The high school that my teenage kids attend is a charter school that has no uniforms and pretty much lets the kids be kids. The focus of the school is on the arts (which should tell you a thing or two about how they dress) with an incredibly talented staff that really connects with the kids in a way that really works. One of the keys to the school is that it is quite small.... about 150 students total for a 4-year high school in all grades.
The small school size (where the other schools in the area that are not "alternative high schools" are all 3k+ students) gives the principal the ability to literally know each student in the school not just by name, but pretty much knows their GPA, what classes they are struggling with, and can give a biographical outline of each student including extra-curricular activities and hobbies that student does. The principal also openly recruits students who are struggling at other schools and may not have the best experience in high school, so often kids who may be contemplating dropping out of high school altogether are attending. That does drop standardized test scores as they are not necessarily the top tier students, but there is definitely a support network including other students that really step in to make friends. Kids who otherwise slip through the cracks and don't get noticed are definitely rounded up and encouraged to succeed. Troubled kids who are screwups are definitely given a chance.... but they either shape up or are kicked out of the school.
My oldest child was definitely one of those kids slipping through the cracks and just lost in the system before he attended this school. My wife and I were told by the school administration at the public middle school that getting a job at McDonalds was the best he could hope for in life, and that he would be lucky simply to complete the four years of high school with a certificate of completion (they held no hope he would even get a diploma). Upon switching to this charter school, my child not only thrived, but excelled at his classes, took advanced placement classes as well as some concurrent enrollment classes at the local university (where he got A grades at the university), and not only graduated but missed becoming valedictorian because he discovered girls his senior year and let his grades slip (he got B grades instead of As for a couple of classes and a couple of other students passed him up in GPA). In other words, he became a very healthy teenage kid and I'm real proud of him particularly now that he is attending a university as a freshman and his college grades are pretty close to what he was getting in high school. In other words, the high school prepared him for college and did so in a way that the public schools were planning on never doing.
I'll also note that in the state where I live (Utah), charter schools do get state-level funding (aka the "per pupil appropriations"), but they do not have the ability to levy local taxes like the public school districts. In other words, they are expected to meet the same performance levels for an amount of money substantially less than what the local public schools do, and yet they thrive and do better than the school districts. It just shows that money isn't everything. The only other source of income for these schools is the state land trust (where one out of every 16 parcels where set aside for education and mineral extraction, oil, or lumber leases gets paid into that fund). That is also a per-pupil source of income, but only amounts to about $20k this year for that school. It is enough to equip a computer lab, buy some other expensive piece of equipment, or do some other significant project, but not enough to even fund an extra teacher.
Admittedly most other measures are subjective and superficial, but you can note some academic standards like some sort of curriculum standard and try to evaluate in ways other than passing out standardized tests to all of the students to see if those standards have been met. You could do a random sampling of the students instead and interview them to see if they understand key concepts, see what they think of their instructors, and take a few random samples of completed homework.
Of course what the Charter School movement is trying to suggest is that ultimately parents know in their gut what local schools do a better job and can "vote with their feet" by enrolling their students in schools that perform. Schools which don't get parental support simply fail from a lack of students under such an approach, which presumes a sort of free market approach. Unfortunately few state charter school programs are really a free market like this too, but that is the goal.
Like maybe deciding to go with the cheaper o-rings with the narrower operating temperatures; just how cold could a Florida launch be anyway?
Engineers from Thiokol wanted to use the more expensive o-rings in that case.... and NASA overruled demanding the cheaper ones. Furthermore, Thiokol also wanted to scrub the launch on the day that Challenger flew.... and NASA administrators thought it was politically a bad idea and flew anyway.
This whole line of thought is bullshit as it presumes that a commercial company would risk lives to save $10, as if they want to pay higher per launch premiums to their insurance providers not to mention want the blood of people on their hands. Look at the problems RKK Energia is facing right now with their vehicles because there have been failures last year and tell me launching companies don't worry about that stuff.
Except for the fact that Lockheed and Boeing have been NASA's contractors for decades.
The difference is how these contracts are funded. The COTS contracts for SpaceX and Orbital have two huge things going for them:
1) These are not "cost-plus" contracts, but rather fixed price contracts where any cost savings during operations is kept entirely by the launch provider. If either company can save even a few hundred dollars by doing something cheaper or avoiding a purchase of the proverbial $10k wrench & hammer, those companies see that savings directly. Neither Lockheed-Martin nor Boeing care about stuff like that as they simply pass those "costs" in the "cost-plus" contract on to taxpayers. There are no cost overruns in a fixed price contract too, so if either Orbital or SpaceX have some unexpected costs showing up.... they need to eat those costs.
2) Both SpaceX and Orbital are free to use these launch vehicles for any other purpose as everything they've made belongs to them and not NASA or the federal government.
I do think there is a time and place for cost-plus contracts where there is a genuine national priority that something absolutely must be made. None the less, this really is a different thing and in a great many ways these other companies have been extensions of the government in how they made their vehicles.
You had better tell that to Richard Branson that his dream is not going to be realized. For myself, I put Branson behind Jeff Bezos in terms of who is going to make the vehicles capable of going to orbit first, and I have my doubts about either one. Yes, I realize that orbital velocities are much less than suborbital hops, but I am not talking about suborbital spacecraft in this case.
I will also tip my hat to Virgin Galactic so far as trying to get airline-like operations out of sub-orbital spacecraft. If he can get it to work out, it will be substantially cheaper mode of transportation to that flight regime than anything else even considered.... cheaper even than the approach that SpaceX is going after. The approach of Virgin Galactic is also a much harder system. Stratolaunch is trying to make what will be the next generation of the White Knight, where the original goal was to put a Falcon 9 hanging under the air carrier as a mobile launch platform.
The White Knight II is planned to be used as a launch platform for small sat payloads below $500/kg to LEO. They plan to develop the rocket once SpaceshipTwo finally gets built, but I have no doubt those engineers are capable of getting it done. The ten year delay in getting commercial suborbital operations going has mainly been with the propulsion system, where Virgin Galactic (and Scaled Composites before them) tried to get their hybrid rocket motors operational. This is still the weak part of the entire SpaceshipTwo design and where most of the time is being spent.
