trajectory and where it likely will be in a couple hundred years, so locating it won't be a problem from my viewpoint.
Somebody remembering the Voyager probes? Those were historic firsts for a whole bunch of reasons, and they will be etched into western society for centuries to come. Other space probes such as some of the earlier space probes (some of which are still active!) that are merely in solar orbit have been more forgotten, but there are a huge number of these artifacts that I believe will be retrieved eventually. Certainly the Viking landers on Mars and the stuff that went to the Moon are going to be grabbed eventually into some museums, including most of the Apollo equipment left behind as well.
When viewed in this context, while the capture of the Voyager vehicles will be a major accomplishment if or when it happens (I'm saying it will happen eventually), it will be in the context of historical artifacts from "earlier civilizations". The computer equipment on the Voyager probes are already something of historical interest because of some of the technologies involved. I think the Voyager probes are some of the last computers in "active" service that still use core memory, as an example.
I won't try to describe core memory other than to suggest looking it up on the wiki or elsewhere. It is remarkable stuff but incredibly expensive. Core memory is also incredibly resistant to radiation damage, which is why it was used on Voyager.
The discussion here is about a condemnation of private commercial spacecraft development and reasons why such efforts in the past have been significantly thwarted and trampled to death. The ORTAG rocket was one of these completely private efforts that had a very high likelihood of success in terms of providing cheap access to space.
It was on grounds of "national security" that this... and other... private rocketry efforts have been killed in the past. The whole side discussion here started with somebody asserting that NASA and the U.S. Federal Government in general making deliberate policy decisions that killed previous private spaceflight efforts. A "citation requested" argument was made, and one strong example given. In this case the ORTAG project.
There have been problems with private efforts to get access to space for decades. One of the first significant private efforts involved AT&T with the launch of the Telstar satellite where they poured millions of dollars just into a lobbying effort to get permission from the U.S. Congress just to be able to get access to a launcher, they paid about 2x the "listed" price for launching a payload into space as was quoted by the Congressional Budget Office for previous launches, and only got to make the one launch. Subsequent efforts to launch a follow-up satellite took nearly a decade, and AT&T was forced out of the game with a "government" corporation set up sort of like Fredie Mac and Fannie Mae are now with financial services (and the usual horse-trading and campaign financing in DC I should note too).
It was claimed that this "private" company (financed entirely by taxpayers, but "owned" by private entities... I don't get it either but this happens far too often in American politics going back to the trans-continental railroad) had a market that was "too small" and therefore simply had to be a monopoly and treated as a utility governed on the federal level. Other competing efforts, including in this case by AT&T (pre break-up I should note with plenty of available capital at their disposal) simply were told they couldn't build competing hardware.
Other vehicles also include the Constaga rocket built by one of the original Mercury astronauts (and a few other non-astronauts), Deke Slayton. Instead of being a mere paper company, he and his company built the rocket and even launched the thing. After the initial test flights, they tried to see if they could market the rocket, and found that NASA had deliberately undercut their business by setting a competing program by flying cargo on the Space Shuttle at a much cheaper price.
It didn't matter that the price given to private industry in the era (this was the early 1980's) was heavily subsidized and furthermore that it wasn't really a serious effort to actually get private cargo into space as demonstrated by the very few payloads that actually went up. It wasn't for a lack of demand or customers asking either, but rather NASA restricting the "slots" to just a couple of well-connected companies or universities. The point is that the government agency, in this case NASA, made policies that were deliberately anti-commercial spaceflight and have continued to thwart efforts at commercial spaceflight development.
Investors wanted to develop private spaceflight companies. The problem comes when the regulatory environment for such efforts is so screwy that you can't predict even if you will be able to launch once the hardware is developed, such as happened with the ORTAG concept. To further complicate the matter, once you get the vehicles built, a business can't even make bona fide decisions for their fiscal future by even predicting what "the government" is going to be charging, regardless of what it costs to use government vehicles.
It would be like if the U.S. Air Force decided to charge $50 for carrying passengers on trans-Atlantic flights (on Air Force One no less with above first class service) when commercial aviation was first starting out. That is precisely the situation that commercial spacecraft companies face today. Forget about how much it actually costs taxpayers or that such a government agency really doesn't have to turn a profit, you simply can't operate a business in that environment.
I think that by the time they will be found, it will be somebody actively searching for artifacts from the 20th Century that is on some expedition for the National Geographic Society. Seriously, this would be a huge prize for anybody wanting to make the effort.
In comparison, Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule was thought to be permanently lost at sea, as was the Titanic. Both have been recovered (or at least spotted and examined in the case of the Titanic), even if it took some time. I think the Voyager probes will be no different and their course + trajectory will be monitored and calculated to within a few dozen miles even when their power sources go out.
Here is the real question: How long will it take humanity to be able to create spacecraft that can reach and surpass the Voyager probes, and will such an attempt be manned or unmanned?
As a time capsule, I think you hit the nail with the hammer there. But it will be human civilization that has Earth origins that will retrieve these vehicles.
For myself, I'd put the bet on about 200 years from now before significant technology and substantial interplanetary spaceflight has the capabilities of routinely getting to the point where the Voyager probes will be at in 200 years. Perhaps sooner, but I wouldn't count on it.
So instead of Germany building a rocket that might be useful for going into space and developing a cheap way to get there in the first place, that is replaced by China who is selling these long-range missiles to all of these "unstable nations" (hint, Iran, Iraq [pre-Kuwait invasion], Pakistan, North Korea, and should I mention some others)?
What is sad is that this is hardly the only rocket launch technology that was stifled on the grounds of "national security", and it should be very much apparent that the embargo of missile technology did very little good in the long run either.
Actually, NASA needs to get back to being like the NACA.... mainly an R&D organization pushing new technologies and new ideas on the far out frontier fringe of aviation and spaceflight. Stuff like nuclear rockets and fusion reactors. It is a pity that NASA didn't pick up Bussard's IEC Polywell reactor after the U.S. Navy dumped them. To me, a gamble of a couple million dollars that might generate a trillion dollars if successful and ends dependency on Middle-East oil is the kind of thing that a government agency like NASA ought to be doing, even if there is only a 10% chance that the idea might work in the first place.
That such a fusion reactor might have spaceflight applications should also be a no-brainer as well. Earth to Mars in 40 days if it is successful.
And look, I'm just using this as but one example of what could be done. There are hundreds of technology development efforts that unfortunately were cut and cut deep in the quest to save the Constellation program and keep that ravenous monster alive. It is about freaking time that the monster was put back into its cage and the rest of NASA allowed to recover from that disaster.
