It also depends on the fine points of the contract. If a clause limiting the terms of the "lifetime membership" was in that contract, the case that five years is sufficient might have been even a correct ruling, assuming that reading such a contract was implied and other kinds of fraud such as employees promising things that weren't in the written contract also did not occur.
It also seems very unlikely that this particular judge set any sort of common law precedence that would apply to the Joyent situation, unless you can show it happened in California and was upheld by a court of appeals or the California state Supreme Court (which in the original contract was the jurisdiction for contract disputes for this particular contract for cloud services).
Sounds like the old clause: "Subject to change without notice" at work.
If only they had provided such a clause in their customer service agreement at the time the contract was written. Usually consumers get screwed over due to contracts written in such a way (aka "buyer beware"), but the same can be said when a company blindly makes promises to customers that they can't deliver.
You can't retroactively add such a clause to an existing contract without consent by all parties involved.
That said, I should clarify that I don't agree with the way software patents are currently handled, but I'm not against the general concept of protecting source code if a better system could be implemented (not likely to happen, but I can imagine such a thing!)
There is a concept called "copyright" that seems to work just fine for protecting software and software ideas. There are also things called derivative copyrights that can in general protect broad ideas. That is what protects authors like J. K. Rowling from getting exploited by would-be pirates of her ideas that she put into her books. It doesn't stop people from writing books about British youth attending a boarding school who learn about magic as a part of the curriculum, but if you borrow too closely from the books and make it seem too much like Hogwarts, you can get into some legal difficulties that cross the line into a derivative work.
Computer software can be and sometimes is the same. More to the point, not only are copyright terms longer than patents, but the rationale for such protection is much more justified from a legal standpoint. Software patents simply are not even necessary in terms of general protection of ideas and are much easier to keep trolls from killing legitimate innovation that patents don't seem to stop.
The Supreme Court also said that mathematical formulas couldn't be patented, yet we have software patents. Contradictory rulings on stuff like this are common.
Will they be able to sue you over your children, the way Monsanto sues people over corn?
Um, if you find children growing out of you due to accidental scattering of some else's "seed", you've got much bigger problems than a patent lawsuit...
I've known a few people who scatter their seed rather far and wide. You can ask more than a few women about "accidental scattering of seed" that has children growing out of them and how that has impacted their lives.
Then again, it sounds like you need somebody to talk to you about the birds and the bees with the talk your parents should have given to you. A refresher course in genetics would be advisable too. Then again I think these judges ought to take a refresher course in genetics as well.
At that level of appeals, the judges are one and the same. The only difference between a civil and criminal case is who happens to be paying for the prosecution (criminal cases are almost always paid for by a government entity) and if the defendant has to spend time in prison or not if unsuccessful. A few other minor differences also hold (in terms of threshold of evidence and a few other things).
The court rooms are the same, the judges are the same, and the precedent setting capability is the same in all cases.
That the original grandparent post was suggesting that patent litigation was a criminal matter may have been a confused, but then again changes in "intellectual property law" have indeed criminalized some violations that previously were merely a civil matter. I would dare say that even members of congress often confuse the two kinds of legal actions, and add confusing things into the laws they write which really mucks things up in a hurry.
Part of the problem with NASA's failure to build any new manned spaceflight vehicle since the Johnson administration (or Nixon administration if you are splitting hairs) is that you also burn out engineers. One of the reasons why engineers get involved with building things that require horrible hours and often crappy wages (compared to jobs requiring similar levels of education and talent like writing day trading software for Wall Street companies) is that they want to see their designs actually get built.
It may be fine for a bunch of lawyers to spend years or even entire lifetimes of effort working on a case that ultimately gets settled for the price of a cup of coffee, but telling that to an engineer that their entire career was a complete and total waste is a good way to burn people out of a job and destroy morale to the point you end up with crap getting churned out by the successive engineers who take their place.
On a rare occasion there is some knowledge transfer that happens when you start with a clean sheet, but that only happens if you use those same engineers that are already discouraged because their multi-year project just got cancelled. If that keeps happening repeatedly, they won't even bother trying to put any extra effort into trying to discover corner cases and other similar problems that could plague a project until after the problems start to surface.
There is a huge difference between science and engineering, where certainly science can be passed on to the future. Engineering knowledge is much harder to pass on when the designs for many of the propulsion systems are so different that they might as well be completely different technologies and arguably even different industries.
There is also the "what if" situation where huge amounts of resources were dumped into the project (like the SCSC) which really didn't result in any significantly new science as the project never got to that stage of development at all. You don't learn too much by pouring concrete in new and exciting ways, as if you could even do something like that in a novel way. I'd be curious as to how much science you really can do on most of the cancelled NASA concepts.
Every rocket I'm aware of that isn't carrying a missile launches to the east
While I will admit there are advantages to flights going eastward, there are a great many satellites that aren't necessarily missiles which engage in polar orbits, or in some cases there are orbits like a Molniya orbit and even related orbit called a Tundra orbit. Polar orbits are used primarily for Earth sensing satellites (including reconnaissance satellites like spy sats, but also including mapping satellites like Google Earth uses). The Molniya and Tundra orbits are used as an alternative to geosynchronous orbit patterns and work much better for communications to locations at high latitude locations (thus are commonly used in Russia and Alaska or northern Canada).
