The sliding doors on my vans that I've had in the past have been a major PITA. They are efficient and necessary in some cases, but when they break down they break down horribly. I'm not suggesting that the gull-wing doors on the Model X would be any better, but the KISS principle applies especially to doors: Keep them as simple as possible.
I don't know how a change in the economic system is going to permit humanity to "become a multi-planetary species". There are certainly some things which need to change in terms of the current nature of corporations in America and elsewhere in the world, and there certainly will be political changes in the next century that are simply unforeseen at the moment simply because we don't have a crystal ball to find out what is going to happen in the future.
This said, looking upon moving humanity into other parts of the Solar System does need to be thinking along the lines of a frontier society. What that really implies is self-reliance on a much more intimate level than you can really imagine. An outpost of humanity on the "frontier" can't depend upon complex logistical system of being able to supply you with everything from bottles of water to pizzas and Levi jeans. It is going to require an attitude of building things that last and can be repaired on site with parts that are machined locally instead of something that is shipped from a distant land and then discarded when it breaks down. There is a reason that "Home Economics" and "shop" used to be commonly taught in North American schools (and perhaps elsewhere) to teach kids how to sew cloths, build tools, and how to construct almost everything you used out of raw materials often extracted from local sources. Spinning wool thread is now an all but forgotten skill that used to be an extremely common "chore" done in most homes like washing dishes or making your bed.
In that sense, moving out into space is going to take rethinking how to bootstrap a society completely from scratch. For government bureaucrats and corporate interests that are trying to enslave humanity, this is something seen undesirable because it makes people independent of the central government. If they can make everything that they need in terms of food, clothing, shelter, and even entertainment that is completely separate and independent upon sources from a place like the Earth, the political control that comes from being able to shut off that logistical supply line loses all sense of political power that comes with it. Perhaps that is the economic system you were referring to that needs to change. If so, I'd have to agree.
Simply put, you can't afford to ship 1 liter bottles of water manufactured on the Earth and ship them to the Moon. The energy penalty for doing that is simply insane, and made as much sense as shipping all of the bread and mutton needed to feed the North American colonies of England from wheat and sheep grown in Liverpool.
The political implications of such self-sufficiency certainly are interesting to think about. Literally rethinking all of the technologies that you need simply to live in space and trying to think how you could make those needed elements from resources that can be found in space outside of the gravity well of the Earth is an interesting thing to also consider. Ultimately I think the skills and processes that come from this sort of self-sufficiency and breaking the need to depend upon some massive factory to satisfy all of our temporal needs could be a good thing too. People living in 3rd world countries could also benefit from the development of these kind of technologies and I believe it can make for a better humanity all around. If it can be done on the Moon or Mars, it certainly could be done in Mali or Alaska.
Obama's "manned space exploration plans" consist of him getting re-elected and doing anything that George W. Bush didn't do. That mainly implies that he should encourage commercial space businesses to develop since George W. Bush didn't do that.
The problem wasn't the creation of the Saturn V, but rather the cancellation of that rocket and shutting down the factories that built it. Werner Von Braun had the vision for an extensive program built upon mass production of that rocket, with the test stands in Texas, Alabama, and the facilities in Florida built to send hundreds of copies of that rocket into space at a rate of about one per month. There was even an "Apollo II" capsule design that could have held up to seven astronauts at the same time.
I've argued in a "what if" situation that for the money spent on the Space Shuttle program, an equal number or even larger number of astronauts could have flown on the Saturn V, build space stations much larger than the ISS, continued with manned exploration of the Moon, and might have even made the trip to Mars by now. Had the Space Shuttle never happened, the infrastructure to do everything else would have been in place. Skylab alone would have remained in orbit for likely another decade, or at least a couple more missions before its septic tanks finally filled up. Perhaps the Skylab backup that is currently sitting in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC would have flown rather than rotting away as a tourist curiosity.
