It was the folks in Huntsville that designed and largely built the Saturn V and were heavily involved in the construction and maintenance of the Space Shuttle.
Yeah, they are a bunch of hillbilly hicks that don't know a thing about spaceflight.
It isn't like space stations area new concept that has never been tried before. I'd dare say that unless you are planning on doing something really daring like a space station capable of holding about 100 people simultaneously and deal with significant logistical issues that sort of scale of activity presents, you aren't really cutting new ground in this area of human endeavor.
The Manned Venus Flyby looked like an interesting project that certainly would require things like radiation protection and long term sustainability in space without immediate or even short-term resupply. On the other hand, I wish they would expand upon the concept of the NAUTILUS-X, which instead of simply an Earth-Moon L-5 laboratory like seems to be presented with this article is a genuine spaceship (as opposed to spacecraft).
The lack of using either a Trans-hab like module or one of the Bigelow modules seems to be a real lack of even seeing what the current state of the art technology in this area is even at. The idea of using cylinders that would need to be limited in size by the the cargo bay of a shuttle seems incredibly old fashioned thinking in particular. There is no particular reason why the quarters need to be cramped, other than the fact that the modules presumably must be built on the Earth and get through the atmosphere in some fashion first before being deployed. Space is huge, so mind bogglingly large that it seems ludicrous that quarters in spaceflight should be cramped at all. Mass has some role to play, but moving a cubic meter or two of air (which is needed anyway) is trivial by comparison.
Bigelow Aerospace has been studying these issues, and will likely relegate projects like this onto the ashheap of other failed NASA programs like SLS, Constellation, Dynasoar, and DC-X. If they don't actually plan on building these things, I wonder in part why they even bother with progressing yesterday's technology one step further towards today.
More likely they're afraid on-line courses will kill off their meatspace universities, and then they won't have a vanity football team.
(I think some states, including the one where I am now, wouldn't fund higher education at all, except to avoid being the only state in the Union without a football team.)
The purpose of the law is a legitimate one: If you claim to be an institution of higher education, you should be in a position to ensure that graduates have access to transcripts, accreditation standards met (as applicable), and some sort of proof that some actual teaching took place. It is being designed to weed out diploma mills and to also go after those who would set up a school, take the money from the students, then disappear into the night with the money but leaving the students to hang out to dry after they have paid tuition. Schools which are not solvent shouldn't take the tuition of the students for the next term.... which the law covers.
There are also a number of schools like the University of Phoenix (to cite an example) which offer on-line courses with paid tuition and grant degrees that are accredited with national accreditation agencies. Another example is Western Governor's University. Such schools would need to coordinate with the Minnesota Office of Higher Education with regards to citizens of Minnesota... and frankly I think this is a reasonable law in that context. If a school goes bankrupt, the law requires that some sort of trustee is made available for transcripts and other records as well so courses taken by students can be recognized by employers or future educational endeavors.
I could imagine schools like the University of Nigeria would be the kind of school that they would want to shut down. Note though this site is currently off-line and I should mention this isn't the real school of this name which is at http://unn.edu.ng/. Fly by night schools should be shut down like snake oil salesmen. Of course there are plenty of Viagra websites and spamvertisements on the internet where such laws haven't stopped that from being marketed either.
How this law applies to on-line psuedoschools which don't offer credit nor charge tuition would seem quite a bit weaker, and 1st amendment issues would start to much more strongly apply. There is no money to refund if the website goes dark, and the lack of credits or even lack of a promise of credentials by taking the courses seems to make even a preservation of transcripts sort of pointless. Stuff like the Khan Academy badges might be a little bit tricky, but I don't think that really amounts to be a real problem.
Don't get into the conspiracy theories and claim things that simply are not true. This has absolutely nothing to do with somebody coming up with a cheaper solution to education and being competitive with brick and mortar schools at a very small fraction of the price... if any money is being exchanged at all.
Does this have any basis of reality to what is being talked about in terms of the State of Minnesota and their "Office of Higher Education"?
That some silly paper pusher has interpreted decades old laws that hardly even anticipated internet distribution of educational content (a real surprise for Minnesota... as they were one of the first states to be involved with distance education).
All that is happening here is an over reaction by one unelected bureaucrat that has yet to have the wrath of the state legislature rain down upon him or her. More than likely a state legislator will simply pass a new law making an exception for on-line institutions that are "non-profit" or don't charge admission, and for those schools who do charge tuition or fees for their course ware will be required to submit some paperwork if they do something in the state. This will be especially true if there are to be an exchange of college credits with these "on-line" schools or degrees granted.
As has every presidential administration since Lydon Johnson and arguably even since William McKinley. Forget about the fact that each President swears an oath not to defend America, but rather to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America", when was the last time you saw a U.S. President assert he couldn't do something because the Constitution forbade him from acting?
