I don't see SpaceX coughing up the $$$ to rebuild the ISS if they crash into it during the docking procedure.
Actually, SpaceX was required to take out an insurance policy on their rocket to pay for any incidental damage that their vehicle might cause. I'm sure that damage to the International Space Station would be covered under this policy.
The financial incentive for SpaceX to avoid doing something like that is two fold though: first, their insurance rates would go through the roof and make subsequent flights uneconomical, and second, the rest of the COTS flights would likely be cancelled as well (with the bulk of the $1.6 billion that SpaceX is getting for these flights going to another contractor like Alliant Techsystems... who is just itching to take over the COTS contract from SpaceX if they screw up).
While I highly doubt that the SpaceX employees running the Dragon capsule are that incompetent to cause even damage to the docking mechanisms (much less take out the entire ISS), this potential is covered and something required by the Federal Aviation Administration prior to even getting a launch permit from the FAA-AST.
In order to take out the ISS, SpaceX would need to pretty much deliberately try to take it out with a retrograde orbit and powering the Dragon capsule with every last bit of thrust to maximize the kinetic to take it out. The ISS is quite huge and can absorb quite a bit of energy. Yes, I know that a Progress spacecraft crashed into MIR a couple of decades ago and caused a whole bunch of damage, but MIR was able to stay in orbit and was used for several years after that crash. It was bad and did cause a whole bunch of problems that took several teams of cosmonauts to repair the station, and there were a couple MIR modules that were made uninhabitable after the crash, but even that didn't take out that space station. It would be the same for the ISS.
It's all PR. I'll call it Commercial when they launch from their facility and have a paypal for me to pay for each KG of payload I want to send up in LEO.
Seriously, this has been happening already. I'm sure Nanoracks will accept most major credit cards and PayPal if you insist. They charge about $25,000 for a "1 unit" or "1 U" rack mount system with a few variables depending on the mass of the system and a few other factors that you can negotiate on the website. At the moment their customers are all going to the International Space Station, and included in the contract allows you to have an astronaut perform in-orbit servicing of your device if necessary. Telemetry is a part of the package and you can have the racks returned to you after being in space for awhile (for an additional cost).
Several of these racks have gone up to the International Space Station already, and a few of them are even on this particular flight of the Falcon 9 with the COTS 2+ mission. If you want to open up your bank account and send them some money, I'm sure they'll take it. I just hope you have something useful to do with that space.
SpaceX also has a program called "Dragon Lab" which offers a similar kind of service where a Dragon capsule can stay up for nearly a year with pressurized cargo in the interior. SpaceX has two schedule flights at the moment on their manifest, and is currently selling space on them to anybody who wants to put something into that vehicle. If you want to put something on there (even just a single kilogram package) I'm sure that Gwynne Shotwell will take your e-mail (gwynne at spacex dot com) and offer you a price to put a package on there. PayPal payments for this service are certainly accepted as well.
Just look at who founded PayPal BTW.... you would hope that Elon would take payments from that company:)
In spite of the cost of the Delta IV, it is still cheaper than the Space Shuttle, and arguably similar in price if not cheaper than the Saturn vehicles were in inflation-adjusted prices from the 1970's.
On the whole, I really like the EELV program, and it was something not only necessary for the national security of America but remarkably well managed as well. Notable too is that NASA wasn't even involved (at least directly) with the program as it was paid for through the USAF budget. The fact that we can even have a discussion in terms of a price difference between the Delta IV, Atlas V, and the Falcon 9 rockets should be remarkable by itself, where the same rockets have been used for both commercial and military payloads (classified and non-classified). Some of the previous launch vehicles used by the military and by NASA were exclusively dedicated to just government payloads. For example, no private company could have purchased a Saturn I flight even if they wanted one. Even Shuttle space was prohibited for commercial customers except in the early days of the Shuttle program (for a good reason too).
I happen to agree with you about the price of the Falcon 9. One of the interesting things about SpaceX is that they have the "cash and carry" price of the Falcon 9 listed on their website, something that neither Boeing nor Lockheed-Martin have done. I think ATK did announce a basic price for their Liberty rocket, but that is the only traditional launcher company doing something like that. Lockheed-Martin in particular, when asked at a press conference about the price they charge the government much less commercial customers, they refuse to comment saying that information is "proprietary".
What keeps companies lean and competent is the ability for new companies to come into the industry. If you and a bunch of your buddies can start up a new rocket company (assuming you have the skills necessary to make them), you should be able to start bending metal and put them into the air.
When new companies can form, it also allows for those bloated and inefficient companies to go bankrupt because they can't compete against these new start-up companies. For something like spaceflight, there are benefits for a well established company to continue doing what it has been doing for years as they have a safety record and can show the quality of what they've done in the past so it is an uphill climb to be recognized as a new start-up company even if you are good. Still, having new companies forming allows not only for growth of the industry, but also makes it so no single company is "too big to fail". THAT is where you get companies which should be shut down and get bloated.
As is happening now within the traditional launcher companies, they are really working hard on trying to stay relevant in terms of competing against the new start-up companies. For years they were inefficient and in fact the cost of spaceflight over the past couple of decades has been steadily going up. American companies have all but stopped performing private commercial launches (for things like communications satellites, photo survey sats, and other vehicles doing commercial activity in space right now). They've been living off of the gravy train coming from the federal government presuming that source of revenue would remain eternally theirs. Instead they are discovering they left an opening for new companies to form like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, and Scaled Composites to take away at least part of the business that formerly went to these traditional aerospace companies.
Scaled Composites is interesting as it was very successful at what it did, built "SpaceShip One" in terms of a suborbital vehicle, and then was purchased by Northrup-Grumman because they were doing things that Northrup-Grumman couldn't do at the time. More than a few offers have been made to Elon Musk to purchase SpaceX (he said so in a recent interview). If these companies are inefficient, they will lose market share and potentially be forced to leave the industry altogether.
BTW, the same thing unfortunately applies to government agencies, but the problem with a government agency is that they generally don't go bankrupt and almost never are shut down. Some agencies like NASA started out as really efficient little organizations with dedicated employees and a thirst to get something amazing done. They became over time bloated and inefficient, but unfortunately there is no way to kill an agency like that. It becomes a political football to even try to clean up any sort of waste, and most political attempts to clean up the corruption tend to inflate costs even more simply because it adds further regulations and layers of oversight. The only way to really reduce costs in a government bureaucracy is to shut it down completely. Because that offends some political constituency who do give campaign contributions to elected officials, that agency simply won't be shut down.
Private companies routinely do get shut down though. That is called bankruptcy. For myself, I think bankruptcy is a good thing because it forces resources allocated to failing companies to be put to better uses elsewhere. In an ideal world, it would be just the folks at the top who get into trouble for mismanaging the company. I can name some examples where this did happen, but often enough it doesn't happen... usually due to some sort of political cover those at the top of company leadership have received from elected officials and business laws that don't hold those running such lousy companies from personal responsibility for their actions.