The only real advantage I see from an air launch system is that it gets you out of the weather (a real problem for Florida launches). The comparatively tiny altitude gain and velocity from the aircraft is trivial. Still, a 100% reusable (except for fuel) system is something worth looking at, and is the main feature to that approach. Exploding rockets are also not so big of a deal when they blow up at 40k feet and can be done over oceans or otherwise far from population centers too. The hybrid motor system, assuming they can get the chemistry to work properly, is also something very simple and easy to use in operation where more time spent in design will make for cheaper operations (as opposed to horrible decisions in the Space Shuttle design which pushed development costs into operations on a routine basis).
Mars-One does not and never will build a launch vehicle capable of going into orbit. They may be entrepreneurs in space, but that is not what the GP was talking about. If you were suggesting Boeing or Lockheed-Martin was capable of competing.... that at least would be talking about companies who build rockets.
EADS-Astrium/AirBus (they are going through a reorganization at the moment) is arguably a major contender for private commercial spaceflight launch as well. RKK Energia (the company who makes the Soyuz rockets) is also a private company who is competitive with the launch costs of both SpaceX and Orbital. You can debate if they really are a private companies or not (they do have shareholders and private investors... but also governments as investors as well).
Richard Branson has said he has his sights upon orbital spaceflight with Virgin Galactic, and there is also Stratolaunch, but those are the only other companies I can see being real competition. I had high hopes for ARCA, the Romanian space group that is doing some interesting things, but their projects seem to take even longer to happen than I thought. I'm sort of pleasantly surprised they are still doing stuff. Another group to watch is Copenhagen Suborbitals, who is building flying hardware (they have sent aloft more than a couple missions) and have technology that could at least theoretically make the trip into orbit over time.
But I still ask, how come commercial space didn't happen in 1980s. Was technology too exotic? There was the Soviet threat but no ITAR.
You might want to dig a bit into the history of OTRAG to see some of the difficulties that people faced in the early development of commercial spaceflight. The largest problem was mainly a "giggle factor" where regulators and people involved with even permitting this kind of activity happening. It took Ronald Reagan to pass the Commercial Space Launch Act which in turn created the Office of Commercial Spaceflight and encouraged government agencies to hire private companies to perform services that previously were done by government personnel.
In other words, it was largely a political issue rather than necessarily a technological one. When AT&T sent up their Testar satellites, they needed specific legislation passed by Congress just to be permitted to launch vehicles into space. For a long time it is this whole permitting process that has had the government getting in the face of anybody trying to seriously consider going into space, and even now the regulations on building spacecraft still are a major hassle and consume full time employees just to meet those regulations even in a very small start-up company with just a dozen employees. Don't even think about starting a company with space-based assets or things going into space without one or more lawyers on staff.
The other aspect is that the internet also created a whole bunch of tech savvy geeks with money. Many of them wanted to do stuff in space, having grown up watching the Apollo Moon missions and hoping that things would be moving along faster in space than it actually has. There were dreams that by the year 2000 we would already have colonies on Mars, yet that didn't happen. Arguably the reason why that didn't happen is because it was too expensive to go there, and Congress seriously gutted the space program following the completion of the Apollo missions. These geeks decided that since government programs aren't getting the job done, they would be willing to try to do it themselves.
The X-Prize is something that has been a catalyst for getting the current generation of commercial spaceflight happening, where conferences before the X-Prize were mostly concentrating on how to expand NASA funding and building constituencies, and conferences after the X-Prize (particularly after Burt Rutan won that X-Prize) started talking about venture capital funding, business plans, and how to avoid getting bogged down in government regulations to get your project going. There really has been a radical change in thinking in recent years, and that explains part of what is happening in commercial spaceflight at the moment.
Not to where this vehicle is going. That F-15 was pretty much limited by physics and its design to the altitude record (again the airframe record and not really even impressive compared to other vehicles at the time other than perhaps impressive compared to other fighter planes.... the record they were trying to make).
Better altitude records were met with the X-15 a decade earlier, and even those records for vehicles launched from a runway, but none the less something much more worthy of comparison. On the other hand, Spaceship One, currently on display in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, was able to exceed the altitude records of even the X-15 and is the vehicle that is merely being upgraded and designed to hold passengers as well.... something that F-15 never could do.
Because it's obvious that our technology has peaked and no one's going to colonize the universe.
How do you possibly know that? What are the causes of "technology peaking" that you are referring to? Is it something about the human condition specifically or is it something more political and something about this particular civilization we live in at the moment? What is keeping technological progress from happening?
It is possible that there is no more science to discover, no more technology to develop, and that what we have right now is the ultimate limit of what can be done in space. I just think you are being an asshole if you are active in trying to prevent others from at least trying to see if there might be more, and stopping somebody else from even trying to leave this planet. If otherwise you are just being a stupid commentator on the sidelines hoping to see everybody fail as you crawl into your hut trying to restart your hunter-gatherer tribe, you are equally being small minded.
No doubt the OP could be written a little more clear that this is an airframe record as opposed to an all-time aeronautical record (which are held by the Voyager 2 for any human artifact and the Apollo 13 crew for any piloted vehicle for altitude or distance from the Earth). None the less, it is showing regular progress and that Virgin Galactic, or more specifically The Spaceship Company (really, the name of the company making these vehicles) is pushing the envelope on its development.
The goals of this particular project are pretty impressive though, and what is really significant here is that somebody is taking the initiative to build upon the experience gained from the X-15 flights and pushing this particular line of spacecraft technology. If these guys are successful and can continue to upgrade the technology for ever higher altitudes and ever longer distances, it will reduce the cost of spaceflight down to levels that resemble the cost of at least a Concorde trans-Atlantic flight. That is something a mere mortal ordinary person in a first world country could afford if they really wanted the chance.
Other spaceship builders are trying other approaches, and it has been long criticized that perhaps an air launched rocket design like SpaceShip Two is a dead end technology. What they have accomplished is to cheapen the cost of flights that previously were conducted on sounding rockets, and for a very modest amount of money ($100k is a very small amount of money when you are talking about spaceflight costs) you can test a research project that you may want to put on the ISS before it goes up in an orbital rocket. There are several very pragmatic applications of this vehicle even if it doesn't ever achieve orbit.
I think he was talking about Elementary Education majors. They know how to count lots of gates.... white gates, black gates, picket fence gates, and other kinds of gates. They will even show you how to put that on a proper number line to count to more than the number of fingers on both hands.
None of this stuff I've mentioned would be possible without the ISS.
I don't know about whether this stuff would be possible, but it'd certainly be cheaper without the ISS, when it were done.