Yes, the kinds of launches that are appropriate for Vandenberg are different than Cape Canaveral, but there certainly is a role even for a civilian space port that can engage in those kind of unique orbits.
Launching south from Florida ends up in Cuba (who isn't too keen on stuff coming from American rockets) and there are some fairly large cities that are generally south of KSC that could cause problems. Pretty much the only direction you can launch from is eastward from KSC. Wallops Island in Virgina has an even narrower range of potential launches, although it is being seriously considered for orbital spaceflight as a launch site.
At the very least it isn't a retrograde orbital inclination like Israel needs to perform when launching their satellites as that country launches their vehicles westward across the Mediterranean Sea (somehow Jordan doesn't like rocket debris landing on them from Israel, and neither does Iraq and Iran).
My point is that there is a good reason why a major space port happens to be in California, and why even a Space Shuttle launch pad was built there (even though it was sadly never used). It isn't just for launching nuclear bombs at Russia.
Vandenberg has the advantage that it has a whole bunch of clear ocean to its south. Florida sort of stinks in that regard, and even Texas isn't nearly so good as California is like. Alaska would work nearly as well, but the relatively mild weather of Santa Barbara also gives Vandenberg a nearly perfect location that similar launch facilities in Alaska don't enjoy so much. There isn't a whole lot to the south of Santa Barbara other than the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island, and Antarctica, which makes polar orbits almost perfect from that location. Besides, the distance from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara in terms of how far the equipment need to travel from the manufacturing plants is an added bonus.
I agree though with JSC, as that could be literally anywhere in America (at least with an airport nearby to ferry in and out astronauts or other NASA personnel), not to mention JPL or Marshall.
Most of the current Federal budget hoo-haw is hysteria manufactured for political purposes. It was never an issue in the past.
You have it completely backwards.
The budget has always been a searingly-hot political issue.
I think you could have simply quit right there. It was a problem in the George Washington administration, and Thomas Jefferson got into a huge pickle because he ended up agreeing to the Louisiana Purchase and in theory spending money without approval from Congress (that was sort of granted after the fact). I don't know of any time in American history when the budgetary process was not a big deal.
Heck, the fact that Parliament controlled the taxation authority was one of the things which put the House of Commons in an upper hand position in the United Kingdom and has turned the English monarchy into the current joke that exists today with almost no real political authority (persuasive authority, absolutely, but not any real ability to object to legislation and get that to stick).
If you want to get a huge turnout to a municipal council meeting, simply hold a hearing on some substantial budget changes or even propose a new tax. The seats will most certainly be filled.
My point in bringing up the whole thing is that the NASA budgetary process is a hold-over from the days that parts of NASA used to be a part of the U.S. Army, and that the whole notion of building rockets was considered a short-term activity. If the rockets are simply something you shoot off for the 4th of July celebrations, a short term contract would be all that is needed as well.
This isn't to say that major projects don't happen in the federal government which require a long-term commitment. The Interstate Highway system took nearly 35 years to go from initial concept and initial construction to completion, and some other larger projects like Hoover Dam or even the U.S. Capitol Building required substantial long-term commitment to getting them finished.
If the idea is that space ships need a longer term commitment in order to be useful, I'd have to agree. Some of that philosophy needs to go into how money is appropriated toward NASA.
By making NASA a civilian agency, the problems that result by being associated with the Army should have made this a moot issue some time ago, but bureaucracies like the U.S. Congress can sometimes be stubborn about even those kind of issues. Besides, it is sexy to appear in a committee talking about space, and generally has strong voter appeal even if nobody pays attention to how votes are cast on measures in those committee meetings.
I realize this would be largely an illusion that you are in control as a tax payer, as there would certainly be programs that get appropriations from the budgetary process that could be "made up" if there wasn't enough popular support from those paying taxes.
The problem with your example of Spanish support of the Catholic Church (something prohibited in the USA through the 1st Amendment, thus it wouldn't ever happen in the USA) is that you are given an all or nothing option. Another problem with the notion is that there aren't more options in terms of where to send that 0,7 EUR instead of the Catholic Church, such as perhaps the Red Cross, ESA, or CERN.
The notion of paying tithing as a government program is a bit weird to me, but I've grown up in a different culture where such a thing would never be considered. Still, the idea that your tax dollars are being used for purposes you don't agree with still is true regardless of religious feelings as it could be for military campaigns you oppose or perhaps for supporting environmental programs you disagree with. It will happen no matter what you do precisely because it is the government messing around with your money, even in a representative government that is determined through voter participation.
The whole purpose of doing something like this is to give some sort of taxpayer participation in the budgetary process, where unpopular programs (due to very few tax payers supporting them) could certainly be seen as targets for budget cuts while highly popular programs (like I would guess includes something like NASA or perhaps the National Park Service or even Head Start) would be seen as off limits in budgetary planning or even be considered legitimate for additional funding increases if there are many voter/taxpayers who support those programs. For some programs, in particular things like NASA, I think it would be a tremendous break in part because the amount which actually goes to those agencies is substantially less than what most taxpayers think is going to those agencies.
