3 generations ago there was no internet and there were no such topics.
Tell that to my grandfather, and kids that graduated with me that are now grandparents (I waited a bit to have kids of my own).
That is 5 generations to mention that have used the internet that I can count, stretching it to 6... do I need more?
Define internet as well, and note I wasn't just talking about posts.
You think 100 years ago people weren't discussing and commenting about constitutional limits of authority and the role of states vs. the federal government in America? Yeah, right!
'tis pity... as that is also a problem with today's youth. You think I'm long-winded? Those of a generation or two before me wrote in much longer replies to similar topics.
And by your strawman defense everything should be legal, crack, coke, lsd, shrooms, weed, prescription drugs...
No, I said nothing of that nature at all. I merely stated that this is an issue that can and ought to be decided on a state level rather than a federal level. States, on a local basis, can decide for themselves what is harmful to their communities or not.... as the case may be. Sometimes a state can join in a compact with other states to pool their resources on some topics or on things that may be of a regional nature, but the constitution is quite clear that states ought to be given some latitude on things of this nature, too.
Far, far too much is getting done on a federal level anyway, which is precisely my point. We shouldn't have to run to the national legislature on every possible issue. If you listen to some activists, it would seem as though state legislative bodies and state courts don't even exist. Also, when there seems to be even a hint that state legislators won't possibly go along with an idea, but congress might, no thought is even given as to if the proposal or concept ought to remain as a decision on the local level or not.
BTW, no, it is not the U.S. Supreme Court that has ultimate jurisdiction on deciding what is good and proper federal law... it is all three federal branches that can decide that issue, and they can decide that on a roughly equal basis. The President can decide if a law ought to be enforced (many laws are on the books that aren't enforced), Congress can enact or repeal laws based on whether those laws are constitutional, and really all the U.S. Supreme Court can do is to decide if enforcement of a particular law will have standing in the U.S. federal court system. That state courts do have inferior standing in regards to the federal courts is also true, and the U.S. Supreme Court is the final word... in terms of the judicial branches of government.
A legitimate complaint that is issued about courts is if they "legislate from the bench" and enact laws based on situations that appear before them. While sometimes it is true that situations arise that simply have no law to govern the problem before the court, there are limits to what a court can and can't do.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with the 14th Amendment, and some of the principles of that amendment, as they apply to states, are valid. This isn't, however, a blanket take-over of all functions of state governments by the federal government. Indeed, the 14th Amendment is quite specific on what it covers, as have judicial rulings based upon apparent violations of this amendment.
There is this strange part of the U.S. Constitution that does need to be mentioned from time to time.... and to remind the feds about this part too:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Then again, places like the U.S. Supreme Court really don't seem to read much out of the constitution much either. Strange how that applies.
I don't recall any part of the U.S. Constitution that explicitly grants federal authority over the growing or even regulation of agriculture products like marijuana. Shipping it across state lines is something different, but you don't have to ship it across state lines in order to grow it or even sell it to a neighbor.
BTW, I knew some farmers who grew Marijuana during WWII on a commercial basis... and even grew it instead of corn and wheat. Yes, the THC content was quite low compared to the current strains of the plant, but it was roughly the same species of plant. They showed me some pictures they took of standing out in the fields with federal agents who were buying the stuff from them as a part of the war effort at the time. The feds were involved only because they happened to be the customer, not because any license was necessary.
I hope you noticed that I'm a different person that the one you previously responded to. I don't know what to apologize for in reference to an earlier post I didn't even write.
As far as getting launch permits to land on the Moon... you might just be surprised at what regulations do exist for going there. International regulation of spaceflight is going to be an interesting and challenging task for future generations of lawyers, and it isn't entirely clear who has jurisdictional authority on spaceflight once you have left the atmosphere. I'd imagine it is a similar regulatory regime as flights through international airspace and ships sailing through international waters.
That only government agencies have gone up into orbit in manned vehicles kind of simplifies the situation, particularly as it has been government employees as the flight commanders. Often these are military officers to even simplify the situation even more, and the rest can certainly be considered "officers of the government" like a postmaster. Privately launched vehicles, once launched, will certainly draw the attention of lawmakers when that will eventually happen.
Random chances in space? You can have a solar flare that suddenly goes your way, an asteroid/meteor can hit you (certainly a non-zero chance for that to happen), or some other sorts of extra-terrestrial events that can happen that are a bit beyond your control.
Admittedly, when traveling through interplanetary space you don't have to worry about things like Earthquakes or impacts of chaotic systems like the weather in the Earth's troposphere from impacting your flight. If an engine stops working on a spacecraft, there might be some sort of panic attack when on a flight to Mars to get it fixed, but there will be time to get a "rescue mission" organized while passengers are still safely using life support systems not tied to the engine. If an engine quits on a 747, it becomes a much more significant problem.
The "media" never loved Sarah Palin.... certainly not in the same way they are enraptured by Obama.
While I will admit that news organizations are really into hip and more into the competition to make the ultimate scoop, there are things about Obama that have and continue to get glossed over that for most other politicians would have driven them out of office. That is the point for why there is a claim of media bias.
Palin goes shopping to buy a couple of outfits for campaign purposes, and she gets crucified as a spendthrift and incompetent hillbilly. Very little is even mentioned about Michele Obama or Hillary Clinton... who simply had fashion designers "donate" even more expensive outfits to the respective campaigns of those two women (OK, Michele Obama was the candidate's wife.... the point still holds true and perhaps even more so). That issue came up less than a week after the announcement of Sarah Palin as the VP candidate for the Republicans.
I'd hardly call any period of time a "honeymoon" period for Palin... except for perhaps the first couple of hours after the initial announcement.... when the reports were more of "WTF?" than anything of substance.
That reporters are also lazy is true. Why else do you think reporters travel on Air Force One on major international presidential trips rather than simply getting to the destinations on their own dime?
For the past couple weeks, as it became clear that Masten had a real shot at completing the level 2 Lunar Lander Challenge and bettering our landing accuracy, I have been kicking myself for not taking the competition more seriously and working on a better landing accuracy. If they pulled it off, I was prepared to congratulate them and give a bit of a sheepish mea culpa.
This is pretty much where this should have ended. John Carmack could have and perhaps should have secured the permit to get the extra flight in... and have taken the steps to even perhaps take a "victory lap" even if they still got first place.
It is always hard to second guess yourself, but Armadillo made their decision. Crying over spilt milk doesn't help here either.
As to if Armadillo... if they had been prepared and available to make the second attempt to improve accuracy... would have been allowed by the judges to make another attempt? I don't know. That is hard to say, but Armadillo wasn't in a position to even say "yes, we want another shot at this now that we know our competitor is closer".
Armadillo had already seen what Masten had done with the level 1 contest, and should have been aware that Masten could pull off an upset like did happen here for the level 2 prize. Being prepared really was the name of the game here.
John Carmack is just bent out of shape because he didn't get 1st place.
I disagree completely. Why should the prize money be "equal"? The point was to provide a strong incentive for contestants to get a vehicle to complete the basic requirements.... and to ensure that somebody who came in "2nd place" would at least receive a little bit of money for their effort instead of simply be left with the expenses of going up.
NASA did an excellent job here... considering that NASA employees running this contest consisted of a single office of I believe two people (it may even be just one) that is administering the Centennial Prizes. The ones to complain about is our lovely legislators in the halls of Capitol Hill who have refused to add any more money to this or other contests to help improve American technical capabilities for spaceflight.