ULA has given up nearly all commercial launches for more than a decade with just a few exceptions. Their costs are too high and most commercial payloads simply can't afford the prices that ULA charges.
Instead most of the commercial launches have been going to the ESA with Ariane launches or being done by rockets built by RKK Energia (which ESA even licensed now that Soyuz spacecraft are flying from South America). China has been able to get into the commercial spaceflight market and taken what few payloads didn't get snatched up by ESA or Russia.
It would be wonderful if ULA was more competitive, and perhaps with encouragement from SpaceX they might even get there. At the moment however and based on historical launches, that doesn't seem to be the case. Almost all of what ULA does are government launches.
There is a difference from a design by committee and a review by a committee. Most of the very successful engineering designs had a single designer who took the lead and made bold plans on how to get that design implemented. The rockets made by Werner von Braun are a good example of what a single person's vision can accomplish, even if there are hundreds or even thousands of people involved in the actual implementation of that idea.
I could point out other kinds of very bold designs for skyscrapers, bridges, ships, and other major endeavors that have been done by people over the years including major engineering accomplishments. Most of the projects that have been done by a single designer are the things which stand the test of time, are duplicated elsewhere, and subsequent generations try to emulate.
The Space Shuttle is a classic design by committee for a vehicle that not only didn't stand the test of time but had significant and insurmountable problems to the point it has all but killed even trying to build reusable spacecraft. There have been some important engineering goals which were attained through the Shuttle program, but imagine what it could have been had a lead engineer stepped up and put his name on the project and guided the whole thing with a personal vision.
BTW, that is precisely what the Falcon 9 has done. It is the vision of one person, namely Elon Musk. If something needs to be changed in the design, he is right in the thick of things to get it swapped out and can often make decisions right on the factory floor for key critical decisions that a NASA cost-plus project would take months or even years to review and implement (after the appropriate number of power point presentations over the issue being raised). Musk simply talks to the factory floor personnel and makes the decision in a few minutes or perhaps an hour of discussion on the factory floor. And you want to know why SpaceX is able to build the Falcon 9 cheaper?
Am I the only one who doesn't see this as a positive thing? Privatization will only provide an excuse to cut the NASA budget even more. And NASA is already outsourced to the gills as it is. And it could set the stage for the government bailing on space research and exploration altogether (and no private company is going to pick up the slack on projects with no profit behind them).
How is the ability to get to space cheaper and more efficiently a bad thing? For NASA or anyone else.
The grandparent poster does have a point why this is a bad thing.
Government budgets are determined by how much you have spent last year, where spending more of your budget or indeed going over budget is rewarded with an even larger budget under base line budgeting systems. Obviously if you spent everything you had and needed more, you needed a larger budget and therefore deserve to get more tax dollars. If for some reason you have money left over at the end of the fiscal year, you really didn't need that money in the first place thus your budget will be cut.
So by giving NASA a cheaper option for going into space, their budget will need to be cut correspondingly cut back so the money can be given to those departments and agencies which can't seem to get their budgetary requirements under control.
Furthermore, SpaceX is a terrible company because most of its work force is concentrated in just one congressional district and just two other locations besides one foreign country where nobody votes in American elections anyway. To do a proper space program you need to put some part of the R&D as well as the fabrication needed to build the spaceship in as many of the 335 congressional districts as you possibly can, preferably in every single one of them. It doesn't matter if this spreading of the wealth costs more, what matters is that all of America has the chance to participate in this amazing adventure of mankind.
Just imagine how many people that an expanded NASA can put to work, and how many engineers stay employed when nothing actually makes the trip into space at all! Nobody has to die or even needs to remotely stay in danger as long as the engineers keep creating power point presentations showing off the latest SciFi research into superluminal flight concepts and ways to think America might be living on Mars in a hundred years or more. That is where government money really needs to go, where Microsoft can boldly go where no software company has ever gone before and expand its offerings to the most mundane of government bureaucrats.
How are you going to stop me from going up into space? Are you going to bribe some politicians (*cough* give campaign contributions) to pass laws prohibiting the exercise? Are you going to put a gun to my head warning me that you will kill me if I try to go into space?
I am not insisting that you go up, where you can remain a Luddite condemned to have you and your posterity remain on this rock we call the Earth while you starve to death on dwindling resources and technology that is falling apart because those who know how to repair the stuff you are using are moving on. You may have a point that your money shouldn't be used to engage in an endeavor you don't agree with, and if your argument is to stop spending tax dollars on something like this, you may have a point.
What I am challenging you here is why you should make such a bold pronouncement to deny me or my posterity from trying to go into space. If it is a pointless exercise, at least give me the chance to find out for myself.
It wasn't really embezzling though. He put the mining software onto the web pages being served by the company running as a background processes in Javascript. The company itself didn't really spend much by way of resources other than a few extra lines of Javascript being pushed out by an HTTP request.
Instead, he was "stealing cycles" from all of the customers who visited the website and running down their web client performance. Considering much of the trash that sometimes is found on many web page these days, it wouldn't surprise me if it might have even been a performance improvement or at least just a wash in terms of any real damage being done to the customer's/client's computers viewing these web pages.
The unethical part (not really illegal as I don't know what law was really broken with this issue) is having the Bitcoins mined on potentially millions of computers and having those Bitcoins flow into his personal Bitcoin hash key (sort of like an account but not really).
The funny thing is if this same developer had simply installed the software on the server running as a background process, he likely would have been completely undetected and would have been able to get away with the "tweak" to the system.... and it would have been more legitimately embezzling as he would have been taking CPU cycles and network bandwidth for personal gain. Had he cut his supervisor into the action or had the Bitcoins be used as a revenue source for the company as a whole... he might have even received a promotion out of the whole thing.
It makes you wonder how many websites are doing this kind of thing, which should be a larger concern.
It is likely that his job duties were changed around so he didn't have access to the same kinds of equipment. That his skills are somehow still valuable is true, but he was "put on the bench" in a big way and certainly was given a negative job performance evaluation on his annual review (or will get one).
I've seen that happen more than once, including people who've earned their way back to trust again at a later date (hopefully wiser due to the process).
I think such a policy is stupid, but it would depend on the kind of business or organization that you work for, how sensitive the data is that you are working with, and in general the nature of the company that you work for as well.
If your company deals with high end client financial data involving transactions of billions of dollars or is involved with highly classified (above Top Secret clearance information) government information on some given computer systems, I'd agree that a strong vetting process is very important.
If you are running a public facing web server that contains just a few published white papers and other mundane reports and is otherwise just a public relations tool, there is no reason to be nearly so paranoid.
If on the other hand you are working for a computer software development team that is trying to stay on the bleeding edge of software technology and you are trying to encourage experimentation and innovation, telling a group of software engineers that they need to go through a legal department in order to even run your own in-house developed software (much less some really cool stuff from outside of the company) is even counter productive to the point I would promise that your engineering development group will fall behind the competition and will soon find themselves out of a job because your company already has a foot in the grave and is waiting for the final death knell to hit. You might even want to start writing up your resume ASAP as you will soon be out of a job yourself.