I'd have to agree. The environment of sending people to and from Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) should be considered a solved engineering problem. It was a tough nut to crack and certainly is a challenge for any group of engineers who want to tackle the problem. A graduate aerospace engineering student who successfully launches something, anything, into orbit on their design likely deserves the graduate degree (especially if they can do it cheaply), but it isn't something their professors ought to be congratulated for as ground breaking or Nobel Prize winners by accomplishing.
There might be room to try and drive down the cost of getting into space. That is something that isn't even on the agenda for NASA and hasn't been for some time. The DC-X program was promising, and hopefully the guys at Blue Origin might take some of the ideas from the project and make them worthwhile and practical. There have been some other ideas on how to lower costs, including the efforts by SpaceX to make a vehicle that worked even if it wasn't at the top peak of performance.
The engineering mantra can be best described as the following:
What ever you want, it can be made:
Cheaper
Sooner
Reliable
Please pick only two of the above options!
I've had bosses insist on all three at the same time, and what they get is none of them happening or the "reliable" aspect gets thrown out the window. Apollo selected the Sooner and Reliable options, and paid dearly for it (4% of the U.S. Federal budget I should note). Not many companies have bosses that are patient to wait for results that may be cheaper in the long run but take some time to happen.
Some of the newer companies getting into commercial spaceflight are now trying to see if it can be made for cheaper instead of sooner. Unfortunately, there are always critics who complain because they are expecting the program to be operated with the mentality that the Apollo program was built. This includes the Constellation program and its supporters.
Mod this parent up. U.S. industry is loathe to spend money on any R&D that does not have an immediate return on investment (read:shareholder gains). That is why there are not now and never will be manned private launchers entirely from the so-called 'private sector'. Too expensive for too little return.
That isn't quite true. There are efforts by private companies to invest in research, even "pure" research, but the current regulatory environment is such that companies who do so are punished in the exchanges and so can't get the cash necessary to continue that sort of research. It becomes simply cheaper to buy up the research from a promising new start-up, milk that start-up for all of that technology, and then spit out those employees when you are through with them as worthless trash.
This isn't just space companies, but almost any technology company. I've had it happen to me personally. Some business leaders can navigate the business environment to keep at least some R&D going, but it is the government to blame for this situation and the tax policies involved that keep this situation perpetuated. As for how to change this corporate culture and the exchange laws to encourage more R&D.... I'd like to figure that problem out too! It isn't merely creating some silly tax incentives but a major reworking of the market rules that would have to happen.
Most people are ignorant of history and would choose to believe that the government propaganda is the only truth that there is.
The role of NASA in suppressing private spaceflight is well known.... at least among those who have followed private spaceflight developments. It wasn't until the establishment of the FAA-AST (Office of Commercial Spaceflight) that it became even remotely possible for a private individual to build their own spaceship. Even then, there are some astounding and absurd policies that are often handed down by the FAA that make it seem like they still want to suppress private spaceflight and research efforts.
If the current regime toward spaceflight research had been held to general aviation a hundred years ago, we would still have no airplanes flying today, or at best they would be at the level of Lindberg's Spirit of St. Louis and mostly done for show, not for substantive commerce that we see today.
They were just worried about having Nazis on the moon:) Considering the Sci-Fi stories they would have been reading as kids, can you really blame them?
Please, let's be real here. The even though ORTAG was a German effort, there was substantial diplomatic pressure brought to bear upon the government of Zaire strongly suggesting that some other diplomatic favors would be granted if they would not be buying such launch services.
Yes, you can really blame these guys. If you are talking Nazis on the Moon, it would be Von Braun, the SS officer in charge of the Saturn V program. He held the rank of Colonel in the SS too.
Why don't government contracts count as private sector?
What is missing here is the source of the R&D and how the rockets are being paid for. Most, nearly all of the rockets that NASA uses have been built and designed on what is called a cost-plus contract. In other words, all of the risk, all of the effort, and nearly all of the hard decisions were made by government employees. This is why government projects can go hugely over budget (including the Constellation program I might add) as the companies involved already have their profit in place. That is the "plus". Any costs that occur are held by the taxpayers, including performing major redesigns along the way.
I should add one more issue to consider with a pure "government contract": Any design is exclusive to the government and simply may not be used for any private citizen... at least not without a significant Act of Congress that explicitly permits its use elsewhere. In the past, there were investors who wanted to buy a couple complete Space Shuttles and had even found financing to build their own vehicle assembly building and launch pad facilities. They were simply told "No", they couldn't have them regardless of the price. It was exclusively the domain of NASA and NASA alone in terms of people going into space.
For something in the "private sector" to be genuinely in the private sector, the private company bears all of the R&D risk, all of the cost considerations, and the "government" is merely one of several different customers. That is the huge difference here, where these companies are quoting a figure, and are paid for delivery of goods. This is the huge difference between what has been offered in the past and what is offered now.
Under cost-plus contracts, there is absolutely no necessity to lower the cost of getting into space. Performance is the only driving issue, and if the project can be completed before the end of the current presidential administration. The Apollo mantra was "waste anything but time". That still, unfortunately, holds true even today including on the Constellation program, at least that is how it was operated.
Companies now have a legitimate reason to drive down costs with flat cost transportation services. A price is set, and companies can either make a bid to offer services or pass on the idea if they think it is to expensive. Competitive bidding may even start happening here, but more specifically if a company can drive down operations and development costs, that brings in extra profit to that company. The incentive to drive down costs is much more pronounced in this kind of purchasing environment.
That is the difference. If you or those supporting Constellation can't figure that one out, I can't help you any further.
Yeah. 6 successful Taurus missions and one Falcon 1 mission. That is really a shitload. Even less than Ariane 1 has achieved. Atlas doesn't count, it was designed by the US Air Force.
Make that two successful Falcon 1 missions.... one by a paying customer and one demo flight that proved the technology.
As a matter of fact, the Ariane had a number of failures, and I don't even want to get into the Atlas rocket. Yes, the Atlas V is a very solid rocket and has been quite reliable, but the heritage is awful to dismal if you look at the early history.
All new rockets have problems, particularly when you have new engineers who must learn some of the hard-won lessons that somehow never get written down in engineering log books. The quality assurance issues and consistency of the SpaceX rockets certainly isn't an issue, and all of the previous failures of the Falcon I rocket were engineering flaws, not material consistency flaws such as is the case with the Space Shuttle and why that vehicle simply must be canceled for once and all.
SpaceX may have missed something still with the Falcon 1 rocket, but I sure would be willing to ride on it in a Mercury-style capsule (given training and some legitimate safety equipment).
I know how to film it. You take some ACTORS and you have them ACT and you point a camera at them, and then you have a movie.
This is assuming that anybody in Hollywood (or what is left of Hollywood) can actually act their way out of a paper bag. There are some actors that I think know their craft and do a pretty good job of it (Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, to give some examples... there are a few others) but most of them fall so flat that they need special effects just to cover up the deficiencies from their lack of skill.