Treatiing the existing ISS structure as sunk costs with the exception of any additional maintenance issues for ongoing development, what kind of costs are we talking about for similar kinds of research currently done on the ISS but performed upon other platforms? I simply disagree with you in regards to the cost being even orders of magnitude cheaper.... and much of that research simply can't be done with single purpose built spacecraft. Even for those experiments which are largely automated, the ISS still has some excellent and cost effective facilities where experiment builders don't need to deal with the substantial overhead of building the spacecraft but rather simply concentrate on the experiment itself.
It is a fair conjecture to suggest it would be cheaper, but the costs for sending experiments up with NanoRacks seem to suggest otherwise. If you can suggest strongly that NanoRacks is being heavily subsidized by taxpayers (other than like I said sunk costs that aren't recoverable from the construction of the ISS), I would definitely be much more pursuaded to accept your argument.
I am not going to dispute that building something like the ISS could have been done much, much cheaper and without the incredibly huge overhead that happened in terms of a government bureaucracy sending up over priced parts on a vehicle designed by a committee that was never really good at any one mission and hugely expensive to operate. Certainly building a completely new station from scratch using something like a Falcon Heavy for launching the components into space and using Bigelow habitats could be built substantially cheaper. Using a back of the envelope guess on published prices for those components, such a station could be built for less than $1.5 billion or about the cost of a single shuttle mission and have more volume and more power to get things done. That is even being generous with the expenses and possibly could be made cheaper still, but that is at least a first stab at a rough price. Why NASA is spending twice that amount annually for ongoing expenses just to operate the ISS suggests there may be some other places that the money is being spent.
Regardless, there still is value for space based research. As bad as NASA is and how bloated that agency is performing, it is surprisingly one of the better run federal agencies that actually performs practical and useful functions that positively impact ordinary citizens in their daily lives. Far more money gets dumped on far more useless projects (the TSA in particular comes to mind, not to mention a great deal of what the NSA is doing) that banging on NASA waste is particularly pointless.
The Russians have sent tourists to the ISS, so why not Virgin Galactic?
The company to look at is Bigelow Aerospace. FYI, this company is partnering with Boeing to build a spacecraft that will carry passengers at a fraction of the price that Space Adventures is currently charging for that opportunity.
As for a microgravity lab, note that NanoRacks already provides this service. They are literally open to anybody willing to use their checkbook to purchase a flight spot. This is no longer the time for theoretical rants, but a time to act and do something as the opportunity is here. At best, all you can do now is to find cheaper ways to get these things to happen or simply take advantage of the opportunities that exist.
All the stuff could be done for a fraction of the cost with robotic probes in orbit. The ISS and manned spaceflight is pork for Houston.
I would say this is utter bullshit.
Yes, there can be some interesting things done with robotic probes, and it is possible that some of the experiments done on the ISS could be operated remotely and doesn't need constant attention by astronauts (like many of the experiments on the ISS do anyway). Still, I think you take for granted how difficult it is to build a spacecraft designed to meet a specific research objective and also dismiss out of hand what value there is to having astronauts being there with the experiment to get them in working order or to troubleshoot the experiments while they are in orbit. Better yet, you are similarly dismissing observations that can be done by somebody in space that may not be readily apparent remotely.
If you want to go into the manned vs. robotic missions feud, you are really being incredibly stupid and short sighted. Both are needed and both deserve funding. I think Carl Sagan (the guy who introduced this meme) did the whole world a massive disservice by introducing this concept, as he was flat out wrong too. Harrison Schmit performed far more science by his trip to the Moon than all of the robotic geology missions combined and discovered samples that would have literally been impossible to obtain without sending an experienced geologist to the Moon. When asked if he could use some astronauts, the lead researcher for the Mars Science Lab (aka Curiosity) said absolutely it would help.
I'll admit there is some low hanging fruit still left that can be collected by robotic probes, and don't make it seem that I think these robotic missions need to end. Far from it, as they are certainly useful, but sending people into space to perform research is also important. That isn't even touching on the fact that without a manned spaceflight program it is remotely possible that all robotic missions would be cut too, thus their funding depends on continued manned exploration.
If you want somebody or something to blame for the current woes of the robotic missions, blame the James West Space Telescope instead. That is a fiscal black hole that is sucking up nearly the entire robotic exploration budget, and I still have my doubts it will even fly. It isn't even a proper replacement of the Hubble telescope. For the money being dumped into that vehicle, literally a thousand Arkyd 100 telescopes could be purchased by a company more than willing to sell them in that quantity. That would include launch costs for that thousand telescopes too. More to the ponit, don't blame the manned spaceflight program for the problems of massive mismanagement of the robotic missions.
Couldn't NASA list the experiments, what they are trying to find out and if they have been successful?
NASA does list the experiments. They are sorted in multiple directions too (by date, mission, researchers, and alphabetically). None the less, your point that media outlets don't really pay attention to this list is a good one and something that should be done to smack some of these journalists into reality.
Another really interesting company who is currently sending experiments up to the ISS is Nanoracks, a for-profit company partnering with NASA on the ISS who is willing to put literally anybody's experiment onto the ISS in a standard enclosure. Results can be either transmitted by telemetry or physically returned to the Earth after completion, exposed to the vacuum of LEO space or kept inside depending on your experimental variables. Thanks to some cooperation Nanoracks has even been able to offer 4 inch cubesats (aka about four inches on each side of the cube) that can be launched from the ISS. If you have some spare bucks, one company even allows you to operate your own satellite through a web browser. It only costs $1k per week where you can develop your own software to use the devices on that satellite. That is a price that a mere mortal like myself or even a college student could put together if they cared.... and that company is even interested in high school groups doing experiments in space.
None of this stuff I've mentioned would be possible without the ISS. Admittedly another space station could be built to do the same thing, but that would require simialr capital outlays to get such a station built in the first place. The ISS is currently open and doing this sort of thing, so it seems a shame to waste this opportunity. Companies like Nanoracks are not being subsidized at least for the astronaut's time and expendible supplies (that is part of the cost of sending those experiments to space), so I do think it would be a shame to destroy a perfectly good research lab now that it is built even if you may think it was far too expensive to build in the first place.
When does INL turn a profit? Los Alamos? Amundsen-Scott? Those are all major laboratories doing basic research. The ISS justifiably fits right in there with all of those facilities, and I"m glad that it is treated as such.