There have been 4 different companies and groups of people involved directly with this contest that have also launched working hardware. That is a huge deal, as these groups have proven flight-worthy hardware capable of being used in other areas. One of the teams had their "chief" engineer hired out from under them and is now working for Scaled Composites. That these guys who built these rockets are now high on the list for head-hunters who want to look for talented and generally young engineers who have the skills necessary to build future rockets.... that should be readily apparent.
This is a very well managed contest, and one of the best applications of taxpayer money that I have seen in a long, long time. To achieve similar results for a conventional NASA technology demonstrator project, it would have easily cost 10x or more with bureaucratic overhead from hell and only one semi-competent company involved that likely would have ended up as a failure or even just a simple paper study instead. That seems to be the typical way that NASA does business, and for their effort they got four different rocket designs each with their own independent design heritage. That is huge in my book.
Your proposal to "share the wealth" makes absolutely no sense to me in this situation at all.
I would love to give a pithy comeback to this post, but I'll avoid the temptation for now.
Fairness is a relative thing, where shit happens to everybody that sometimes is out of our control. Yes, we can occasionally make decisions that will help improve our odds of success at a task we are dedicated to accomplishing, but things do happen that are randomly bad and awful to ourselves and those around us.
People die of heart attacks, illness, or even events completely out of our control. Perhaps a drunk driver happens to be driving down the lane of traffic you are in.... going the opposite direction and deliberately heading into your vehicle's hood. Maybe you are the "lucky" bastard that gets shot when somebody goes postal. The mechanic who worked on your airplane before you left for another state was distracted and forgot to re-connect a critical hydraulic line. Stuff happens that is beyond your control.
This is precisely what happened to both Masten and Armadillo (after a fashion). Masten simply was prepared and had their permits and vehicles in place to be able to take advantage of that last launch opportunity.
In many ways, I'm surprised that Armadillo didn't schedule another flight test for the level 2 competition so they could improve their accuracy, but after completing the qualification run for the prize, it was felt they should move on to other things. The whole point of the accuracy of the landing pad was to provide a "tie-breaker".... which is precisely what happened here.
In the grand scheme of things, Aramdillo doesn't really care. They are getting some money for their involvement with this competition (they already got money for the level one completion they did last year), and this isn't a big deal. It isn't Armadillo who is crying foul or complaining about not getting the money.
I'm curious about what you think would be missing here, in terms of a real lunar lander?
I'm not suggesting here that the trip into LEO and to get into Lunar orbit is a trivial thing, but presuming that some other vehicle such as the SpaceX Falcon 9 was to launch the Pixel or a similar spacecraft built by Aramdillo.... are you sure it would be considerably more difficult to build a lander that would be capable of picking up a lunar soil sample and then return that to the Earth?
I don't think this is quite so big of a difference as you are implying here. Yes, there would be some additional technical challenges involved including dealing with the conditions of "deep space" and getting a proper navigation system that isn't reliant upon the GPS hardware that all of the contestants of this contest used, but I don't think it is that significant of a challenge for these guys... after they have completed this challenge.
The delta-v requirements of this challenge is identical to going from lunar orbit to the Lunar surface, and then being able to lift off again from the surface back into lunar orbit. No doubt the technical challenges are there, and it wouldn't be easy, but it isn't so far fetched to see these guys actually land a real vehicle on the Moon itself.
Strangely enough, one of the early "proof of demonstration" projects John Carmack had with his software was a completely software demonstration of the flight control systems.
He even posted the code for it... but I don't want to bother trying to dig it up. It wasn't that polished, but it did do the job.
Mr. Carmack also controls most of the flight systems with his laptop computer out in the field.... so I wouldn't doubt that he may be using the spacebar or arrow keys to be controlling thrust. When most folks are staring at the rocket, he is usually hunched over his little laptop during the tests.
If this contest generates some congressional support for a level 3 prize.... I'd put Armadillo as a leading contender.
Or more significantly, if I were trying to build a vehicle that would actually go to the Moon, Armadillo's tech would be something I'd seriously consider in terms of purchasing. I don't know if Armadillo is going to get involved in the Google Lunar X-Prize (a completely different contest), but they certainly have the vehicle capable of getting to the ground in once piece.
Now that would be real bragging rights... and something Aramdillo might be able to take to the bank for a great many customers. Armadillo's vehicles would also be an order of magnitude cheaper than "big space" companies such as Boeing, Northrup-Grumman (who has put more than their fair share of vehicles on the Moon), and Lockheed-Martin.
It is very interesting to see how John Carmack is applying software engineering principles to "hard" engineering like rocket development. The "build a little, test a lot, rapid cycle" type of engineering common in software development is almost an alien concept for rocket engineers. Unlike most rocket shops, his vehicles have seen numerous test flights and are constantly being tweaked with actual flight data. Fuel costs for him are a significant issue.... unlike most rocket launchers.
Significantly, in terms of Delta-v expended by the design of this demonstration, these vehicles have proven that they would be capable of landing on the Moon from lunar orbit... which was sort of the point of the test.
The only thing missing from this demonstration is a removal of the GPS devices that were used for stabilization and navigation. In some ways, it would be very hard to pull off a demonstration without those navigation aids... as the FAA has specific "Earth" requirements that have to be met for vehicles flying in American airspace that don't apply on the Moon.
I would love to see a "level 3" competition for this challenge that would be even more realistic or even have the vehicles landing on the Moon.... assuming that the organization met the qualifications for the level 1 and 2 requirements first.
The funny statement by Armadillo was that they had even suggested that they had the materials and even the regulatory paperwork near completion to perform the level 2 qualification using a manned vehicle. Now that would be interesting to see.
Hardly. I will have to give general kudos to the Slashdot editors who usually look at multiple submissions and have to make a judgement call on links in the summaries.
Yes, it is sometimes a blog post, but far more often it is the link to the actual news source (which can be a blog, too!) If the "announcement" is on a blog, that is the original source.
Word of mouth will often come through news aggregators and via blogs. Heck, I've found out some interesting stuff from blogs that I regularly visit... and then posted it on/. Still, the links to the actual source of information is often in the summaries.
Yes, summaries often lack a bit of quality that perhaps leave some room for criticism an hour or two later.... so live with it or start your own site that you think could do better. This is more a function of the rush to get a scoop than trying to be 100% accurate. I prefer the scoops of interesting information I get from slashdot rather than the polished news articles from MSNBC or Fox News... if it gets covered in the "mainstream" news at all.
One news source that I have hope will improve and gain more popularity is Wikinews. If you are a grammar Nazi and want to constantly fix somebody else's grammar on a news story.... that is the place for you. It just doesn't have the "penetration" in the geek community as/. has, unfortunately.
This wasn't even poor Q/A as I'm sure this software likely passed all of the necessary reviews.
This is a failure to understand the problem domain and realize what the limits of software like this might be. The design specs on the clocks that were used in this situation likely had their operational parameters well defined by the manufacturer, but the engineer who built this system completely ignored that they would only be accurate for a narrow time windows.
This is a specification error, and something that would not have been caught in a Q/A performance review. Perhaps a complete engineering review from top to bottom by a very skilled engineering manager who doesn't have to worry about things like making a profit, but such reviews are rare because they are so incredibly expensive to perform. Only on the most critical kinds of equipment, such as medical devices or something where somebody's life depends on it working will such a review be done.
This is debatable with military equipment, and often it will meet such standards. However this is something that likely wouldn't have to pass the same level of review as a medical device, and the contracting company involved would have gone broke to engage in that sort of review on all of their products.... where this was a system that was awarded based on the lowest bid.