I'd have to agree that a minimalist set done in abstract rather than dumping millions into CGI would be just as effective. If you have ever seen a production of "Our Town", you would know what I'm talking about. Rather than trying to show the impossible, let the audience know that it isn't the set or the stunning visuals which are the point of the film.
Are you talking about this encyclopedia? Yeah, it has been doing pretty well. I really do wonder what folks 100 years from now are going to think of that effort.
Now if Quentin Tarantino were to take over this film.... it might just be something I would love to watch. Peter Jackson might even do a pretty good job, as might Leonard Nemoy (he does stuff other than Spock, I should note).
Emmerich doing this seems like a major disaster to me. Excretions might be the proper term here too..... good one there!
I can name one "science fiction book" that not only was successfully translated into a move, but was a HUGE improvement over the content of the original book:
Contact, starring Jodi Foster, produced and directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Seriously, if you have ever made the mistake of reading the original prose by Carl Sagan, you would have to agree with me. The book was one of the top 10 worst books ever written and mass published. Even the plot lines in the original book were horrible and somehow Robert Zemeckis pulled out the best ideas and grafted in a genuine love of all things science fiction with what must have been a much better writer when the screenplay was finally written. Heck, the plot details are even better in the movie.
I loved the movie, hated the book, and am glad that I read the book well after seeing the movie for the first time. The whole business of searching the digits of the number pi for cryptic clues from the aliens is something that I'm glad was never put into the movie at all. I suppose I should give some credit to Carl Sagan for at least coming up with introducing the idea of a successful SETI project, but that was what I think is the only significant contribution made by the original author. Even that, unfortunately, was not really an original idea.
I am looking forward to the next re-make of Dune as a movie, as it looks like that may finally do Frank Herbert's book some justice. The David Lynch version does have some significant problems, even though when viewed independently from the book it is an OK movie.
It was Roland Emmerich himself that said he had nothing to do with the Stargate TV series, and in fact was quite offended with the direction that it took. If you listen to the director's commentary on the Stargate movie DVD disc, his contempt for the TV series is nearly total. Since he himself ignored the TV series and wanted to distance himself from that series and its producers (including Richard Dean Anderson... who became an executive producer on the show)... I say that we do him the favor and not give Roland Emmerich any credit for that series either and certainly not the longevity of that series especially.
I certainly think the TV series was a major improvement over the original movie... something that doesn't usually happen in such a transition.
It is unfortunate that I don't have any mod points right now. I couldn't agree more.... I, Robot was an absolutely hideous movie compared to the book. It completely missed the point of the book and certainly didn't really explore the concepts of the laws of robotics in more than simply a superficial fashion.
Of the other movies in his resume, the other Roland Emmerich films also give me the shudders to think of how bad they could be. Heck, I think it would be an improvement for some of those films to have Jar Jar Binks come walking into the scene with some singing Wookies.... if you know what I mean from the George Lucas films.
I sort of enjoyed Independence Day.... provided I put my brain into neutral and was under a buzz from some adult beverages. More of that stuff helps, I should note. I don't even have a desire to watch 2012, and criticized the trailer to no end on Hulu when I saw that piece of tripe for the first time. Day After Tomorrow? Please, give me a break. That was even worse than the others.
I love the foundation books, and it disappoints me to no end that they've given such a treasure to a hack like Emmerich. It will more than likely be a horrible movie, sort of how the Starship Troopers ended up being filmed by a very much non-fan of the author or book. I presume it will include Hari Seldon and talk about Trantor to some extent. I sure hope that he at least looks at the feel of Coruscant from the later Star Wars trilogy (episodes I-III) to at least sort of present this massive planet as a city feel in the distant future which is a galactic capital. Asimov explained in one of the books that Trantor had at least a dozen planets tasked to it just for food production to feed the citizens on Trantor, with an incredible amount of interstellar commerce happening just to maintain the status quo of the planet.
Somehow I think all of that is going to be glossed over or even ignored. And that is just the initial setting of the book. The Psionic mental manipulations that happen in the books should be even more interesting to try and capture on film, and it would take a genius to pull that off. I don't think Emmerich is going to be the one to make that happen either.
All I can hope is that in the distant future (20-40 years from now) some other brave director actually reads these books and decides to "re-imagine" the books to do them justice. Sort of how Peter Jackson finally figured out how to do the Lord of the Rings in a way that worked. Emmerich isn't that person.
Laws about murder are usually a state law, not a local municipal ordinance. I dare you to prove that your home state has not enforced a murder statute for more than 20 years. Let's get real here.
Besides, murder statutes are one of the few laws that is almost always going to be invoked if violated and will nearly always result in a police investigation... even in very jaded big city police departments that feel they are over worked and under paid.
In a small town? Are you kidding me? If you are in such a small town that is so quiet, it may be important to get some state help on enforcement of such a law as well. I've heard of some small towns that essentially go "bankrupt" as it usually costs close to $1 million in legal costs and added security for incarceration in order to prosecute a murder charge. If you are in a town of just a couple hundred people, that could be the entire annual budget for the town for all municipal services. As I said, it is usually the state government that steps in for situations like that just because of this problem, including prosecution funding on the state level to help deal with these costs involved.
Prove to me that any murder wasn't investigated in a small town, and charges not filed when a clear suspect was identified. It won't happen.
It's a nice idea, but there are some laws applied to businesses which are basically never enforced. For example, I doubt anybody has been prosecuted for selling radium-based cure-alls in the past 20 years.
So why is such a law on the books in the first place?
Actually, that is a bad example. A much better example is a law that regulates how horses are to be watered and how many hitching posts are required on a given store frontage for a downtown business. Such laws do exist and haven't been enforced for over a century in some cases.
So, if no one gets murdered for a 21 day period, murder becomes legal? Yes, sorry, but you walked right into that one;-)
I don't know of any state in the USA that has failed to enforce a murder statute for more than 20 years. This example given is not just a false example, it is a bad example. I didn't say 21 days, I said 20 years. I'm just not quibbling over this exact period of time, as it could be less like 10 years or 5 years or more like 30 or 40 years. I don't know exactly, but it is the idea here that a law could expire simply by a lack of enforcement that I'm talking about.
An absurd example with an absurd time frame isn't going to be the case. I mentioned constitutional provisions such as impeachment rules, as those can be only invoked once a century or more.... but those are constitutional provisions anyway and usually get a closer review before being put into the legal code in the first place with a much higher bar that is required to pass in order to become a part of the body of law.
In this particular case with the terrorist registration law, I have my doubts that such a law would ever be proven to be enforced and its only purpose is to expand and exaggerate sentences in an effort to stifle free speech. Simply asking a state officer to testify in court about how many people actually engaged in registration would be sufficient in this case to show non-enforcement of such a law.