The sad thing is that the real policy setting and rules making which ultimately determine who becomes president is in the hands of a much, much smaller minority. The elections that really matter today are those for the "state central committee" of each political party who in turn (either through convention or in that committee meeting... it really doesn't matter as the rules are set in those committees anyway) who in turn select the national committee members.
In the case of the Republican Party (because I've studied it a whole bunch more) the real power to make changes and to set the national agenda for that party is in the hands of 110 "national committee members" (two from every state + territories including DC) who set the convention agenda, make the delegate rules, act as the "credentials committee" (aka those who recognize if you will be a delegate on a case by case basis), and really are where the actual political power in America resides. Note that these "national committee members" (they exist for both Republicans and Democrats) are not members of congress but separately selected for their positions in what is sometimes not a very democratic process in the first place. At best, they are selected during state conventions by state delegates... if those delegates even bother showing up to the vote as it isn't one of the sexy "presidential" votes or even deciding the nomination for the senatorial candidates. Often the place where these national committee members are selected is at a separate convention different than the main election year convention as well... leading to even fewer delegates being involved in the selection of these people.
Ron Paul found this out the hard way, as did most of the contenders for the Republican Party as Mitt Romney was able to get the support of most of these national committee members and definitely the support of most state committees as well. That is why Ron Paul supporters were tossed out into the cold, because they didn't have the internal support from within the party to get the job done. That is also why almost nobody gets the nomination unless they have been running for the Presidency several times: they need to get "their people" into those very important national committee positions in the first place.
In other words, those actually selecting who becomes President of the United States isn't even the 10% of the eligible voters who bother to show up to primaries or participate in neighborhood caucus meetings, it is instead that very select and largely self-appointed groups of just a few hundred people in both major parties who set the rules to decide who gets the job, or just 1 out of a million possible voters set up in a manner that is clearly not proportional by population either.
I think calling this a choice between two evils is very appropriate. The USA is headed for a cliff of disaster (in a whole bunch of ways) and the current choice is between whether to apply the brakes or hit the accelerator. It doesn't really matter because the cliff is only 100 feet away and you are going over 100 mph. Somebody has yelled to turn the steering wheel instead, but nobody listened when it mattered.
A part of me would like to see Obama get elected, as he will need to take the blame for what happens next. It won't be pretty regardless of who is in charge.
Of course many thought we as a species would have established permanent bases on the Moon and even a manned spaceflight mission to.... Saturn. (or was that Jupiter?)
I'd personally put the likelihood of anybody from the Earth ever getting to the Alpha Centauri system or for that matter any star within about 15 light years of the Earth no earlier than the year 2500 A.D., if even that early. That even is assuming we find an Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone of a star with liquid water oceans anywhere within that range.
There might be an unmanned space probe that will be sent to one of these stellar systems by 2154 (not to arrive at that time... just get sent by some future successor to NASA). If it takes a century or two to make the trip, that wouldn't be a big deal. Hopefully successful nuclear fusion reactors will finally be a proven technology by that year.
I would argue that the real 'inventor" of the atomic bomb, at least so far as to produce the scientific theory (nuclear fission) that firmly established how it could be built, was discovered by Lise Meitner. It was even more sobering that she was a prominent scientist in a university of Nazi Germany, but was kept from actually doing much with her theories because she was both a woman and a Jew. As a result, she had to flee to Sweden in what is a most amazing story worthy of an Indiana Jones movie.
She should have received a Nobel Prize for her work, but the International Atomic Union gave her an honor worthy of her accomplishments: naming an element after her. She certainly ranks right with Marie Curie in terms of accomplishments.
Interestingly, she was offered a job at Los Alamos and flat out refused to be involved because she completely understood what the implications of building such a weapons meant and what was required to get it built.
Why start with vacuum tubes when you can go all the way back to Leyden jar batteries and spinning copper wires using hand-made tools and raw ore you dug out of the ground. I suppose you also blow your own silla-based glass too?
More correctly and accurately the "logical if-then" really is modus ponens.
Interestingly, in formal logic discussions (aka "philosophical logic") this is one of the most used "functions" as following the syllogistic pattern through modus ponens gives you valid arguments, with the exception of "A" being true and "B" being false.... which is the logical definition of a fallacy.
I had the good fortune in my academic career of landing in a formal logic class taught by a defrocked Jesuit priest. He knew next to nothing about computers or electronics, but he understood syllogisms and formal logic from a classical viewpoint and gave me insights into computer programming and electronics that I wouldn't have had otherwise. It also gave me clinching proof that computer geeks do need to take at least some classes in the humanities to learn about their craft.
I thought I was an expert in logic going into the class and certainly I could make truth tables in my sleep and perform all sorts of mathematical operations on boolean variables. I discovered I was just an infant intellectually on the topic after just a couple of days of listening to this professor.