Part of the problem is that the ISS really is incomplete to be able to support the personnel needed to make it really thrive as a research lab. It was supposed to have a crew of six astronauts on board full-time (that was the original design) where two of those astronauts would deal with station keeping duties (at least trading off the equivalent of two astronauts doing that work) while the other four would be doing basic research.
That hasn't happened The TransHab module in particular is needed to provide additional berthing arrangements (aka sleeping quarters) for the astronauts or at least another lab module that can expand the occupancy as well as one of the other partners (either ESA or NASA) needs to develop another spacecraft to bring astronauts up and down. NASA is working on that so it is just a matter of time.
Regardless, the ISS is doing some tremendous work right now, and it is disingenuous to suggest that spider webs are the only thing being studied. The number of experiments numbers in the hundreds that have already been completed. You can debate the merit of that research based upon the funding being done, but far less has been done with far more money in other endeavors of government activity. The entire ISS program, including all shuttle launches and training and all of the maintenance costs, is still less than the amount of money spent on air conditioning equipment used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
As for private stations going into space and trying to duplicate the features of the ISS, I would bet that Robert Bigelow would be willing to help you out if you had a good idea and some funding sources to consider. I agree it would be done much cheaper by private industry, but it already is built... so do you really think it needs to be thrown away and splashed in the Pacific Ocean?
Japan is somebody you shouldn't write off either. They did build the Kibo module and have paid a substantial part of the costs involved too. If you would ask anybody involved, I would dare say that Japan is an equal partner in terms of decisions like this. The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, is making plenty of progress on their own as well and certainly deserves to be recognized as a space faring nation, including having an astronaut corps of its own.
Good news for the Russian Space Agency. They get to ferry Americans up to space for at least another 10 years.
I wouldn't be so quick to make that assumption. There are certainly other vehicles which can take people to the ISS besides the Soyuz spacecraft, and one of which will be flying within the decade. I would even suggest all three will be flying routinely.
He wasn't talking about the USSR. He was talking about East Germany vs. WestGermany, not to mention North vs. South Korea.
In Germany, you had people of similar educational background, the same language, the same culture, and frankly all of the hallmarks of a properly controlled scientific study where the only real difference was the government which was administered over each one. Heck, in the middle of East Germany you even had a secondary experiment of East vs. West Berlin for comparison (where it could be argued that West Berlin had a whole bunch of things going against it and should have collapsed).
This isn't a red herring, but rather something on your part trying to redefine socialism as something not equal to communism in any way.
I suppose you could also use the examples of Hong Kong vs. Shanghai, although the Chinese government has screwed up Hong Kong so it isn't so much of a contrasting example not to mention that Shanghai is hardly all that socialist anymore either.
The argument could also be said more about liberty in general, as in the ability to do whatever you want without needing approval from the government. The more government regulation that somebody needs to deal with (and you must admit that the German Stasi were very controlling of the lives of people in East Germany), the less likely they are able to provide for themselves or others. Perhaps you can have a genuinely free society that also has a general socialist attitude towards its people, but the principle of general liberty for individuals is the point, not communism vs. capitalism.
Allow everyone to vote multiple times, changing their votes as they wish, up and until the deadline, where the last vote will count as just 1 vote.
That isn't nearly as easy as you are suggesting, and it gives the government (including incumbent candidates) still the ability to track how you voted giving even more leverage to coerce your vote and cause intimidation. That is sort of the point of the "Australian Ballot" (the place it was introduced prior to its usage in America) where you vote in a closed voting booth where nobody can see what vote you cast, and then your ballot is anonymized by mixing it in with that of many other voters as soon as it has been verified that you have cast one and only one vote.
That process of making it obscure as to which ballot is your ballot is precisely the process that keeps the intimidation away. Your suggestion of being "easy" to discard earlier votes implies that the ballot you have cast has been tracked so it can be discarded, thus it can also be proven how you cast your vote.
Yes, it is possible to randomize the ballots after the conclusion of the election, but by having that process happen as you put your ballot into the voting box you can be assured that nobody else has had access to your voting record to track your vote other than yourself at the point in time it becomes anonymous.
I would suggest you read this article for more details. It most definitely involves Kickstarter and similar websites, as the regulations are about how those websites are required to hire accountants and lawyers to review every project..... or simply kick the door down and let every possible person set up a project.
Specifically, if one of these crowdfunding portals does any sort of culling of a project (including filtering out obvious trolls proposing patent nonsense or gibberish), they must hire these people who must conform to these new SEC rules. Craig's List, Amazon, and eBay aren't being regulated with these rules, but that isn't what you were talking about in terms of crowdsourcing.
You should be fully aware that major investors and big finance companies and the major mutual fund houses really don't have any problems trying to invest in anything they want. Either those kind of investors have a senator or congressman in their pocket to make legal anything they want to do or at the very least a team of lawyers and accountants to bullshit their way into doing quite literally anything they want to do. In other words, the SEC doesn't really regulate "Big Finance" as you put it and any additional regulations don't matter for those guys as it simply keeps any other potential competition from becoming the next Warren Buffet. In fact, Warren Buffet could never have built his business if he started in today's regulatory climate with the cash & position he was in when he started.
This is all about small time investors and the attitude that somebody with a spare hundred dollars is incapable of being able to make an informed decision about a potential investment opportunity. Crowd sourcing is all about ordinary people with small projects that can't afford lawyers & accountants trying to get other ordinary people to invest in their ideas.
I don't think so. The SEC regulates selling stock in companies and that is what they are doing here.
I've invested in several Kickstarter projects, and I have never been promised any sort of share in a company for that investment. Generally it is just things like T-shirts, perhaps an early Alpha/Beta release of a game, one of the first copies of some hardware project, or a DVD copy of a movie that the project is trying to make. Almost every one of these projects is extremely careful not to invoke SEC rules about selling stock of any kind. High end investments for those projects usually are things like being able to sit down and have lunch with the development team, go "behind the scenes" and see whatever it is that is being made during development, or in the case of a movie or video game you can have your likeness or avatar (depending on the project) be included including any pseudonym you may fancy.
So no, stock is not an issue here, at least not any more than somebody selling stuff on eBay or Amazon. This is not the penny stock markets and has nothing to do with actual securities being exchanged, unless you think of a DVD or Blu-Ray disc as something of an investment tool?
