I'm sorry that I may have received the wrong impression on this issue. This was one of the reasons I simply flat out refused to be involved with Nupedia once I started to get into the project, even though I was an early supporter of the idea and was a part of the group brought forward with Richard Stallman when he merged the Gnupedia project with Nupedia.
I was told flat out by several of the early organizers that I was not welcome to write for either Nupedia nor Wikipedia early on, so I quietly left both projects for a number of years until I found out about Wikibooks, and sort of came in through a back way into Wikipedia once things started to get better established. If my own recollection is a bit murky that was a great many years ago and I can't really tell you who was speaking with authority and who wasn't at the time because it is all jumbled together and I was sort of sitting on the sidelines trying to help with the technical side of things until my own efforts were thrown under the bus.
I sort of thought you were supportive of that attitude at the time, and if my memory is faulty on this issue I sincerely apologize. Some of those e-mails that went back and forth are now lost to crashed hard drives and abandoned computers of long ago so it is hard for me to document what specifically happened.
It is unfortunate as well that I wasn't able to help out with some of that early development effort, as I think I could have helped to contribute as well.
Regardless, as a parent of several children who use Wikipedia as a resource (where I've taught them critical source evaluation skills and even writing skills because of Wikipedia), I am concerned about the completely unfiltered nature of Wikipedia and how some of the content really isn't something I would like them to be viewing. I don't understand what the opposition is here for a completely voluntary to use and to enact system of content labeling for mature content.
If anything they're as concerned or more concerned about litter from the up to 10,000 spectators that might go to see launches than they are about the complex itself.
If SpaceX does a manned spaceflight launch from this complex, I'd expect that 10k spectators might be a severe underestimate.
Still, of all of the complaints being raised, this is one of the few that rings true and is a valid complaint. Of course the hotels, restaurants, and service businesses in the area would really love to have this kind of dilemma on their hands to deal with where the local chamber of commerce might pass the hat to hire dumpsters and a cleanup crew even if SpaceX doesn't (or done jointly with the rest of the chamber of commerce).
Hydrazine is used for in-space thrusters. It can be nasty stuff and is toxic, but isn't the fuel used in the main engines. For the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule, it is only about a hundred pounds of the stuff.
The Falcon 1 uses rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen... hence the products of water and CO2. Most rockets run a bit oxygen rich, so there tends to be some extra exotic products but those are very minor even though they mainly happen in the lower atmosphere (stuff like NOx and other nitrate chemicals due to the high temperature exhaust interacting with the ambient air at the launch site).
The largest problem that has kept people confined to low-Earth orbit has been the cost to get there, pure and simple. The business case for getting into space in the first place and doing something once you get there must cope with the fact that a 1 liter bottle of water costs about $20,000 in order to put it into that position. It doesn't have to be that though.
I love to point out that the fuel costs on the Space Shuttle for each launch were less than the catering budget that the NASA public relations office spent on the press corps at each launch. Among all of the costs for launching a Shuttle, fuel was so insignificant that it was lost in the statistical noise of the budget and wasn't even a consideration. That generally is true for almost every other current generation launcher.
The actual cost of putting that 1 liter bottle of water into space, if you strip out the other costs and concentrate just on the fuel costs, are about $10. That is a huge difference, where doing something simple like merely trying to make the spaceship reusable can make the costs go down significantly, not to mention actually putting the spacecraft into serial production and not worrying so much about trying to get that last little bit of performance out of the spacecraft but instead trying to make it cheaper to put stuff into space.
SpaceX currently can put that same 1 liter bottle of water into that same location for about $5,000 using the Falcon 9 in its current configuration, or about $10,000 when put inside of the Dragon capsule. The long term goal of the company is to make that cost go down to about $1,000 over the next several years and in theory down to about $100 if their reusable vehicle strategy can work... making fuel costs something much more important.
If you can get that cost to go down, so much else becomes possible. You can put a 50 ton spacecraft capable of going to Mars into space for a price considerably cheaper if the cost of putting it up there in the first place isn't so expensive. It also makes the ability to earn a profit from something happening in space so much easier that you can close the business case for doing something like mining asteroids for Platinum group metals that you can bring back to the Earth along with fuel resources so you don't need to keep shipping up not just bottles of water but also that fuel needed to go elsewhere in the solar system for a price less than that earlier quoted $20,000 per kilogram.
In other words, driving the cost of spaceflight is a virtuous circle of opportunity which makes everything else possible.
Don't get me started on the pillaging of the natives bit. While I won't deny that it happened and might have even been the motivation for early expeditions to the Americas from Europe, that isn't where the bulk of the money to be made in trans Atlantic trade occurred.
I don't think you realize how dangerous federal entitlements and block spending has been to the rest of the country. Steal from California? That state is flushing money down the sewer. The problem is that too much money is being spent and that spending needs to be brought under control in some fashion.
And yes, I think the rest of the country would be better off if the tax revenues coming from California weren't being added to the federal treasury.... not that tax revenue means anything any more due to massive deficits and magical money coming from thin air by the Federal Reserve.
Fix that problem (it is a political, not a physics issue) and it wouldn't be so bad. Then again the other problems of Mexico are mostly political issues too.
The idea has been considered already. SpaceX is simply looking for more options, as they are getting enough business to keep the rest of these spaceports busy and there are some drawbacks to the other launch sites that are causing some problems with their customers.
To define what a wasteland is, you need to define the term. Some would see a coastal swamp as a wasteland incapable of being used for something useful like a farm... which is pretty much why nobody has built stuff in the area already. Besides, read some of the above comments about why a spaceport can't simply be located in any random location.