I wonder what that same HG Wells would have thought of looking at a farmer driving his air conditioned enclosed cab tractor plowing his field while talking on a cell phone negotiating a future contract with a trader in Chicago for the crop he is harvesting at the moment. Or for that matter looking at a bunch of airmen conducting sorties over Afghanistan while relaxing in a Las Vegas suburb.
Perhaps more astounding would be to tell this time traveler that people went to the Moon, sampled a bunch of rocks, and then never bothered going back for another 50 years while letting the spaceships that could have (or even should have) been used rot away from rust and are eaten out by mice.
Yeah, it is a weird world we live in, which would certainly would confound and even confuse somebody from even the 19th Century. What was interesting though is that people at the end of the 19th Century knew that the world was going to change in some profound ways, and that the old ways of doing things was on its way out. The fruits of the industrial revolution were finally being noticed and it was transforming the lives of very ordinary people in profound ways.
While I do know of "christian" terrorist groups like the Irish Republican Army, this is utter bullshit to say there are "far more christian terrorism attacks in the US last year than muslim"
Actually, I would even be curious what even is considered a terrorist attack at all. American cities are not being routinely bombed by religious extremist groups of any kind. That there are some domestic "gangs" or "thugs" as it may be termed who in years past might be called "mafia" or "organized crime", that is hardly the definition of a "terrorist group". I would even go so far as to define a terrorist group, as opposed to a criminal gang (that rarely has any religious affiliation of any kind), as a group explicitly sponsored and supported by a nation-state of some kind. Some communist groups fit that description in the recent past, but they haven't been active in America for decades, at least in terms of "terrorist activities".
Supposedly there have been some "terrorist plots" that have been uncovered, but most of what gets reported is an overreaction by local law enforcement to either a slightly insane person or the very rare cases of some actual fanatics doing something stupid. Timothy McVeigh was an example of somebody who was definitely missing something upstairs and not a real terrorist threat (although clearly a danger to society).
There is this strange scientific principle called the laws of entropy that sort of ultimately prevent proper renewable energy sources, so it is pointless to really single out any particular energy source out. Furthermore, almost all "energy sources" can in theory be synthesized through some sort of industrial process as well with enough effort.
There is a need for alternative high density energy fuel or storage media of some sort though which can be both portable enough to be useful, restorable or refillable in a reasonable period of time (under a half hour or less... preferably under about 10 minutes), and safe enough that an ordinary citizen with nothing more than a few hours of training can safely use and operate.
The options available which fit those requirements are very few. You are stuck with either a hydrocarbon fuel of some sort or an electrical storage device. About the only other viable alternative might be a "Mr. Fusion" type portable nuclear power plant (fusion or fission). I don't think very many people would necessarily be happy with millions of radioisotope thermoelectric generators on highways, but it is an alternative which is an established technology already.
Until a viable alternative is produced which is demonstratively cheaper to operate and meets the needs of ordinary people, we are pretty much stuck with hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline or diesel fuel, with ethanol as a reserve fuel that has a whole bunch of other problems.
SpaceX was already working on the development of the Falcon 9 before NASA got into the act.... so it is completely false that it wouldn't exist without NASA's involvement. I'll admit that NASA money was involved and that it is a subsidy of the development of the Falcon 9, but it wasn't a "cost-plus" project nor has NASA been involved with the design choices. NASA's involvement in the Falcon 9 has been more for general mission requirements and technology transfer as required by law... and to help promote the development of spaceflight in America, something also required by law and a part of the agency's explicit mission and charter as given to NASA by the United States Congress.
NASA wasn't the first customer either, as SpaceX had a manifest of several other customers before NASA became one of them. A much earlier customer was the U.S. Air Force (admittedly still the U.S. federal government). Orbcomm was however one of the very first customers to sign on at a time when it was critical to the development of the Falcon class of vehicles. As a matter of fact, it was the government of Malaysia who even beat NASA to space as a paying customer on SpaceX vehicles (which flew on the Falcon 1 flight 5).
A nice try to justify what you think happened, but it doesn't represent the facts nor reflect the manifest of future flights for the Falcon rockets. This early manifest from SpaceX paints a very different story:
There were customers who were supposed to be launching ahead of the NASA flights to the ISS, but either they dropped out (such as the "classified mission" that I don't think ever happened) or were rescheduled to other flight times. General schedule slippage has also happened... but that is typical of the spaceflight industry as well.
I would hope that SpaceX decides to go the extra mile with Orbcomm and try to work out a solution of some kind... including offering some sort of freebee like another slot on another launch.
The conversations between Orbcomm and SpaceX would be rather interesting to hear...or at least read the e-mails going back and forth.
The problem is that Orbcomm will have to do that boost using propellant on board the satellite... propellant that was intended to help with station keeping. The original goal was to use the upper stage of the Falcon 9 to perform that boost with a 2nd burn after the Dragon capsule was released. That has happened with other Falcon 9 flights, but the problem was that in theory the upper stage of the Falcon 9 after the burn could have been in a flight path that eventually would intersect with the ISS and potentially collide with the ISS.