What if this anti-free speech law were enforced? What if dissidents were arrested and put to jail? Or they just had a few people working with the registration? By your suggestion, it would still stand. In my opinion, the problem here is not if the law is enforced or not. The problem is that the law runs against the most basic democratic rights - the right to assemble with your peers, and the right to criticize the powers that be without fear of harassment.
What about it? If it was enforced, it is enforced! There still is the court of public opinion that can get unjust laws repealed and cause protests, riots, and changes in the make-up of legislative assemblies in a representative constitutional republic. Those going to jail under such conditions can invoke Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi as legitimate role models for how good men went to jail to protest unjust laws... and eventually got those laws repealed.
To me, it is a much larger problem if a law is passed and then not enforced for political reasons because such a government doesn't want to create such legal martyrs that bring in the wrath of the electorate. Selective enforcement of a law is a bad thing, and can be a tool for oppression. I also see in this case that a law of this nature (the anti-terrorism statute) is also going to be passed for show to demonstrate that a legislator is "tough on crime", but it never was intended to be enforced in the first place. If it was never intended to be enforced in the first place, and it isn't enforced for a considerable period of time, it shouldn't be enforced when an administration change happens and they decide to go after a political enemy with this seldom invoked law.
The problem is that these laws are not enforced because it is not politically viable for prosecutors to enforce them on a widespread basis.
If a county sheriff would have widespread enforce an anti-fornication law, not only might he have to arrest some of his own deputies, he might have to arrest the children of politically "important" people or perhaps even shut down a local high school.
I'm giving this as an example, but there are some laws that are on the books but simply never enforced at all. To me, this is a very dangerous situation, particularly when ignorance of a law is not considered a valid defense in court either.
It would be a good thing to kind of kick up some law enforcement agencies to pay attention to various laws and have an attitude of "use it or lose it" on those laws. Eventually, many of the worst laws that are unsavory to the electorate would be repealed simply by voting in a candidate that hates that particular law. It isn't as if that hasn't happened already.... otherwise there wouldn't be marijuana legalization laws being passed in places like California.
It is when laws are selectively enforced where genuine tyranny happens in a constitutional republic.
I would prefer a constitutional amendment that goes something like this:
Any law which isn't enforced and has no public record of ever having been enforced for a certain period of time, say 20 years or perhaps less, that the law in question simply is null and void.
A constitutional provision is one thing, such as procedures for impeachment or something that is rarely invoked for a good reason, but for laws that impact ordinary citizens, a failure to even enforce these laws (such as the anti-sodomy laws and co-habitation/fornication laws) ought to be simply declared obsolete due to lack of enforcement.
A token enforcement merely to keep the law on the books would not be considered acceptable. A pattern of widespread enforcement of such a law would have to be demonstrated for it to be considered valid under such a provision.
In this particular case with the terrorist registration law, I have my doubts that such a law would ever be proven to be enforced and its only purpose is to expand and exaggerate sentences in an effort to stifle free speech. Simply asking a state officer to testify in court about how many people actually engaged in registration would be sufficient in this case to show non-enforcement of such a law.
Too bad that such a provision or legal concept is not typically a part of common law.
Until the 1968 spaceflight of Apollo 8, the thought to take a high resolution image of the Earth at a distance simply never was conceived. The particularly image of the Earth from the Moon, as captured by the Apollo 8 crew, is even now the #1 most requested photo in the NASA archive ever. Period.
It was this particular image that became the poster image of the Earth as a "big blue marble" and as something precious and unique into the consciousness of western nations. Looking at the vastness of space, comprehending just how little life there is in the Solar System much less the entire universe really brought environmental issues to a focus and gave the movement legitimacy to convince members of Congress and ordinary voters that something needed to be done with the environment. All of that happened in the 1970's, and it was going to the Moon which made that happen.
No, robotic flights couldn't and didn't achieve those results. Those running the robots that went to the Moon never looked back at the Earth, because they weren't instructed to do so. Those robots never ran out of energy, and didn't have "free time" to kick back and ponder just where in fact they were at.
There is simply no way that a robotic probe could have possibly achieved anything near the experience and insight (not necessarily knowledge) about what space really means without having a person up there to experience it.
While there was an environmental movement before 1968, it was anemic and mostly oriented toward things like building national parks and modest protection of some parts of the country. Broad environmental concerns didn't happen until afterward.
Now, space tourism will likely make them the most money, and therefore they'll probably focus on that part.
You're kidding right? You think a company can make more money on a handful of very rich vacationers than it can on government contracts? Manned commercial space (orbital) transport will likely have one kind of customer....rich governments. They are the only ones who can afford it.
No, I'm not kidding here either. Yes, I do think that there are wealthy customers who would be willing to take a trip into space... if the price is reasonable.
One thing that space tourism has that government contracts don't is that space tourism has price elasticity where a modest drop in price will result in significantly increased sales.
On the other hand, if you drop the price of a launcher to land a government contract, all you've done is screwed over yourself and your competitors. That, more than anything else, is the reason why the cost for access to space has not dropped at all over the past 30 years... because there is no incentive to do so. The point of the spaceflight industries was to keep skilled technicians employed rather than letting that talent go to waste. It was also to keep several key senators in their office.
Until now, space tourism was mostly a dream because government regulations were such that even asking and begging for a trip into space couldn't happen no matter how much money you threw on the table. About the only way you could buy your way into space was to buy your way into political office and fly into space as a political junket. Even that wasn't a sure thing.
In the long run, it will be the "space tourism" that will generate far more money, even though it will eventually be cut-throat competition and driving down costs. It should be telling that of the various considerations for going into space right now, the cost of fuel is dead last in terms of cost considerations. Heck, the budget for the catering services of the ground lanuch control is more than the cost of the fuel to get up into space.
While I agree with the notion that it was long, long overdue to cancel the Ares I rocket design and with it the Constellation program (for the most part... it is still limping along even now), it wasn't really George W. Bush's vision at all. Instead it was the vision of Michael Griffin who was the agency head and sort of his own personal vision for the future of NASA.
All Bush said was that getting back to the Moon ought to be a long term priority as should moving on to the rest of the Solar System. I think that is indeed a proper vision of the future, and Bush knew full well that it was his successor who was going to be in a position to really set the vision for the future of American spaceflight. What was Bush's decision that I can applaud him for is that he made the choice to shut down the Shuttle program. That, too, is a decision that is long, long overdue but at least it is happening. Before Bush, the question was if the Shuttle should be retired. After Bush, the decision was when.
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I'm not suggesting that it is something which would be done in the next century with chemical rockets.
Yes, I'd agree, it would have to be either a fusion rocket or something powered with anti-matter as fuel for energy density, and if it is using a reaction mass that the "exhaust" is moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light with an ISP that is incredible.