The issue you are complaining about is the result of federalizing issues that really should remain state level issues. To me, that sort of reinforces the point that the rest of America might be better off without California and New York, even if it would force fiscal reality to take hold as well.
I suppose I shouldn't have responded to flamebait, but it was begging to be said. Still, I would be curious what demented hedonistic lifestyle you are referring to?
Jackalopes are native to any place where there is somebody gullible to believe they exist. I don't think Douglas, WY has any sort of exclusive claim to the idea, but it makes for a nice Chamber of Commerce web page. Good for them and those towns that have the largest ball of twine or some other similar nonsense.
Space exploration with today's technology might well be like trying to build a 747 in medieval times. It's not going to go any faster no matter how much money you pour into hot air balloon building. The best thing you could have done at the time was to fund research in physics.
If you really want to explore space, you probably need to invest in the LHC and similar fundamental research.
I'll admit that spaceflight around the solar system today is very similar in nature to what it was like to travel across oceans in the 1600's. It is a dangerous activity that pushes the limits of construction technology as well as presents hazards that we haven't really experienced before, but that doesn't imply you need to stay on your behind and not try.
I completely disagree that basic research into physical science is needed at all. You don't need to know anything but celestial mechanics and perhaps a little bit of General Relativity to be able to navigate your way around the solar system or even be able to survive the trip in terms of potential health hazards. The technologies to get around are very well known.
You may argue that it is insanely expensive to get into space, but that has nothing to do with physics but instead has to do with government regulations and interference in the marketplace as well as a complete failure by government programs trying to reduce the cost of access to space. From the perspective of simply fuel costs it should only cost a few thousand dollars to put somebody into orbit. Elon Musk's assertion that a round trip ticket to Mars costing about a half million dollars and make a profit for his company is not really stretching the imagination.
Knowledge gained from the LHC, while perhaps useful, is not needed in order to figure out how to put people and things into space much less gain knowledge about how to extract resources from asteroids, the Moon, and elsewhere in the Solar System. The raw technology for getting around has already been developed and indeed is already in use. It really is an issue of vision and the willingness to go out and try. Sitting on our behinds and doing nothing is myopic at best. It will be by exploring the solar system and getting "out there" that new breakthroughs in scientific research will happen.
The problem at Cape Canaveral is that it is a busy place, and expected to become even busier. SpaceX is looking for another launch site precisely because they can't get the launch slots available from all of the competition from other launch providers trying to launch out of that site, especially ULA but there are others. Space Florida is trying hard to get some of the rest of the launch providers to at least consider the place as well.
The problem with jobs at the Cape in Florida is mainly because the Shuttle program was winding down, and NASA did a piss poor job of providing a bridge between the jobs that used to be there under the Shuttle program and what they will be needing once everything gets shuffled around to all of the new launch providers picking up the slack trying to send the same tonnage into space.
Oh... some of the newer companies like SpaceX don't need so many people to send the same amount of stuff into space.... which sort of sucks if you were one of those people who got cut.
Or form letter concern about "loss of the function and value of all wetlands". My take is that a launch facility would increase the value of such wetlands. It'd also increase the long term viability of such a refuge since there's not going to be many people who would try to grab land next to an active spaceport.
The only people I could imagine would be interested in buying land next to an active spaceport would be other launch providers who might like to build their own launch complex nearby. Since those tend to be rather large in terms of area (buying up nearby privately owned land and turning it into the launch complex including buffer zones) I would say it would be a net increase in wilderness area overall if that happens. Having multiple launch providers at the same general area would be beneficial for other launch related services like cryogenic fuel suppliers and other related service industries in direct support of such launchers.
The real question to ask is why Cape Canaveral doesn't look like Daytona Beach or Miami Beach? That should be obvious, but it doesn't seem to be the case for these environmentalists.
There isn't any suggestion that I've seen for the "local government" to spend any money on this endeavor, and in fact that the local government is going to get a whole bunch of tax revenue by having this spaceport built. That doesn't sound like siphoning away cash but rather pouring cash into the local government and a way to increase local services and lower the overall tax rate for everybody else at the same time along with bringing in hundreds of college educated people who can teach part-time in local schools with practical real world experience in aerospace engineering and related disciplines.
That is a bad thing?
As far as preserving the ecosystem.... have you looked at Cape Canaveral? It could have been a bustling sprawl of beach houses, condos, hotels, and tourism. Instead it is a wildlife sanctuary where most of the land is filled with anything but people. I'd argue that building a spaceport at this location is going to do more to help the environment and lessen the environmental impact of this stretch of coastline than any other possible use of the area, including if it was simply designated as an official wilderness area and turned into a national park. Fewer roads will be built, what roads do exist will be abandoned and allowed to revert to wilderness, and a substantially lesser impact upon the area will happen including buying up nearby ranches over time to make this space port something that will make the ecological impact on the area far less than had it been "put to use" for any other purpose.
I guess that is a terrible use for the area, and it should be turned into an oil refinery instead. Good thinking there.
There was a bat that made a home on the external tank of a shuttle once. It even hung on for dear life at least past the launch tower at his perch, at which point it isn't really known if the bat made the trip into space or not, or survived MaxQ for that matter.
I guess that is why Las Cruces, New Mexico decided to build a spaceport nearby. They are doing both air launched vehicles with Virgin Galactic as well as some pad launches.