Yes, I'd say this was a sloppy system designer as well, and somebody who should be demoted/fired for not properly expressing what the operational limits of this weapons system would be (uptime of 5 hours of operation or whatever it may be). If those operational limits don't meet specifications, then something should have been redesigned in this situation. Odds are that those specifications weren't listed in the first place.
This also seems to be a difference between American and Asian engineers (culturally... I don't care about skin color here). American engineers tend to think about the actual application domain and "fill in" specifications that are missing. Most Asian engineers (from my own experiences... your experience may vary) tend to be much more exacting to the delivered specifications and don't "think outside of the box" too much. That the Asian engineers tend to deliver product faster is also true... making the Americans seem lazy for even trying to make the effort to understand the problem a little bit better.
Japanese tend to be thinking more like Americans from more recent experience... so this isn't one size fits all to all Asian countries either. Of course the Japanese have had more time to interact with western nations as well. The Chinese culture is very definitely "do as you are told and don't question the boss, even if he is wrong."
Amazingly, if the US were to stop picking fights with other nations in the world, they would find that they could safely reduce their military budget.
Determining a good balance between a formidable military that scares away any would-be enemies from even thinking about invasion or causing damage to the USA, and what is simply gilding the lily of military weapons, personnel, and training is something that certainly is worth arguing about.
There is also the tendency that when given the gift of a well trained and equipped military, that most politicians choose to actually use the military as a weapon to further their own political aims... whatever they may be. Certainly Clinton used the military to his own advantage when he was President, as did all of previous U.S. Presidents since the Lincoln administration. How ironic it was that Woodrow Wilson ran on "He kept us out of war" and plunged the USA into one of the largest wars since the U.S. Civil War.
Iraq and Afghanistan aren't anything special when looked at through the long-term lens of history. One good thing that may come from it is that the current political leaders are war-weary in America and don't really care to start another war any time soon. It was George Washington that sent U.S. Marines into northern Africa for the first foreign war. Please explain why anything more recent is any different than that action?
Is it a myth that a great many (in the early days almost all) of the rocket engineers involved in building the early NASA rockets and even earlier the U.S. Army rockets were German engineers? Von Braun himself was an SS officer and helped to found the V-2 rocket program at Penemunde. It wasn't just a cursory situation, the V-2 was his design and baby. (I'm sorry, I said V-1 originally, which really wasn't Von Braun's design. My mistake there. The V-2 was all his, however.)
It was also the first rocket to have demonstrated the capability of being able to leave the atmosphere of the Earth and reach sub-orbital velocities. I'd hardly call that a myth. Von Braun deliberately surrendered to the U.S. Army because neither he nor his team wanted to spend the post-war years in a Soviet gulag in Siberia. I don't blame him either. About 100+ of the engineers and technicians that worked with Von Braun were also brought to America out into New Mexico and later to Huntsville for the early design work that NASA later used, including the Redstone and Jupiter-C rockets.
I had a former boss who worked with the Redstone rockets and was personally involved in launching about 1,000 Redstone rockets in the space of about 3 weeks, as a part of an Army test to see how rapidly rockets could be prepared and launched. Seriously, there were 10's of thousands of rockets that were launched by Von Braun's teams over the 5 decades of his engineering career. I don't know what about any of this is a myth at all. It was this design team that formed the core engineering group that built the Saturn V.... although I'll admit that it involved a great many more engineers from a huge spectrum of American society as well.
As far as the Gemini missions, while I'll admit that they did help to develop manned spaceflight procedures and practices, almost none of the Gemini rocket had anything to do with the Saturn V design. As a matter of fact, the Saturn V was already well under development before the first proposal to even build the Atlas-Centaur rockets that eventually carried the Gemini capsules into orbit were designed. It was at the very least rockets of a completely different heritage, design philosophy, and engineering team that built those vehicles.
As a matter of fact, in many ways the Gemini spacecraft was much more advanced than at least the Apollo Block 1 capsules, and could even be argued technically as a slight upgrade over even the Block 2 capsules that eventually went to the Moon with Neil Armstrong. The point is that Gemini didn't precede Apollo in terms of vehicle design. It just went up first is all that happened.
I think you also missed what was proposed by the Vision for Space Exploration as offered by President George W. Bush. He didn't want to do it all over again for a fuzzy warm feeling. What President Bush simply wanted to do was to set a long-term goal for NASA to actually do something. On the basic level, what is there to dispute that eventually getting Americans to Mars as a long-term NASA goal over the next century? Is that something you think is foolish? If not that, then what should be NASA's long-term goal... or should it simply be disbanded as an agency?
Going back to the Moon is a preliminary step, and there are reasons to return to the Moon that have value in and of itself. This isn't an attempt to return to the Moon within a decade. Bush openly acknowledged that it would be his successor that would have to take on the more serious issues in terms of what specific kind of project or program would be put together in terms of actually achieving these goals, but that along the way a new vehicle would have to be developed that would at least let future Presidents be able to have option to decide on what to do next.
That Obama can't seem to make a decision on what to do is a problem for Obama and not something to be dumped onto Bush.
BTW, my criticism is that it wasn't Bush, but rather Mike Griffin that ram-rodded the Ares I design down the throats of everybody, a
If this is the case.... show me the lunar exploration vehicles that have been back to the Apollo 17 landing site... or other valuable locations.
It also isn't just having the same resolution as the human eye, but having somebody there to actually feel, taste, and experience the environment. Somebody to bang on the chassis and get it moving when it isn't, or to wipe the dust off the top.
You can also send up "instructions" when coupled by training and education that far and away exceed the capacity of any sort of robotic probe. Also, you gain the ability to have independent intuition to make snap judgment calls. It is those sort of snap judgment calls that Dr. Schmitt made when he was on the Moon that captured rocks that would never have been discovered by a team running a robotic probe. He was there making a genuine field survey in a way that no robotic probe could ever have made such a study.
You are saying that robots can do the job for 1/3rd the money? That little savings? That sort of cost reduction could be compensated strictly by privatizing the launch vehicles and letting free market competition be able to provide "cash and carry" launch vehicles like the SpaceX Falcon 9. I find this a failed argument as well, and I say send up the human scientists if we can do it cheaper than NASA can send up the robotic probes! Let's put a dozen Harrison Schmitt's up into space for the price of a single robotic mission!
Look, I'm not saying that robots are evil or bad, or that they shouldn't be used, but I think it is pig-headed to insist that real flesh-blood people should never go into space and that the whole of the universe above 50km from the surface of this planet should be left pristine to satisfy scientific curiosity alone. I know that isn't the same thing as advocating a more intense robotic exploration of the Solar System, but it is essentially the same result in the end.
There is a role for human spaceflight, and I wish those who advocate for robotic exploration of space wouldn't keep trashing the manned efforts when the end result could be very cooperative instead of in competition with each other. Carl Sagan did the scientific community a major disservice to advocate the elimination of manned spaceflight, and his arguments are also tired and worn out, especially when the situation is changing for spaceflight.
The point is that the T-bonds are mostly internal naval gazing, which was the point of the previous poster.
While the bonds may be real in terms of printed on real paper and may represent money owed to the SSA, the fact that a simple act of congress could "move" all of those bonds to the general treasury and wipe out their value is also just as real.
The point is that when the bonds need to be redeemed, that the money to pay won't be there. That is the real concern.