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The high school that my teenage kids attend is a charter school that has no uniforms and pretty much lets the kids be kids. The focus of the school is on the arts (which should tell you a thing or two about how they dress) with an incredibly talented staff that really connects with the kids in a way that really works. One of the keys to the school is that it is quite small.... about 150 students total for a 4-year high school in all grades.
The small school size (where the other schools in the area that are not "alternative high schools" are all 3k+ students) gives the principal the ability to literally know each student in the school not just by name, but pretty much knows their GPA, what classes they are struggling with, and can give a biographical outline of each student including extra-curricular activities and hobbies that student does. The principal also openly recruits students who are struggling at other schools and may not have the best experience in high school, so often kids who may be contemplating dropping out of high school altogether are attending. That does drop standardized test scores as they are not necessarily the top tier students, but there is definitely a support network including other students that really step in to make friends. Kids who otherwise slip through the cracks and don't get noticed are definitely rounded up and encouraged to succeed. Troubled kids who are screwups are definitely given a chance.... but they either shape up or are kicked out of the school.
My oldest child was definitely one of those kids slipping through the cracks and just lost in the system before he attended this school. My wife and I were told by the school administration at the public middle school that getting a job at McDonalds was the best he could hope for in life, and that he would be lucky simply to complete the four years of high school with a certificate of completion (they held no hope he would even get a diploma). Upon switching to this charter school, my child not only thrived, but excelled at his classes, took advanced placement classes as well as some concurrent enrollment classes at the local university (where he got A grades at the university), and not only graduated but missed becoming valedictorian because he discovered girls his senior year and let his grades slip (he got B grades instead of As for a couple of classes and a couple of other students passed him up in GPA). In other words, he became a very healthy teenage kid and I'm real proud of him particularly now that he is attending a university as a freshman and his college grades are pretty close to what he was getting in high school. In other words, the high school prepared him for college and did so in a way that the public schools were planning on never doing.
I'll also note that in the state where I live (Utah), charter schools do get state-level funding (aka the "per pupil appropriations"), but they do not have the ability to levy local taxes like the public school districts. In other words, they are expected to meet the same performance levels for an amount of money substantially less than what the local public schools do, and yet they thrive and do better than the school districts. It just shows that money isn't everything. The only other source of income for these schools is the state land trust (where one out of every 16 parcels where set aside for education and mineral extraction, oil, or lumber leases gets paid into that fund). That is also a per-pupil source of income, but only amounts to about $20k this year for that school. It is enough to equip a computer lab, buy some other expensive piece of equipment, or do some other significant project, but not enough to even fund an extra teacher.
Admittedly most other measures are subjective and superficial, but you can note some academic standards like some sort of curriculum standard and try to evaluate in ways other than passing out standardized tests to all of the students to see if those standards have been met. You could do a random sampling of the students instead and interview them to see if they understand key concepts, see what they think of their instructors, and take a few random samples of completed homework.
Of course what the Charter School movement is trying to suggest is that ultimately parents know in their gut what local schools do a better job and can "vote with their feet" by enrolling their students in schools that perform. Schools which don't get parental support simply fail from a lack of students under such an approach, which presumes a sort of free market approach. Unfortunately few state charter school programs are really a free market like this too, but that is the goal.
Like maybe deciding to go with the cheaper o-rings with the narrower operating temperatures; just how cold could a Florida launch be anyway?
Engineers from Thiokol wanted to use the more expensive o-rings in that case.... and NASA overruled demanding the cheaper ones. Furthermore, Thiokol also wanted to scrub the launch on the day that Challenger flew.... and NASA administrators thought it was politically a bad idea and flew anyway.
This whole line of thought is bullshit as it presumes that a commercial company would risk lives to save $10, as if they want to pay higher per launch premiums to their insurance providers not to mention want the blood of people on their hands. Look at the problems RKK Energia is facing right now with their vehicles because there have been failures last year and tell me launching companies don't worry about that stuff.
Except for the fact that Lockheed and Boeing have been NASA's contractors for decades.
The difference is how these contracts are funded. The COTS contracts for SpaceX and Orbital have two huge things going for them:
1) These are not "cost-plus" contracts, but rather fixed price contracts where any cost savings during operations is kept entirely by the launch provider. If either company can save even a few hundred dollars by doing something cheaper or avoiding a purchase of the proverbial $10k wrench & hammer, those companies see that savings directly. Neither Lockheed-Martin nor Boeing care about stuff like that as they simply pass those "costs" in the "cost-plus" contract on to taxpayers. There are no cost overruns in a fixed price contract too, so if either Orbital or SpaceX have some unexpected costs showing up.... they need to eat those costs.
2) Both SpaceX and Orbital are free to use these launch vehicles for any other purpose as everything they've made belongs to them and not NASA or the federal government.
I do think there is a time and place for cost-plus contracts where there is a genuine national priority that something absolutely must be made. None the less, this really is a different thing and in a great many ways these other companies have been extensions of the government in how they made their vehicles.
You had better tell that to Richard Branson that his dream is not going to be realized. For myself, I put Branson behind Jeff Bezos in terms of who is going to make the vehicles capable of going to orbit first, and I have my doubts about either one. Yes, I realize that orbital velocities are much less than suborbital hops, but I am not talking about suborbital spacecraft in this case.
I will also tip my hat to Virgin Galactic so far as trying to get airline-like operations out of sub-orbital spacecraft. If he can get it to work out, it will be substantially cheaper mode of transportation to that flight regime than anything else even considered.... cheaper even than the approach that SpaceX is going after. The approach of Virgin Galactic is also a much harder system. Stratolaunch is trying to make what will be the next generation of the White Knight, where the original goal was to put a Falcon 9 hanging under the air carrier as a mobile launch platform.
The White Knight II is planned to be used as a launch platform for small sat payloads below $500/kg to LEO. They plan to develop the rocket once SpaceshipTwo finally gets built, but I have no doubt those engineers are capable of getting it done. The ten year delay in getting commercial suborbital operations going has mainly been with the propulsion system, where Virgin Galactic (and Scaled Composites before them) tried to get their hybrid rocket motors operational. This is still the weak part of the entire SpaceshipTwo design and where most of the time is being spent.
The only real advantage I see from an air launch system is that it gets you out of the weather (a real problem for Florida launches). The comparatively tiny altitude gain and velocity from the aircraft is trivial. Still, a 100% reusable (except for fuel) system is something worth looking at, and is the main feature to that approach. Exploding rockets are also not so big of a deal when they blow up at 40k feet and can be done over oceans or otherwise far from population centers too. The hybrid motor system, assuming they can get the chemistry to work properly, is also something very simple and easy to use in operation where more time spent in design will make for cheaper operations (as opposed to horrible decisions in the Space Shuttle design which pushed development costs into operations on a routine basis).