I would also think that some lobbying efforts would instead transform into public relations efforts that would be in support of or in opposition to various federal agencies to receive this money. Since such "lobbying" would be out in the public, it would be a legitimate part of the political process.
The cost of various wars are not considered part of the military's budget because those are separate appropriations.
If you want to get into hair splitting arguments in terms of how much one branch of the government gets over another one and if special appropriations such as the disaster relief bill following Hurricane Katrina should be recorded in terms of the overall budgetary process, go head and start that hair splitting. Appropriations often happen outside of the normal budgetary process, and I don't expect that to end for any federal agency either. They aren't viewed as a part of the normal budget because they are seen as one-time appropriations not to generally be repeated (it is hoped).
What about simply directing where 5% of your tax dollars will be spent?
Seriously, this is an interesting notion and it would certainly be interesting to see which agencies would get extra funding and which ones would be ignored if they depended upon popular support for funding.
I may like to give to NASA, but others may want their "discretionary tax dollars" spent on the USMC instead, or perhaps added to the budget of the Peace Corps, the EPA, or even the IRS. There may even be some who simply want the money allocated to the Bureau of the Public Debt (aka not really given to any federal agency at all and instead pay down the deficit).
The constitutional aspect is derived from how NASA started. Keep in mind that some significant parts of NASA came from the U.S. Army Field Artillery Branch, which was how Werner Von Braun ended up coming to NASA. There were also several U.S. Navy programs that were folded into NASA as well, but the Army is something significant to explicitly mention.
When the U.S. Constitution was written, there was a significant concern about a standing army running around North America with the potential to stage a coup d'état and thus overthrow any civilian government that had goals and aims which were different from the Army's goals. There are many historical examples which show this concern was well founded, and one of the steps taken to control the Army is to force annual accounting to Congress on their needs and to require annual reauthorization of expenditures.
The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, was acknowledged to be quite a bit different and even when the U.S. Constitution was written it was acknowledged that some ship building programs may take several years for completion. Even acts of the Washington Administration (yes, that George Washington) through the Naval Act of 1794 had a several year term placed upon its completion to build a fleet of six frigates that ultimately formed the core of the U.S. Navy that exists today. In fact, the U.S.S. Constitution (created in that act) is still a commissioned U.S. Navy warship even today.
I'll also point out that one of the reasons for creating the U.S. Air Force was explicitly to set up multi-year appropriations for that branch of military service that otherwise wouldn't be possible if they remained a part of the U.S. Army. It was an acknowledgement that the annual arrangements for the Army aren't sufficient for advanced airplanes that may need a multi-year contract for completion.
In this sense, what is being proposed is acknowledging it takes more than a year to build a reliable rocket, especially for things which will be taking people to other planets. The model that congress should be following for building things in space should be more along the lines of the U.S. Navy where ship will be traveling to distant locations and will be expensive to build. Certainly the notion that a rocket going into space is nothing more than a glorified artillery shell needs to be left behind. I certainly think the notion of a NASA administrator staging a coup upon the federal government with his agency backing up such a coup is laughable by any measure of the imagination.
I presume you are talking about Jeff Greason and the Lynx rocketplane? I would dare say they are at about the same level of projects as Copenhagen Suborbital, along with Armadillo Aerospace and if I dare say Richard Branson and Spaceship Two (definitely more money is getting put onto that spacecraft).
There are a number of companies who are preparing vehicles for flight into space at various regimes and price points, but I wouldn't hold any particular group with derision over another. Some have succeeded and others have failed, but that is the nature of human progress. I certainly wouldn't deride the Lynx because you may think Greason lacks credentials in aerospace engineering, because he sure knows engineering management. The Lynx is progressing along just fine too.
You can orbit a super-massive black hole (like the one at the galactic center) and slow down time significantly.... but at the cost of not just massive exposure to radiation but also tidal forces that would rip your legs and head off your body even while technically outside of the event horizon (thus still in theory capable of leaving).
Travel at 99.9x% of the speed of light has other similar health risks where the background cosmic radiation can through blue shifts in frequency turn into deadly radiation... much less any star light that was formerly in the visible light bands when traveling at that speed. Collision avoidance of any "dark" objects would be tricky too, like any wandering comets or asteroids much less planet sized objects in interstellar space. Heck, smashing into something the size of a walnut would not be pretty, although that would be mostly a part of that same radiation hazard at that speed.
Buzz Aldrin wrote about a proposed "Apollo II" (read that as "Apollo Two") capsule that was kicked around the office inside of the NASA astronaut corps for a little while. That basic idea is pretty much what Orion has turned into, although the original proposal was to merely expand the Apollo capsule that could still fit on top of an Apollo service module.
The one impressive thing with Copenhagen Suborbital isn't necessarily the cutting edge technology, but rather the incredible low-cost approach they are taking for its development and using largely donations and donated labor to build everything. The comparison is much better made against Armadillo Aerospace, other than the fact they don't have a fairy god-millionaire who is helping them out to sponsor their vehicle development. But they do have Kickstarter and a huge fan base that kind of makes up for that missing part of the picture.