Some changes needed to happen and the same tempo that was going on in the late 1960's did have to change, but the Saturn V did not need to be abandoned. The Soyuz rocket and capsule, designed during the same era, is still going today and has proven to be a genuine workhorse of a vehicle. There is no reason why Saturn I/V rockets could not have been allowed to continue in their production queue once the infrastructure to make them had finally been built and the cost of making those factories had already been paid for.
The fact that the Moon landing hoax proponents are given any sort of room at all is real sad. That the only "proof" that the Moon landings happened (besides Buzz Aldrin's fist) is that there are some really good telescopes taking pictures of the landing sites. We should have people there, where a conversation with somebody on the Moon is at least as common as talking to somebody from Antarctica. Poets, painters, photographers, and other people who are skilled in arts should be on the Moon. Instead we have Alan Bean (who isn't bad, but he went into art after the fact).
The question also begs to be asked.... is this all that America can ever be? Is the United States of America a has-been former empire destined to relive its glory days on the pages of history books, never to be a great nation again, or is there something more that can be said about that country to rise above the petty politics and quagmires of constant warfare to become something more than just another footnote on the ash heap of world empires? Is the Moon landing the "high point" of American technological progress? Like Waterloo was for France or the Battle of Britain for the United Kingdom?
Perhaps it is the high point, as America is going to be bogged down in a debt quagmire that will be difficult to get out of at this point. Even going off to do foreign wars is not longer profitable, not that it was much good in the past either.
If America closes its frontier completely and doesn't move out to the rest of the Solar System, the only people it can blame is its own Congress and inept leadership incapable of seeing anything more in the future. If the infrastructure collapses, it is again because of lousy leadership to keep that infrastructure going and to train people to not just keep it maintained but to improve upon that infrastructure.
A Shuttle program that was developed under the previous administration I might add. True, the actual work didn't begin until the Nixon administration, but the planning started under the Johnson administration.
Yeah... the Moon is nothing but a bunch of raw elements like Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, Silicon, Aluminum, Iron, and other similar stuff. We are obviously too stupid to know how to rearrange those elements into something that might prove to be useful nor do we know how to obtain elements that might be in a local deficiency and how to engage in "trade" to obtain those other elements from other locations either.
The reason why the Obama administration is pushing for private space enterprises is two fold:
First, he doesn't have to spend more money on the military-industrial complex, so he can look good, "cut government waste", and screw the Republican states like Utah, Mississippi, and Texas all at the same time. I'd call that a win for him by itself.
Second, by actually trying to encourage private enterprise into going into space, he is doing something the George W. Bush administration didn't do, because as everybody knows if Bush did something, Obama must do the exact opposite. Because in regards to spaceflight the Bush administration demanded a central design bureau to construct an elaborate series of rockets, spaceships under a ten year plan, the Obama administration can do the opposite and actually encourage free market capitalism instead, particularly because it is "not Bush".
Of course George W. Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" was hijacked by many of the same people being quoted here as supporters of Romney... including Dr. Griffin in particular. The very lean and innovative approach to expanding into the rest of the solar system was destroyed by a government designed and built heavy space launcher that boldly went and did what hundreds of people have done countless times before in terms of building another big rocket that went billions of dollars over budget and never did anything other than a silly sub-orbital flight which proved nothing other than how to move rockets around on equipment at Kennedy Space Center... as if that was something which needed to even be studied. Oh, I guess a launch pad and tower were built for this now canceled rocket with people scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do with it.
Perhaps that was one of the "bank-sanctioned Ponzi-schemes" as well?
I agree... we need low cost transportation and infrastructure.
So what is current American space policy to get that accomplished? What is the ultimate goal that should be set to make that something other than a mission in an of itself into something which could benefit America economically rather than simply go and bankrupt a bunch of Aerospace firms, as the cost of building rockets is no longer a money making business?