There are some contexts and situations where you do need to be concerned about people installing software, and other times where it doesn't matter at all. Apple Computer, IBM, Microsoft, and several other major companies all have groups within their companies running software like Seti@Home or Folding@Home, so something like Bitcoin wouldn't be completely out of the question either in terms of legitimate experimentation and pushing limits on computer technology and trying to figure out how stuff like that works. A company like IBM has policies in place to tell you which computers are available for software experiments like this and which ones are completely off limits for doing stuff like distributed computing.
I don't know anything about the company you work for, and the policy of that company may be justified given the context of what you do. You also shouldn't presume that should be a universal policy though.
This guy was disciplined... at least according to the original article.
I've installed software like this on computers where I had permission to install various kinds of applications on those computers and was told to use my own judgement in those situations. It wouldn't hurt for a Director of Information Technology to set policies on distributed computing projects of various kinds as it relates to the organization in question, and in the case of Bitcoin it could be argued that any work units that are found should belong to the company and not to the technician who installed the software, but otherwise I fail to see what the problem is here?
Installing stuff like this without approval of the director if such approval is expected for any outside software package is something actionable, but there is no indication that this particular technician had any such requirement at all.
In terms of your concerns about memory consumption, CPU bandwidth, and malware issues, I think you are being overly paranoid about the issue. Bitcoin can be compiled from source code where a source code audit can be performed, and Seti@Home is pretty reputable as well. Concerns about malware are completely unjustified in this situation. That sometimes Bitcoin work unit search software can be installed through malware is a side effect that has nothing to do with deliberate installation of this kind of software on a computer system where permission is granted.
If anything, software like this is a good way to "stress test" a computer and has some very useful features that would even be desirable in a business computing environment. For projects like Seti@Home, you can even count the resources being used in this manner as a charitable "in-kind" contribution to a bona fide 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization and accounted for in various ways that could provide a financial benefit to a for profit company if they wanted to perform the necessary accounting. Since it would be using computing resources when the company isn't using them, it also has otherwise a negligible business impact.
It all depends on the context of how the software was installed and as you said, permission to perform that act.
Both Seti@Home and the default client for Bitcoin operate at the lowest thread priority possible (at least for a standard high level application that doesn't go into kernel mode). They are designed explicitly with the goal in mind to not get in the way of other programming tasks and should take up the CPU computing time normally performed by some other sort of idle process that most operating systems have when there is nothing else for the CPU to be performing.
In terms of "people's time is valuable", that is utter bullshit. This software will not steal hours and in both cases the network bandwidth is negligible as well. Network bandwidth might be a lesser issue to worry about, but these are very lightweight protocols.... Seti@Home especially. Browsing one web page per hour is going to suck up far more bandwidth, and don't even get started on any multi-media content like streamed audio or video.
In terms of CPU bandwidth, this would be CPU cycles that the computer would otherwise be doing absolutely nothing anyway. There is a very slight overhead in terms of having a few extra threads for the CPU to manage that otherwise wouldn't be there (very small overhead but is still there none the less) and these processes do take up a small portion of the RAM on the computer as well which could impact performance of some applications that are poorly written or are memory hogs. If you are running Microsoft Windows, the Windows Explorer program itself is such a wasteful hog of resources that any other application like Bitcoin or Seti@Home are marginal noise by comparison, much less if you are running something like MS Office. Linux is a bit more lean but even then a GUI shell of almost any sort also tends to chew up a whole bunch of system resources that put to shame anything these other applications perform... and both software packages can be operated in command-line only mode as well to reduce system impact.
One other side issue is simply software systems interaction. As much as you hope that modern operating systems keep data and code separated from one application to the next and some strong memory protection to keep programs from clobbering each other or impacting each other in competition for "system resoruces" of various kinds, sometimes weird interactions happen between various applications that can sometimes produce unexpected results. Simply having this software on a computer might cause a software glitch merely by being there. It certainly introduces more potential bugs to a computer system. On the other hand, these software packages are heavily tested and bugs which would crash your computer with something like the Blue Screen of Death would likely have been found and fixed with popular software packages like Bitcoin and Seti@Home, where my first guess for a BSOD would be something else and putting these applications as nearly the last thing to consider for system trouble shooting. Regardless, I've uninstalled this kind of software on systems I've used when trying to do software development if only to reduce the number of variables that might be causing problems with my software.
The problem is that many modern computer systems have a reduced power option when they are idle, even if it is for just a fraction of a second. In particular the Bitcoin software tends to do some rather high performance mathematical routines that require parts of the CPU to be powered that otherwise wouldn't be in a low-power mode, or perhaps really push the GPU to be performing calculations that can be very energy intensive. For older computers, this is something that wouldn't even be noticed as the CPU power consumption on older CPUs was rather constant but for the newer computers it can mean a doubling of power, certainly causing more heat to be generated and if they are in an air conditioned server closet that increased power consumption is something that could potentially be rather significant and even noticeable to an outside observer like a comptroller who notices that power consumption has increa
I think there are a number of people that you could include in any list of people important to the development of electricity and electrical technologies. Off the top of my head, I can think of several others:
Benjamin Franklin
Alessandro Volta
Georg Ohm
Michael Faraday
Joseph Henry
Charles Wheatstone
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
Philo Farnsworth
Guglielmo Marconi
That is just barely scratching the surface. I didn't know much about Steinmetz myself, but after reading the link you provided he certainly should be included with the other gentlemen on this list along with Edison and Tesla.
How is that different from a modern research laboratory? Of the inventions that Edison actually made, creating the modern R&D lab was perhaps is best accomplishment where he also invented mushroom management over the workers in that lab. Edison is the prototype of the pointy-haired boss that Scott Adams draws on occasion. Well, a cross between a pointy-haired boss and an early 20th century version of Iron Man, but I think that is sort of where the inspiration for Iron Man came from as well.
Presuming that technology in the future may figure out how to travel through time, the Time Capsules that preserve detailed drawing for alternating current devices created by Steve Jobs might have them preserved for 10k+ years with instructions to be sent back in time 20k years and buried in Serbia at a place Tesla could find them. Yeah, I could see that working out.
Of course you knew that John Titor was a close personal friend of Steve Jobs as well.
I forget which flight where this happened, but it seems like there was a very early NASA flight which did lift off the pad and land back down, only going just a fraction of an inch (or a few millimeters) before coming back down, then the engines shut off.
I also remember seeing several early flights where the rocket did lift off more than a few feet then came crashing back down... in some cases taking the launch tower out with the rocket. This particular procedure of holding the rocket down at launch has some very expensive and spectacular launches as the reason why this is done. A couple of these launches even made network television broadcasts before astronauts started to ride the very same rockets (I think they were Redstone and Atlas rockets that had problems in the early days of the Mercury program).