Mars-One does not and never will build a launch vehicle capable of going into orbit. They may be entrepreneurs in space, but that is not what the GP was talking about. If you were suggesting Boeing or Lockheed-Martin was capable of competing.... that at least would be talking about companies who build rockets.
EADS-Astrium/AirBus (they are going through a reorganization at the moment) is arguably a major contender for private commercial spaceflight launch as well. RKK Energia (the company who makes the Soyuz rockets) is also a private company who is competitive with the launch costs of both SpaceX and Orbital. You can debate if they really are a private companies or not (they do have shareholders and private investors... but also governments as investors as well).
Richard Branson has said he has his sights upon orbital spaceflight with Virgin Galactic, and there is also Stratolaunch, but those are the only other companies I can see being real competition. I had high hopes for ARCA, the Romanian space group that is doing some interesting things, but their projects seem to take even longer to happen than I thought. I'm sort of pleasantly surprised they are still doing stuff. Another group to watch is Copenhagen Suborbitals, who is building flying hardware (they have sent aloft more than a couple missions) and have technology that could at least theoretically make the trip into orbit over time.
But I still ask, how come commercial space didn't happen in 1980s. Was technology too exotic? There was the Soviet threat but no ITAR.
You might want to dig a bit into the history of OTRAG to see some of the difficulties that people faced in the early development of commercial spaceflight. The largest problem was mainly a "giggle factor" where regulators and people involved with even permitting this kind of activity happening. It took Ronald Reagan to pass the Commercial Space Launch Act which in turn created the Office of Commercial Spaceflight and encouraged government agencies to hire private companies to perform services that previously were done by government personnel.
In other words, it was largely a political issue rather than necessarily a technological one. When AT&T sent up their Testar satellites, they needed specific legislation passed by Congress just to be permitted to launch vehicles into space. For a long time it is this whole permitting process that has had the government getting in the face of anybody trying to seriously consider going into space, and even now the regulations on building spacecraft still are a major hassle and consume full time employees just to meet those regulations even in a very small start-up company with just a dozen employees. Don't even think about starting a company with space-based assets or things going into space without one or more lawyers on staff.
The other aspect is that the internet also created a whole bunch of tech savvy geeks with money. Many of them wanted to do stuff in space, having grown up watching the Apollo Moon missions and hoping that things would be moving along faster in space than it actually has. There were dreams that by the year 2000 we would already have colonies on Mars, yet that didn't happen. Arguably the reason why that didn't happen is because it was too expensive to go there, and Congress seriously gutted the space program following the completion of the Apollo missions. These geeks decided that since government programs aren't getting the job done, they would be willing to try to do it themselves.
The X-Prize is something that has been a catalyst for getting the current generation of commercial spaceflight happening, where conferences before the X-Prize were mostly concentrating on how to expand NASA funding and building constituencies, and conferences after the X-Prize (particularly after Burt Rutan won that X-Prize) started talking about venture capital funding, business plans, and how to avoid getting bogged down in government regulations to get your project going. There really has been a radical change in thinking in recent years, and that explains part of what is happening in commercial spaceflight at the moment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7YAN9--3MA
Not to where this vehicle is going. That F-15 was pretty much limited by physics and its design to the altitude record (again the airframe record and not really even impressive compared to other vehicles at the time other than perhaps impressive compared to other fighter planes.... the record they were trying to make).
Better altitude records were met with the X-15 a decade earlier, and even those records for vehicles launched from a runway, but none the less something much more worthy of comparison. On the other hand, Spaceship One, currently on display in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, was able to exceed the altitude records of even the X-15 and is the vehicle that is merely being upgraded and designed to hold passengers as well.... something that F-15 never could do.
Because it's obvious that our technology has peaked and no one's going to colonize the universe.
How do you possibly know that? What are the causes of "technology peaking" that you are referring to? Is it something about the human condition specifically or is it something more political and something about this particular civilization we live in at the moment? What is keeping technological progress from happening?
It is possible that there is no more science to discover, no more technology to develop, and that what we have right now is the ultimate limit of what can be done in space. I just think you are being an asshole if you are active in trying to prevent others from at least trying to see if there might be more, and stopping somebody else from even trying to leave this planet. If otherwise you are just being a stupid commentator on the sidelines hoping to see everybody fail as you crawl into your hut trying to restart your hunter-gatherer tribe, you are equally being small minded.
No doubt the OP could be written a little more clear that this is an airframe record as opposed to an all-time aeronautical record (which are held by the Voyager 2 for any human artifact and the Apollo 13 crew for any piloted vehicle for altitude or distance from the Earth). None the less, it is showing regular progress and that Virgin Galactic, or more specifically The Spaceship Company (really, the name of the company making these vehicles) is pushing the envelope on its development.
The goals of this particular project are pretty impressive though, and what is really significant here is that somebody is taking the initiative to build upon the experience gained from the X-15 flights and pushing this particular line of spacecraft technology. If these guys are successful and can continue to upgrade the technology for ever higher altitudes and ever longer distances, it will reduce the cost of spaceflight down to levels that resemble the cost of at least a Concorde trans-Atlantic flight. That is something a mere mortal ordinary person in a first world country could afford if they really wanted the chance.
Other spaceship builders are trying other approaches, and it has been long criticized that perhaps an air launched rocket design like SpaceShip Two is a dead end technology. What they have accomplished is to cheapen the cost of flights that previously were conducted on sounding rockets, and for a very modest amount of money ($100k is a very small amount of money when you are talking about spaceflight costs) you can test a research project that you may want to put on the ISS before it goes up in an orbital rocket. There are several very pragmatic applications of this vehicle even if it doesn't ever achieve orbit.
I think he was talking about Elementary Education majors. They know how to count lots of gates.... white gates, black gates, picket fence gates, and other kinds of gates. They will even show you how to put that on a proper number line to count to more than the number of fingers on both hands.
None of this stuff I've mentioned would be possible without the ISS.
I don't know about whether this stuff would be possible, but it'd certainly be cheaper without the ISS, when it were done.