That said, collecting Voyager at some point in the future is something that I believe will be possible. Records are currently kept both on its current trajectory and where it likely will be in a couple hundred years, so locating it won't be a problem from my viewpoint.
Somebody remembering the Voyager probes? Those were historic firsts for a whole bunch of reasons, and they will be etched into western society for centuries to come. Other space probes such as some of the earlier space probes (some of which are still active!) that are merely in solar orbit have been more forgotten, but there are a huge number of these artifacts that I believe will be retrieved eventually. Certainly the Viking landers on Mars and the stuff that went to the Moon are going to be grabbed eventually into some museums, including most of the Apollo equipment left behind as well.
When viewed in this context, while the capture of the Voyager vehicles will be a major accomplishment if or when it happens (I'm saying it will happen eventually), it will be in the context of historical artifacts from "earlier civilizations". The computer equipment on the Voyager probes are already something of historical interest because of some of the technologies involved. I think the Voyager probes are some of the last computers in "active" service that still use core memory, as an example.
I won't try to describe core memory other than to suggest looking it up on the wiki or elsewhere. It is remarkable stuff but incredibly expensive. Core memory is also incredibly resistant to radiation damage, which is why it was used on Voyager.
The discussion here is about a condemnation of private commercial spacecraft development and reasons why such efforts in the past have been significantly thwarted and trampled to death. The ORTAG rocket was one of these completely private efforts that had a very high likelihood of success in terms of providing cheap access to space.
It was on grounds of "national security" that this... and other... private rocketry efforts have been killed in the past. The whole side discussion here started with somebody asserting that NASA and the U.S. Federal Government in general making deliberate policy decisions that killed previous private spaceflight efforts. A "citation requested" argument was made, and one strong example given. In this case the ORTAG project.
There have been problems with private efforts to get access to space for decades. One of the first significant private efforts involved AT&T with the launch of the Telstar satellite where they poured millions of dollars just into a lobbying effort to get permission from the U.S. Congress just to be able to get access to a launcher, they paid about 2x the "listed" price for launching a payload into space as was quoted by the Congressional Budget Office for previous launches, and only got to make the one launch. Subsequent efforts to launch a follow-up satellite took nearly a decade, and AT&T was forced out of the game with a "government" corporation set up sort of like Fredie Mac and Fannie Mae are now with financial services (and the usual horse-trading and campaign financing in DC I should note too).
It was claimed that this "private" company (financed entirely by taxpayers, but "owned" by private entities... I don't get it either but this happens far too often in American politics going back to the trans-continental railroad) had a market that was "too small" and therefore simply had to be a monopoly and treated as a utility governed on the federal level. Other competing efforts, including in this case by AT&T (pre break-up I should note with plenty of available capital at their disposal) simply were told they couldn't build competing hardware.
Other vehicles also include the Constaga rocket built by one of the original Mercury astronauts (and a few other non-astronauts), Deke Slayton. Instead of being a mere paper company, he and his company built the rocket and even launched the thing. After the initial test flights, they tried to see if they could market the rocket, and found that NASA had deliberately undercut their business by setting a competing program by flying cargo on the Space Shuttle at a much cheaper price.
It didn't matter that the price given to private industry in the era (this was the early 1980's) was heavily subsidized and furthermore that it wasn't really a serious effort to actually get private cargo into space as demonstrated by the very few payloads that actually went up. It wasn't for a lack of demand or customers asking either, but rather NASA restricting the "slots" to just a couple of well-connected companies or universities. The point is that the government agency, in this case NASA, made policies that were deliberately anti-commercial spaceflight and have continued to thwart efforts at commercial spaceflight development.
Investors wanted to develop private spaceflight companies. The problem comes when the regulatory environment for such efforts is so screwy that you can't predict even if you will be able to launch once the hardware is developed, such as happened with the ORTAG concept. To further complicate the matter, once you get the vehicles built, a business can't even make bona fide decisions for their fiscal future by even predicting what "the government" is going to be charging, regardless of what it costs to use government vehicles.
It would be like if the U.S. Air Force decided to charge $50 for carrying passengers on trans-Atlantic flights (on Air Force One no less with above first class service) when commercial aviation was first starting out. That is precisely the situation that commercial spacecraft companies face today. Forget about how much it actually costs taxpayers or that such a government agency really doesn't have to turn a profit, you simply can't operate a business in that environment.
I think that by the time they will be found, it will be somebody actively searching for artifacts from the 20th Century that is on some expedition for the National Geographic Society. Seriously, this would be a huge prize for anybody wanting to make the effort.
In comparison, Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule was thought to be permanently lost at sea, as was the Titanic. Both have been recovered (or at least spotted and examined in the case of the Titanic), even if it took some time. I think the Voyager probes will be no different and their course + trajectory will be monitored and calculated to within a few dozen miles even when their power sources go out.
Here is the real question: How long will it take humanity to be able to create spacecraft that can reach and surpass the Voyager probes, and will such an attempt be manned or unmanned?
As a time capsule, I think you hit the nail with the hammer there. But it will be human civilization that has Earth origins that will retrieve these vehicles.
For myself, I'd put the bet on about 200 years from now before significant technology and substantial interplanetary spaceflight has the capabilities of routinely getting to the point where the Voyager probes will be at in 200 years. Perhaps sooner, but I wouldn't count on it.
So instead of Germany building a rocket that might be useful for going into space and developing a cheap way to get there in the first place, that is replaced by China who is selling these long-range missiles to all of these "unstable nations" (hint, Iran, Iraq [pre-Kuwait invasion], Pakistan, North Korea, and should I mention some others)?
What is sad is that this is hardly the only rocket launch technology that was stifled on the grounds of "national security", and it should be very much apparent that the embargo of missile technology did very little good in the long run either.
Actually, NASA needs to get back to being like the NACA.... mainly an R&D organization pushing new technologies and new ideas on the far out frontier fringe of aviation and spaceflight. Stuff like nuclear rockets and fusion reactors. It is a pity that NASA didn't pick up Bussard's IEC Polywell reactor after the U.S. Navy dumped them. To me, a gamble of a couple million dollars that might generate a trillion dollars if successful and ends dependency on Middle-East oil is the kind of thing that a government agency like NASA ought to be doing, even if there is only a 10% chance that the idea might work in the first place.
That such a fusion reactor might have spaceflight applications should also be a no-brainer as well. Earth to Mars in 40 days if it is successful.
And look, I'm just using this as but one example of what could be done. There are hundreds of technology development efforts that unfortunately were cut and cut deep in the quest to save the Constellation program and keep that ravenous monster alive. It is about freaking time that the monster was put back into its cage and the rest of NASA allowed to recover from that disaster.