To avoid the danger, the 2nd stage had to wait for the extra burn... which essentially forced the deployment of the Orbcomm satellite. Since the Falcon 9 uses Liquid Oxygen as an oxidizer, that will boil out before it can be used again to fix the issue. Another flight path might have been possible, but it needed extensive review by NASA before it could be approved... thus it wasn't going to happen.
SpaceX has had two significant engine failures out of 45 Merlin 1 engines that have been fired for attempted spaceflight missions, with a couple other mishaps including an unfortunate smashing together of the 1st and 2nd stages of a Falcon 1. The first engine was a major screw-up because the engineers in charge forgot to account for galvanometric corrosion... and the engine fell apart in the first few seconds of flight in a spectacular fashion. Arguably SpaceX has learned a whole lot from that initial incident, but their flight record isn't completely clean either.
There was also another engine that seemed to have some problems but usually isn't counted as a "failure" as the engine was able to shut down at the appointed time.
Still, that isn't a bad record, and a heritage that is worth building upon as well as something to envy for most spacecraft manufacturers. It is also something that is typical or even a relatively low failure rate for a brand new engine design that didn't have a legacy heritage.
I'll also point out that most engineers learn far more from failures than they learn from successes. That this engine failed but the mission was able to go on is going to give the engineers something to chew on for the next several months... where I'm sure that SpaceX is going to attempt to reproduce the conditions that caused the failure in the first place. One more testing regime for them to install at McGregor... and a few more SpaceX jobs in Texas.
SpaceX didn't meet the terms of the original contract. I'm sure there are some escape clauses and other legal language that will absolve SpaceX of liability in that case, and it should be noted that SpaceX did have the technical capability of completing the contract... NASA simply wouldn't let them relight the 2nd stage to push the Orbcomm satellite into a higher orbit. NASA's rationale for denying the 2nd burn of the upper stage of the Falcon 9 may even be reasonable, but unfortunately the satellite didn't get to where it was supposed to be at.
Sort of like the Phobos-Grunt mission that Russia sent up about a year ago. Yeah, it got up into space and looked cool, but it didn't get to where it was supposed to be at (which was Mars in the case of that particular spacecraft... and instead crashed into the Earth after a few hundred orbits).
SpaceX is going to make money by delivering on their promises. Failing to deliver has got to hurt no matter how you cut it up, and will certainly make for companies like Orbcomm and others thinking of using SpaceX services to think twice if the vehicles aren't going to where they were promised. That in this case the satellite was a test vehicle and its final orbit wasn't nearly as critical doesn't dismiss the fact that it was a sort of screw-up that needs to be addressed for other customers in the future. It certainly is a bit of tarnish on the reputation of SpaceX.
This particular spacecraft was originally supposed to fly on a Falcon 1e, but that vehicle has been cancelled (even though the Falcon 1e is still on the SpaceX main web page) and the full manifest has been transferred to the Falcon 9 family. Had Orbcomm been the primary customer instead of a secondary customer, would the result have been different? Are secondary customers going to always get the shaft with NASA as a primary customer?
Of course the flight to the ISS includes the Dragon capsule... something missing from the $54 million price tag.
I think NASA is also paying a slight premium as they have been moved up ahead of other customers on the launch manifest and other "special treatment". Regardless, the price tag of $133 million is less than what other launch providers are asking, and even the $1.6 billion going to SpaceX is less than the $1.9 billion which Orbital Science is getting for their commercial resupply flights on the Antares rocket, with fewer launches and no return capacity on the Orbital spacecraft either. Orbital did originally plan on a return capacity, and also considered (or rather is considering still) a crewed variant of the capsule.
That spacecraft is supposed to go up in December... if all other things work out.
Elon Musk is making a big deal about the fact that the majority of his flight manifest for the future is for non-government commercial payloads. One of the reasons why the Orbcomm satellite was a big deal is in part that SpaceX needs to go through that backlog of payloads and get stuff into space.
That the satellite didn't get to where it was supposed to be at was a huge blow, but it is the kind of thing that SpaceX will be doing more of in the future.
There is a reason it looks like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That movie was based upon reality due to the fact that the director, Stanley Kubrick, wanted to portray something realistic considering that there were real spacecraft going to real places (like the Moon) at the time he was making and released the film. Most other "science fiction" movies gloss over this reality in a horrible way. The only time you get something action packed is when something goes horribly wrong... and perhaps at launch when huge amounts of energy are being released.
Then again do you enjoy watching videos of your father parking his car in the driveway?
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It was the folks in Huntsville that designed and largely built the Saturn V and were heavily involved in the construction and maintenance of the Space Shuttle.
Yeah, they are a bunch of hillbilly hicks that don't know a thing about spaceflight.