Treatiing the existing ISS structure as sunk costs with the exception of any additional maintenance issues for ongoing development, what kind of costs are we talking about for similar kinds of research currently done on the ISS but performed upon other platforms? I simply disagree with you in regards to the cost being even orders of magnitude cheaper.... and much of that research simply can't be done with single purpose built spacecraft. Even for those experiments which are largely automated, the ISS still has some excellent and cost effective facilities where experiment builders don't need to deal with the substantial overhead of building the spacecraft but rather simply concentrate on the experiment itself.
It is a fair conjecture to suggest it would be cheaper, but the costs for sending experiments up with NanoRacks seem to suggest otherwise. If you can suggest strongly that NanoRacks is being heavily subsidized by taxpayers (other than like I said sunk costs that aren't recoverable from the construction of the ISS), I would definitely be much more pursuaded to accept your argument.
I am not going to dispute that building something like the ISS could have been done much, much cheaper and without the incredibly huge overhead that happened in terms of a government bureaucracy sending up over priced parts on a vehicle designed by a committee that was never really good at any one mission and hugely expensive to operate. Certainly building a completely new station from scratch using something like a Falcon Heavy for launching the components into space and using Bigelow habitats could be built substantially cheaper. Using a back of the envelope guess on published prices for those components, such a station could be built for less than $1.5 billion or about the cost of a single shuttle mission and have more volume and more power to get things done. That is even being generous with the expenses and possibly could be made cheaper still, but that is at least a first stab at a rough price. Why NASA is spending twice that amount annually for ongoing expenses just to operate the ISS suggests there may be some other places that the money is being spent.
Regardless, there still is value for space based research. As bad as NASA is and how bloated that agency is performing, it is surprisingly one of the better run federal agencies that actually performs practical and useful functions that positively impact ordinary citizens in their daily lives. Far more money gets dumped on far more useless projects (the TSA in particular comes to mind, not to mention a great deal of what the NSA is doing) that banging on NASA waste is particularly pointless.
The Russians have sent tourists to the ISS, so why not Virgin Galactic?
The company to look at is Bigelow Aerospace. FYI, this company is partnering with Boeing to build a spacecraft that will carry passengers at a fraction of the price that Space Adventures is currently charging for that opportunity.
As for a microgravity lab, note that NanoRacks already provides this service. They are literally open to anybody willing to use their checkbook to purchase a flight spot. This is no longer the time for theoretical rants, but a time to act and do something as the opportunity is here. At best, all you can do now is to find cheaper ways to get these things to happen or simply take advantage of the opportunities that exist.
All the stuff could be done for a fraction of the cost with robotic probes in orbit. The ISS and manned spaceflight is pork for Houston.
I would say this is utter bullshit.
Yes, there can be some interesting things done with robotic probes, and it is possible that some of the experiments done on the ISS could be operated remotely and doesn't need constant attention by astronauts (like many of the experiments on the ISS do anyway). Still, I think you take for granted how difficult it is to build a spacecraft designed to meet a specific research objective and also dismiss out of hand what value there is to having astronauts being there with the experiment to get them in working order or to troubleshoot the experiments while they are in orbit. Better yet, you are similarly dismissing observations that can be done by somebody in space that may not be readily apparent remotely.
If you want to go into the manned vs. robotic missions feud, you are really being incredibly stupid and short sighted. Both are needed and both deserve funding. I think Carl Sagan (the guy who introduced this meme) did the whole world a massive disservice by introducing this concept, as he was flat out wrong too. Harrison Schmit performed far more science by his trip to the Moon than all of the robotic geology missions combined and discovered samples that would have literally been impossible to obtain without sending an experienced geologist to the Moon. When asked if he could use some astronauts, the lead researcher for the Mars Science Lab (aka Curiosity) said absolutely it would help.
I'll admit there is some low hanging fruit still left that can be collected by robotic probes, and don't make it seem that I think these robotic missions need to end. Far from it, as they are certainly useful, but sending people into space to perform research is also important. That isn't even touching on the fact that without a manned spaceflight program it is remotely possible that all robotic missions would be cut too, thus their funding depends on continued manned exploration.
If you want somebody or something to blame for the current woes of the robotic missions, blame the James West Space Telescope instead. That is a fiscal black hole that is sucking up nearly the entire robotic exploration budget, and I still have my doubts it will even fly. It isn't even a proper replacement of the Hubble telescope. For the money being dumped into that vehicle, literally a thousand Arkyd 100 telescopes could be purchased by a company more than willing to sell them in that quantity. That would include launch costs for that thousand telescopes too. More to the ponit, don't blame the manned spaceflight program for the problems of massive mismanagement of the robotic missions.
Couldn't NASA list the experiments, what they are trying to find out and if they have been successful?
NASA does list the experiments. They are sorted in multiple directions too (by date, mission, researchers, and alphabetically). None the less, your point that media outlets don't really pay attention to this list is a good one and something that should be done to smack some of these journalists into reality.
Another really interesting company who is currently sending experiments up to the ISS is Nanoracks, a for-profit company partnering with NASA on the ISS who is willing to put literally anybody's experiment onto the ISS in a standard enclosure. Results can be either transmitted by telemetry or physically returned to the Earth after completion, exposed to the vacuum of LEO space or kept inside depending on your experimental variables. Thanks to some cooperation Nanoracks has even been able to offer 4 inch cubesats (aka about four inches on each side of the cube) that can be launched from the ISS. If you have some spare bucks, one company even allows you to operate your own satellite through a web browser. It only costs $1k per week where you can develop your own software to use the devices on that satellite. That is a price that a mere mortal like myself or even a college student could put together if they cared.... and that company is even interested in high school groups doing experiments in space.
None of this stuff I've mentioned would be possible without the ISS. Admittedly another space station could be built to do the same thing, but that would require simialr capital outlays to get such a station built in the first place. The ISS is currently open and doing this sort of thing, so it seems a shame to waste this opportunity. Companies like Nanoracks are not being subsidized at least for the astronaut's time and expendible supplies (that is part of the cost of sending those experiments to space), so I do think it would be a shame to destroy a perfectly good research lab now that it is built even if you may think it was far too expensive to build in the first place.
When does INL turn a profit? Los Alamos? Amundsen-Scott? Those are all major laboratories doing basic research. The ISS justifiably fits right in there with all of those facilities, and I"m glad that it is treated as such.
Part of the problem is that the ISS really is incomplete to be able to support the personnel needed to make it really thrive as a research lab. It was supposed to have a crew of six astronauts on board full-time (that was the original design) where two of those astronauts would deal with station keeping duties (at least trading off the equivalent of two astronauts doing that work) while the other four would be doing basic research.