I expect that most every city with a fairly large amount of room to the east is eventually going to have a spaceport. If the mayor of Douglas wants to encourage SpaceX to build at their location instead, I'd suggest they try to put together a delegation and send a quick message to gwynne at spacex dot com and let her know that the site is available including tax incentives and other inducements to get the location considered.
Good luck with that... and I mean it. If the location is as good as you say and the jackalopes aren't going to be in danger if a rocket blows up in the area, it certainly deserves some real consideration. SpaceX hasn't chosen the site yet, and is very much open to other suggestions. Just don't wait until they start pouring concrete though.
All I ask is to give me the chance to get off this rock and to put my own money into the attempt to do so. What I and others with my attitude complain about is some idiot who is getting in our way trying to stop us from even trying, particularly when they are completely clueless about the enterprise and don't know a damn thing about physics, science, or even how their actions are actually killing themselves in the process as well.
Mankind as a whole, to the most remote and technologically backward countries in the most impoverish and destitute areas of the world and elsewhere as well, as a result of the exploration of space than any other single activity that has happened in the past century. It has prevented more wars, fed more people, kept more people from natural disasters, given new insights into almost every field of science, and made practical differences in the lives of every single person on this planet than anything else which has been done.
It is the future of mankind to go into space, although the step to do that is completely voluntary. You don't have to go, but please give me the chance to leave. If you are pulling out the shotgun telling me that I can't come back, that is your choice too... and I might just say good riddance as well. Don't be too surprised if a few rocks fall from the sky though to smash that shotgun and anybody holding it. It kind of sucks living at the bottom of a gravity well. Literally it sucks stuff down upon you so good luck with that.
There are alternatives. There is a spot near Miami that is competing against Brownsville, as is a spot in Puerto Rico and the Big Island in Hawaii. Hawaii has been mostly ruled out (the locals don't want SpaceX there) but the other spots are open... and the folks in Florida just have to go up the coast a little bit to see how much money spaceflight can bring to a community. The point still remains that there aren't really that many suitable locations where this kind of thing can happen and to suggest otherwise is ignoring physics and geography.
You need a location that has a whole lot of water to the east and is as close to the equator as possible. That does exist in China, a few islands in the Pacific Ocean, South America (mainly Brazil but French Guiana works just fine for the ESA), and the above named locations. This spot in Brownsville is pretty unique in the world to be in a 1st world country and at a nearly ideal latitude with a whole lot of water to the east. The purpose of water to the east is because you get an extra push from the rotation of the Earth (that is the physics part) when you launch to the east. The geography part is important because you don't want pieces of the rocket landing on people either by accident (when a rocket blows up) or even semi-accidentally (when the 1st stage goes down... it has to go somewhere and hopefully not on somebody's living room). The part of Mexico a bit further south from Brownsville could also work.... but then again do you want to export even more jobs to Mexico?
What is interesting here, as pointed out by khallow and others, is that by building a major space port at this location and perhaps even expanding that spaceport slightly for other would-be launch operators, it will do far more to protect the environment and preserve the current wildlife in the area than almost any other kind of activity which could be done at the site. If anything, fewer roads will be built, fewer visitors damaging wildlife habitat, and less of an overall environmental impact on the area in general will happen than if the area was officially recognized as a national park or formal wildlife refuge and receive an official wilderness designation.
This isn't a risk to the environment, it is a huge blessing to it. Because it will be bringing in literally millions of dollars into the local economy it will also be huge to the tax base of the area providing schools, parks, and all of the social services that you could hope for and more... and a strong reason not to use the area near the space port for any other activity. If there is pollution in the wildlife area, the tax dollars will be there to treat raw sewage and deal with the other problems to clean the area up. Law enforcement will be active in getting people out of the area during a launch (and often even between launches) and hunting in the area simply won't happen because it will simply be dangerous to do that kind of activity. Simply put, capitalism will play its hand and force the area to become a wildlife area by the nature of the activity. This isn't like building an an oil refinery at this location, as its status as essentially a wilderness is the reason they want the site. The areas around this launch site will even likely be turned more into a wilderness as well.
California is still the nation's envy. Do you think people talking about the "American Dream" want to live in shit holes like Texas? Every American city that is outside of California, Washington, New York and Colorado could disappear tomorrow and no one other than inbred retards would care.
I think most of the rest of America wouldn't notice if any of those cities in the states you mention disappeared as well and might even sigh with relief that they can finally balance the federal budget.
Perhaps some day New Jersey can live up to its state motto instead of being the armpit of America or acting as a suburb of NYC.
We have pretty good amount of space here on earth too. We can colonise the sea for instance, or build down instead of up. There is lots of space available before we even come up with crazy plans to build O'Neil colonies in space.
Building into the ocean is much harder than it looks. It would be seriously cheaper to build at L-5 than to build a floating platform in the Gulf of Mexico (where the climate is at least fairly agreeable). If you could seastead in a fairly economical manner, it would be done in a serious way right now.
Antarctica is often suggested as a place you can go that is more hospitable to life than Mars, and I'd have to agree. The problem with Antarctica is that politically you can't do anything there because of the various treaties and a very real concern that a major colonization effort in Antarctica would result in a major world conflict like World War II over who owns what on that continent. Treating the place as a playground by scientists is one way to diffuse the issue and kick the can down the road for another century or more, where hopefully resources from space will make anything that can be obtained from Antarctica irrelevant.
Digging down is just plain stupid. Again, it would be done much more than it is if it was so easy. Most of the time people are digging up into the sky, which is something that has been happening for a couple of centuries and the last century in particular. While the very tall skyscrapers have all of the headlines, there are a great many smaller buildings that still go over a dozen stories and include both residential, commercial, and industrial facilities. Digging up into the sky does cost money and is only done in urban centers where it makes sense.