My original point was that Social Security ought to be treated as a welfare benefit, just like Food Stamps, WIC, or AFDC (traditionally called "welfare"). Sooner or later our government will have to be thinking along those lines anyway, even with increasing tax rates.
Certainly there will reach a point that ordinary workers will not be able to or be willing to support somebody who is retired... particularly when the ratio of retired people to workers hits a 1:1 rate.
So in a way the process of redeeming a T-bond "owned" by another government agency is a sham. No, not all buyers of T-bonds are victims of a con, but they aren't a branch of the federal government issuing stuff to itself either.
Of course another approach is to simply create all of the money to pay off the SSA bonds without taxes by simply issuing the money as dollars created out of nothing (aka simply printing it up). That creates its own problems, of course. And yes, the federal government could do just that.
Actually, no. They didn't follow the same path as Apollo 1. Apollo 1 was going to be a manned flight, but didn't go up because they ended up killing the astronauts involved.
BTW, yes, the $450 million was just for this specific launch and not the whole program. I know it doesn't sound quite right, but several billion dollars have already been spent on this program (10's of billions?) and by the time this whole program is finished, nearly $100 billion will have been spent before anybody gets to the Moon, much less Mars. A full Mars mission is going to be yet an additional appropriation above and beyond even this incredibly wasteful program as will any actual mission to the Moon. This is just the money to get the vehicle up to the ISS alone and nothing more, and perhaps be able to add an ISS module when the Shuttle is retired.
As for other vehicle designs in the program? Almost all other alternative designs were squelched due to political, not technical or fiscal reasons. At least one alternative approach, DIRECT, has had active development and engineering time devoted to it since even before the Ares I/V was officially selected. The selection criteria for this system was hardly without bias, and the primary consideration was to preserve the pool of employees at the various contractor facilities that currently process Shuttle equipment.
BTW, this isn't the same path that the Saturn series of rockets took. First of all, the engineers and designers who made the Saturn V were all engineers and technicians that had decades of experience under their belts, many of whom helped to build the V-1 rockets for Adolph Hitler. By the time they built the Saturn V, they had flown 10's of thousands of rockets of nearly a couple dozen different designs. This doesn't even remotely compare to the engineers who built/designed this rocket at all.
Also, the Saturn V was noted for its risky "All Up" tests that examined several components and major sections simultaneously so they could make the "before this decade is out" deadline. Comparison to the Apollo 1 aren't even reasonably fair or appropriate here. BTW, the first actual flight of the Saturn series rockets was not Apollo 1, but rather AS-201, and that isn't even the first "Saturn" vehicle technically. The first test of the Saturn V was with the Apollo 4 flight.
I still would like to know what, exactly, was learned and why the next flight (in 2013) that will actually test real hardware instead of this mock-up look-alike wasn't done instead. Again, the only real major accomplishment is that they learned how to handle this rocket on its own instead of being connected to a Shuttle. I don't think a flight was even necessary to get that to happen.
It has been great hearing from you again. I'll have to call you sometime fairly soon.
I've tried my little bit for trying to change mankind in my own way... by running for public office. It certainly gives you a different perspective on the whole concept of a representative republic when you try to become one of those representatives. It shocks me what I've actually voted for... with my very limited involvement in legislative franchise. I think I've done some good along the way, and I can only hope that I can continue to make some good in the future.
For myself, I thought DHS was a good idea in terms of executive department coordination/organization from desperate agencies that needed a unified voice with both the President and the U.S. Congress. The parts and pieces of DHS existed prior to 9/11, and those parts unfortunately didn't work well with each other. That part perhaps needed to be fixed.
The granting of authority that really didn't exist previously, however, is one thing that I have not been comfortable with, and I do think that the Bush administration (reinforced by the Obama administration that doesn't want to dismantle any of this authority either) was out of line to even seek after this sort of authority.
Ditto for the ability of a government agency to restrict or control the communications infrastructure of its citizens. It does concern me that folks want to control something of this nature, and are apparently clueless over what it is that they want to get accomplished.
Will the government send somebody to Mars in our lifetimes? I don't think so... at least not under some "super" Apollo-type program that is a flag and footprints for Old Glory and as a P.R. stunt for America. The money to do that simply isn't there, nor is the desire to get a project like that happening there either.
Do I think that folks may get to Mars in our lifetimes? On that I have no doubt. I think it may take a concerted government attempt at traffic control to keep people from going to Mars, and even then it will be a largely futile effort. Private spaceflight efforts are progressing far too quickly to stop them.
The problem is essentially what can the government do to stop people from going to Mars, assuming that hundreds or thousands of people are in Low-Earth Orbit and tinkering around with exotic propulsion technologies and designing vehicles to push out even further? I suppose that the FAA might start to significantly regulate all forms of spaceflight (not just launches into space), but there will likely be folks who say "go to hell" and ignore even these licensing requirements.
Circum-lunar flights are already being planned, and folks willing to bankroll the trips as well completely independent of government spaceflight programs. Heading off to Mars, from a pure energy viewpoint, is not that much more in terms of a vehicle other than getting the ability to sustain yourself for a slightly longer period of time in space. Tack on a couple more BA-330 units and you might have a functional vehicle to Mars.
The hard part is simply getting to orbit the Earth in the first place. That is a solved problem.
It isn't even the desire or even the funds, but having governments that are willing to let their citizens be able to make the trick.
Part of the problem with the Soyuz vehicles is that you have to complete training to become a cosmonaut and have the ability to essentially serve in every position on the vehicle and be able to fly it as well as the most experienced cosmonaut. This requires visas to Russia (with both the permission of the Russian government and the government of the potential "guest"), searches by customs agents for "exporting dangerous equipment" under ITAR restrictions (the laws that keep weapon technology from going to "the enemy"... like a Nintendo Wii or a recipe for "Rocket Candy"), and spending up to a year in Russia on your own dime to complete the cosmonaut training.
Surprisingly, even with all of these onerous requirements and spending so much of your own money and time into completing the cosmonaut training including fitness, height, and age requirements, there is still a waiting line of nearly a dozen people who want to get into space through the Russians.
In other words, it isn't just sanity for mankind as a whole, but sanity for lawmakers in Washington D.C. and Moscow (where there seems to be a bit more sanity in this regard... they like their money and having foreigners pay for their space program).
It will be interesting to see if SpaceX gets the Falcon 9 launched and the Dragon capsule worked out and tested for manned spaceflight... to see if the FAA will even issue a flight worthiness certificate for the vehicle. It is government red tape and not technical/engineer capability that is preventing human spaceflight at the moment.
Most of this is due to the fact that all of the previous attempts by NASA to develop vehicles that travel into space have been a nearly never-ending string of failures. The DynaSoar, DC-X, "international space plane", CEV, and other concepts have come and gone with nearly annual regularity. The series of vehicle designs that flopped goes back even further if you consider the Big "G" vehicle (a 5-man Gemini spacecraft) and the Apollo II capsule (a 7-man variant of the familiar vehicle that went to the Moon).
The Orion/Ares is surprising mainly because it is the first vehicle that actually got to perform a major test with all of this history since the Shuttle. The DC-X also had a flight test, but it didn't get that high off the ground, nor was it widely reported by the popular news media when it happened. In fact, I'd say that the current Ares I design and where the DC-X design was halted are at similar stages of development (with much more political support for the Ares I design, however).
As a P.R. coup, this launch turned out fairly well for the entrenched and established NASA bureaucracy. They know it, and that is why it has been so welcomed.
So, you mean to say that the U.S. space program hasn't launched a single vehicle or sent an astronaut into space for some time?