I wasn't aware that fiber optic ethernet communications systems using IPv6 and radiation hardened FPGAs using multi-core processors was 1960's technology. I could be mistaken on that notion however. That is just the guidance computer and the internal communications systems in the Falcon 9, much less the Niobium nozzles and the friction stir welded tanks that are used in the Falcon 9.
If all of that is 1960's tech, I'd hate to see what real 21st century technology would be like.
My point is that an engineering change happened which was not strictly needed for anything other than some purpose that had absolutely nothing to do with safety or even spaceflight. A waiver could have been granted by the EPA to allow the old foam to be used, which was a part of the original design of the space shuttle and was a part of the original design.
If there had been more of a reason for switching to a new foam for legitimate safety concerns, there might be more of a cause to complain.
I'll admit that there were many engineers and certainly the NASA management who thought even the "new" non-CFC foam was harmless and couldn't believe the engineering reports that it could cause damage (in spite having seen non-fatal damage in previous flights of the Shuttle that should have indicated a problem.) The clinching proof was a simulated wing test done before senior NASA brass where the foam was sent up against a simulated shuttle wing at about half the velocity of the impact that supposedly hit the Columbia, and the wing was nearly destroyed with the impact and certainly was punctured in a manner thought consistent with what happened to the Columbia.
Regardless, it was a major management screw up as engineers had been complaining about this issue previous to the final flight of the Columbia, yet NASA had not learned its lesson from the Challenger incident to allow these engineering reports of potential flaws and failure modes to be reviewed and addressed other than simply throwing those reports in the trash can upon receipt.
You are confusing the engines that Orbital Science will be using for its COTS flights, which are being made by RKK Energia.
Then again, those are very reliable engines that have a long flight history, so why is that any sort of problem?
As mentioned by khallow, SpaceX manufactures the Merlin engines being used by the Falcon 9 on the same factory floor where the skin and the rest of the Falcon 9 and even the Dragon capsule have been manufactured, and the test stand for proving the Merlin engines is in McGreagor, Texas. I suppose that you might think Texas is a foreign country outside of the USA, but I can't help out with your understanding of geography. Is Texas a part of the Russian Republic? I know a few people who think California might be, so you could possibly be correct.
I think that is true with the solid rocket boosters on the shuttle, but I'm pretty sure with a liquid rocket you can just turn off the valves and pumps supplying the liquid fuel.
Which is of course why the Liberty rocket is so much safer to use than the Falcon 9, because obviously the ability to shut down the rocket engines after they've been ignited is of so little importance that it shouldn't ever be considered.
(Note: I'm joking, but that is what ATK would have you believe.)
Show me the rocket that NASA built... and I'll show you the rocket built by a contractor.... which incidentally is private enterprise.
It will also be a rocket owned and operated by NASA personnel where those private companies by law simply can't sell those vehicles to private individuals at any price without explicit congressional authority to sell those rockets. That is presuming anybody wants to go through the headache of trying to convince 435 members of congress to even consider such a request.
To buy a Falcon 9, all you need to do is get on the phone with Gwynne Shotwell or Elon Musk and you can have the vehicle shipped wherever you may want it. For enough money, they'll even arrange for delivery of that rocket within a week if you care and might even bump NASA's COTS flight if you really want precedence. Otherwise you need to line up behind the other customers who have already purchased the rocket.
Yes, you can do something similar with the EELV program rockets like the Atlas V and Delta IV.. Then again, those weren't really NASA rockets either, were they?
SpaceX has been receiving money for the development of the Falcon series of rockets from the U.S. government over the life of the whole program. DARPA helped to pay for some of the initial Falcon 1 flights viewing the prospect of another launch company as something beneficial for the American military. DARPA payloads were on board those flights, including a satellite put together by the cadets at the Air Force Academy which flew on flight 3 of the Falcon 1.
This said, Elon Musk and the investors in SpaceX did pay for the bulk of the Falcon 1 development program, and the first two flights of the Falcon 9 were paid completely by SpaceX.
SpaceX has received money under the "Space Act Agreements" program operated through NASA to help with the development of the Falcon 9 as well, including helping to pay for the conformance testing of the docking system that the Dragon capsule will be using to attach itself to the International Space Station. This current flight will also be paid for by NASA through the COTS program, although it should be viewed differently than the cost-plus contractor model that was used to develop all of the previous NASA rocket systems including the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle vehicles as well as most of the other rockets that NASA has used in the past including stuff like the Scout rocket and other "unmanned" vehicles.
There is a difference here, even though I will be the first to admit that some government money is being involved. The largest difference that should be noticed is that SpaceX owns the vehicle and does not need NASA permission in order to sell these vehicles to private individuals.... which was not the case for the Space Shuttle or any of the other vehicles operated by NASA. In the 1970's, a wealthy person could not have gone to Boeing and the other NASA contractors to simply buy a Saturn V regardless of how much money they had, and I know for a fact that in the 1980's and 1990's there were several private investors who wanted to buy a Space Shuttle....and couldn't get congressional authorization for the purchase. There are several private companies who already have purchased the Falcon 9 and will be on future flights of the spacecraft (assuming all goes well in the next few days). Those vehicle being purchased by private companies certainly are not being purchased with public funds.
The Saturn V needed all five of its engines running at lift off. I don't know how often a Saturn V launch was aborted just prior to launch, but it did use a similar kind of detection system like the Falcon 9 used today and there were abort parameters for the launch. It wasn't until after the Saturn V was part way into its flight that it could lose one of the engines and maintain its mission profile. The 1st stage in that case did need to burn a little bit longer when that happened though.
In fact the main job of the mission commander during launch was to grab onto an "abort" handle where at any point he didn't like any of the numbers he was seeing that he could twist the handle and stop the flight or send the crew module into abort mode and activate the launch escape system. There were other people who did something similar up until launch and even for a couple minutes afterward at KSC and in Houston at the Johnson Space Center.
The real question that should be asked is why did the Nixon administration junk the Saturn V with all of those capabilities like you are suggesting and replace that with the Space Shuttle, which flew smaller amounts of cargo for a much higher price per launch? Yes, I know the Shuttle wasn't supposed to be more expensive than Saturn V launches, but in the end it turned out to be much more expensive, with a reduced payload capacity and completely abandoning the ability to travel back to the Moon.
BTW, SpaceX is working on an engine called the "Merlin 2" that Elon Musk claims will have the same thrust capacity as the F1 engines used on the Saturn V. As envisioned in a future version of the Falcon 9, it will replace the entire 9-engine cluster currently being used with just one engine instead, or a heavy lift class vehicle that will completely replace for the first time in 40 years the capabilities America had once upon a time with the Saturn V. At the moment, no other country or organization on Earth has that capability or is even planning on that ability (even the SLS won't match the Saturn V performance envelope) so what is your point again?