Regardless of anything else you may think about this rocket, they are "bending metal" and sending stuff into the air as well as the fact they already have several launches under their belt to demonstrate at least some level of competence for sending stuff up with this technology. It isn't necessarily what Copenhagen Suborbital has done in terms of being compared to national space programs, but rather that they are doing anything at all and certainly in comparison to other amateur/semi-professional groups working on a shoestring budget they are as far along doing real spaceflight as anybody else in the world.
There are a few retired NASA (and apparently ESA) engineers working in Copenhagen Suborbital as well, so the technical skill of those involved is pretty high and they do know what they are doing.
A whole lot can happen between now and November, where the real fight hasn't started yet in terms of Obama vs. Romney yet. I certainly wouldn't count out Romney from winning, but I will admit that at the moment the contest is up to Obama to lose by doing something really stupid.
I really like these charts, particularly the ones covering previous elections. What seemed to galvanize voters in 2004 was the decided lack of leadership on the part of John McCain, or at least a feeling that Obama could do a better job than McCain in terms of responding to the financial panic of 2004 that happened right before the election. Something similar could certainly happen in the next few months. Obama's response in such a situation will be critical.
It is also possible that this could be sort of like the 1972 elections, but in reverse. Obama might be able to get a decisive win, but ends up losing Congress or at least not really helping his party much in terms of control of Congress. It certainly seems unlike for the Democratic Party to regain the House of Representatives, and the Senate is likely going to either stay on a razor thin margin of control by the Democrats or perhaps gain a thin majority for Republicans.
They frequently stream NASA TV, plus you have a chatroom full of space nerds who more often than not have answers to almost any technical question you can think up. The only problem comes if they are crushed with visitors, but I've seen them handle 20k simultaneous users before. The chat room gets sort of nuts when you have that many people, so it isn't perfect.
Ben and Cariann also do color commentary when things get pretty slow, but also know when to shut up (unlike the NBC commentators for the Olympics).
I have no doubt that Charles Bolden was taken into the White House and that Barack Obama very likely said those things to him. For Bolden's tenure as NASA Administrator, those may even been seen as admirable things for him to accomplish while in that position.
I do think this is way overblown though. I'll also say that on the whole Bolden seems to be a very competent administrator over the agency in spite of the fact that he gets almost no support from the White House in terms of his agency's direction nor any sort of funding or support from the Democrats in terms of even funding the agency.
Space policy is dead last in terms of things that the Obama administration is concerned about, where the only thing that the White House is trying to make sure is that they don't lose votes in Florida or make it a clearly partisan issue over space policy. Bolden has been mostly successful in doing that too. About the only thing that the Republicans are doing for that matter is to make sure that Alabama and Utah get to keep their part of the NASA budget (thanks Shelby and Hatch!) I don't see a Romney administration making much of a difference in space policy either, unless he appoints Newt Gingrich as NASA administrator (which would make this gaffe by Bolden seem extremely trivial by comparison to almost anything which would leave Gingrich's mouth).
Perhaps some day there will be some serious space policy. I expect to wait a decade or more for that to happen though.
If there is a theme park for weird science, I'd say it would have to be the Exploratorium. If you happen to ever get to the San Francisco area in your travels, it is most definitely a geek out site to visit and check out... especially with your kids if you have them with you but going by yourself is also worth the time as well.
They could also use some benefactors and philanthropists to help them out, but to me it is what a museum really ought to be instead of a bunch of stuffy static exhibits.
Then again the Saturn V could have been used for military missions as well. There certainly was no law or reason why it couldn't be used, if the military needed such a payload. That such a launch would be hard to hide might be a problem, but the same could be said about Shuttle launches.
The original building at Cape Canaveral (the Vehicle Assembly Building) was designed to house the successor to the Saturn V, which was going to be an even larger rocket. Once the Saturn V was basically proving itself along with things like the original F1 engine being able to produce the desired thrust, plans for that follow up rocket were dropped.
There are a total of four bays in the Vehicle Assembly Building, two of which are currently being refit for the SLS program including the mobile launcher pad that was used for both the Saturn V and Space Shuttle launches. The other two bays have been in theory offered to other businesses that may want to have a similar kind of capability or for any future projects that NASA may want to put together that goes beyond the SLS project.
The Saturn V was originally designed to be used for a long, long time with production runs numbering in the hundreds if not thousands of copies. The test stand set up along with the part supplier chains were originally told that the Moon landings were only going to be the warm up to a much more aggressive manned spaceflight program. Unfortunately Congress choose not to go that route and instead cut the program altogether in favor of a design which came from another part of NASA. That is what gave us the Space Shuttle.
I still argue that the Saturn V could have sent into space just as much tonnage into orbit and perhaps even more astronauts, as well as preserving at least in theory the capability of returning to the Moon and would have even kept orbital space stations operational (including more missions to the original Skylab) for a price far cheaper than the Shuttle program. That is looking in hind sight, but your point about the Saturn V is pretty spot on.
It is also interesting to note that part of that effort to develop the Saturn V is still in use today... by Space X with their McGregor, Texas facility that is being used to test the Merlin engines used on the Falcon rockets. The test stands being used were developed to work with the F1 engines, and the work flow patterns designed by Werner Von Braun have simply been repurposed by Elon Musk for the Merlin engine processing. In other words, the cheap prices that you see with the Falcon 9 owes at least part of its heritage to the original F1 engines that were developed so many years ago.