Hmmm... I would have sworn that there was a shuttle mission recently, and another one scheduled for a not too distant future... or am I missing something here?
Slashdot Mirror
3 generations ago there was no internet and there were no such topics.
Tell that to my grandfather, and kids that graduated with me that are now grandparents (I waited a bit to have kids of my own).
That is 5 generations to mention that have used the internet that I can count, stretching it to 6... do I need more?
Define internet as well, and note I wasn't just talking about posts.
You think 100 years ago people weren't discussing and commenting about constitutional limits of authority and the role of states vs. the federal government in America? Yeah, right!
'tis pity... as that is also a problem with today's youth. You think I'm long-winded? Those of a generation or two before me wrote in much longer replies to similar topics.
And by your strawman defense everything should be legal, crack, coke, lsd, shrooms, weed, prescription drugs...
No, I said nothing of that nature at all. I merely stated that this is an issue that can and ought to be decided on a state level rather than a federal level. States, on a local basis, can decide for themselves what is harmful to their communities or not.... as the case may be. Sometimes a state can join in a compact with other states to pool their resources on some topics or on things that may be of a regional nature, but the constitution is quite clear that states ought to be given some latitude on things of this nature, too.
Far, far too much is getting done on a federal level anyway, which is precisely my point. We shouldn't have to run to the national legislature on every possible issue. If you listen to some activists, it would seem as though state legislative bodies and state courts don't even exist. Also, when there seems to be even a hint that state legislators won't possibly go along with an idea, but congress might, no thought is even given as to if the proposal or concept ought to remain as a decision on the local level or not.
BTW, no, it is not the U.S. Supreme Court that has ultimate jurisdiction on deciding what is good and proper federal law... it is all three federal branches that can decide that issue, and they can decide that on a roughly equal basis. The President can decide if a law ought to be enforced (many laws are on the books that aren't enforced), Congress can enact or repeal laws based on whether those laws are constitutional, and really all the U.S. Supreme Court can do is to decide if enforcement of a particular law will have standing in the U.S. federal court system. That state courts do have inferior standing in regards to the federal courts is also true, and the U.S. Supreme Court is the final word... in terms of the judicial branches of government.
A legitimate complaint that is issued about courts is if they "legislate from the bench" and enact laws based on situations that appear before them. While sometimes it is true that situations arise that simply have no law to govern the problem before the court, there are limits to what a court can and can't do.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with the 14th Amendment, and some of the principles of that amendment, as they apply to states, are valid. This isn't, however, a blanket take-over of all functions of state governments by the federal government. Indeed, the 14th Amendment is quite specific on what it covers, as have judicial rulings based upon apparent violations of this amendment.
There is this strange part of the U.S. Constitution that does need to be mentioned from time to time.... and to remind the feds about this part too:
Then again, places like the U.S. Supreme Court really don't seem to read much out of the constitution much either. Strange how that applies.
I don't recall any part of the U.S. Constitution that explicitly grants federal authority over the growing or even regulation of agriculture products like marijuana. Shipping it across state lines is something different, but you don't have to ship it across state lines in order to grow it or even sell it to a neighbor.
BTW, I knew some farmers who grew Marijuana during WWII on a commercial basis... and even grew it instead of corn and wheat. Yes, the THC content was quite low compared to the current strains of the plant, but it was roughly the same species of plant. They showed me some pictures they took of standing out in the fields with federal agents who were buying the stuff from them as a part of the war effort at the time. The feds were involved only because they happened to be the customer, not because any license was necessary.
I hope you noticed that I'm a different person that the one you previously responded to. I don't know what to apologize for in reference to an earlier post I didn't even write.
As far as getting launch permits to land on the Moon... you might just be surprised at what regulations do exist for going there. International regulation of spaceflight is going to be an interesting and challenging task for future generations of lawyers, and it isn't entirely clear who has jurisdictional authority on spaceflight once you have left the atmosphere. I'd imagine it is a similar regulatory regime as flights through international airspace and ships sailing through international waters.
That only government agencies have gone up into orbit in manned vehicles kind of simplifies the situation, particularly as it has been government employees as the flight commanders. Often these are military officers to even simplify the situation even more, and the rest can certainly be considered "officers of the government" like a postmaster. Privately launched vehicles, once launched, will certainly draw the attention of lawmakers when that will eventually happen.
Random chances in space? You can have a solar flare that suddenly goes your way, an asteroid/meteor can hit you (certainly a non-zero chance for that to happen), or some other sorts of extra-terrestrial events that can happen that are a bit beyond your control.
Admittedly, when traveling through interplanetary space you don't have to worry about things like Earthquakes or impacts of chaotic systems like the weather in the Earth's troposphere from impacting your flight. If an engine stops working on a spacecraft, there might be some sort of panic attack when on a flight to Mars to get it fixed, but there will be time to get a "rescue mission" organized while passengers are still safely using life support systems not tied to the engine. If an engine quits on a 747, it becomes a much more significant problem.
The "media" never loved Sarah Palin.... certainly not in the same way they are enraptured by Obama.
While I will admit that news organizations are really into hip and more into the competition to make the ultimate scoop, there are things about Obama that have and continue to get glossed over that for most other politicians would have driven them out of office. That is the point for why there is a claim of media bias.
Palin goes shopping to buy a couple of outfits for campaign purposes, and she gets crucified as a spendthrift and incompetent hillbilly. Very little is even mentioned about Michele Obama or Hillary Clinton... who simply had fashion designers "donate" even more expensive outfits to the respective campaigns of those two women (OK, Michele Obama was the candidate's wife.... the point still holds true and perhaps even more so). That issue came up less than a week after the announcement of Sarah Palin as the VP candidate for the Republicans.
I'd hardly call any period of time a "honeymoon" period for Palin... except for perhaps the first couple of hours after the initial announcement.... when the reports were more of "WTF?" than anything of substance.
That reporters are also lazy is true. Why else do you think reporters travel on Air Force One on major international presidential trips rather than simply getting to the destinations on their own dime?
This is pretty much where this should have ended. John Carmack could have and perhaps should have secured the permit to get the extra flight in... and have taken the steps to even perhaps take a "victory lap" even if they still got first place.
It is always hard to second guess yourself, but Armadillo made their decision. Crying over spilt milk doesn't help here either.
As to if Armadillo... if they had been prepared and available to make the second attempt to improve accuracy... would have been allowed by the judges to make another attempt? I don't know. That is hard to say, but Armadillo wasn't in a position to even say "yes, we want another shot at this now that we know our competitor is closer".
Armadillo had already seen what Masten had done with the level 1 contest, and should have been aware that Masten could pull off an upset like did happen here for the level 2 prize. Being prepared really was the name of the game here.
John Carmack is just bent out of shape because he didn't get 1st place.
I disagree completely. Why should the prize money be "equal"? The point was to provide a strong incentive for contestants to get a vehicle to complete the basic requirements.... and to ensure that somebody who came in "2nd place" would at least receive a little bit of money for their effort instead of simply be left with the expenses of going up.
NASA did an excellent job here... considering that NASA employees running this contest consisted of a single office of I believe two people (it may even be just one) that is administering the Centennial Prizes. The ones to complain about is our lovely legislators in the halls of Capitol Hill who have refused to add any more money to this or other contests to help improve American technical capabilities for spaceflight.