It isn't like space stations area new concept that has never been tried before. I'd dare say that unless you are planning on doing something really daring like a space station capable of holding about 100 people simultaneously and deal with significant logistical issues that sort of scale of activity presents, you aren't really cutting new ground in this area of human endeavor.
The Manned Venus Flyby looked like an interesting project that certainly would require things like radiation protection and long term sustainability in space without immediate or even short-term resupply. On the other hand, I wish they would expand upon the concept of the NAUTILUS-X, which instead of simply an Earth-Moon L-5 laboratory like seems to be presented with this article is a genuine spaceship (as opposed to spacecraft).
The lack of using either a Trans-hab like module or one of the Bigelow modules seems to be a real lack of even seeing what the current state of the art technology in this area is even at. The idea of using cylinders that would need to be limited in size by the the cargo bay of a shuttle seems incredibly old fashioned thinking in particular. There is no particular reason why the quarters need to be cramped, other than the fact that the modules presumably must be built on the Earth and get through the atmosphere in some fashion first before being deployed. Space is huge, so mind bogglingly large that it seems ludicrous that quarters in spaceflight should be cramped at all. Mass has some role to play, but moving a cubic meter or two of air (which is needed anyway) is trivial by comparison.
Bigelow Aerospace has been studying these issues, and will likely relegate projects like this onto the ashheap of other failed NASA programs like SLS, Constellation, Dynasoar, and DC-X. If they don't actually plan on building these things, I wonder in part why they even bother with progressing yesterday's technology one step further towards today.
More likely they're afraid on-line courses will kill off their meatspace universities, and then they won't have a vanity football team.
(I think some states, including the one where I am now, wouldn't fund higher education at all, except to avoid being the only state in the Union without a football team.)
The purpose of the law is a legitimate one: If you claim to be an institution of higher education, you should be in a position to ensure that graduates have access to transcripts, accreditation standards met (as applicable), and some sort of proof that some actual teaching took place. It is being designed to weed out diploma mills and to also go after those who would set up a school, take the money from the students, then disappear into the night with the money but leaving the students to hang out to dry after they have paid tuition. Schools which are not solvent shouldn't take the tuition of the students for the next term.... which the law covers.
There are also a number of schools like the University of Phoenix (to cite an example) which offer on-line courses with paid tuition and grant degrees that are accredited with national accreditation agencies. Another example is Western Governor's University. Such schools would need to coordinate with the Minnesota Office of Higher Education with regards to citizens of Minnesota... and frankly I think this is a reasonable law in that context. If a school goes bankrupt, the law requires that some sort of trustee is made available for transcripts and other records as well so courses taken by students can be recognized by employers or future educational endeavors.
I could imagine schools like the University of Nigeria would be the kind of school that they would want to shut down. Note though this site is currently off-line and I should mention this isn't the real school of this name which is at http://unn.edu.ng/. Fly by night schools should be shut down like snake oil salesmen. Of course there are plenty of Viagra websites and spamvertisements on the internet where such laws haven't stopped that from being marketed either.
How this law applies to on-line psuedoschools which don't offer credit nor charge tuition would seem quite a bit weaker, and 1st amendment issues would start to much more strongly apply. There is no money to refund if the website goes dark, and the lack of credits or even lack of a promise of credentials by taking the courses seems to make even a preservation of transcripts sort of pointless. Stuff like the Khan Academy badges might be a little bit tricky, but I don't think that really amounts to be a real problem.
Don't get into the conspiracy theories and claim things that simply are not true. This has absolutely nothing to do with somebody coming up with a cheaper solution to education and being competitive with brick and mortar schools at a very small fraction of the price... if any money is being exchanged at all.
Does this have any basis of reality to what is being talked about in terms of the State of Minnesota and their "Office of Higher Education"?
That some silly paper pusher has interpreted decades old laws that hardly even anticipated internet distribution of educational content (a real surprise for Minnesota... as they were one of the first states to be involved with distance education).
All that is happening here is an over reaction by one unelected bureaucrat that has yet to have the wrath of the state legislature rain down upon him or her. More than likely a state legislator will simply pass a new law making an exception for on-line institutions that are "non-profit" or don't charge admission, and for those schools who do charge tuition or fees for their course ware will be required to submit some paperwork if they do something in the state. This will be especially true if there are to be an exchange of college credits with these "on-line" schools or degrees granted.
As has every presidential administration since Lydon Johnson and arguably even since William McKinley. Forget about the fact that each President swears an oath not to defend America, but rather to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America", when was the last time you saw a U.S. President assert he couldn't do something because the Constitution forbade him from acting?
The sad thing is that the real policy setting and rules making which ultimately determine who becomes president is in the hands of a much, much smaller minority. The elections that really matter today are those for the "state central committee" of each political party who in turn (either through convention or in that committee meeting... it really doesn't matter as the rules are set in those committees anyway) who in turn select the national committee members.