I won't even go into why the Moon is a good place to go, but rather point out that I do agree a genuine infrastructure consisting of fuel depots in space, genuine spaceships that don't need to actually land on planetary bodies (or even on asteroids for that matter), and space stations or habitats that can be consumers of resources in space as well as factories for doing other things or even becoming a destination in and of themselves. Sure, some "near-earth objects" might have lower delta-v, but going to a geosynchronous orbit is even cheaper, and the Earht-Moon LaGrangian points are pretty good too... all of which are better than going to the Moon.... but the Moon certainly can be one of those destinations. This wikipedia article does a very good job of explaining not just how much delta-v is needed to get around the solar system, but even how much from one general location to another including a very intuitive graph that helps you calculate almost any delta v for common destination in the Solar System with nothing more than a simple calculator and 3rd grade math skills.
All of this is presuming that going into the Solar System in some significant manner, which would include bases on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and other locations. If that is the goal, then the reason for building cheap transporations systems to get there is axiomatic. If you don't care to go into space and build this kind of infrastructure to begin seriously exploiting the resources of space and instead want to continue the current status quo where multi-billion dollar communications and spy satellites that only need to be lofted up into the sky about once a decade or so and only a couple of launches per year in total, then we don't need cheap transportation into space. Define the goal, then the rest can be explained much more easily and more easily justified.
It also takes a change in mentality here, where you can't presume that a government bureaucracy is going to be the only customer, and that some central planning bureau is going to be making all of the decisions. If we are going to return to the Moon, it can't be with a Soviet-style ten year plan with the whole thing built at government expense. If that is the plan, I would also agree it would be wildly expensive and wasteful. I argue that it doesn't have to be so nearly expensive and could even be largely self-supporting.... but that would require opening up space for private individuals and organizations to get into the act as well in a meaningful way and not merely as contractors for the big government enterprise.
If there is a secret American military base on Mars, when Robert Zurbin finally gets there he'll get to have a house warming party put on by the staff of that base.
There are so many legitimate stories about spaceflight and real spaceships that it boggles the mind to think that it is worthwhile to even bother reading tripe like this stuff from the "psychics". Sadly, they are drawn to policy discussions about spaceflight and are a part of the conversation even if you think they need to be dismissed completely.
I do like Buzz Aldrin's solution to nut jobs that say he never walked on the Moon: Simply punching them in the face and telling them to go to hell.
ROM look-up tables can do wonders if you aren't begging for high accuracy (or even if you are) and are screaming fast (one extra fetch cycle). Trig functions are often done that way in FPUs as well, so it isn't without precedent. The hard part is simply silicon real estate being traded for circuit complexity.
To explain, a ROM table simply maps one to one for every value (or high order bits if you are looking for less accuracy but smaller ROM real estate) that you want to change over to another value. ROM is also something that can be built quite efficiently, so it isn't all that big of a deal either. With a single extra clock cycle as the "penalty" for culling out the dividing circuity, it is a good way to significantly simplify the CPU design and still give you most of the performance that you need.
While there have been some changes recently on the federal level, once a campaign is over the candidate is pretty much free to use whatever money is left over for their own use. It wasn't until very recently that members of congress could take all of the "leftover" campaign money and simply put it into their retirement account directly for when they finally leave office (and some of the long-time members of congress are "grandfathered" into that situation still).
The "Super PAC" money, as you point out, is still that way. As you've pointed out there are also "charities" being run by politicians where money they would have spent anyway is being spent by the charity. Perhaps for "worthy causes", but a sort of a joke in the first place. Perhaps setting up scholarships for their grandkids is useful, but is that a real "charity"?
I understand the metaphor here, but even that notion of "Hollywood" being merely a collection of entertainment companies is also largely dead, for many of the very same reasons... and most of what I wrote even applies in that context. Those traditional entertainment companies had their stranglehold upon the entertainment industry when the studio system broke down. It has been a very slow process and the remnants of that old studio production system is still around, but it is gradually being dismantled.
The actual municipality of Hollywood, California did and still does to a significantly lesser extent have a whole bunch of the "infrastructure needs" to produce a motion picture. You can still go to Hollywood (and nearby towns) with nothing more than a line of credit and an idea to make a motion picture with some of the top talent in the world. That time is fading, as is the traditional distribution companies and studios.