There have been 4 different companies and groups of people involved directly with this contest that have also launched working hardware. That is a huge deal, as these groups have proven flight-worthy hardware capable of being used in other areas. One of the teams had their "chief" engineer hired out from under them and is now working for Scaled Composites. That these guys who built these rockets are now high on the list for head-hunters who want to look for talented and generally young engineers who have the skills necessary to build future rockets.... that should be readily apparent.
This is a very well managed contest, and one of the best applications of taxpayer money that I have seen in a long, long time. To achieve similar results for a conventional NASA technology demonstrator project, it would have easily cost 10x or more with bureaucratic overhead from hell and only one semi-competent company involved that likely would have ended up as a failure or even just a simple paper study instead. That seems to be the typical way that NASA does business, and for their effort they got four different rocket designs each with their own independent design heritage. That is huge in my book.
Your proposal to "share the wealth" makes absolutely no sense to me in this situation at all.
I would love to give a pithy comeback to this post, but I'll avoid the temptation for now.
Fairness is a relative thing, where shit happens to everybody that sometimes is out of our control. Yes, we can occasionally make decisions that will help improve our odds of success at a task we are dedicated to accomplishing, but things do happen that are randomly bad and awful to ourselves and those around us.
People die of heart attacks, illness, or even events completely out of our control. Perhaps a drunk driver happens to be driving down the lane of traffic you are in.... going the opposite direction and deliberately heading into your vehicle's hood. Maybe you are the "lucky" bastard that gets shot when somebody goes postal. The mechanic who worked on your airplane before you left for another state was distracted and forgot to re-connect a critical hydraulic line. Stuff happens that is beyond your control.
This is precisely what happened to both Masten and Armadillo (after a fashion). Masten simply was prepared and had their permits and vehicles in place to be able to take advantage of that last launch opportunity.
In many ways, I'm surprised that Armadillo didn't schedule another flight test for the level 2 competition so they could improve their accuracy, but after completing the qualification run for the prize, it was felt they should move on to other things. The whole point of the accuracy of the landing pad was to provide a "tie-breaker".... which is precisely what happened here.
In the grand scheme of things, Aramdillo doesn't really care. They are getting some money for their involvement with this competition (they already got money for the level one completion they did last year), and this isn't a big deal. It isn't Armadillo who is crying foul or complaining about not getting the money.
I'm curious about what you think would be missing here, in terms of a real lunar lander?
I'm not suggesting here that the trip into LEO and to get into Lunar orbit is a trivial thing, but presuming that some other vehicle such as the SpaceX Falcon 9 was to launch the Pixel or a similar spacecraft built by Aramdillo.... are you sure it would be considerably more difficult to build a lander that would be capable of picking up a lunar soil sample and then return that to the Earth?
I don't think this is quite so big of a difference as you are implying here. Yes, there would be some additional technical challenges involved including dealing with the conditions of "deep space" and getting a proper navigation system that isn't reliant upon the GPS hardware that all of the contestants of this contest used, but I don't think it is that significant of a challenge for these guys... after they have completed this challenge.
The delta-v requirements of this challenge is identical to going from lunar orbit to the Lunar surface, and then being able to lift off again from the surface back into lunar orbit. No doubt the technical challenges are there, and it wouldn't be easy, but it isn't so far fetched to see these guys actually land a real vehicle on the Moon itself.
Strangely enough, one of the early "proof of demonstration" projects John Carmack had with his software was a completely software demonstration of the flight control systems.
He even posted the code for it... but I don't want to bother trying to dig it up. It wasn't that polished, but it did do the job.
Mr. Carmack also controls most of the flight systems with his laptop computer out in the field.... so I wouldn't doubt that he may be using the spacebar or arrow keys to be controlling thrust. When most folks are staring at the rocket, he is usually hunched over his little laptop during the tests.
If this contest generates some congressional support for a level 3 prize.... I'd put Armadillo as a leading contender.
Or more significantly, if I were trying to build a vehicle that would actually go to the Moon, Armadillo's tech would be something I'd seriously consider in terms of purchasing. I don't know if Armadillo is going to get involved in the Google Lunar X-Prize (a completely different contest), but they certainly have the vehicle capable of getting to the ground in once piece.
Now that would be real bragging rights... and something Aramdillo might be able to take to the bank for a great many customers. Armadillo's vehicles would also be an order of magnitude cheaper than "big space" companies such as Boeing, Northrup-Grumman (who has put more than their fair share of vehicles on the Moon), and Lockheed-Martin.
It is very interesting to see how John Carmack is applying software engineering principles to "hard" engineering like rocket development. The "build a little, test a lot, rapid cycle" type of engineering common in software development is almost an alien concept for rocket engineers. Unlike most rocket shops, his vehicles have seen numerous test flights and are constantly being tweaked with actual flight data. Fuel costs for him are a significant issue.... unlike most rocket launchers.
Significantly, in terms of Delta-v expended by the design of this demonstration, these vehicles have proven that they would be capable of landing on the Moon from lunar orbit... which was sort of the point of the test.
The only thing missing from this demonstration is a removal of the GPS devices that were used for stabilization and navigation. In some ways, it would be very hard to pull off a demonstration without those navigation aids... as the FAA has specific "Earth" requirements that have to be met for vehicles flying in American airspace that don't apply on the Moon.
I would love to see a "level 3" competition for this challenge that would be even more realistic or even have the vehicles landing on the Moon.... assuming that the organization met the qualifications for the level 1 and 2 requirements first.
The funny statement by Armadillo was that they had even suggested that they had the materials and even the regulatory paperwork near completion to perform the level 2 qualification using a manned vehicle. Now that would be interesting to see.
Hardly. I will have to give general kudos to the Slashdot editors who usually look at multiple submissions and have to make a judgement call on links in the summaries.
Yes, it is sometimes a blog post, but far more often it is the link to the actual news source (which can be a blog, too!) If the "announcement" is on a blog, that is the original source.
Word of mouth will often come through news aggregators and via blogs. Heck, I've found out some interesting stuff from blogs that I regularly visit... and then posted it on /. Still, the links to the actual source of information is often in the summaries.
Yes, summaries often lack a bit of quality that perhaps leave some room for criticism an hour or two later.... so live with it or start your own site that you think could do better. This is more a function of the rush to get a scoop than trying to be 100% accurate. I prefer the scoops of interesting information I get from slashdot rather than the polished news articles from MSNBC or Fox News... if it gets covered in the "mainstream" news at all.
One news source that I have hope will improve and gain more popularity is Wikinews. If you are a grammar Nazi and want to constantly fix somebody else's grammar on a news story.... that is the place for you. It just doesn't have the "penetration" in the geek community as /. has, unfortunately.
This wasn't even poor Q/A as I'm sure this software likely passed all of the necessary reviews.
This is a failure to understand the problem domain and realize what the limits of software like this might be. The design specs on the clocks that were used in this situation likely had their operational parameters well defined by the manufacturer, but the engineer who built this system completely ignored that they would only be accurate for a narrow time windows.
This is a specification error, and something that would not have been caught in a Q/A performance review. Perhaps a complete engineering review from top to bottom by a very skilled engineering manager who doesn't have to worry about things like making a profit, but such reviews are rare because they are so incredibly expensive to perform. Only on the most critical kinds of equipment, such as medical devices or something where somebody's life depends on it working will such a review be done.
This is debatable with military equipment, and often it will meet such standards. However this is something that likely wouldn't have to pass the same level of review as a medical device, and the contracting company involved would have gone broke to engage in that sort of review on all of their products.... where this was a system that was awarded based on the lowest bid.