I might agree that an archology could be built that could house up to a million people in a relatively small footprint of land and be able to be self-sufficient. These do require a substantial supply of raw materials and in order to get built require the urban services of a large metro area to at least get started until self-sufficiency is attained. For myself though, I think it will take building stuff like an O'Neill colony and learning how to manage resources effectively in space to be able to build proper archologies on the Earth. Furthermore, it will be from space where the raw materials to build stuff like that will come from rather than from digging stuff out of the ground here on the Earth.
Space is huge. So mingbogglingly huge that you can't possibly imagine just how much room you have to expand in space. The future of humanity is up there, not on this rock... which can be turned into an ecological reserve in due time. The only other end game if we stay here on the Earth is to do some sort of Malthusian genocide as the current growth of mankind can't survive on limited resources. In space there are more galaxies than people, and more stars in this galaxy than people. It will also take a long, long time before it can even be remotely considered to be crowded in this Solar System alone.
My problem with Larry Sanger is that he is all high and mighty about who should be privileged to write articles for Wikipedia and who shouldn't. He was the guy who started Nupedia, and his attitude about who might be qualified for writing encyclopedia articles was very restrictive and frankly snotty (or snobby) from my own POV. Basically he expected that the free encyclopedia would only be written by folks with a PhD and stubs by those with college degrees.... and you would only write articles in your field of expertise.
Basically his view of Wikipedia is that the deletionists should rule the day completely and get everything they ever hoped for and more to the point even the most hardcore deletionist would start to question why content was being removed. The only things that could stand up for references were things from published scholarly journals... certainly nothing pedestrian like a newspaper or popular magazine. Forget about blogs or anything found on the internet, that would be completely forbidden and it wouldn't even matter who wrote any of that content on-line.
There is also some general bad blood between many in the Wikipedia community and Larry Sanger for other reasons as well that go beyond this discussion, so it suffices to say there are many problems with what he says.
From that perspective, I take almost everything I hear from Larry Sanger with a grain of salt and generally dismiss almost everything he says, but in this case I tend to side with him so far as I think the suggestion is a good one so far as it is completely voluntary in its use and application. It doesn't censor a thing, is easily implemented, takes up very little room in the MediaWiki database, is easily monitored for abuse, and it doesn't require constant oversight by admins other than to step in and moderate discussions from time to time. Having a flag like this might even be a way for people to vent about various issues and certainly could be an option to bring up instead of forcing an AfD and all of the problems that creates.
If it only impacts a small amount of content, then even fighting this flag is something that seems trivial and stupid to do. You will never need to do anything about this flag other than reverting some troll who put it on a page where it isn't deserved at all and may even do a pretty good job of identifying trolls.
As for NPOV issues, I fail to see how this violates even the spirit of WP:NPOV or the general neutral POV philosophy of page development. If it was being used to delete content simply because that content might be controversial (try to look up the Wikibooks Jokebook some time for a real tragedy in that department) I would agree that is an issue. Content is being deleted from Wikipedia because it somehow offends certain religious and political groups and that should be fought against. That said, I don't see what this idea does other than creates something akin to creating a category label for content of various kinds and filters either for that category or against it. I suppose you could filter either for or against Star Trek related content as well and do pretty much the same thing. I wonder if that decision would be controversial?
For crying out loud, this isn't censoring, nor is it really hard to draw a line on this stuff.
If it is flagrant porn, the flag will go on. If it isn't, the flag will be there only because of a troll and be instantly reverted. If it is in dispute, there will be about 500k of discussion about the decision to put the flag on the content and the civil libertarians will be fighting the Puritans with a nearly constant edit war lasting a couple of years and result in ArbCom decisions with a few editors banned over the controversy.
The decision to put the flag on this content is done at the editor level... or perhaps at the "autoconfirmed user" level (like what you need to edit semi-protected content). It isn't that big of a deal and you can get that kind of status by simply participating on Wikipedia for four days. If you disagree with the flag, you can add it or remove it or join into that battle royale of discussion arguing over specific content and the application of the flag. You certainly don't need to worry about some faceless censoring committee. As for genuine medical photos... that can be dealt with on a case by case basis as well.
You can also choose to add this flag or not, and you as a parent can decide if you want to use this flag or not for your kids (it is originally opt-out). If you don't want to trip across some porn when randomly going through Wikipedia, you can filter that out or you can turn the switch off and have that stuff included. It is your choice. Censorship would be removing choices from people, and this does exactly the opposite as it expands the range of choices for you to use.
These kind of pages are often nominated for deletion (the Prykete Bong page received three separate RfD nominations and a minor wheel war on top of that) and often become the source of edit wars as well. Furthermore, even if the content is appropriate for a certain sub-set of pages, trolls and other petty juvenile pranks often throw this kind of content onto other heavy traffic pages as a form of vandalism. Yes, those are easily reverted, but if you admin on Wikimedia projects you eventually become even numb to seeing such junk.
If all you do is edit astronomy and political articles, you will never see this kind of stuff.
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I'm sorry that I may have received the wrong impression on this issue. This was one of the reasons I simply flat out refused to be involved with Nupedia once I started to get into the project, even though I was an early supporter of the idea and was a part of the group brought forward with Richard Stallman when he merged the Gnupedia project with Nupedia.