That hasn't happened The TransHab module in particular is needed to provide additional berthing arrangements (aka sleeping quarters) for the astronauts or at least another lab module that can expand the occupancy as well as one of the other partners (either ESA or NASA) needs to develop another spacecraft to bring astronauts up and down. NASA is working on that so it is just a matter of time.
Regardless, the ISS is doing some tremendous work right now, and it is disingenuous to suggest that spider webs are the only thing being studied. The number of experiments numbers in the hundreds that have already been completed. You can debate the merit of that research based upon the funding being done, but far less has been done with far more money in other endeavors of government activity. The entire ISS program, including all shuttle launches and training and all of the maintenance costs, is still less than the amount of money spent on air conditioning equipment used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
As for private stations going into space and trying to duplicate the features of the ISS, I would bet that Robert Bigelow would be willing to help you out if you had a good idea and some funding sources to consider. I agree it would be done much cheaper by private industry, but it already is built... so do you really think it needs to be thrown away and splashed in the Pacific Ocean?
Japan is somebody you shouldn't write off either. They did build the Kibo module and have paid a substantial part of the costs involved too. If you would ask anybody involved, I would dare say that Japan is an equal partner in terms of decisions like this. The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, is making plenty of progress on their own as well and certainly deserves to be recognized as a space faring nation, including having an astronaut corps of its own.
Good news for the Russian Space Agency. They get to ferry Americans up to space for at least another 10 years.
I wouldn't be so quick to make that assumption. There are certainly other vehicles which can take people to the ISS besides the Soyuz spacecraft, and one of which will be flying within the decade. I would even suggest all three will be flying routinely.
He wasn't talking about the USSR. He was talking about East Germany vs. WestGermany, not to mention North vs. South Korea.
In Germany, you had people of similar educational background, the same language, the same culture, and frankly all of the hallmarks of a properly controlled scientific study where the only real difference was the government which was administered over each one. Heck, in the middle of East Germany you even had a secondary experiment of East vs. West Berlin for comparison (where it could be argued that West Berlin had a whole bunch of things going against it and should have collapsed).
This isn't a red herring, but rather something on your part trying to redefine socialism as something not equal to communism in any way.
I suppose you could also use the examples of Hong Kong vs. Shanghai, although the Chinese government has screwed up Hong Kong so it isn't so much of a contrasting example not to mention that Shanghai is hardly all that socialist anymore either.
The argument could also be said more about liberty in general, as in the ability to do whatever you want without needing approval from the government. The more government regulation that somebody needs to deal with (and you must admit that the German Stasi were very controlling of the lives of people in East Germany), the less likely they are able to provide for themselves or others. Perhaps you can have a genuinely free society that also has a general socialist attitude towards its people, but the principle of general liberty for individuals is the point, not communism vs. capitalism.
On the bright side, President Snowden will finally be able to pardon himself, return home, and begin to reform the NSA.
As funny as it sounds, this isn't a bad idea. It likely will be the only way to really get Edward Snowden to be successful in returning to America.
Thats easy to solve.
Allow everyone to vote multiple times, changing their votes as they wish, up and until the deadline, where the last vote will count as just 1 vote.
That isn't nearly as easy as you are suggesting, and it gives the government (including incumbent candidates) still the ability to track how you voted giving even more leverage to coerce your vote and cause intimidation. That is sort of the point of the "Australian Ballot" (the place it was introduced prior to its usage in America) where you vote in a closed voting booth where nobody can see what vote you cast, and then your ballot is anonymized by mixing it in with that of many other voters as soon as it has been verified that you have cast one and only one vote.
That process of making it obscure as to which ballot is your ballot is precisely the process that keeps the intimidation away. Your suggestion of being "easy" to discard earlier votes implies that the ballot you have cast has been tracked so it can be discarded, thus it can also be proven how you cast your vote.
Yes, it is possible to randomize the ballots after the conclusion of the election, but by having that process happen as you put your ballot into the voting box you can be assured that nobody else has had access to your voting record to track your vote other than yourself at the point in time it becomes anonymous.
I would suggest you read this article for more details. It most definitely involves Kickstarter and similar websites, as the regulations are about how those websites are required to hire accountants and lawyers to review every project..... or simply kick the door down and let every possible person set up a project.
Specifically, if one of these crowdfunding portals does any sort of culling of a project (including filtering out obvious trolls proposing patent nonsense or gibberish), they must hire these people who must conform to these new SEC rules. Craig's List, Amazon, and eBay aren't being regulated with these rules, but that isn't what you were talking about in terms of crowdsourcing.
You should be fully aware that major investors and big finance companies and the major mutual fund houses really don't have any problems trying to invest in anything they want. Either those kind of investors have a senator or congressman in their pocket to make legal anything they want to do or at the very least a team of lawyers and accountants to bullshit their way into doing quite literally anything they want to do. In other words, the SEC doesn't really regulate "Big Finance" as you put it and any additional regulations don't matter for those guys as it simply keeps any other potential competition from becoming the next Warren Buffet. In fact, Warren Buffet could never have built his business if he started in today's regulatory climate with the cash & position he was in when he started.
This is all about small time investors and the attitude that somebody with a spare hundred dollars is incapable of being able to make an informed decision about a potential investment opportunity. Crowd sourcing is all about ordinary people with small projects that can't afford lawyers & accountants trying to get other ordinary people to invest in their ideas.
> It's overreach
I don't think so. The SEC regulates selling stock in companies and that is what they are doing here.
I've invested in several Kickstarter projects, and I have never been promised any sort of share in a company for that investment. Generally it is just things like T-shirts, perhaps an early Alpha/Beta release of a game, one of the first copies of some hardware project, or a DVD copy of a movie that the project is trying to make. Almost every one of these projects is extremely careful not to invoke SEC rules about selling stock of any kind. High end investments for those projects usually are things like being able to sit down and have lunch with the development team, go "behind the scenes" and see whatever it is that is being made during development, or in the case of a movie or video game you can have your likeness or avatar (depending on the project) be included including any pseudonym you may fancy.
So no, stock is not an issue here, at least not any more than somebody selling stuff on eBay or Amazon. This is not the penny stock markets and has nothing to do with actual securities being exchanged, unless you think of a DVD or Blu-Ray disc as something of an investment tool?