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It also depends on the fine points of the contract. If a clause limiting the terms of the "lifetime membership" was in that contract, the case that five years is sufficient might have been even a correct ruling, assuming that reading such a contract was implied and other kinds of fraud such as employees promising things that weren't in the written contract also did not occur.
It also seems very unlikely that this particular judge set any sort of common law precedence that would apply to the Joyent situation, unless you can show it happened in California and was upheld by a court of appeals or the California state Supreme Court (which in the original contract was the jurisdiction for contract disputes for this particular contract for cloud services).
Smells like a class action suit to me...
Sounds like the old clause: "Subject to change without notice" at work.
If only they had provided such a clause in their customer service agreement at the time the contract was written. Usually consumers get screwed over due to contracts written in such a way (aka "buyer beware"), but the same can be said when a company blindly makes promises to customers that they can't deliver.
You can't retroactively add such a clause to an existing contract without consent by all parties involved.
That said, I should clarify that I don't agree with the way software patents are currently handled, but I'm not against the general concept of protecting source code if a better system could be implemented (not likely to happen, but I can imagine such a thing!)
There is a concept called "copyright" that seems to work just fine for protecting software and software ideas. There are also things called derivative copyrights that can in general protect broad ideas. That is what protects authors like J. K. Rowling from getting exploited by would-be pirates of her ideas that she put into her books. It doesn't stop people from writing books about British youth attending a boarding school who learn about magic as a part of the curriculum, but if you borrow too closely from the books and make it seem too much like Hogwarts, you can get into some legal difficulties that cross the line into a derivative work.
Computer software can be and sometimes is the same. More to the point, not only are copyright terms longer than patents, but the rationale for such protection is much more justified from a legal standpoint. Software patents simply are not even necessary in terms of general protection of ideas and are much easier to keep trolls from killing legitimate innovation that patents don't seem to stop.
The Supreme Court also said that mathematical formulas couldn't be patented, yet we have software patents. Contradictory rulings on stuff like this are common.
Will they be able to sue you over your children, the way Monsanto sues people over corn?
Um, if you find children growing out of you due to accidental scattering of some else's "seed", you've got much bigger problems than a patent lawsuit...
I've known a few people who scatter their seed rather far and wide. You can ask more than a few women about "accidental scattering of seed" that has children growing out of them and how that has impacted their lives.
Then again, it sounds like you need somebody to talk to you about the birds and the bees with the talk your parents should have given to you. A refresher course in genetics would be advisable too. Then again I think these judges ought to take a refresher course in genetics as well.
At that level of appeals, the judges are one and the same. The only difference between a civil and criminal case is who happens to be paying for the prosecution (criminal cases are almost always paid for by a government entity) and if the defendant has to spend time in prison or not if unsuccessful. A few other minor differences also hold (in terms of threshold of evidence and a few other things).
The court rooms are the same, the judges are the same, and the precedent setting capability is the same in all cases.
That the original grandparent post was suggesting that patent litigation was a criminal matter may have been a confused, but then again changes in "intellectual property law" have indeed criminalized some violations that previously were merely a civil matter. I would dare say that even members of congress often confuse the two kinds of legal actions, and add confusing things into the laws they write which really mucks things up in a hurry.
Part of the problem with NASA's failure to build any new manned spaceflight vehicle since the Johnson administration (or Nixon administration if you are splitting hairs) is that you also burn out engineers. One of the reasons why engineers get involved with building things that require horrible hours and often crappy wages (compared to jobs requiring similar levels of education and talent like writing day trading software for Wall Street companies) is that they want to see their designs actually get built.
It may be fine for a bunch of lawyers to spend years or even entire lifetimes of effort working on a case that ultimately gets settled for the price of a cup of coffee, but telling that to an engineer that their entire career was a complete and total waste is a good way to burn people out of a job and destroy morale to the point you end up with crap getting churned out by the successive engineers who take their place.
On a rare occasion there is some knowledge transfer that happens when you start with a clean sheet, but that only happens if you use those same engineers that are already discouraged because their multi-year project just got cancelled. If that keeps happening repeatedly, they won't even bother trying to put any extra effort into trying to discover corner cases and other similar problems that could plague a project until after the problems start to surface.
There is a huge difference between science and engineering, where certainly science can be passed on to the future. Engineering knowledge is much harder to pass on when the designs for many of the propulsion systems are so different that they might as well be completely different technologies and arguably even different industries.
There is also the "what if" situation where huge amounts of resources were dumped into the project (like the SCSC) which really didn't result in any significantly new science as the project never got to that stage of development at all. You don't learn too much by pouring concrete in new and exciting ways, as if you could even do something like that in a novel way. I'd be curious as to how much science you really can do on most of the cancelled NASA concepts.
Every rocket I'm aware of that isn't carrying a missile launches to the east
While I will admit there are advantages to flights going eastward, there are a great many satellites that aren't necessarily missiles which engage in polar orbits, or in some cases there are orbits like a Molniya orbit and even related orbit called a Tundra orbit. Polar orbits are used primarily for Earth sensing satellites (including reconnaissance satellites like spy sats, but also including mapping satellites like Google Earth uses). The Molniya and Tundra orbits are used as an alternative to geosynchronous orbit patterns and work much better for communications to locations at high latitude locations (thus are commonly used in Russia and Alaska or northern Canada).