I'd have to agree. The environment of sending people to and from Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) should be considered a solved engineering problem. It was a tough nut to crack and certainly is a challenge for any group of engineers who want to tackle the problem. A graduate aerospace engineering student who successfully launches something, anything, into orbit on their design likely deserves the graduate degree (especially if they can do it cheaply), but it isn't something their professors ought to be congratulated for as ground breaking or Nobel Prize winners by accomplishing.
There might be room to try and drive down the cost of getting into space. That is something that isn't even on the agenda for NASA and hasn't been for some time. The DC-X program was promising, and hopefully the guys at Blue Origin might take some of the ideas from the project and make them worthwhile and practical. There have been some other ideas on how to lower costs, including the efforts by SpaceX to make a vehicle that worked even if it wasn't at the top peak of performance.
The engineering mantra can be best described as the following:
What ever you want, it can be made:
Please pick only two of the above options!
I've had bosses insist on all three at the same time, and what they get is none of them happening or the "reliable" aspect gets thrown out the window. Apollo selected the Sooner and Reliable options, and paid dearly for it (4% of the U.S. Federal budget I should note). Not many companies have bosses that are patient to wait for results that may be cheaper in the long run but take some time to happen.
Some of the newer companies getting into commercial spaceflight are now trying to see if it can be made for cheaper instead of sooner. Unfortunately, there are always critics who complain because they are expecting the program to be operated with the mentality that the Apollo program was built. This includes the Constellation program and its supporters.
Mod this parent up.
U.S. industry is loathe to spend money on any R&D that does not have an immediate return on investment (read:shareholder gains). That is why there are not now and never will be manned private launchers entirely from the so-called 'private sector'. Too expensive for too little return.
That isn't quite true. There are efforts by private companies to invest in research, even "pure" research, but the current regulatory environment is such that companies who do so are punished in the exchanges and so can't get the cash necessary to continue that sort of research. It becomes simply cheaper to buy up the research from a promising new start-up, milk that start-up for all of that technology, and then spit out those employees when you are through with them as worthless trash.
This isn't just space companies, but almost any technology company. I've had it happen to me personally. Some business leaders can navigate the business environment to keep at least some R&D going, but it is the government to blame for this situation and the tax policies involved that keep this situation perpetuated. As for how to change this corporate culture and the exchange laws to encourage more R&D.... I'd like to figure that problem out too! It isn't merely creating some silly tax incentives but a major reworking of the market rules that would have to happen.
Most people are ignorant of history and would choose to believe that the government propaganda is the only truth that there is.
The role of NASA in suppressing private spaceflight is well known.... at least among those who have followed private spaceflight developments. It wasn't until the establishment of the FAA-AST (Office of Commercial Spaceflight) that it became even remotely possible for a private individual to build their own spaceship. Even then, there are some astounding and absurd policies that are often handed down by the FAA that make it seem like they still want to suppress private spaceflight and research efforts.
If the current regime toward spaceflight research had been held to general aviation a hundred years ago, we would still have no airplanes flying today, or at best they would be at the level of Lindberg's Spirit of St. Louis and mostly done for show, not for substantive commerce that we see today.
They were just worried about having Nazis on the moon :) Considering the Sci-Fi stories they would have been reading as kids, can you really blame them?
Please, let's be real here. The even though ORTAG was a German effort, there was substantial diplomatic pressure brought to bear upon the government of Zaire strongly suggesting that some other diplomatic favors would be granted if they would not be buying such launch services.
Yes, you can really blame these guys. If you are talking Nazis on the Moon, it would be Von Braun, the SS officer in charge of the Saturn V program. He held the rank of Colonel in the SS too.
Why don't government contracts count as private sector?
What is missing here is the source of the R&D and how the rockets are being paid for. Most, nearly all of the rockets that NASA uses have been built and designed on what is called a cost-plus contract. In other words, all of the risk, all of the effort, and nearly all of the hard decisions were made by government employees. This is why government projects can go hugely over budget (including the Constellation program I might add) as the companies involved already have their profit in place. That is the "plus". Any costs that occur are held by the taxpayers, including performing major redesigns along the way.
I should add one more issue to consider with a pure "government contract": Any design is exclusive to the government and simply may not be used for any private citizen... at least not without a significant Act of Congress that explicitly permits its use elsewhere. In the past, there were investors who wanted to buy a couple complete Space Shuttles and had even found financing to build their own vehicle assembly building and launch pad facilities. They were simply told "No", they couldn't have them regardless of the price. It was exclusively the domain of NASA and NASA alone in terms of people going into space.
For something in the "private sector" to be genuinely in the private sector, the private company bears all of the R&D risk, all of the cost considerations, and the "government" is merely one of several different customers. That is the huge difference here, where these companies are quoting a figure, and are paid for delivery of goods. This is the huge difference between what has been offered in the past and what is offered now.
Under cost-plus contracts, there is absolutely no necessity to lower the cost of getting into space. Performance is the only driving issue, and if the project can be completed before the end of the current presidential administration. The Apollo mantra was "waste anything but time". That still, unfortunately, holds true even today including on the Constellation program, at least that is how it was operated.
Companies now have a legitimate reason to drive down costs with flat cost transportation services. A price is set, and companies can either make a bid to offer services or pass on the idea if they think it is to expensive. Competitive bidding may even start happening here, but more specifically if a company can drive down operations and development costs, that brings in extra profit to that company. The incentive to drive down costs is much more pronounced in this kind of purchasing environment.
That is the difference. If you or those supporting Constellation can't figure that one out, I can't help you any further.
Yeah. 6 successful Taurus missions and one Falcon 1 mission. That is really a shitload. Even less than Ariane 1 has achieved.
Atlas doesn't count, it was designed by the US Air Force.
Make that two successful Falcon 1 missions.... one by a paying customer and one demo flight that proved the technology.
As a matter of fact, the Ariane had a number of failures, and I don't even want to get into the Atlas rocket. Yes, the Atlas V is a very solid rocket and has been quite reliable, but the heritage is awful to dismal if you look at the early history.
All new rockets have problems, particularly when you have new engineers who must learn some of the hard-won lessons that somehow never get written down in engineering log books. The quality assurance issues and consistency of the SpaceX rockets certainly isn't an issue, and all of the previous failures of the Falcon I rocket were engineering flaws, not material consistency flaws such as is the case with the Space Shuttle and why that vehicle simply must be canceled for once and all.
SpaceX may have missed something still with the Falcon 1 rocket, but I sure would be willing to ride on it in a Mercury-style capsule (given training and some legitimate safety equipment).
I know how to film it. You take some ACTORS and you have them ACT and you point a camera at them, and then you have a movie.
This is assuming that anybody in Hollywood (or what is left of Hollywood) can actually act their way out of a paper bag. There are some actors that I think know their craft and do a pretty good job of it (Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, to give some examples... there are a few others) but most of them fall so flat that they need special effects just to cover up the deficiencies from their lack of skill.