While it is cute to say "let's kill Hollywood", there isn't really much there anymore except for the banks, movie financiers, and a whole lot of pornography being made in the San Fernando Valley behind the Hollywood Hills. A whole lot of production has moved to places like Vancouver or even to other continents like Bollywood or the production facilities Peter Jackson has built up in New Zealand.
In spite of being a double negative, you can't say that there is no traditional filmmaking in Hollywood. There is some stuff that is happening due to sheer inertia of having all of the infrastructure in place to make stuff there, including costume shops, props, sound stages, post-production suites, and special effects shops of various kinds as well as a concentration of talented actors, directors, and producers. This said, Hollywood is dying anyway and it is not nearly the center of the entertainment business that it once was say 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. Music production is even less significant, and forms of entertainment like video games really aren't being done at all in the Los Angeles region.
More to the point, if you want to make a major feature film, have world-wide distribution, and get it considered a major block-buster film with a significant cultural impact.... you no longer need to even stop in Hollywood at all any more to get it done or even to screen the film in the first place. About the only reason you would need to have a theater in Los Angeles County show your film (much less do any other business in LA County) is both because the audience is big enough that you don't want to ignore it as well as the fact you need a screening there simply to get an Academy Award (as if that means anything either).
If the goal is to kill Hollywood, you are stabbing something on life-support as it is taking its last gasp of air in the first place. Some group of hactivists are more likely to revive this comatose industry than to simply walk away and just hope it dies a peaceful death due to sheer neglect.
If anything, the reason why the Hollywood lobbyists are so busy in Washington DC is mainly because they have nothing better to do as the companies they are working for no longer are doing anything productive, as if making movies in the first place was considered productive. With no product to make and dropping revenue streams due to a lack of making anything new, it is no wonder that they are trying to grasp at straws trying to hang onto whatever other source of revenue they could have missed and skipped over in the past.
Something that must be established if you are going to suggest something here is that the basic concept of a district seat is not going to go away in America. In other words, single representative will always be accountable to a specific geographic region and the voters in that region. On top of that multiple overlapping governments and jurisdictions that don't view each other in some kind of hierarchy but rather as peers even if from the outside they appear to be in a neat and orderly hierarchy. Well, the federal government thinks they are the top dog, but in reality they really aren't and from the viewpoint of an ordinary citizen that government is insignificant.
All this said, the way those representatives have been selected over the years has changed dramatically, with "innovations", tweaks, and even basic rules for how those votes are cast, who is even eligible, and how the votes are even counted has changed considerably even in my lifetime. Over the past 100 years or so it has been even more dramatic where the minimum age has been lowered to 18, women have been allowed to vote, and even the concept of an "Australian Ballot" was introduced (aka you could cast a vote in private and your vote would remain anonymous in terms of who you in particular voted for). At the beginning of the American Republic, votes were cast out in the open in public assemblies, usually by raising hands in a show of support for a particular candidate. It was usually accompanied by some free beer or whiskey being offered to those who would support a particular candidate.
Variations of transferable votes, Condorcet voting, Instant run-off voting, and other preferential voting systems have been discussed and even tried at multiple locations. For myself, I think it is just a matter of time before such a system is ultimately accepted in America. Given modern computing technology, the perceived difficulties in actually counting such ballots is largely a thing of the past.
With statements like you've made in this post, you would be surprised what the FAA does require when they issue a flight worthiness certificate. No, the inspectors from the FAA don't review every line of code nor do they demand x-rays and microscopic details of all critical parts, but manufacturers to keep track of much of that information and have it stored away "just in case" there is an accident investigation board held on that aircraft that is being made. This is even more true when somebody sell a vehicle to the U.S. government.... where the paperwork for most vehicles weighs more than the vehicle being delivered.
No, I'm not kidding here either. There are warehouses larger than most aircraft hangers (including more than a few former aircraft hangers themselves) that hold boxes and pallets of this paperwork. Some of it has been put into microfilm or digitized.... but that seems to just increase the stack of paperwork even more. When the proverbial stuff hits the fan, all of that is examined including every single line of code used in the flight control computers as well.