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I don't see SpaceX coughing up the $$$ to rebuild the ISS if they crash into it during the docking procedure.
Actually, SpaceX was required to take out an insurance policy on their rocket to pay for any incidental damage that their vehicle might cause. I'm sure that damage to the International Space Station would be covered under this policy.
The financial incentive for SpaceX to avoid doing something like that is two fold though: first, their insurance rates would go through the roof and make subsequent flights uneconomical, and second, the rest of the COTS flights would likely be cancelled as well (with the bulk of the $1.6 billion that SpaceX is getting for these flights going to another contractor like Alliant Techsystems... who is just itching to take over the COTS contract from SpaceX if they screw up).
While I highly doubt that the SpaceX employees running the Dragon capsule are that incompetent to cause even damage to the docking mechanisms (much less take out the entire ISS), this potential is covered and something required by the Federal Aviation Administration prior to even getting a launch permit from the FAA-AST.
In order to take out the ISS, SpaceX would need to pretty much deliberately try to take it out with a retrograde orbit and powering the Dragon capsule with every last bit of thrust to maximize the kinetic to take it out. The ISS is quite huge and can absorb quite a bit of energy. Yes, I know that a Progress spacecraft crashed into MIR a couple of decades ago and caused a whole bunch of damage, but MIR was able to stay in orbit and was used for several years after that crash. It was bad and did cause a whole bunch of problems that took several teams of cosmonauts to repair the station, and there were a couple MIR modules that were made uninhabitable after the crash, but even that didn't take out that space station. It would be the same for the ISS.
It's all PR. I'll call it Commercial when they launch from their facility and have a paypal for me to pay for each KG of payload I want to send up in LEO.
Ask, and ye shall receive
Seriously, this has been happening already. I'm sure Nanoracks will accept most major credit cards and PayPal if you insist. They charge about $25,000 for a "1 unit" or "1 U" rack mount system with a few variables depending on the mass of the system and a few other factors that you can negotiate on the website. At the moment their customers are all going to the International Space Station, and included in the contract allows you to have an astronaut perform in-orbit servicing of your device if necessary. Telemetry is a part of the package and you can have the racks returned to you after being in space for awhile (for an additional cost).
Several of these racks have gone up to the International Space Station already, and a few of them are even on this particular flight of the Falcon 9 with the COTS 2+ mission. If you want to open up your bank account and send them some money, I'm sure they'll take it. I just hope you have something useful to do with that space.
SpaceX also has a program called "Dragon Lab" which offers a similar kind of service where a Dragon capsule can stay up for nearly a year with pressurized cargo in the interior. SpaceX has two schedule flights at the moment on their manifest, and is currently selling space on them to anybody who wants to put something into that vehicle. If you want to put something on there (even just a single kilogram package) I'm sure that Gwynne Shotwell will take your e-mail (gwynne at spacex dot com) and offer you a price to put a package on there. PayPal payments for this service are certainly accepted as well.
Just look at who founded PayPal BTW.... you would hope that Elon would take payments from that company :)
In spite of the cost of the Delta IV, it is still cheaper than the Space Shuttle, and arguably similar in price if not cheaper than the Saturn vehicles were in inflation-adjusted prices from the 1970's.
On the whole, I really like the EELV program, and it was something not only necessary for the national security of America but remarkably well managed as well. Notable too is that NASA wasn't even involved (at least directly) with the program as it was paid for through the USAF budget. The fact that we can even have a discussion in terms of a price difference between the Delta IV, Atlas V, and the Falcon 9 rockets should be remarkable by itself, where the same rockets have been used for both commercial and military payloads (classified and non-classified). Some of the previous launch vehicles used by the military and by NASA were exclusively dedicated to just government payloads. For example, no private company could have purchased a Saturn I flight even if they wanted one. Even Shuttle space was prohibited for commercial customers except in the early days of the Shuttle program (for a good reason too).
I happen to agree with you about the price of the Falcon 9. One of the interesting things about SpaceX is that they have the "cash and carry" price of the Falcon 9 listed on their website, something that neither Boeing nor Lockheed-Martin have done. I think ATK did announce a basic price for their Liberty rocket, but that is the only traditional launcher company doing something like that. Lockheed-Martin in particular, when asked at a press conference about the price they charge the government much less commercial customers, they refuse to comment saying that information is "proprietary".
What keeps companies lean and competent is the ability for new companies to come into the industry. If you and a bunch of your buddies can start up a new rocket company (assuming you have the skills necessary to make them), you should be able to start bending metal and put them into the air.
When new companies can form, it also allows for those bloated and inefficient companies to go bankrupt because they can't compete against these new start-up companies. For something like spaceflight, there are benefits for a well established company to continue doing what it has been doing for years as they have a safety record and can show the quality of what they've done in the past so it is an uphill climb to be recognized as a new start-up company even if you are good. Still, having new companies forming allows not only for growth of the industry, but also makes it so no single company is "too big to fail". THAT is where you get companies which should be shut down and get bloated.
As is happening now within the traditional launcher companies, they are really working hard on trying to stay relevant in terms of competing against the new start-up companies. For years they were inefficient and in fact the cost of spaceflight over the past couple of decades has been steadily going up. American companies have all but stopped performing private commercial launches (for things like communications satellites, photo survey sats, and other vehicles doing commercial activity in space right now). They've been living off of the gravy train coming from the federal government presuming that source of revenue would remain eternally theirs. Instead they are discovering they left an opening for new companies to form like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, and Scaled Composites to take away at least part of the business that formerly went to these traditional aerospace companies.
Scaled Composites is interesting as it was very successful at what it did, built "SpaceShip One" in terms of a suborbital vehicle, and then was purchased by Northrup-Grumman because they were doing things that Northrup-Grumman couldn't do at the time. More than a few offers have been made to Elon Musk to purchase SpaceX (he said so in a recent interview). If these companies are inefficient, they will lose market share and potentially be forced to leave the industry altogether.
BTW, the same thing unfortunately applies to government agencies, but the problem with a government agency is that they generally don't go bankrupt and almost never are shut down. Some agencies like NASA started out as really efficient little organizations with dedicated employees and a thirst to get something amazing done. They became over time bloated and inefficient, but unfortunately there is no way to kill an agency like that. It becomes a political football to even try to clean up any sort of waste, and most political attempts to clean up the corruption tend to inflate costs even more simply because it adds further regulations and layers of oversight. The only way to really reduce costs in a government bureaucracy is to shut it down completely. Because that offends some political constituency who do give campaign contributions to elected officials, that agency simply won't be shut down.
Private companies routinely do get shut down though. That is called bankruptcy. For myself, I think bankruptcy is a good thing because it forces resources allocated to failing companies to be put to better uses elsewhere. In an ideal world, it would be just the folks at the top who get into trouble for mismanaging the company. I can name some examples where this did happen, but often enough it doesn't happen... usually due to some sort of political cover those at the top of company leadership have received from elected officials and business laws that don't hold those running such lousy companies from personal responsibility for their actions.