I was told flat out by several of the early organizers that I was not welcome to write for either Nupedia nor Wikipedia early on, so I quietly left both projects for a number of years until I found out about Wikibooks, and sort of came in through a back way into Wikipedia once things started to get better established. If my own recollection is a bit murky that was a great many years ago and I can't really tell you who was speaking with authority and who wasn't at the time because it is all jumbled together and I was sort of sitting on the sidelines trying to help with the technical side of things until my own efforts were thrown under the bus.
I sort of thought you were supportive of that attitude at the time, and if my memory is faulty on this issue I sincerely apologize. Some of those e-mails that went back and forth are now lost to crashed hard drives and abandoned computers of long ago so it is hard for me to document what specifically happened.
It is unfortunate as well that I wasn't able to help out with some of that early development effort, as I think I could have helped to contribute as well.
Regardless, as a parent of several children who use Wikipedia as a resource (where I've taught them critical source evaluation skills and even writing skills because of Wikipedia), I am concerned about the completely unfiltered nature of Wikipedia and how some of the content really isn't something I would like them to be viewing. I don't understand what the opposition is here for a completely voluntary to use and to enact system of content labeling for mature content.
If anything they're as concerned or more concerned about litter from the up to 10,000 spectators that might go to see launches than they are about the complex itself.
If SpaceX does a manned spaceflight launch from this complex, I'd expect that 10k spectators might be a severe underestimate.
Still, of all of the complaints being raised, this is one of the few that rings true and is a valid complaint. Of course the hotels, restaurants, and service businesses in the area would really love to have this kind of dilemma on their hands to deal with where the local chamber of commerce might pass the hat to hire dumpsters and a cleanup crew even if SpaceX doesn't (or done jointly with the rest of the chamber of commerce).
Hydrazine is used for in-space thrusters. It can be nasty stuff and is toxic, but isn't the fuel used in the main engines. For the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule, it is only about a hundred pounds of the stuff.
The Falcon 1 uses rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen... hence the products of water and CO2. Most rockets run a bit oxygen rich, so there tends to be some extra exotic products but those are very minor even though they mainly happen in the lower atmosphere (stuff like NOx and other nitrate chemicals due to the high temperature exhaust interacting with the ambient air at the launch site).
So you're saying that hundreds of years from now we'll find out that a portion of our population has been commuting to Mars the whole time?
Perhaps we'll arrive on Mars and discover that some secret group of Nazi Germans got there first.
If you ask a stupid question, you deserve a stupid answer.
The largest problem that has kept people confined to low-Earth orbit has been the cost to get there, pure and simple. The business case for getting into space in the first place and doing something once you get there must cope with the fact that a 1 liter bottle of water costs about $20,000 in order to put it into that position. It doesn't have to be that though.
I love to point out that the fuel costs on the Space Shuttle for each launch were less than the catering budget that the NASA public relations office spent on the press corps at each launch. Among all of the costs for launching a Shuttle, fuel was so insignificant that it was lost in the statistical noise of the budget and wasn't even a consideration. That generally is true for almost every other current generation launcher.
The actual cost of putting that 1 liter bottle of water into space, if you strip out the other costs and concentrate just on the fuel costs, are about $10. That is a huge difference, where doing something simple like merely trying to make the spaceship reusable can make the costs go down significantly, not to mention actually putting the spacecraft into serial production and not worrying so much about trying to get that last little bit of performance out of the spacecraft but instead trying to make it cheaper to put stuff into space.
SpaceX currently can put that same 1 liter bottle of water into that same location for about $5,000 using the Falcon 9 in its current configuration, or about $10,000 when put inside of the Dragon capsule. The long term goal of the company is to make that cost go down to about $1,000 over the next several years and in theory down to about $100 if their reusable vehicle strategy can work... making fuel costs something much more important.
If you can get that cost to go down, so much else becomes possible. You can put a 50 ton spacecraft capable of going to Mars into space for a price considerably cheaper if the cost of putting it up there in the first place isn't so expensive. It also makes the ability to earn a profit from something happening in space so much easier that you can close the business case for doing something like mining asteroids for Platinum group metals that you can bring back to the Earth along with fuel resources so you don't need to keep shipping up not just bottles of water but also that fuel needed to go elsewhere in the solar system for a price less than that earlier quoted $20,000 per kilogram.
In other words, driving the cost of spaceflight is a virtuous circle of opportunity which makes everything else possible.
Don't get me started on the pillaging of the natives bit. While I won't deny that it happened and might have even been the motivation for early expeditions to the Americas from Europe, that isn't where the bulk of the money to be made in trans Atlantic trade occurred.
I don't think you realize how dangerous federal entitlements and block spending has been to the rest of the country. Steal from California? That state is flushing money down the sewer. The problem is that too much money is being spent and that spending needs to be brought under control in some fashion.
And yes, I think the rest of the country would be better off if the tax revenues coming from California weren't being added to the federal treasury.... not that tax revenue means anything any more due to massive deficits and magical money coming from thin air by the Federal Reserve.
One word sums up why Mexico is a bad choice: ITAR
Fix that problem (it is a political, not a physics issue) and it wouldn't be so bad. Then again the other problems of Mexico are mostly political issues too.
SpaceX is leasing a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. They also have another launch site in California (at Vandenberg AFB) and even a third launch site in the Marshall Islands.
The idea has been considered already. SpaceX is simply looking for more options, as they are getting enough business to keep the rest of these spaceports busy and there are some drawbacks to the other launch sites that are causing some problems with their customers.
To define what a wasteland is, you need to define the term. Some would see a coastal swamp as a wasteland incapable of being used for something useful like a farm... which is pretty much why nobody has built stuff in the area already. Besides, read some of the above comments about why a spaceport can't simply be located in any random location.