In the case of the Republican Party (because I've studied it a whole bunch more) the real power to make changes and to set the national agenda for that party is in the hands of 110 "national committee members" (two from every state + territories including DC) who set the convention agenda, make the delegate rules, act as the "credentials committee" (aka those who recognize if you will be a delegate on a case by case basis), and really are where the actual political power in America resides. Note that these "national committee members" (they exist for both Republicans and Democrats) are not members of congress but separately selected for their positions in what is sometimes not a very democratic process in the first place. At best, they are selected during state conventions by state delegates... if those delegates even bother showing up to the vote as it isn't one of the sexy "presidential" votes or even deciding the nomination for the senatorial candidates. Often the place where these national committee members are selected is at a separate convention different than the main election year convention as well... leading to even fewer delegates being involved in the selection of these people.
Ron Paul found this out the hard way, as did most of the contenders for the Republican Party as Mitt Romney was able to get the support of most of these national committee members and definitely the support of most state committees as well. That is why Ron Paul supporters were tossed out into the cold, because they didn't have the internal support from within the party to get the job done. That is also why almost nobody gets the nomination unless they have been running for the Presidency several times: they need to get "their people" into those very important national committee positions in the first place.
In other words, those actually selecting who becomes President of the United States isn't even the 10% of the eligible voters who bother to show up to primaries or participate in neighborhood caucus meetings, it is instead that very select and largely self-appointed groups of just a few hundred people in both major parties who set the rules to decide who gets the job, or just 1 out of a million possible voters set up in a manner that is clearly not proportional by population either.
I think calling this a choice between two evils is very appropriate. The USA is headed for a cliff of disaster (in a whole bunch of ways) and the current choice is between whether to apply the brakes or hit the accelerator. It doesn't really matter because the cliff is only 100 feet away and you are going over 100 mph. Somebody has yelled to turn the steering wheel instead, but nobody listened when it mattered.
A part of me would like to see Obama get elected, as he will need to take the blame for what happens next. It won't be pretty regardless of who is in charge.
Of course many thought we as a species would have established permanent bases on the Moon and even a manned spaceflight mission to.... Saturn. (or was that Jupiter?)
I'd personally put the likelihood of anybody from the Earth ever getting to the Alpha Centauri system or for that matter any star within about 15 light years of the Earth no earlier than the year 2500 A.D., if even that early. That even is assuming we find an Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone of a star with liquid water oceans anywhere within that range.
There might be an unmanned space probe that will be sent to one of these stellar systems by 2154 (not to arrive at that time... just get sent by some future successor to NASA). If it takes a century or two to make the trip, that wouldn't be a big deal. Hopefully successful nuclear fusion reactors will finally be a proven technology by that year.
I would argue that the real 'inventor" of the atomic bomb, at least so far as to produce the scientific theory (nuclear fission) that firmly established how it could be built, was discovered by Lise Meitner. It was even more sobering that she was a prominent scientist in a university of Nazi Germany, but was kept from actually doing much with her theories because she was both a woman and a Jew. As a result, she had to flee to Sweden in what is a most amazing story worthy of an Indiana Jones movie.
She should have received a Nobel Prize for her work, but the International Atomic Union gave her an honor worthy of her accomplishments: naming an element after her. She certainly ranks right with Marie Curie in terms of accomplishments.
Interestingly, she was offered a job at Los Alamos and flat out refused to be involved because she completely understood what the implications of building such a weapons meant and what was required to get it built.
The thought of changing this to "OJFS" seems to suggest another famous Californian. I just don't know how you can get away from the puns.
Why start with vacuum tubes when you can go all the way back to Leyden jar batteries and spinning copper wires using hand-made tools and raw ore you dug out of the ground. I suppose you also blow your own silla-based glass too?
More correctly and accurately the "logical if-then" really is modus ponens.
Interestingly, in formal logic discussions (aka "philosophical logic") this is one of the most used "functions" as following the syllogistic pattern through modus ponens gives you valid arguments, with the exception of "A" being true and "B" being false.... which is the logical definition of a fallacy.
I had the good fortune in my academic career of landing in a formal logic class taught by a defrocked Jesuit priest. He knew next to nothing about computers or electronics, but he understood syllogisms and formal logic from a classical viewpoint and gave me insights into computer programming and electronics that I wouldn't have had otherwise. It also gave me clinching proof that computer geeks do need to take at least some classes in the humanities to learn about their craft.
I thought I was an expert in logic going into the class and certainly I could make truth tables in my sleep and perform all sorts of mathematical operations on boolean variables. I discovered I was just an infant intellectually on the topic after just a couple of days of listening to this professor.