ULA has given up nearly all commercial launches for more than a decade with just a few exceptions. Their costs are too high and most commercial payloads simply can't afford the prices that ULA charges.
Instead most of the commercial launches have been going to the ESA with Ariane launches or being done by rockets built by RKK Energia (which ESA even licensed now that Soyuz spacecraft are flying from South America). China has been able to get into the commercial spaceflight market and taken what few payloads didn't get snatched up by ESA or Russia.
It would be wonderful if ULA was more competitive, and perhaps with encouragement from SpaceX they might even get there. At the moment however and based on historical launches, that doesn't seem to be the case. Almost all of what ULA does are government launches.
There is a difference from a design by committee and a review by a committee. Most of the very successful engineering designs had a single designer who took the lead and made bold plans on how to get that design implemented. The rockets made by Werner von Braun are a good example of what a single person's vision can accomplish, even if there are hundreds or even thousands of people involved in the actual implementation of that idea.
I could point out other kinds of very bold designs for skyscrapers, bridges, ships, and other major endeavors that have been done by people over the years including major engineering accomplishments. Most of the projects that have been done by a single designer are the things which stand the test of time, are duplicated elsewhere, and subsequent generations try to emulate.
The Space Shuttle is a classic design by committee for a vehicle that not only didn't stand the test of time but had significant and insurmountable problems to the point it has all but killed even trying to build reusable spacecraft. There have been some important engineering goals which were attained through the Shuttle program, but imagine what it could have been had a lead engineer stepped up and put his name on the project and guided the whole thing with a personal vision.
BTW, that is precisely what the Falcon 9 has done. It is the vision of one person, namely Elon Musk. If something needs to be changed in the design, he is right in the thick of things to get it swapped out and can often make decisions right on the factory floor for key critical decisions that a NASA cost-plus project would take months or even years to review and implement (after the appropriate number of power point presentations over the issue being raised). Musk simply talks to the factory floor personnel and makes the decision in a few minutes or perhaps an hour of discussion on the factory floor. And you want to know why SpaceX is able to build the Falcon 9 cheaper?
Am I the only one who doesn't see this as a positive thing? Privatization will only provide an excuse to cut the NASA budget even more. And NASA is already outsourced to the gills as it is. And it could set the stage for the government bailing on space research and exploration altogether (and no private company is going to pick up the slack on projects with no profit behind them).
How is the ability to get to space cheaper and more efficiently a bad thing? For NASA or anyone else.
The grandparent poster does have a point why this is a bad thing.
Government budgets are determined by how much you have spent last year, where spending more of your budget or indeed going over budget is rewarded with an even larger budget under base line budgeting systems. Obviously if you spent everything you had and needed more, you needed a larger budget and therefore deserve to get more tax dollars. If for some reason you have money left over at the end of the fiscal year, you really didn't need that money in the first place thus your budget will be cut.
So by giving NASA a cheaper option for going into space, their budget will need to be cut correspondingly cut back so the money can be given to those departments and agencies which can't seem to get their budgetary requirements under control.
Furthermore, SpaceX is a terrible company because most of its work force is concentrated in just one congressional district and just two other locations besides one foreign country where nobody votes in American elections anyway. To do a proper space program you need to put some part of the R&D as well as the fabrication needed to build the spaceship in as many of the 335 congressional districts as you possibly can, preferably in every single one of them. It doesn't matter if this spreading of the wealth costs more, what matters is that all of America has the chance to participate in this amazing adventure of mankind.
Just imagine how many people that an expanded NASA can put to work, and how many engineers stay employed when nothing actually makes the trip into space at all! Nobody has to die or even needs to remotely stay in danger as long as the engineers keep creating power point presentations showing off the latest SciFi research into superluminal flight concepts and ways to think America might be living on Mars in a hundred years or more. That is where government money really needs to go, where Microsoft can boldly go where no software company has ever gone before and expand its offerings to the most mundane of government bureaucrats.
P.S. I don't believe a single word of this.
How are you going to stop me from going up into space? Are you going to bribe some politicians (*cough* give campaign contributions) to pass laws prohibiting the exercise? Are you going to put a gun to my head warning me that you will kill me if I try to go into space?
I am not insisting that you go up, where you can remain a Luddite condemned to have you and your posterity remain on this rock we call the Earth while you starve to death on dwindling resources and technology that is falling apart because those who know how to repair the stuff you are using are moving on. You may have a point that your money shouldn't be used to engage in an endeavor you don't agree with, and if your argument is to stop spending tax dollars on something like this, you may have a point.
What I am challenging you here is why you should make such a bold pronouncement to deny me or my posterity from trying to go into space. If it is a pointless exercise, at least give me the chance to find out for myself.
It wasn't really embezzling though. He put the mining software onto the web pages being served by the company running as a background processes in Javascript. The company itself didn't really spend much by way of resources other than a few extra lines of Javascript being pushed out by an HTTP request.
Instead, he was "stealing cycles" from all of the customers who visited the website and running down their web client performance. Considering much of the trash that sometimes is found on many web page these days, it wouldn't surprise me if it might have even been a performance improvement or at least just a wash in terms of any real damage being done to the customer's/client's computers viewing these web pages.
The unethical part (not really illegal as I don't know what law was really broken with this issue) is having the Bitcoins mined on potentially millions of computers and having those Bitcoins flow into his personal Bitcoin hash key (sort of like an account but not really).
The funny thing is if this same developer had simply installed the software on the server running as a background process, he likely would have been completely undetected and would have been able to get away with the "tweak" to the system.... and it would have been more legitimately embezzling as he would have been taking CPU cycles and network bandwidth for personal gain. Had he cut his supervisor into the action or had the Bitcoins be used as a revenue source for the company as a whole... he might have even received a promotion out of the whole thing.
It makes you wonder how many websites are doing this kind of thing, which should be a larger concern.
It is likely that his job duties were changed around so he didn't have access to the same kinds of equipment. That his skills are somehow still valuable is true, but he was "put on the bench" in a big way and certainly was given a negative job performance evaluation on his annual review (or will get one).
I've seen that happen more than once, including people who've earned their way back to trust again at a later date (hopefully wiser due to the process).
I think such a policy is stupid, but it would depend on the kind of business or organization that you work for, how sensitive the data is that you are working with, and in general the nature of the company that you work for as well.
If your company deals with high end client financial data involving transactions of billions of dollars or is involved with highly classified (above Top Secret clearance information) government information on some given computer systems, I'd agree that a strong vetting process is very important.
If you are running a public facing web server that contains just a few published white papers and other mundane reports and is otherwise just a public relations tool, there is no reason to be nearly so paranoid.
If on the other hand you are working for a computer software development team that is trying to stay on the bleeding edge of software technology and you are trying to encourage experimentation and innovation, telling a group of software engineers that they need to go through a legal department in order to even run your own in-house developed software (much less some really cool stuff from outside of the company) is even counter productive to the point I would promise that your engineering development group will fall behind the competition and will soon find themselves out of a job because your company already has a foot in the grave and is waiting for the final death knell to hit. You might even want to start writing up your resume ASAP as you will soon be out of a job yourself.