The issue you are complaining about is the result of federalizing issues that really should remain state level issues. To me, that sort of reinforces the point that the rest of America might be better off without California and New York, even if it would force fiscal reality to take hold as well.
I suppose I shouldn't have responded to flamebait, but it was begging to be said. Still, I would be curious what demented hedonistic lifestyle you are referring to?
Jackalopes are native to any place where there is somebody gullible to believe they exist. I don't think Douglas, WY has any sort of exclusive claim to the idea, but it makes for a nice Chamber of Commerce web page. Good for them and those towns that have the largest ball of twine or some other similar nonsense.
Space exploration with today's technology might well be like trying to build a 747 in medieval times. It's not going to go any faster no matter how much money you pour into hot air balloon building. The best thing you could have done at the time was to fund research in physics.
If you really want to explore space, you probably need to invest in the LHC and similar fundamental research.
I'll admit that spaceflight around the solar system today is very similar in nature to what it was like to travel across oceans in the 1600's. It is a dangerous activity that pushes the limits of construction technology as well as presents hazards that we haven't really experienced before, but that doesn't imply you need to stay on your behind and not try.
I completely disagree that basic research into physical science is needed at all. You don't need to know anything but celestial mechanics and perhaps a little bit of General Relativity to be able to navigate your way around the solar system or even be able to survive the trip in terms of potential health hazards. The technologies to get around are very well known.
You may argue that it is insanely expensive to get into space, but that has nothing to do with physics but instead has to do with government regulations and interference in the marketplace as well as a complete failure by government programs trying to reduce the cost of access to space. From the perspective of simply fuel costs it should only cost a few thousand dollars to put somebody into orbit. Elon Musk's assertion that a round trip ticket to Mars costing about a half million dollars and make a profit for his company is not really stretching the imagination.
Knowledge gained from the LHC, while perhaps useful, is not needed in order to figure out how to put people and things into space much less gain knowledge about how to extract resources from asteroids, the Moon, and elsewhere in the Solar System. The raw technology for getting around has already been developed and indeed is already in use. It really is an issue of vision and the willingness to go out and try. Sitting on our behinds and doing nothing is myopic at best. It will be by exploring the solar system and getting "out there" that new breakthroughs in scientific research will happen.
The problem at Cape Canaveral is that it is a busy place, and expected to become even busier. SpaceX is looking for another launch site precisely because they can't get the launch slots available from all of the competition from other launch providers trying to launch out of that site, especially ULA but there are others. Space Florida is trying hard to get some of the rest of the launch providers to at least consider the place as well.
The problem with jobs at the Cape in Florida is mainly because the Shuttle program was winding down, and NASA did a piss poor job of providing a bridge between the jobs that used to be there under the Shuttle program and what they will be needing once everything gets shuffled around to all of the new launch providers picking up the slack trying to send the same tonnage into space.
Oh... some of the newer companies like SpaceX don't need so many people to send the same amount of stuff into space.... which sort of sucks if you were one of those people who got cut.
Or form letter concern about "loss of the function and value of all wetlands". My take is that a launch facility would increase the value of such wetlands. It'd also increase the long term viability of such a refuge since there's not going to be many people who would try to grab land next to an active spaceport.
The only people I could imagine would be interested in buying land next to an active spaceport would be other launch providers who might like to build their own launch complex nearby. Since those tend to be rather large in terms of area (buying up nearby privately owned land and turning it into the launch complex including buffer zones) I would say it would be a net increase in wilderness area overall if that happens. Having multiple launch providers at the same general area would be beneficial for other launch related services like cryogenic fuel suppliers and other related service industries in direct support of such launchers.
The real question to ask is why Cape Canaveral doesn't look like Daytona Beach or Miami Beach? That should be obvious, but it doesn't seem to be the case for these environmentalists.
There isn't any suggestion that I've seen for the "local government" to spend any money on this endeavor, and in fact that the local government is going to get a whole bunch of tax revenue by having this spaceport built. That doesn't sound like siphoning away cash but rather pouring cash into the local government and a way to increase local services and lower the overall tax rate for everybody else at the same time along with bringing in hundreds of college educated people who can teach part-time in local schools with practical real world experience in aerospace engineering and related disciplines.
That is a bad thing?
As far as preserving the ecosystem.... have you looked at Cape Canaveral? It could have been a bustling sprawl of beach houses, condos, hotels, and tourism. Instead it is a wildlife sanctuary where most of the land is filled with anything but people. I'd argue that building a spaceport at this location is going to do more to help the environment and lessen the environmental impact of this stretch of coastline than any other possible use of the area, including if it was simply designated as an official wilderness area and turned into a national park. Fewer roads will be built, what roads do exist will be abandoned and allowed to revert to wilderness, and a substantially lesser impact upon the area will happen including buying up nearby ranches over time to make this space port something that will make the ecological impact on the area far less than had it been "put to use" for any other purpose.
I guess that is a terrible use for the area, and it should be turned into an oil refinery instead. Good thinking there.
There was a bat that made a home on the external tank of a shuttle once. It even hung on for dear life at least past the launch tower at his perch, at which point it isn't really known if the bat made the trip into space or not, or survived MaxQ for that matter.
I guess that is why Las Cruces, New Mexico decided to build a spaceport nearby. They are doing both air launched vehicles with Virgin Galactic as well as some pad launches.