I'd have to agree that a minimalist set done in abstract rather than dumping millions into CGI would be just as effective. If you have ever seen a production of "Our Town", you would know what I'm talking about. Rather than trying to show the impossible, let the audience know that it isn't the set or the stunning visuals which are the point of the film.
Unfortunately, that isn't an Emmerich style.
Are you talking about this encyclopedia? Yeah, it has been doing pretty well. I really do wonder what folks 100 years from now are going to think of that effort.
As for slashdot being Terminus.... perhaps.
Now if Quentin Tarantino were to take over this film.... it might just be something I would love to watch. Peter Jackson might even do a pretty good job, as might Leonard Nemoy (he does stuff other than Spock, I should note).
Emmerich doing this seems like a major disaster to me. Excretions might be the proper term here too..... good one there!
I can name one "science fiction book" that not only was successfully translated into a move, but was a HUGE improvement over the content of the original book:
Contact, starring Jodi Foster, produced and directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Seriously, if you have ever made the mistake of reading the original prose by Carl Sagan, you would have to agree with me. The book was one of the top 10 worst books ever written and mass published. Even the plot lines in the original book were horrible and somehow Robert Zemeckis pulled out the best ideas and grafted in a genuine love of all things science fiction with what must have been a much better writer when the screenplay was finally written. Heck, the plot details are even better in the movie.
I loved the movie, hated the book, and am glad that I read the book well after seeing the movie for the first time. The whole business of searching the digits of the number pi for cryptic clues from the aliens is something that I'm glad was never put into the movie at all. I suppose I should give some credit to Carl Sagan for at least coming up with introducing the idea of a successful SETI project, but that was what I think is the only significant contribution made by the original author. Even that, unfortunately, was not really an original idea.
I am looking forward to the next re-make of Dune as a movie, as it looks like that may finally do Frank Herbert's book some justice. The David Lynch version does have some significant problems, even though when viewed independently from the book it is an OK movie.
It was Roland Emmerich himself that said he had nothing to do with the Stargate TV series, and in fact was quite offended with the direction that it took. If you listen to the director's commentary on the Stargate movie DVD disc, his contempt for the TV series is nearly total. Since he himself ignored the TV series and wanted to distance himself from that series and its producers (including Richard Dean Anderson... who became an executive producer on the show)... I say that we do him the favor and not give Roland Emmerich any credit for that series either and certainly not the longevity of that series especially.
I certainly think the TV series was a major improvement over the original movie... something that doesn't usually happen in such a transition.
It is unfortunate that I don't have any mod points right now. I couldn't agree more.... I, Robot was an absolutely hideous movie compared to the book. It completely missed the point of the book and certainly didn't really explore the concepts of the laws of robotics in more than simply a superficial fashion.
Of the other movies in his resume, the other Roland Emmerich films also give me the shudders to think of how bad they could be. Heck, I think it would be an improvement for some of those films to have Jar Jar Binks come walking into the scene with some singing Wookies.... if you know what I mean from the George Lucas films.
I sort of enjoyed Independence Day.... provided I put my brain into neutral and was under a buzz from some adult beverages. More of that stuff helps, I should note. I don't even have a desire to watch 2012, and criticized the trailer to no end on Hulu when I saw that piece of tripe for the first time. Day After Tomorrow? Please, give me a break. That was even worse than the others.
I love the foundation books, and it disappoints me to no end that they've given such a treasure to a hack like Emmerich. It will more than likely be a horrible movie, sort of how the Starship Troopers ended up being filmed by a very much non-fan of the author or book. I presume it will include Hari Seldon and talk about Trantor to some extent. I sure hope that he at least looks at the feel of Coruscant from the later Star Wars trilogy (episodes I-III) to at least sort of present this massive planet as a city feel in the distant future which is a galactic capital. Asimov explained in one of the books that Trantor had at least a dozen planets tasked to it just for food production to feed the citizens on Trantor, with an incredible amount of interstellar commerce happening just to maintain the status quo of the planet.
Somehow I think all of that is going to be glossed over or even ignored. And that is just the initial setting of the book. The Psionic mental manipulations that happen in the books should be even more interesting to try and capture on film, and it would take a genius to pull that off. I don't think Emmerich is going to be the one to make that happen either.
All I can hope is that in the distant future (20-40 years from now) some other brave director actually reads these books and decides to "re-imagine" the books to do them justice. Sort of how Peter Jackson finally figured out how to do the Lord of the Rings in a way that worked. Emmerich isn't that person.
Laws about murder are usually a state law, not a local municipal ordinance. I dare you to prove that your home state has not enforced a murder statute for more than 20 years. Let's get real here.
Besides, murder statutes are one of the few laws that is almost always going to be invoked if violated and will nearly always result in a police investigation... even in very jaded big city police departments that feel they are over worked and under paid.
In a small town? Are you kidding me? If you are in such a small town that is so quiet, it may be important to get some state help on enforcement of such a law as well. I've heard of some small towns that essentially go "bankrupt" as it usually costs close to $1 million in legal costs and added security for incarceration in order to prosecute a murder charge. If you are in a town of just a couple hundred people, that could be the entire annual budget for the town for all municipal services. As I said, it is usually the state government that steps in for situations like that just because of this problem, including prosecution funding on the state level to help deal with these costs involved.
Prove to me that any murder wasn't investigated in a small town, and charges not filed when a clear suspect was identified. It won't happen.
It's a nice idea, but there are some laws applied to businesses which are basically never enforced. For example, I doubt anybody has been prosecuted for selling radium-based cure-alls in the past 20 years.
So why is such a law on the books in the first place?
Actually, that is a bad example. A much better example is a law that regulates how horses are to be watered and how many hitching posts are required on a given store frontage for a downtown business. Such laws do exist and haven't been enforced for over a century in some cases.
So, if no one gets murdered for a 21 day period, murder becomes legal? Yes, sorry, but you walked right into that one ;-)
I don't know of any state in the USA that has failed to enforce a murder statute for more than 20 years. This example given is not just a false example, it is a bad example. I didn't say 21 days, I said 20 years. I'm just not quibbling over this exact period of time, as it could be less like 10 years or 5 years or more like 30 or 40 years. I don't know exactly, but it is the idea here that a law could expire simply by a lack of enforcement that I'm talking about.
An absurd example with an absurd time frame isn't going to be the case. I mentioned constitutional provisions such as impeachment rules, as those can be only invoked once a century or more.... but those are constitutional provisions anyway and usually get a closer review before being put into the legal code in the first place with a much higher bar that is required to pass in order to become a part of the body of law.