The situation is analogous here, where if somebody dies from a pacemaker or life-saving device, that all of that will come out into the open. That somebody is being preemptive and expecting this ahead of time is the only difference. Good engineers document everything they do. Lousy engineers sort of pretend to document everything..... but the worst thing you can do is to sit in a deposition and have to explain to a room full of lawyers why you didn't make the documentation when a major screw up happens. I've seen it happen, and it isn't pretty.
I'm curious how you have come to the conclusion that there is no afterlife? I take it that you have lived until the heat death of the universe, visited every possible habitable world, experienced all that could possibly be experienced by mankind, and then came back in a time machine with this sudden revelation?
Do you really believe that when you die that that is the end and your existence is no more? Are you absolutely positive that even future advanced technology won't be able to revive you from the dead in a million years or so? Are you staking an absolute hard stance that time-travel is not possible and will never be possible?
Hard absolute statements like this make me question the motives of anybody who makes statements like this. In a couple hundred years everybody reading this will know for themselves if there is an "afterlife" or not, and I promise that I'm going to track you down eventually if one exists to get you to apologize for even making such a statement like this. Of course by that time you will write it off as the impetuous nature of youth speaking from sheer ignorance so that would be a pointless exercise. I'm sure we'll meet if there is an afterlife.
Besides, even presuming that your existence does end, the legacy of these two captains still is going to be different... and that is something which has endured and will endure for some time to come. Even if for some reason this particular captain of the Costa Concordia is tired and acquitted of all criminal charges and set free, his career as a merchant marine is over. I seriously doubt anybody would let him be in command of anything larger than a bathtub.
On top of that, this story has legs. I think it is going to be worse than a few weeks of public ridicule, and on top of that he has also tarnished his family's name in a way that very few in history have been able to pull off. His name will be mentioned with derision and score for every generation of future sea captains as an example of what never to do if you get into that position.
GM didn't bother to even make more than about 10,000 of their Volt model either. I put that more something that is a problem with their marketing team than anything that is a problem with the engineering.
If you want me to nitpick about problems with the Volt, I could go on, and there are numerous issues that I see which GM didn't need to get into, but none the less the Volt is a sign that General Motors wants to stay relevant and continue to be involved with the electric automobile "just in case" it starts to take off in terms of public acceptance.
If electricity was made incredibly cheap due to fusion power, losses would be trivial and irrelevant. I have no idea what that does to the overall environment, but that is a completely separate issue. Besides, who says you need to have power lines that extend for thousands of miles? On top of that, the grid with power lines is already built and designed to handle Gigawatts of energy, while something like a Hydrogen gas pipeline would require a whole new infrastructure.
Natural Gas pipelines are interesting, but they couldn't easily be used to mix Methane and Hydrogen at the same time. Perhaps a method could be created to do that, but it isn't easy or cheap.
I also think you missed the point I was making that Hydrogen generation being made at a very local level, and note also that Hydrogen can also be produced through methods that don't require electrolysis or even electricity at all. Fusion plants could also simply heat up water to the point of disassociation, allowing simple separation of Oxygen and Hydrogen as separate gasses. You just have to think outside of the box.
Hydrogen can be produced at the point of delivery or even in your home, so the distribution system doesn't need to be nearly so extensive as natural gas or other fuel distribution systems. It can also be shipped in bulk as ordinary water for those few places that may need to have it shipped in from a distance. A tanker truck full of water is not really a significant danger on a highway other than the sheer mass of the vehicle.
Getting fueling stations set up is a bit harder for hydrogen, and by far and away the hardest part is simply getting the chicken or egg problem going where you need a sizable enough fleet of hydrogen vehicles to justify building the fueling stations in the first place. There is a fleet of natural gas vehicles, and even then it is hard to come by fueling stations for that fuel source.
A similar problem is happening with electric vehicles, but recharging stations are beginning to appear now that you can find electric vehicles that would be able to use them in the first place. Home charging stations are the key here that makes it work. I'm just suggesting that a similar kind of set-up could be used for hydrogen cars as well.