I wonder what that same HG Wells would have thought of looking at a farmer driving his air conditioned enclosed cab tractor plowing his field while talking on a cell phone negotiating a future contract with a trader in Chicago for the crop he is harvesting at the moment. Or for that matter looking at a bunch of airmen conducting sorties over Afghanistan while relaxing in a Las Vegas suburb.
Perhaps more astounding would be to tell this time traveler that people went to the Moon, sampled a bunch of rocks, and then never bothered going back for another 50 years while letting the spaceships that could have (or even should have) been used rot away from rust and are eaten out by mice.
Yeah, it is a weird world we live in, which would certainly would confound and even confuse somebody from even the 19th Century. What was interesting though is that people at the end of the 19th Century knew that the world was going to change in some profound ways, and that the old ways of doing things was on its way out. The fruits of the industrial revolution were finally being noticed and it was transforming the lives of very ordinary people in profound ways.
While I do know of "christian" terrorist groups like the Irish Republican Army, this is utter bullshit to say there are "far more christian terrorism attacks in the US last year than muslim"
Actually, I would even be curious what even is considered a terrorist attack at all. American cities are not being routinely bombed by religious extremist groups of any kind. That there are some domestic "gangs" or "thugs" as it may be termed who in years past might be called "mafia" or "organized crime", that is hardly the definition of a "terrorist group". I would even go so far as to define a terrorist group, as opposed to a criminal gang (that rarely has any religious affiliation of any kind), as a group explicitly sponsored and supported by a nation-state of some kind. Some communist groups fit that description in the recent past, but they haven't been active in America for decades, at least in terms of "terrorist activities".
Supposedly there have been some "terrorist plots" that have been uncovered, but most of what gets reported is an overreaction by local law enforcement to either a slightly insane person or the very rare cases of some actual fanatics doing something stupid. Timothy McVeigh was an example of somebody who was definitely missing something upstairs and not a real terrorist threat (although clearly a danger to society).
There is this strange scientific principle called the laws of entropy that sort of ultimately prevent proper renewable energy sources, so it is pointless to really single out any particular energy source out. Furthermore, almost all "energy sources" can in theory be synthesized through some sort of industrial process as well with enough effort.
There is a need for alternative high density energy fuel or storage media of some sort though which can be both portable enough to be useful, restorable or refillable in a reasonable period of time (under a half hour or less... preferably under about 10 minutes), and safe enough that an ordinary citizen with nothing more than a few hours of training can safely use and operate.
The options available which fit those requirements are very few. You are stuck with either a hydrocarbon fuel of some sort or an electrical storage device. About the only other viable alternative might be a "Mr. Fusion" type portable nuclear power plant (fusion or fission). I don't think very many people would necessarily be happy with millions of radioisotope thermoelectric generators on highways, but it is an alternative which is an established technology already.
Until a viable alternative is produced which is demonstratively cheaper to operate and meets the needs of ordinary people, we are pretty much stuck with hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline or diesel fuel, with ethanol as a reserve fuel that has a whole bunch of other problems.
Uh-oh -- crewed capacity with no return capability is a recipe for disaster! :)
Yeah, kind of gives you a little bit of a concern there, doesn't it?
SpaceX was already working on the development of the Falcon 9 before NASA got into the act.... so it is completely false that it wouldn't exist without NASA's involvement. I'll admit that NASA money was involved and that it is a subsidy of the development of the Falcon 9, but it wasn't a "cost-plus" project nor has NASA been involved with the design choices. NASA's involvement in the Falcon 9 has been more for general mission requirements and technology transfer as required by law... and to help promote the development of spaceflight in America, something also required by law and a part of the agency's explicit mission and charter as given to NASA by the United States Congress.
NASA wasn't the first customer either, as SpaceX had a manifest of several other customers before NASA became one of them. A much earlier customer was the U.S. Air Force (admittedly still the U.S. federal government). Orbcomm was however one of the very first customers to sign on at a time when it was critical to the development of the Falcon class of vehicles. As a matter of fact, it was the government of Malaysia who even beat NASA to space as a paying customer on SpaceX vehicles (which flew on the Falcon 1 flight 5).
A nice try to justify what you think happened, but it doesn't represent the facts nor reflect the manifest of future flights for the Falcon rockets. This early manifest from SpaceX paints a very different story:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070210100122/http://spacex.com/launch_manifest.php
There were customers who were supposed to be launching ahead of the NASA flights to the ISS, but either they dropped out (such as the "classified mission" that I don't think ever happened) or were rescheduled to other flight times. General schedule slippage has also happened... but that is typical of the spaceflight industry as well.
I would hope that SpaceX decides to go the extra mile with Orbcomm and try to work out a solution of some kind... including offering some sort of freebee like another slot on another launch.
The conversations between Orbcomm and SpaceX would be rather interesting to hear...or at least read the e-mails going back and forth.