There are some contexts and situations where you do need to be concerned about people installing software, and other times where it doesn't matter at all. Apple Computer, IBM, Microsoft, and several other major companies all have groups within their companies running software like Seti@Home or Folding@Home, so something like Bitcoin wouldn't be completely out of the question either in terms of legitimate experimentation and pushing limits on computer technology and trying to figure out how stuff like that works. A company like IBM has policies in place to tell you which computers are available for software experiments like this and which ones are completely off limits for doing stuff like distributed computing.
I don't know anything about the company you work for, and the policy of that company may be justified given the context of what you do. You also shouldn't presume that should be a universal policy though.
If you don't mind it showing up as the lead headline of Drudge Report or Huffington Post, I suppose that is the current real yardstick.
I'd agree with you on FB and Twitter though. I swear some people post messages each time they take a dump.
This guy was disciplined... at least according to the original article.
I've installed software like this on computers where I had permission to install various kinds of applications on those computers and was told to use my own judgement in those situations. It wouldn't hurt for a Director of Information Technology to set policies on distributed computing projects of various kinds as it relates to the organization in question, and in the case of Bitcoin it could be argued that any work units that are found should belong to the company and not to the technician who installed the software, but otherwise I fail to see what the problem is here?
Installing stuff like this without approval of the director if such approval is expected for any outside software package is something actionable, but there is no indication that this particular technician had any such requirement at all.
In terms of your concerns about memory consumption, CPU bandwidth, and malware issues, I think you are being overly paranoid about the issue. Bitcoin can be compiled from source code where a source code audit can be performed, and Seti@Home is pretty reputable as well. Concerns about malware are completely unjustified in this situation. That sometimes Bitcoin work unit search software can be installed through malware is a side effect that has nothing to do with deliberate installation of this kind of software on a computer system where permission is granted.
If anything, software like this is a good way to "stress test" a computer and has some very useful features that would even be desirable in a business computing environment. For projects like Seti@Home, you can even count the resources being used in this manner as a charitable "in-kind" contribution to a bona fide 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization and accounted for in various ways that could provide a financial benefit to a for profit company if they wanted to perform the necessary accounting. Since it would be using computing resources when the company isn't using them, it also has otherwise a negligible business impact.
It all depends on the context of how the software was installed and as you said, permission to perform that act.
Both Seti@Home and the default client for Bitcoin operate at the lowest thread priority possible (at least for a standard high level application that doesn't go into kernel mode). They are designed explicitly with the goal in mind to not get in the way of other programming tasks and should take up the CPU computing time normally performed by some other sort of idle process that most operating systems have when there is nothing else for the CPU to be performing.
In terms of "people's time is valuable", that is utter bullshit. This software will not steal hours and in both cases the network bandwidth is negligible as well. Network bandwidth might be a lesser issue to worry about, but these are very lightweight protocols.... Seti@Home especially. Browsing one web page per hour is going to suck up far more bandwidth, and don't even get started on any multi-media content like streamed audio or video.
In terms of CPU bandwidth, this would be CPU cycles that the computer would otherwise be doing absolutely nothing anyway. There is a very slight overhead in terms of having a few extra threads for the CPU to manage that otherwise wouldn't be there (very small overhead but is still there none the less) and these processes do take up a small portion of the RAM on the computer as well which could impact performance of some applications that are poorly written or are memory hogs. If you are running Microsoft Windows, the Windows Explorer program itself is such a wasteful hog of resources that any other application like Bitcoin or Seti@Home are marginal noise by comparison, much less if you are running something like MS Office. Linux is a bit more lean but even then a GUI shell of almost any sort also tends to chew up a whole bunch of system resources that put to shame anything these other applications perform... and both software packages can be operated in command-line only mode as well to reduce system impact.
One other side issue is simply software systems interaction. As much as you hope that modern operating systems keep data and code separated from one application to the next and some strong memory protection to keep programs from clobbering each other or impacting each other in competition for "system resoruces" of various kinds, sometimes weird interactions happen between various applications that can sometimes produce unexpected results. Simply having this software on a computer might cause a software glitch merely by being there. It certainly introduces more potential bugs to a computer system. On the other hand, these software packages are heavily tested and bugs which would crash your computer with something like the Blue Screen of Death would likely have been found and fixed with popular software packages like Bitcoin and Seti@Home, where my first guess for a BSOD would be something else and putting these applications as nearly the last thing to consider for system trouble shooting. Regardless, I've uninstalled this kind of software on systems I've used when trying to do software development if only to reduce the number of variables that might be causing problems with my software.
The problem is that many modern computer systems have a reduced power option when they are idle, even if it is for just a fraction of a second. In particular the Bitcoin software tends to do some rather high performance mathematical routines that require parts of the CPU to be powered that otherwise wouldn't be in a low-power mode, or perhaps really push the GPU to be performing calculations that can be very energy intensive. For older computers, this is something that wouldn't even be noticed as the CPU power consumption on older CPUs was rather constant but for the newer computers it can mean a doubling of power, certainly causing more heat to be generated and if they are in an air conditioned server closet that increased power consumption is something that could potentially be rather significant and even noticeable to an outside observer like a comptroller who notices that power consumption has increa
I think there are a number of people that you could include in any list of people important to the development of electricity and electrical technologies. Off the top of my head, I can think of several others:
That is just barely scratching the surface. I didn't know much about Steinmetz myself, but after reading the link you provided he certainly should be included with the other gentlemen on this list along with Edison and Tesla.
How is that different from a modern research laboratory? Of the inventions that Edison actually made, creating the modern R&D lab was perhaps is best accomplishment where he also invented mushroom management over the workers in that lab. Edison is the prototype of the pointy-haired boss that Scott Adams draws on occasion. Well, a cross between a pointy-haired boss and an early 20th century version of Iron Man, but I think that is sort of where the inspiration for Iron Man came from as well.
Presuming that technology in the future may figure out how to travel through time, the Time Capsules that preserve detailed drawing for alternating current devices created by Steve Jobs might have them preserved for 10k+ years with instructions to be sent back in time 20k years and buried in Serbia at a place Tesla could find them. Yeah, I could see that working out.
Of course you knew that John Titor was a close personal friend of Steve Jobs as well.
I forget which flight where this happened, but it seems like there was a very early NASA flight which did lift off the pad and land back down, only going just a fraction of an inch (or a few millimeters) before coming back down, then the engines shut off.
I also remember seeing several early flights where the rocket did lift off more than a few feet then came crashing back down... in some cases taking the launch tower out with the rocket. This particular procedure of holding the rocket down at launch has some very expensive and spectacular launches as the reason why this is done. A couple of these launches even made network television broadcasts before astronauts started to ride the very same rockets (I think they were Redstone and Atlas rockets that had problems in the early days of the Mercury program).