I expect that most every city with a fairly large amount of room to the east is eventually going to have a spaceport. If the mayor of Douglas wants to encourage SpaceX to build at their location instead, I'd suggest they try to put together a delegation and send a quick message to gwynne at spacex dot com and let her know that the site is available including tax incentives and other inducements to get the location considered.
Good luck with that... and I mean it. If the location is as good as you say and the jackalopes aren't going to be in danger if a rocket blows up in the area, it certainly deserves some real consideration. SpaceX hasn't chosen the site yet, and is very much open to other suggestions. Just don't wait until they start pouring concrete though.
All I ask is to give me the chance to get off this rock and to put my own money into the attempt to do so. What I and others with my attitude complain about is some idiot who is getting in our way trying to stop us from even trying, particularly when they are completely clueless about the enterprise and don't know a damn thing about physics, science, or even how their actions are actually killing themselves in the process as well.
Mankind as a whole, to the most remote and technologically backward countries in the most impoverish and destitute areas of the world and elsewhere as well, as a result of the exploration of space than any other single activity that has happened in the past century. It has prevented more wars, fed more people, kept more people from natural disasters, given new insights into almost every field of science, and made practical differences in the lives of every single person on this planet than anything else which has been done.
It is the future of mankind to go into space, although the step to do that is completely voluntary. You don't have to go, but please give me the chance to leave. If you are pulling out the shotgun telling me that I can't come back, that is your choice too... and I might just say good riddance as well. Don't be too surprised if a few rocks fall from the sky though to smash that shotgun and anybody holding it. It kind of sucks living at the bottom of a gravity well. Literally it sucks stuff down upon you so good luck with that.
There are alternatives. There is a spot near Miami that is competing against Brownsville, as is a spot in Puerto Rico and the Big Island in Hawaii. Hawaii has been mostly ruled out (the locals don't want SpaceX there) but the other spots are open... and the folks in Florida just have to go up the coast a little bit to see how much money spaceflight can bring to a community. The point still remains that there aren't really that many suitable locations where this kind of thing can happen and to suggest otherwise is ignoring physics and geography.
You need a location that has a whole lot of water to the east and is as close to the equator as possible. That does exist in China, a few islands in the Pacific Ocean, South America (mainly Brazil but French Guiana works just fine for the ESA), and the above named locations. This spot in Brownsville is pretty unique in the world to be in a 1st world country and at a nearly ideal latitude with a whole lot of water to the east. The purpose of water to the east is because you get an extra push from the rotation of the Earth (that is the physics part) when you launch to the east. The geography part is important because you don't want pieces of the rocket landing on people either by accident (when a rocket blows up) or even semi-accidentally (when the 1st stage goes down... it has to go somewhere and hopefully not on somebody's living room). The part of Mexico a bit further south from Brownsville could also work.... but then again do you want to export even more jobs to Mexico?
What is interesting here, as pointed out by khallow and others, is that by building a major space port at this location and perhaps even expanding that spaceport slightly for other would-be launch operators, it will do far more to protect the environment and preserve the current wildlife in the area than almost any other kind of activity which could be done at the site. If anything, fewer roads will be built, fewer visitors damaging wildlife habitat, and less of an overall environmental impact on the area in general will happen than if the area was officially recognized as a national park or formal wildlife refuge and receive an official wilderness designation.
This isn't a risk to the environment, it is a huge blessing to it. Because it will be bringing in literally millions of dollars into the local economy it will also be huge to the tax base of the area providing schools, parks, and all of the social services that you could hope for and more... and a strong reason not to use the area near the space port for any other activity. If there is pollution in the wildlife area, the tax dollars will be there to treat raw sewage and deal with the other problems to clean the area up. Law enforcement will be active in getting people out of the area during a launch (and often even between launches) and hunting in the area simply won't happen because it will simply be dangerous to do that kind of activity. Simply put, capitalism will play its hand and force the area to become a wildlife area by the nature of the activity. This isn't like building an an oil refinery at this location, as its status as essentially a wilderness is the reason they want the site. The areas around this launch site will even likely be turned more into a wilderness as well.
California is still the nation's envy. Do you think people talking about the "American Dream" want to live in shit holes like Texas? Every American city that is outside of California, Washington, New York and Colorado could disappear tomorrow and no one other than inbred retards would care.
I think most of the rest of America wouldn't notice if any of those cities in the states you mention disappeared as well and might even sigh with relief that they can finally balance the federal budget.
Perhaps some day New Jersey can live up to its state motto instead of being the armpit of America or acting as a suburb of NYC.
We have pretty good amount of space here on earth too. We can colonise the sea for instance, or build down instead of up. There is lots of space available before we even come up with crazy plans to build O'Neil colonies in space.
Building into the ocean is much harder than it looks. It would be seriously cheaper to build at L-5 than to build a floating platform in the Gulf of Mexico (where the climate is at least fairly agreeable). If you could seastead in a fairly economical manner, it would be done in a serious way right now.
Antarctica is often suggested as a place you can go that is more hospitable to life than Mars, and I'd have to agree. The problem with Antarctica is that politically you can't do anything there because of the various treaties and a very real concern that a major colonization effort in Antarctica would result in a major world conflict like World War II over who owns what on that continent. Treating the place as a playground by scientists is one way to diffuse the issue and kick the can down the road for another century or more, where hopefully resources from space will make anything that can be obtained from Antarctica irrelevant.
Digging down is just plain stupid. Again, it would be done much more than it is if it was so easy. Most of the time people are digging up into the sky, which is something that has been happening for a couple of centuries and the last century in particular. While the very tall skyscrapers have all of the headlines, there are a great many smaller buildings that still go over a dozen stories and include both residential, commercial, and industrial facilities. Digging up into the sky does cost money and is only done in urban centers where it makes sense.