Yes, the kinds of launches that are appropriate for Vandenberg are different than Cape Canaveral, but there certainly is a role even for a civilian space port that can engage in those kind of unique orbits.
Launching south from Florida ends up in Cuba (who isn't too keen on stuff coming from American rockets) and there are some fairly large cities that are generally south of KSC that could cause problems. Pretty much the only direction you can launch from is eastward from KSC. Wallops Island in Virgina has an even narrower range of potential launches, although it is being seriously considered for orbital spaceflight as a launch site.
At the very least it isn't a retrograde orbital inclination like Israel needs to perform when launching their satellites as that country launches their vehicles westward across the Mediterranean Sea (somehow Jordan doesn't like rocket debris landing on them from Israel, and neither does Iraq and Iran).
My point is that there is a good reason why a major space port happens to be in California, and why even a Space Shuttle launch pad was built there (even though it was sadly never used). It isn't just for launching nuclear bombs at Russia.
Vandenberg has the advantage that it has a whole bunch of clear ocean to its south. Florida sort of stinks in that regard, and even Texas isn't nearly so good as California is like. Alaska would work nearly as well, but the relatively mild weather of Santa Barbara also gives Vandenberg a nearly perfect location that similar launch facilities in Alaska don't enjoy so much. There isn't a whole lot to the south of Santa Barbara other than the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island, and Antarctica, which makes polar orbits almost perfect from that location. Besides, the distance from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara in terms of how far the equipment need to travel from the manufacturing plants is an added bonus.
I agree though with JSC, as that could be literally anywhere in America (at least with an airport nearby to ferry in and out astronauts or other NASA personnel), not to mention JPL or Marshall.
You have it completely backwards.
The budget has always been a searingly-hot political issue.
I think you could have simply quit right there. It was a problem in the George Washington administration, and Thomas Jefferson got into a huge pickle because he ended up agreeing to the Louisiana Purchase and in theory spending money without approval from Congress (that was sort of granted after the fact). I don't know of any time in American history when the budgetary process was not a big deal.
Heck, the fact that Parliament controlled the taxation authority was one of the things which put the House of Commons in an upper hand position in the United Kingdom and has turned the English monarchy into the current joke that exists today with almost no real political authority (persuasive authority, absolutely, but not any real ability to object to legislation and get that to stick).
If you want to get a huge turnout to a municipal council meeting, simply hold a hearing on some substantial budget changes or even propose a new tax. The seats will most certainly be filled.
My point in bringing up the whole thing is that the NASA budgetary process is a hold-over from the days that parts of NASA used to be a part of the U.S. Army, and that the whole notion of building rockets was considered a short-term activity. If the rockets are simply something you shoot off for the 4th of July celebrations, a short term contract would be all that is needed as well.
This isn't to say that major projects don't happen in the federal government which require a long-term commitment. The Interstate Highway system took nearly 35 years to go from initial concept and initial construction to completion, and some other larger projects like Hoover Dam or even the U.S. Capitol Building required substantial long-term commitment to getting them finished.
If the idea is that space ships need a longer term commitment in order to be useful, I'd have to agree. Some of that philosophy needs to go into how money is appropriated toward NASA.
By making NASA a civilian agency, the problems that result by being associated with the Army should have made this a moot issue some time ago, but bureaucracies like the U.S. Congress can sometimes be stubborn about even those kind of issues. Besides, it is sexy to appear in a committee talking about space, and generally has strong voter appeal even if nobody pays attention to how votes are cast on measures in those committee meetings.
I realize this would be largely an illusion that you are in control as a tax payer, as there would certainly be programs that get appropriations from the budgetary process that could be "made up" if there wasn't enough popular support from those paying taxes.
The problem with your example of Spanish support of the Catholic Church (something prohibited in the USA through the 1st Amendment, thus it wouldn't ever happen in the USA) is that you are given an all or nothing option. Another problem with the notion is that there aren't more options in terms of where to send that 0,7 EUR instead of the Catholic Church, such as perhaps the Red Cross, ESA, or CERN.
The notion of paying tithing as a government program is a bit weird to me, but I've grown up in a different culture where such a thing would never be considered. Still, the idea that your tax dollars are being used for purposes you don't agree with still is true regardless of religious feelings as it could be for military campaigns you oppose or perhaps for supporting environmental programs you disagree with. It will happen no matter what you do precisely because it is the government messing around with your money, even in a representative government that is determined through voter participation.
The whole purpose of doing something like this is to give some sort of taxpayer participation in the budgetary process, where unpopular programs (due to very few tax payers supporting them) could certainly be seen as targets for budget cuts while highly popular programs (like I would guess includes something like NASA or perhaps the National Park Service or even Head Start) would be seen as off limits in budgetary planning or even be considered legitimate for additional funding increases if there are many voter/taxpayers who support those programs. For some programs, in particular things like NASA, I think it would be a tremendous break in part because the amount which actually goes to those agencies is substantially less than what most taxpayers think is going to those agencies.
I would also think that some lobbying efforts would instead transform into public relations efforts that would be in support of or in opposition to various federal agencies to receive this money. Since such "lobbying" would be out in the public, it would be a legitimate part of the political process.