I wasn't aware that fiber optic ethernet communications systems using IPv6 and radiation hardened FPGAs using multi-core processors was 1960's technology. I could be mistaken on that notion however. That is just the guidance computer and the internal communications systems in the Falcon 9, much less the Niobium nozzles and the friction stir welded tanks that are used in the Falcon 9.
If all of that is 1960's tech, I'd hate to see what real 21st century technology would be like.
How I changed the story? Where?
My point is that an engineering change happened which was not strictly needed for anything other than some purpose that had absolutely nothing to do with safety or even spaceflight. A waiver could have been granted by the EPA to allow the old foam to be used, which was a part of the original design of the space shuttle and was a part of the original design.
If there had been more of a reason for switching to a new foam for legitimate safety concerns, there might be more of a cause to complain.
I'll admit that there were many engineers and certainly the NASA management who thought even the "new" non-CFC foam was harmless and couldn't believe the engineering reports that it could cause damage (in spite having seen non-fatal damage in previous flights of the Shuttle that should have indicated a problem.) The clinching proof was a simulated wing test done before senior NASA brass where the foam was sent up against a simulated shuttle wing at about half the velocity of the impact that supposedly hit the Columbia, and the wing was nearly destroyed with the impact and certainly was punctured in a manner thought consistent with what happened to the Columbia.
Regardless, it was a major management screw up as engineers had been complaining about this issue previous to the final flight of the Columbia, yet NASA had not learned its lesson from the Challenger incident to allow these engineering reports of potential flaws and failure modes to be reviewed and addressed other than simply throwing those reports in the trash can upon receipt.
You are confusing the engines that Orbital Science will be using for its COTS flights, which are being made by RKK Energia.
Then again, those are very reliable engines that have a long flight history, so why is that any sort of problem?
As mentioned by khallow, SpaceX manufactures the Merlin engines being used by the Falcon 9 on the same factory floor where the skin and the rest of the Falcon 9 and even the Dragon capsule have been manufactured, and the test stand for proving the Merlin engines is in McGreagor, Texas. I suppose that you might think Texas is a foreign country outside of the USA, but I can't help out with your understanding of geography. Is Texas a part of the Russian Republic? I know a few people who think California might be, so you could possibly be correct.
I think that is true with the solid rocket boosters on the shuttle, but I'm pretty sure with a liquid rocket you can just turn off the valves and pumps supplying the liquid fuel.
Which is of course why the Liberty rocket is so much safer to use than the Falcon 9, because obviously the ability to shut down the rocket engines after they've been ignited is of so little importance that it shouldn't ever be considered.
(Note: I'm joking, but that is what ATK would have you believe.)
Show me the rocket that NASA built... and I'll show you the rocket built by a contractor.... which incidentally is private enterprise.
It will also be a rocket owned and operated by NASA personnel where those private companies by law simply can't sell those vehicles to private individuals at any price without explicit congressional authority to sell those rockets. That is presuming anybody wants to go through the headache of trying to convince 435 members of congress to even consider such a request.
To buy a Falcon 9, all you need to do is get on the phone with Gwynne Shotwell or Elon Musk and you can have the vehicle shipped wherever you may want it. For enough money, they'll even arrange for delivery of that rocket within a week if you care and might even bump NASA's COTS flight if you really want precedence. Otherwise you need to line up behind the other customers who have already purchased the rocket.
Yes, you can do something similar with the EELV program rockets like the Atlas V and Delta IV.. Then again, those weren't really NASA rockets either, were they?
SpaceX has been receiving money for the development of the Falcon series of rockets from the U.S. government over the life of the whole program. DARPA helped to pay for some of the initial Falcon 1 flights viewing the prospect of another launch company as something beneficial for the American military. DARPA payloads were on board those flights, including a satellite put together by the cadets at the Air Force Academy which flew on flight 3 of the Falcon 1.
This said, Elon Musk and the investors in SpaceX did pay for the bulk of the Falcon 1 development program, and the first two flights of the Falcon 9 were paid completely by SpaceX.
SpaceX has received money under the "Space Act Agreements" program operated through NASA to help with the development of the Falcon 9 as well, including helping to pay for the conformance testing of the docking system that the Dragon capsule will be using to attach itself to the International Space Station. This current flight will also be paid for by NASA through the COTS program, although it should be viewed differently than the cost-plus contractor model that was used to develop all of the previous NASA rocket systems including the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle vehicles as well as most of the other rockets that NASA has used in the past including stuff like the Scout rocket and other "unmanned" vehicles.
There is a difference here, even though I will be the first to admit that some government money is being involved. The largest difference that should be noticed is that SpaceX owns the vehicle and does not need NASA permission in order to sell these vehicles to private individuals.... which was not the case for the Space Shuttle or any of the other vehicles operated by NASA. In the 1970's, a wealthy person could not have gone to Boeing and the other NASA contractors to simply buy a Saturn V regardless of how much money they had, and I know for a fact that in the 1980's and 1990's there were several private investors who wanted to buy a Space Shuttle....and couldn't get congressional authorization for the purchase. There are several private companies who already have purchased the Falcon 9 and will be on future flights of the spacecraft (assuming all goes well in the next few days). Those vehicle being purchased by private companies certainly are not being purchased with public funds.
The Saturn V needed all five of its engines running at lift off. I don't know how often a Saturn V launch was aborted just prior to launch, but it did use a similar kind of detection system like the Falcon 9 used today and there were abort parameters for the launch. It wasn't until after the Saturn V was part way into its flight that it could lose one of the engines and maintain its mission profile. The 1st stage in that case did need to burn a little bit longer when that happened though.
In fact the main job of the mission commander during launch was to grab onto an "abort" handle where at any point he didn't like any of the numbers he was seeing that he could twist the handle and stop the flight or send the crew module into abort mode and activate the launch escape system. There were other people who did something similar up until launch and even for a couple minutes afterward at KSC and in Houston at the Johnson Space Center.
The real question that should be asked is why did the Nixon administration junk the Saturn V with all of those capabilities like you are suggesting and replace that with the Space Shuttle, which flew smaller amounts of cargo for a much higher price per launch? Yes, I know the Shuttle wasn't supposed to be more expensive than Saturn V launches, but in the end it turned out to be much more expensive, with a reduced payload capacity and completely abandoning the ability to travel back to the Moon.
BTW, SpaceX is working on an engine called the "Merlin 2" that Elon Musk claims will have the same thrust capacity as the F1 engines used on the Saturn V. As envisioned in a future version of the Falcon 9, it will replace the entire 9-engine cluster currently being used with just one engine instead, or a heavy lift class vehicle that will completely replace for the first time in 40 years the capabilities America had once upon a time with the Saturn V. At the moment, no other country or organization on Earth has that capability or is even planning on that ability (even the SLS won't match the Saturn V performance envelope) so what is your point again?