What would make hydrogen become a viable fuel source in my own opinion would be the development of nuclear fusion as a viable energy source. Discounting cold fusion completely, if something like the Polywell or even the Tokamak fusion reactors ever got to a production power situation, they could make hydrogen gas cheap enough as a fuel source to make it practical. Since neither of those fusion reactor types can ever be scaled down to the size of a consumer automobile, something like hydrogen would be the next best thing.
So the reason why Toyota decided to make a major cash investment into Tesla Motors and had the CEO come to California to meet with Elon Musk was because they already were the world leader in electric vehicle transportation and didn't need to copy or learn anything from Tesla?
Seriously, please explain that one.
BTW, it was the CEO of General Motors who met with Martin Eberhardt when Tesla was in Detroit (doing a sales demo in that city) that was the clinching case to build the Chevy Volt. The Roadster really was the inspiration for getting the Volt built. The Volt was also the only new vehicle project that survived the GM bankruptcy as well. I think that says Tesla was a bit more than a "boutique electric car manufacturer".
I could get into more details, and certainly the inspiration to use standard Li-ion cells was something that neither Toyota nor Daimler ever got the gumption to try out. Keep in mind the EV-1 used ordinary Lead-acid batteries, and until Tesla came out with their battery packs it was not even considered something possible to try Lithium technology for automobiles.
For components that matter and are in areas that need to be protected, I'm pretty sure Tesla uses milspec components, and Elon Musk publicly announced that for most of the interior components they use stuff found in more ordinary consumer electronics.
The really complex part electrically is the battery monitoring system, where Tesla has a dedicated system monitoring the voltage levels and maintaining consistent heat levels in an attempt to keep the Li-ion battery pack from overheating or "melting down"... as sometimes happens with the technology. The cells are isolated with the system in a way that if one cell burns up, it won't take the whole battery pack out with it. That is mechanical engineering, but it doesn't have moving parts.
As for the moving parts themselves are concerned, the Tesla vehicles have a simple electric motor (AC variable frequency induction motors) with a transmission to match wheel speed.... and the transmission is rather simple compared to internal combustion engine transmissions. The hard part there is simply getting a transmission built that would handle the torque put out by the electric motor. Going from 0-60 in under 4 seconds (the Model S appears to match this same performance spec that the Roadster also had) is a whole lot of torque to put onto the drive shaft. An auto mechanic would have no problem recognizing or repairing the transmission. Electric motors are quite famous for being rugged, and would likely outlast the chassis of the vehicle it is mounted in.
The other miscellaneous gizmos you are talking about are what you would find on any luxury automobile. Yes, they are potential points of failure, but it won't stop the vehicle from operation and they are also repaired quite easily. Replacing those components is no different than trying to change a bulb inside the dash of a more ordinary automobile. None of those components should take more than an hour to replaced even if your were a novice mechanic.
Seriously, I fail to see where the complexity is at, other than simply putting together the whole thing. Compared to modern ICE automobiles, it is significantly less complexity. Compared to a hammer or a crowbar, yes it is more complex. What is your standard here?
The Roadster was not an Elise with a different nameplate. Yes, the chassis was made at the same factory for both vehicles, but that is pretty much where the similarity ended.
You miss the whole point of what happened here. Walking the length of the plane was not merely to prove you could walk around inside, he was making sure he was the very last person to leave, making sure all passengers and crew left before him as it was his responsibility to ensure their safety. That "rescuers" were around to help Captain Sully out was also part of his plan of action as he notified the air control towers and anybody else he could contact about where he was going and what he was doing. Taking the maintenance log was not just "covering his butt" but even further taking responsibility for his action and making sure that a full accounting of what took place could be entered into the official record.
The point is that the captain of the Costa Concordia not only abandoned ship with crew and passengers still on board, he didn't even bother to survey what could be done to help them out or to even acknowledge that there might even be a problem in the first place. His one and only goal was to save his own behind, and he did a pretty lousy job of even doing that.