The cost of various wars are not considered part of the military's budget because those are separate appropriations.
If you want to get into hair splitting arguments in terms of how much one branch of the government gets over another one and if special appropriations such as the disaster relief bill following Hurricane Katrina should be recorded in terms of the overall budgetary process, go head and start that hair splitting. Appropriations often happen outside of the normal budgetary process, and I don't expect that to end for any federal agency either. They aren't viewed as a part of the normal budget because they are seen as one-time appropriations not to generally be repeated (it is hoped).
What about simply directing where 5% of your tax dollars will be spent?
Seriously, this is an interesting notion and it would certainly be interesting to see which agencies would get extra funding and which ones would be ignored if they depended upon popular support for funding.
I may like to give to NASA, but others may want their "discretionary tax dollars" spent on the USMC instead, or perhaps added to the budget of the Peace Corps, the EPA, or even the IRS. There may even be some who simply want the money allocated to the Bureau of the Public Debt (aka not really given to any federal agency at all and instead pay down the deficit).
The general idea is something I really like.
The constitutional aspect is derived from how NASA started. Keep in mind that some significant parts of NASA came from the U.S. Army Field Artillery Branch, which was how Werner Von Braun ended up coming to NASA. There were also several U.S. Navy programs that were folded into NASA as well, but the Army is something significant to explicitly mention.
When the U.S. Constitution was written, there was a significant concern about a standing army running around North America with the potential to stage a coup d'état and thus overthrow any civilian government that had goals and aims which were different from the Army's goals. There are many historical examples which show this concern was well founded, and one of the steps taken to control the Army is to force annual accounting to Congress on their needs and to require annual reauthorization of expenditures.
The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, was acknowledged to be quite a bit different and even when the U.S. Constitution was written it was acknowledged that some ship building programs may take several years for completion. Even acts of the Washington Administration (yes, that George Washington) through the Naval Act of 1794 had a several year term placed upon its completion to build a fleet of six frigates that ultimately formed the core of the U.S. Navy that exists today. In fact, the U.S.S. Constitution (created in that act) is still a commissioned U.S. Navy warship even today.
I'll also point out that one of the reasons for creating the U.S. Air Force was explicitly to set up multi-year appropriations for that branch of military service that otherwise wouldn't be possible if they remained a part of the U.S. Army. It was an acknowledgement that the annual arrangements for the Army aren't sufficient for advanced airplanes that may need a multi-year contract for completion.
In this sense, what is being proposed is acknowledging it takes more than a year to build a reliable rocket, especially for things which will be taking people to other planets. The model that congress should be following for building things in space should be more along the lines of the U.S. Navy where ship will be traveling to distant locations and will be expensive to build. Certainly the notion that a rocket going into space is nothing more than a glorified artillery shell needs to be left behind. I certainly think the notion of a NASA administrator staging a coup upon the federal government with his agency backing up such a coup is laughable by any measure of the imagination.
I presume you are talking about Jeff Greason and the Lynx rocketplane? I would dare say they are at about the same level of projects as Copenhagen Suborbital, along with Armadillo Aerospace and if I dare say Richard Branson and Spaceship Two (definitely more money is getting put onto that spacecraft).
There are a number of companies who are preparing vehicles for flight into space at various regimes and price points, but I wouldn't hold any particular group with derision over another. Some have succeeded and others have failed, but that is the nature of human progress. I certainly wouldn't deride the Lynx because you may think Greason lacks credentials in aerospace engineering, because he sure knows engineering management. The Lynx is progressing along just fine too.
You can orbit a super-massive black hole (like the one at the galactic center) and slow down time significantly.... but at the cost of not just massive exposure to radiation but also tidal forces that would rip your legs and head off your body even while technically outside of the event horizon (thus still in theory capable of leaving).
Travel at 99.9x% of the speed of light has other similar health risks where the background cosmic radiation can through blue shifts in frequency turn into deadly radiation... much less any star light that was formerly in the visible light bands when traveling at that speed. Collision avoidance of any "dark" objects would be tricky too, like any wandering comets or asteroids much less planet sized objects in interstellar space. Heck, smashing into something the size of a walnut would not be pretty, although that would be mostly a part of that same radiation hazard at that speed.
Buzz Aldrin wrote about a proposed "Apollo II" (read that as "Apollo Two") capsule that was kicked around the office inside of the NASA astronaut corps for a little while. That basic idea is pretty much what Orion has turned into, although the original proposal was to merely expand the Apollo capsule that could still fit on top of an Apollo service module.
The one impressive thing with Copenhagen Suborbital isn't necessarily the cutting edge technology, but rather the incredible low-cost approach they are taking for its development and using largely donations and donated labor to build everything. The comparison is much better made against Armadillo Aerospace, other than the fact they don't have a fairy god-millionaire who is helping them out to sponsor their vehicle development. But they do have Kickstarter and a huge fan base that kind of makes up for that missing part of the picture.
Regardless of anything else you may think about this rocket, they are "bending metal" and sending stuff into the air as well as the fact they already have several launches under their belt to demonstrate at least some level of competence for sending stuff up with this technology. It isn't necessarily what Copenhagen Suborbital has done in terms of being compared to national space programs, but rather that they are doing anything at all and certainly in comparison to other amateur/semi-professional groups working on a shoestring budget they are as far along doing real spaceflight as anybody else in the world.