I might agree that an archology could be built that could house up to a million people in a relatively small footprint of land and be able to be self-sufficient. These do require a substantial supply of raw materials and in order to get built require the urban services of a large metro area to at least get started until self-sufficiency is attained. For myself though, I think it will take building stuff like an O'Neill colony and learning how to manage resources effectively in space to be able to build proper archologies on the Earth. Furthermore, it will be from space where the raw materials to build stuff like that will come from rather than from digging stuff out of the ground here on the Earth.
Space is huge. So mingbogglingly huge that you can't possibly imagine just how much room you have to expand in space. The future of humanity is up there, not on this rock... which can be turned into an ecological reserve in due time. The only other end game if we stay here on the Earth is to do some sort of Malthusian genocide as the current growth of mankind can't survive on limited resources. In space there are more galaxies than people, and more stars in this galaxy than people. It will also take a long, long time before it can even be remotely considered to be crowded in this Solar System alone.
My problem with Larry Sanger is that he is all high and mighty about who should be privileged to write articles for Wikipedia and who shouldn't. He was the guy who started Nupedia, and his attitude about who might be qualified for writing encyclopedia articles was very restrictive and frankly snotty (or snobby) from my own POV. Basically he expected that the free encyclopedia would only be written by folks with a PhD and stubs by those with college degrees.... and you would only write articles in your field of expertise.
Basically his view of Wikipedia is that the deletionists should rule the day completely and get everything they ever hoped for and more to the point even the most hardcore deletionist would start to question why content was being removed. The only things that could stand up for references were things from published scholarly journals... certainly nothing pedestrian like a newspaper or popular magazine. Forget about blogs or anything found on the internet, that would be completely forbidden and it wouldn't even matter who wrote any of that content on-line.
There is also some general bad blood between many in the Wikipedia community and Larry Sanger for other reasons as well that go beyond this discussion, so it suffices to say there are many problems with what he says.
From that perspective, I take almost everything I hear from Larry Sanger with a grain of salt and generally dismiss almost everything he says, but in this case I tend to side with him so far as I think the suggestion is a good one so far as it is completely voluntary in its use and application. It doesn't censor a thing, is easily implemented, takes up very little room in the MediaWiki database, is easily monitored for abuse, and it doesn't require constant oversight by admins other than to step in and moderate discussions from time to time. Having a flag like this might even be a way for people to vent about various issues and certainly could be an option to bring up instead of forcing an AfD and all of the problems that creates.
If it only impacts a small amount of content, then even fighting this flag is something that seems trivial and stupid to do. You will never need to do anything about this flag other than reverting some troll who put it on a page where it isn't deserved at all and may even do a pretty good job of identifying trolls.
As for NPOV issues, I fail to see how this violates even the spirit of WP:NPOV or the general neutral POV philosophy of page development. If it was being used to delete content simply because that content might be controversial (try to look up the Wikibooks Jokebook some time for a real tragedy in that department) I would agree that is an issue. Content is being deleted from Wikipedia because it somehow offends certain religious and political groups and that should be fought against. That said, I don't see what this idea does other than creates something akin to creating a category label for content of various kinds and filters either for that category or against it. I suppose you could filter either for or against Star Trek related content as well and do pretty much the same thing. I wonder if that decision would be controversial?
For crying out loud, this isn't censoring, nor is it really hard to draw a line on this stuff.
If it is flagrant porn, the flag will go on. If it isn't, the flag will be there only because of a troll and be instantly reverted. If it is in dispute, there will be about 500k of discussion about the decision to put the flag on the content and the civil libertarians will be fighting the Puritans with a nearly constant edit war lasting a couple of years and result in ArbCom decisions with a few editors banned over the controversy.
The decision to put the flag on this content is done at the editor level... or perhaps at the "autoconfirmed user" level (like what you need to edit semi-protected content). It isn't that big of a deal and you can get that kind of status by simply participating on Wikipedia for four days. If you disagree with the flag, you can add it or remove it or join into that battle royale of discussion arguing over specific content and the application of the flag. You certainly don't need to worry about some faceless censoring committee. As for genuine medical photos... that can be dealt with on a case by case basis as well.
You can also choose to add this flag or not, and you as a parent can decide if you want to use this flag or not for your kids (it is originally opt-out). If you don't want to trip across some porn when randomly going through Wikipedia, you can filter that out or you can turn the switch off and have that stuff included. It is your choice. Censorship would be removing choices from people, and this does exactly the opposite as it expands the range of choices for you to use.
I would say it is a larger headache for administrators than for ordinary editors. Articles and content surrounding the sex pages and quasi-legal content (like a Wikibook about making your own bongK/a>) often draw in controversy by themselves. People like Jimmy Wales, when they wade into those controversies, often leave a big wake behind them as well and damages the community in countless ways. BTW, I don't mind Jimmy Wales voicing his opinion in these situations, my beef is when he acts unilaterally ignoring any sort of consensus building process at all.
These kind of pages are often nominated for deletion (the Prykete Bong page received three separate RfD nominations and a minor wheel war on top of that) and often become the source of edit wars as well. Furthermore, even if the content is appropriate for a certain sub-set of pages, trolls and other petty juvenile pranks often throw this kind of content onto other heavy traffic pages as a form of vandalism. Yes, those are easily reverted, but if you admin on Wikimedia projects you eventually become even numb to seeing such junk.
If all you do is edit astronomy and political articles, you will never see this kind of stuff.