As to being a hero or not, that is for others to decide and for you to proclaim if you think the title fits. Obviously you don't think it applies in the case of Captain Sully, and I'm not going to even bother trying to convince you otherwise. I certainly don't think the title applies to the captain of the Costa Concordia, as he didn't even perform the job of being captain.
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The sliding doors on my vans that I've had in the past have been a major PITA. They are efficient and necessary in some cases, but when they break down they break down horribly. I'm not suggesting that the gull-wing doors on the Model X would be any better, but the KISS principle applies especially to doors: Keep them as simple as possible.
I don't know how a change in the economic system is going to permit humanity to "become a multi-planetary species". There are certainly some things which need to change in terms of the current nature of corporations in America and elsewhere in the world, and there certainly will be political changes in the next century that are simply unforeseen at the moment simply because we don't have a crystal ball to find out what is going to happen in the future.
This said, looking upon moving humanity into other parts of the Solar System does need to be thinking along the lines of a frontier society. What that really implies is self-reliance on a much more intimate level than you can really imagine. An outpost of humanity on the "frontier" can't depend upon complex logistical system of being able to supply you with everything from bottles of water to pizzas and Levi jeans. It is going to require an attitude of building things that last and can be repaired on site with parts that are machined locally instead of something that is shipped from a distant land and then discarded when it breaks down. There is a reason that "Home Economics" and "shop" used to be commonly taught in North American schools (and perhaps elsewhere) to teach kids how to sew cloths, build tools, and how to construct almost everything you used out of raw materials often extracted from local sources. Spinning wool thread is now an all but forgotten skill that used to be an extremely common "chore" done in most homes like washing dishes or making your bed.
In that sense, moving out into space is going to take rethinking how to bootstrap a society completely from scratch. For government bureaucrats and corporate interests that are trying to enslave humanity, this is something seen undesirable because it makes people independent of the central government. If they can make everything that they need in terms of food, clothing, shelter, and even entertainment that is completely separate and independent upon sources from a place like the Earth, the political control that comes from being able to shut off that logistical supply line loses all sense of political power that comes with it. Perhaps that is the economic system you were referring to that needs to change. If so, I'd have to agree.
Simply put, you can't afford to ship 1 liter bottles of water manufactured on the Earth and ship them to the Moon. The energy penalty for doing that is simply insane, and made as much sense as shipping all of the bread and mutton needed to feed the North American colonies of England from wheat and sheep grown in Liverpool.
The political implications of such self-sufficiency certainly are interesting to think about. Literally rethinking all of the technologies that you need simply to live in space and trying to think how you could make those needed elements from resources that can be found in space outside of the gravity well of the Earth is an interesting thing to also consider. Ultimately I think the skills and processes that come from this sort of self-sufficiency and breaking the need to depend upon some massive factory to satisfy all of our temporal needs could be a good thing too. People living in 3rd world countries could also benefit from the development of these kind of technologies and I believe it can make for a better humanity all around. If it can be done on the Moon or Mars, it certainly could be done in Mali or Alaska.
Obama's "manned space exploration plans" consist of him getting re-elected and doing anything that George W. Bush didn't do. That mainly implies that he should encourage commercial space businesses to develop since George W. Bush didn't do that.
The problem wasn't the creation of the Saturn V, but rather the cancellation of that rocket and shutting down the factories that built it. Werner Von Braun had the vision for an extensive program built upon mass production of that rocket, with the test stands in Texas, Alabama, and the facilities in Florida built to send hundreds of copies of that rocket into space at a rate of about one per month. There was even an "Apollo II" capsule design that could have held up to seven astronauts at the same time.
I've argued in a "what if" situation that for the money spent on the Space Shuttle program, an equal number or even larger number of astronauts could have flown on the Saturn V, build space stations much larger than the ISS, continued with manned exploration of the Moon, and might have even made the trip to Mars by now. Had the Space Shuttle never happened, the infrastructure to do everything else would have been in place. Skylab alone would have remained in orbit for likely another decade, or at least a couple more missions before its septic tanks finally filled up. Perhaps the Skylab backup that is currently sitting in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC would have flown rather than rotting away as a tourist curiosity.