The problem is that Orbcomm will have to do that boost using propellant on board the satellite... propellant that was intended to help with station keeping. The original goal was to use the upper stage of the Falcon 9 to perform that boost with a 2nd burn after the Dragon capsule was released. That has happened with other Falcon 9 flights, but the problem was that in theory the upper stage of the Falcon 9 after the burn could have been in a flight path that eventually would intersect with the ISS and potentially collide with the ISS.
To avoid the danger, the 2nd stage had to wait for the extra burn... which essentially forced the deployment of the Orbcomm satellite. Since the Falcon 9 uses Liquid Oxygen as an oxidizer, that will boil out before it can be used again to fix the issue. Another flight path might have been possible, but it needed extensive review by NASA before it could be approved... thus it wasn't going to happen.
SpaceX has had two significant engine failures out of 45 Merlin 1 engines that have been fired for attempted spaceflight missions, with a couple other mishaps including an unfortunate smashing together of the 1st and 2nd stages of a Falcon 1. The first engine was a major screw-up because the engineers in charge forgot to account for galvanometric corrosion... and the engine fell apart in the first few seconds of flight in a spectacular fashion. Arguably SpaceX has learned a whole lot from that initial incident, but their flight record isn't completely clean either.
There was also another engine that seemed to have some problems but usually isn't counted as a "failure" as the engine was able to shut down at the appointed time.
Still, that isn't a bad record, and a heritage that is worth building upon as well as something to envy for most spacecraft manufacturers. It is also something that is typical or even a relatively low failure rate for a brand new engine design that didn't have a legacy heritage.
I'll also point out that most engineers learn far more from failures than they learn from successes. That this engine failed but the mission was able to go on is going to give the engineers something to chew on for the next several months... where I'm sure that SpaceX is going to attempt to reproduce the conditions that caused the failure in the first place. One more testing regime for them to install at McGregor... and a few more SpaceX jobs in Texas.
SpaceX didn't meet the terms of the original contract. I'm sure there are some escape clauses and other legal language that will absolve SpaceX of liability in that case, and it should be noted that SpaceX did have the technical capability of completing the contract... NASA simply wouldn't let them relight the 2nd stage to push the Orbcomm satellite into a higher orbit. NASA's rationale for denying the 2nd burn of the upper stage of the Falcon 9 may even be reasonable, but unfortunately the satellite didn't get to where it was supposed to be at.
Sort of like the Phobos-Grunt mission that Russia sent up about a year ago. Yeah, it got up into space and looked cool, but it didn't get to where it was supposed to be at (which was Mars in the case of that particular spacecraft... and instead crashed into the Earth after a few hundred orbits).
SpaceX is going to make money by delivering on their promises. Failing to deliver has got to hurt no matter how you cut it up, and will certainly make for companies like Orbcomm and others thinking of using SpaceX services to think twice if the vehicles aren't going to where they were promised. That in this case the satellite was a test vehicle and its final orbit wasn't nearly as critical doesn't dismiss the fact that it was a sort of screw-up that needs to be addressed for other customers in the future. It certainly is a bit of tarnish on the reputation of SpaceX.
This particular spacecraft was originally supposed to fly on a Falcon 1e, but that vehicle has been cancelled (even though the Falcon 1e is still on the SpaceX main web page) and the full manifest has been transferred to the Falcon 9 family. Had Orbcomm been the primary customer instead of a secondary customer, would the result have been different? Are secondary customers going to always get the shaft with NASA as a primary customer?
Of course the flight to the ISS includes the Dragon capsule... something missing from the $54 million price tag.
I think NASA is also paying a slight premium as they have been moved up ahead of other customers on the launch manifest and other "special treatment". Regardless, the price tag of $133 million is less than what other launch providers are asking, and even the $1.6 billion going to SpaceX is less than the $1.9 billion which Orbital Science is getting for their commercial resupply flights on the Antares rocket, with fewer launches and no return capacity on the Orbital spacecraft either. Orbital did originally plan on a return capacity, and also considered (or rather is considering still) a crewed variant of the capsule.
That spacecraft is supposed to go up in December... if all other things work out.
Elon Musk is making a big deal about the fact that the majority of his flight manifest for the future is for non-government commercial payloads. One of the reasons why the Orbcomm satellite was a big deal is in part that SpaceX needs to go through that backlog of payloads and get stuff into space.
That the satellite didn't get to where it was supposed to be at was a huge blow, but it is the kind of thing that SpaceX will be doing more of in the future.
There is a reason it looks like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That movie was based upon reality due to the fact that the director, Stanley Kubrick, wanted to portray something realistic considering that there were real spacecraft going to real places (like the Moon) at the time he was making and released the film. Most other "science fiction" movies gloss over this reality in a horrible way. The only time you get something action packed is when something goes horribly wrong... and perhaps at launch when huge amounts of energy are being released.
Then again do you enjoy watching videos of your father parking his car in the driveway?
Is the Texas State Militia recruiting?