There are a few retired NASA (and apparently ESA) engineers working in Copenhagen Suborbital as well, so the technical skill of those involved is pretty high and they do know what they are doing.
A whole lot can happen between now and November, where the real fight hasn't started yet in terms of Obama vs. Romney yet. I certainly wouldn't count out Romney from winning, but I will admit that at the moment the contest is up to Obama to lose by doing something really stupid.
I really like these charts, particularly the ones covering previous elections. What seemed to galvanize voters in 2004 was the decided lack of leadership on the part of John McCain, or at least a feeling that Obama could do a better job than McCain in terms of responding to the financial panic of 2004 that happened right before the election. Something similar could certainly happen in the next few months. Obama's response in such a situation will be critical.
It is also possible that this could be sort of like the 1972 elections, but in reverse. Obama might be able to get a decisive win, but ends up losing Congress or at least not really helping his party much in terms of control of Congress. It certainly seems unlike for the Democratic Party to regain the House of Representatives, and the Senate is likely going to either stay on a razor thin margin of control by the Democrats or perhaps gain a thin majority for Republicans.
I happen to like SpaceVidcast:
http://www.spacevidcast.com/live/
They frequently stream NASA TV, plus you have a chatroom full of space nerds who more often than not have answers to almost any technical question you can think up. The only problem comes if they are crushed with visitors, but I've seen them handle 20k simultaneous users before. The chat room gets sort of nuts when you have that many people, so it isn't perfect.
Ben and Cariann also do color commentary when things get pretty slow, but also know when to shut up (unlike the NBC commentators for the Olympics).
I have no doubt that Charles Bolden was taken into the White House and that Barack Obama very likely said those things to him. For Bolden's tenure as NASA Administrator, those may even been seen as admirable things for him to accomplish while in that position.
I do think this is way overblown though. I'll also say that on the whole Bolden seems to be a very competent administrator over the agency in spite of the fact that he gets almost no support from the White House in terms of his agency's direction nor any sort of funding or support from the Democrats in terms of even funding the agency.
Space policy is dead last in terms of things that the Obama administration is concerned about, where the only thing that the White House is trying to make sure is that they don't lose votes in Florida or make it a clearly partisan issue over space policy. Bolden has been mostly successful in doing that too. About the only thing that the Republicans are doing for that matter is to make sure that Alabama and Utah get to keep their part of the NASA budget (thanks Shelby and Hatch!) I don't see a Romney administration making much of a difference in space policy either, unless he appoints Newt Gingrich as NASA administrator (which would make this gaffe by Bolden seem extremely trivial by comparison to almost anything which would leave Gingrich's mouth).
Perhaps some day there will be some serious space policy. I expect to wait a decade or more for that to happen though.
If there is a theme park for weird science, I'd say it would have to be the Exploratorium. If you happen to ever get to the San Francisco area in your travels, it is most definitely a geek out site to visit and check out... especially with your kids if you have them with you but going by yourself is also worth the time as well.
They could also use some benefactors and philanthropists to help them out, but to me it is what a museum really ought to be instead of a bunch of stuffy static exhibits.
Then again the Saturn V could have been used for military missions as well. There certainly was no law or reason why it couldn't be used, if the military needed such a payload. That such a launch would be hard to hide might be a problem, but the same could be said about Shuttle launches.
The original building at Cape Canaveral (the Vehicle Assembly Building) was designed to house the successor to the Saturn V, which was going to be an even larger rocket. Once the Saturn V was basically proving itself along with things like the original F1 engine being able to produce the desired thrust, plans for that follow up rocket were dropped.
There are a total of four bays in the Vehicle Assembly Building, two of which are currently being refit for the SLS program including the mobile launcher pad that was used for both the Saturn V and Space Shuttle launches. The other two bays have been in theory offered to other businesses that may want to have a similar kind of capability or for any future projects that NASA may want to put together that goes beyond the SLS project.
The Saturn V was originally designed to be used for a long, long time with production runs numbering in the hundreds if not thousands of copies. The test stand set up along with the part supplier chains were originally told that the Moon landings were only going to be the warm up to a much more aggressive manned spaceflight program. Unfortunately Congress choose not to go that route and instead cut the program altogether in favor of a design which came from another part of NASA. That is what gave us the Space Shuttle.
I still argue that the Saturn V could have sent into space just as much tonnage into orbit and perhaps even more astronauts, as well as preserving at least in theory the capability of returning to the Moon and would have even kept orbital space stations operational (including more missions to the original Skylab) for a price far cheaper than the Shuttle program. That is looking in hind sight, but your point about the Saturn V is pretty spot on.
It is also interesting to note that part of that effort to develop the Saturn V is still in use today... by Space X with their McGregor, Texas facility that is being used to test the Merlin engines used on the Falcon rockets. The test stands being used were developed to work with the F1 engines, and the work flow patterns designed by Werner Von Braun have simply been repurposed by Elon Musk for the Merlin engine processing. In other words, the cheap prices that you see with the Falcon 9 owes at least part of its heritage to the original F1 engines that were developed so many years ago.