Yes, I'd say this was a sloppy system designer as well, and somebody who should be demoted/fired for not properly expressing what the operational limits of this weapons system would be (uptime of 5 hours of operation or whatever it may be). If those operational limits don't meet specifications, then something should have been redesigned in this situation. Odds are that those specifications weren't listed in the first place.
This also seems to be a difference between American and Asian engineers (culturally... I don't care about skin color here). American engineers tend to think about the actual application domain and "fill in" specifications that are missing. Most Asian engineers (from my own experiences... your experience may vary) tend to be much more exacting to the delivered specifications and don't "think outside of the box" too much. That the Asian engineers tend to deliver product faster is also true... making the Americans seem lazy for even trying to make the effort to understand the problem a little bit better.
Japanese tend to be thinking more like Americans from more recent experience... so this isn't one size fits all to all Asian countries either. Of course the Japanese have had more time to interact with western nations as well. The Chinese culture is very definitely "do as you are told and don't question the boss, even if he is wrong."
Amazingly, if the US were to stop picking fights with other nations in the world, they would find that they could safely reduce their military budget.
Determining a good balance between a formidable military that scares away any would-be enemies from even thinking about invasion or causing damage to the USA, and what is simply gilding the lily of military weapons, personnel, and training is something that certainly is worth arguing about.
There is also the tendency that when given the gift of a well trained and equipped military, that most politicians choose to actually use the military as a weapon to further their own political aims... whatever they may be. Certainly Clinton used the military to his own advantage when he was President, as did all of previous U.S. Presidents since the Lincoln administration. How ironic it was that Woodrow Wilson ran on "He kept us out of war" and plunged the USA into one of the largest wars since the U.S. Civil War.
Iraq and Afghanistan aren't anything special when looked at through the long-term lens of history. One good thing that may come from it is that the current political leaders are war-weary in America and don't really care to start another war any time soon. It was George Washington that sent U.S. Marines into northern Africa for the first foreign war. Please explain why anything more recent is any different than that action?
Is it a myth that a great many (in the early days almost all) of the rocket engineers involved in building the early NASA rockets and even earlier the U.S. Army rockets were German engineers? Von Braun himself was an SS officer and helped to found the V-2 rocket program at Penemunde. It wasn't just a cursory situation, the V-2 was his design and baby. (I'm sorry, I said V-1 originally, which really wasn't Von Braun's design. My mistake there. The V-2 was all his, however.)
It was also the first rocket to have demonstrated the capability of being able to leave the atmosphere of the Earth and reach sub-orbital velocities. I'd hardly call that a myth. Von Braun deliberately surrendered to the U.S. Army because neither he nor his team wanted to spend the post-war years in a Soviet gulag in Siberia. I don't blame him either. About 100+ of the engineers and technicians that worked with Von Braun were also brought to America out into New Mexico and later to Huntsville for the early design work that NASA later used, including the Redstone and Jupiter-C rockets.
I had a former boss who worked with the Redstone rockets and was personally involved in launching about 1,000 Redstone rockets in the space of about 3 weeks, as a part of an Army test to see how rapidly rockets could be prepared and launched. Seriously, there were 10's of thousands of rockets that were launched by Von Braun's teams over the 5 decades of his engineering career. I don't know what about any of this is a myth at all. It was this design team that formed the core engineering group that built the Saturn V.... although I'll admit that it involved a great many more engineers from a huge spectrum of American society as well.
As far as the Gemini missions, while I'll admit that they did help to develop manned spaceflight procedures and practices, almost none of the Gemini rocket had anything to do with the Saturn V design. As a matter of fact, the Saturn V was already well under development before the first proposal to even build the Atlas-Centaur rockets that eventually carried the Gemini capsules into orbit were designed. It was at the very least rockets of a completely different heritage, design philosophy, and engineering team that built those vehicles.
As a matter of fact, in many ways the Gemini spacecraft was much more advanced than at least the Apollo Block 1 capsules, and could even be argued technically as a slight upgrade over even the Block 2 capsules that eventually went to the Moon with Neil Armstrong. The point is that Gemini didn't precede Apollo in terms of vehicle design. It just went up first is all that happened.
I think you also missed what was proposed by the Vision for Space Exploration as offered by President George W. Bush. He didn't want to do it all over again for a fuzzy warm feeling. What President Bush simply wanted to do was to set a long-term goal for NASA to actually do something. On the basic level, what is there to dispute that eventually getting Americans to Mars as a long-term NASA goal over the next century? Is that something you think is foolish? If not that, then what should be NASA's long-term goal... or should it simply be disbanded as an agency?
Going back to the Moon is a preliminary step, and there are reasons to return to the Moon that have value in and of itself. This isn't an attempt to return to the Moon within a decade. Bush openly acknowledged that it would be his successor that would have to take on the more serious issues in terms of what specific kind of project or program would be put together in terms of actually achieving these goals, but that along the way a new vehicle would have to be developed that would at least let future Presidents be able to have option to decide on what to do next.
That Obama can't seem to make a decision on what to do is a problem for Obama and not something to be dumped onto Bush.
BTW, my criticism is that it wasn't Bush, but rather Mike Griffin that ram-rodded the Ares I design down the throats of everybody, a
If this is the case.... show me the lunar exploration vehicles that have been back to the Apollo 17 landing site... or other valuable locations.
It also isn't just having the same resolution as the human eye, but having somebody there to actually feel, taste, and experience the environment. Somebody to bang on the chassis and get it moving when it isn't, or to wipe the dust off the top.
You can also send up "instructions" when coupled by training and education that far and away exceed the capacity of any sort of robotic probe. Also, you gain the ability to have independent intuition to make snap judgment calls. It is those sort of snap judgment calls that Dr. Schmitt made when he was on the Moon that captured rocks that would never have been discovered by a team running a robotic probe. He was there making a genuine field survey in a way that no robotic probe could ever have made such a study.
You are saying that robots can do the job for 1/3rd the money? That little savings? That sort of cost reduction could be compensated strictly by privatizing the launch vehicles and letting free market competition be able to provide "cash and carry" launch vehicles like the SpaceX Falcon 9. I find this a failed argument as well, and I say send up the human scientists if we can do it cheaper than NASA can send up the robotic probes! Let's put a dozen Harrison Schmitt's up into space for the price of a single robotic mission!
Look, I'm not saying that robots are evil or bad, or that they shouldn't be used, but I think it is pig-headed to insist that real flesh-blood people should never go into space and that the whole of the universe above 50km from the surface of this planet should be left pristine to satisfy scientific curiosity alone. I know that isn't the same thing as advocating a more intense robotic exploration of the Solar System, but it is essentially the same result in the end.
There is a role for human spaceflight, and I wish those who advocate for robotic exploration of space wouldn't keep trashing the manned efforts when the end result could be very cooperative instead of in competition with each other. Carl Sagan did the scientific community a major disservice to advocate the elimination of manned spaceflight, and his arguments are also tired and worn out, especially when the situation is changing for spaceflight.
The point is that the T-bonds are mostly internal naval gazing, which was the point of the previous poster.
While the bonds may be real in terms of printed on real paper and may represent money owed to the SSA, the fact that a simple act of congress could "move" all of those bonds to the general treasury and wipe out their value is also just as real.
The point is that when the bonds need to be redeemed, that the money to pay won't be there. That is the real concern.
My original point was that Social Security ought to be treated as a welfare benefit, just like Food Stamps, WIC, or AFDC (traditionally called "welfare"). Sooner or later our government will have to be thinking along those lines anyway, even with increasing tax rates.