In this particular case with the terrorist registration law, I have my doubts that such a law would ever be proven to be enforced and its only purpose is to expand and exaggerate sentences in an effort to stifle free speech. Simply asking a state officer to testify in court about how many people actually engaged in registration would be sufficient in this case to show non-enforcement of such a law.
What if this anti-free speech law were enforced? What if dissidents were arrested and put to jail? Or they just had a few people working with the registration? By your suggestion, it would still stand. In my opinion, the problem here is not if the law is enforced or not. The problem is that the law runs against the most basic democratic rights - the right to assemble with your peers, and the right to criticize the powers that be without fear of harassment.
What about it? If it was enforced, it is enforced! There still is the court of public opinion that can get unjust laws repealed and cause protests, riots, and changes in the make-up of legislative assemblies in a representative constitutional republic. Those going to jail under such conditions can invoke Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi as legitimate role models for how good men went to jail to protest unjust laws... and eventually got those laws repealed.
To me, it is a much larger problem if a law is passed and then not enforced for political reasons because such a government doesn't want to create such legal martyrs that bring in the wrath of the electorate. Selective enforcement of a law is a bad thing, and can be a tool for oppression. I also see in this case that a law of this nature (the anti-terrorism statute) is also going to be passed for show to demonstrate that a legislator is "tough on crime", but it never was intended to be enforced in the first place. If it was never intended to be enforced in the first place, and it isn't enforced for a considerable period of time, it shouldn't be enforced when an administration change happens and they decide to go after a political enemy with this seldom invoked law.
The problem is that these laws are not enforced because it is not politically viable for prosecutors to enforce them on a widespread basis.
If a county sheriff would have widespread enforce an anti-fornication law, not only might he have to arrest some of his own deputies, he might have to arrest the children of politically "important" people or perhaps even shut down a local high school.
I'm giving this as an example, but there are some laws that are on the books but simply never enforced at all. To me, this is a very dangerous situation, particularly when ignorance of a law is not considered a valid defense in court either.
It would be a good thing to kind of kick up some law enforcement agencies to pay attention to various laws and have an attitude of "use it or lose it" on those laws. Eventually, many of the worst laws that are unsavory to the electorate would be repealed simply by voting in a candidate that hates that particular law. It isn't as if that hasn't happened already.... otherwise there wouldn't be marijuana legalization laws being passed in places like California.
It is when laws are selectively enforced where genuine tyranny happens in a constitutional republic.
I would prefer a constitutional amendment that goes something like this:
Any law which isn't enforced and has no public record of ever having been enforced for a certain period of time, say 20 years or perhaps less, that the law in question simply is null and void.
A constitutional provision is one thing, such as procedures for impeachment or something that is rarely invoked for a good reason, but for laws that impact ordinary citizens, a failure to even enforce these laws (such as the anti-sodomy laws and co-habitation/fornication laws) ought to be simply declared obsolete due to lack of enforcement.
A token enforcement merely to keep the law on the books would not be considered acceptable. A pattern of widespread enforcement of such a law would have to be demonstrated for it to be considered valid under such a provision.
In this particular case with the terrorist registration law, I have my doubts that such a law would ever be proven to be enforced and its only purpose is to expand and exaggerate sentences in an effort to stifle free speech. Simply asking a state officer to testify in court about how many people actually engaged in registration would be sufficient in this case to show non-enforcement of such a law.
Too bad that such a provision or legal concept is not typically a part of common law.
Until the 1968 spaceflight of Apollo 8, the thought to take a high resolution image of the Earth at a distance simply never was conceived. The particularly image of the Earth from the Moon, as captured by the Apollo 8 crew, is even now the #1 most requested photo in the NASA archive ever. Period.
It was this particular image that became the poster image of the Earth as a "big blue marble" and as something precious and unique into the consciousness of western nations. Looking at the vastness of space, comprehending just how little life there is in the Solar System much less the entire universe really brought environmental issues to a focus and gave the movement legitimacy to convince members of Congress and ordinary voters that something needed to be done with the environment. All of that happened in the 1970's, and it was going to the Moon which made that happen.
No, robotic flights couldn't and didn't achieve those results. Those running the robots that went to the Moon never looked back at the Earth, because they weren't instructed to do so. Those robots never ran out of energy, and didn't have "free time" to kick back and ponder just where in fact they were at.
There is simply no way that a robotic probe could have possibly achieved anything near the experience and insight (not necessarily knowledge) about what space really means without having a person up there to experience it.
While there was an environmental movement before 1968, it was anemic and mostly oriented toward things like building national parks and modest protection of some parts of the country. Broad environmental concerns didn't happen until afterward.
There, that is some evidence. Try to refute me.
Now, space tourism will likely make them the most money, and therefore they'll probably focus on that part.
You're kidding right? You think a company can make more money on a handful of very rich vacationers than it can on government contracts? Manned commercial space (orbital) transport will likely have one kind of customer....rich governments. They are the only ones who can afford it.
No, I'm not kidding here either. Yes, I do think that there are wealthy customers who would be willing to take a trip into space... if the price is reasonable.
One thing that space tourism has that government contracts don't is that space tourism has price elasticity where a modest drop in price will result in significantly increased sales.
On the other hand, if you drop the price of a launcher to land a government contract, all you've done is screwed over yourself and your competitors. That, more than anything else, is the reason why the cost for access to space has not dropped at all over the past 30 years... because there is no incentive to do so. The point of the spaceflight industries was to keep skilled technicians employed rather than letting that talent go to waste. It was also to keep several key senators in their office.
Until now, space tourism was mostly a dream because government regulations were such that even asking and begging for a trip into space couldn't happen no matter how much money you threw on the table. About the only way you could buy your way into space was to buy your way into political office and fly into space as a political junket. Even that wasn't a sure thing.
In the long run, it will be the "space tourism" that will generate far more money, even though it will eventually be cut-throat competition and driving down costs. It should be telling that of the various considerations for going into space right now, the cost of fuel is dead last in terms of cost considerations. Heck, the budget for the catering services of the ground lanuch control is more than the cost of the fuel to get up into space.
While I agree with the notion that it was long, long overdue to cancel the Ares I rocket design and with it the Constellation program (for the most part... it is still limping along even now), it wasn't really George W. Bush's vision at all. Instead it was the vision of Michael Griffin who was the agency head and sort of his own personal vision for the future of NASA.
All Bush said was that getting back to the Moon ought to be a long term priority as should moving on to the rest of the Solar System. I think that is indeed a proper vision of the future, and Bush knew full well that it was his successor who was going to be in a position to really set the vision for the future of American spaceflight. What was Bush's decision that I can applaud him for is that he made the choice to shut down the Shuttle program. That, too, is a decision that is long, long overdue but at least it is happening. Before Bush, the question was if the Shuttle should be retired. After Bush, the decision was when.