Certainly there will reach a point that ordinary workers will not be able to or be willing to support somebody who is retired... particularly when the ratio of retired people to workers hits a 1:1 rate.
So in a way the process of redeeming a T-bond "owned" by another government agency is a sham. No, not all buyers of T-bonds are victims of a con, but they aren't a branch of the federal government issuing stuff to itself either.
Of course another approach is to simply create all of the money to pay off the SSA bonds without taxes by simply issuing the money as dollars created out of nothing (aka simply printing it up). That creates its own problems, of course. And yes, the federal government could do just that.
Actually, no. They didn't follow the same path as Apollo 1. Apollo 1 was going to be a manned flight, but didn't go up because they ended up killing the astronauts involved.
BTW, yes, the $450 million was just for this specific launch and not the whole program. I know it doesn't sound quite right, but several billion dollars have already been spent on this program (10's of billions?) and by the time this whole program is finished, nearly $100 billion will have been spent before anybody gets to the Moon, much less Mars. A full Mars mission is going to be yet an additional appropriation above and beyond even this incredibly wasteful program as will any actual mission to the Moon. This is just the money to get the vehicle up to the ISS alone and nothing more, and perhaps be able to add an ISS module when the Shuttle is retired.
As for other vehicle designs in the program? Almost all other alternative designs were squelched due to political, not technical or fiscal reasons. At least one alternative approach, DIRECT, has had active development and engineering time devoted to it since even before the Ares I/V was officially selected. The selection criteria for this system was hardly without bias, and the primary consideration was to preserve the pool of employees at the various contractor facilities that currently process Shuttle equipment.
BTW, this isn't the same path that the Saturn series of rockets took. First of all, the engineers and designers who made the Saturn V were all engineers and technicians that had decades of experience under their belts, many of whom helped to build the V-1 rockets for Adolph Hitler. By the time they built the Saturn V, they had flown 10's of thousands of rockets of nearly a couple dozen different designs. This doesn't even remotely compare to the engineers who built/designed this rocket at all.
Also, the Saturn V was noted for its risky "All Up" tests that examined several components and major sections simultaneously so they could make the "before this decade is out" deadline. Comparison to the Apollo 1 aren't even reasonably fair or appropriate here. BTW, the first actual flight of the Saturn series rockets was not Apollo 1, but rather AS-201, and that isn't even the first "Saturn" vehicle technically. The first test of the Saturn V was with the Apollo 4 flight.
I still would like to know what, exactly, was learned and why the next flight (in 2013) that will actually test real hardware instead of this mock-up look-alike wasn't done instead. Again, the only real major accomplishment is that they learned how to handle this rocket on its own instead of being connected to a Shuttle. I don't think a flight was even necessary to get that to happen.
It has been great hearing from you again. I'll have to call you sometime fairly soon.
I've tried my little bit for trying to change mankind in my own way... by running for public office. It certainly gives you a different perspective on the whole concept of a representative republic when you try to become one of those representatives. It shocks me what I've actually voted for... with my very limited involvement in legislative franchise. I think I've done some good along the way, and I can only hope that I can continue to make some good in the future.
For myself, I thought DHS was a good idea in terms of executive department coordination/organization from desperate agencies that needed a unified voice with both the President and the U.S. Congress. The parts and pieces of DHS existed prior to 9/11, and those parts unfortunately didn't work well with each other. That part perhaps needed to be fixed.
The granting of authority that really didn't exist previously, however, is one thing that I have not been comfortable with, and I do think that the Bush administration (reinforced by the Obama administration that doesn't want to dismantle any of this authority either) was out of line to even seek after this sort of authority.
Ditto for the ability of a government agency to restrict or control the communications infrastructure of its citizens. It does concern me that folks want to control something of this nature, and are apparently clueless over what it is that they want to get accomplished.
Will the government send somebody to Mars in our lifetimes? I don't think so... at least not under some "super" Apollo-type program that is a flag and footprints for Old Glory and as a P.R. stunt for America. The money to do that simply isn't there, nor is the desire to get a project like that happening there either.
Do I think that folks may get to Mars in our lifetimes? On that I have no doubt. I think it may take a concerted government attempt at traffic control to keep people from going to Mars, and even then it will be a largely futile effort. Private spaceflight efforts are progressing far too quickly to stop them.
The problem is essentially what can the government do to stop people from going to Mars, assuming that hundreds or thousands of people are in Low-Earth Orbit and tinkering around with exotic propulsion technologies and designing vehicles to push out even further? I suppose that the FAA might start to significantly regulate all forms of spaceflight (not just launches into space), but there will likely be folks who say "go to hell" and ignore even these licensing requirements.
Circum-lunar flights are already being planned, and folks willing to bankroll the trips as well completely independent of government spaceflight programs. Heading off to Mars, from a pure energy viewpoint, is not that much more in terms of a vehicle other than getting the ability to sustain yourself for a slightly longer period of time in space. Tack on a couple more BA-330 units and you might have a functional vehicle to Mars.
The hard part is simply getting to orbit the Earth in the first place. That is a solved problem.
It isn't even the desire or even the funds, but having governments that are willing to let their citizens be able to make the trick.
Part of the problem with the Soyuz vehicles is that you have to complete training to become a cosmonaut and have the ability to essentially serve in every position on the vehicle and be able to fly it as well as the most experienced cosmonaut. This requires visas to Russia (with both the permission of the Russian government and the government of the potential "guest"), searches by customs agents for "exporting dangerous equipment" under ITAR restrictions (the laws that keep weapon technology from going to "the enemy"... like a Nintendo Wii or a recipe for "Rocket Candy"), and spending up to a year in Russia on your own dime to complete the cosmonaut training.
Surprisingly, even with all of these onerous requirements and spending so much of your own money and time into completing the cosmonaut training including fitness, height, and age requirements, there is still a waiting line of nearly a dozen people who want to get into space through the Russians.
In other words, it isn't just sanity for mankind as a whole, but sanity for lawmakers in Washington D.C. and Moscow (where there seems to be a bit more sanity in this regard... they like their money and having foreigners pay for their space program).
It will be interesting to see if SpaceX gets the Falcon 9 launched and the Dragon capsule worked out and tested for manned spaceflight... to see if the FAA will even issue a flight worthiness certificate for the vehicle. It is government red tape and not technical/engineer capability that is preventing human spaceflight at the moment.
Most of this is due to the fact that all of the previous attempts by NASA to develop vehicles that travel into space have been a nearly never-ending string of failures. The DynaSoar, DC-X, "international space plane", CEV, and other concepts have come and gone with nearly annual regularity. The series of vehicle designs that flopped goes back even further if you consider the Big "G" vehicle (a 5-man Gemini spacecraft) and the Apollo II capsule (a 7-man variant of the familiar vehicle that went to the Moon).
The Orion/Ares is surprising mainly because it is the first vehicle that actually got to perform a major test with all of this history since the Shuttle. The DC-X also had a flight test, but it didn't get that high off the ground, nor was it widely reported by the popular news media when it happened. In fact, I'd say that the current Ares I design and where the DC-X design was halted are at similar stages of development (with much more political support for the Ares I design, however).
As a P.R. coup, this launch turned out fairly well for the entrenched and established NASA bureaucracy. They know it, and that is why it has been so welcomed.
So, you mean to say that the U.S. space program hasn't launched a single vehicle or sent an astronaut into space for some time?
Hmmm... I would have sworn that there was a shuttle mission recently, and another one scheduled for a not too distant future... or am I missing something here?