Some changes needed to happen and the same tempo that was going on in the late 1960's did have to change, but the Saturn V did not need to be abandoned. The Soyuz rocket and capsule, designed during the same era, is still going today and has proven to be a genuine workhorse of a vehicle. There is no reason why Saturn I/V rockets could not have been allowed to continue in their production queue once the infrastructure to make them had finally been built and the cost of making those factories had already been paid for.
The fact that the Moon landing hoax proponents are given any sort of room at all is real sad. That the only "proof" that the Moon landings happened (besides Buzz Aldrin's fist) is that there are some really good telescopes taking pictures of the landing sites. We should have people there, where a conversation with somebody on the Moon is at least as common as talking to somebody from Antarctica. Poets, painters, photographers, and other people who are skilled in arts should be on the Moon. Instead we have Alan Bean (who isn't bad, but he went into art after the fact).
The question also begs to be asked.... is this all that America can ever be? Is the United States of America a has-been former empire destined to relive its glory days on the pages of history books, never to be a great nation again, or is there something more that can be said about that country to rise above the petty politics and quagmires of constant warfare to become something more than just another footnote on the ash heap of world empires? Is the Moon landing the "high point" of American technological progress? Like Waterloo was for France or the Battle of Britain for the United Kingdom?
Perhaps it is the high point, as America is going to be bogged down in a debt quagmire that will be difficult to get out of at this point. Even going off to do foreign wars is not longer profitable, not that it was much good in the past either.
If America closes its frontier completely and doesn't move out to the rest of the Solar System, the only people it can blame is its own Congress and inept leadership incapable of seeing anything more in the future. If the infrastructure collapses, it is again because of lousy leadership to keep that infrastructure going and to train people to not just keep it maintained but to improve upon that infrastructure.
A Shuttle program that was developed under the previous administration I might add. True, the actual work didn't begin until the Nixon administration, but the planning started under the Johnson administration.
Yeah... the Moon is nothing but a bunch of raw elements like Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, Silicon, Aluminum, Iron, and other similar stuff. We are obviously too stupid to know how to rearrange those elements into something that might prove to be useful nor do we know how to obtain elements that might be in a local deficiency and how to engage in "trade" to obtain those other elements from other locations either.
The reason why the Obama administration is pushing for private space enterprises is two fold:
First, he doesn't have to spend more money on the military-industrial complex, so he can look good, "cut government waste", and screw the Republican states like Utah, Mississippi, and Texas all at the same time. I'd call that a win for him by itself.
Second, by actually trying to encourage private enterprise into going into space, he is doing something the George W. Bush administration didn't do, because as everybody knows if Bush did something, Obama must do the exact opposite. Because in regards to spaceflight the Bush administration demanded a central design bureau to construct an elaborate series of rockets, spaceships under a ten year plan, the Obama administration can do the opposite and actually encourage free market capitalism instead, particularly because it is "not Bush".
Of course George W. Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" was hijacked by many of the same people being quoted here as supporters of Romney... including Dr. Griffin in particular. The very lean and innovative approach to expanding into the rest of the solar system was destroyed by a government designed and built heavy space launcher that boldly went and did what hundreds of people have done countless times before in terms of building another big rocket that went billions of dollars over budget and never did anything other than a silly sub-orbital flight which proved nothing other than how to move rockets around on equipment at Kennedy Space Center... as if that was something which needed to even be studied. Oh, I guess a launch pad and tower were built for this now canceled rocket with people scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do with it.
Perhaps that was one of the "bank-sanctioned Ponzi-schemes" as well?
I agree... we need low cost transportation and infrastructure.
So what is current American space policy to get that accomplished? What is the ultimate goal that should be set to make that something other than a mission in an of itself into something which could benefit America economically rather than simply go and bankrupt a bunch of Aerospace firms, as the cost of building rockets is no longer a money making business?
I won't even go into why the Moon is a good place to go, but rather point out that I do agree a genuine infrastructure consisting of fuel depots in space, genuine spaceships that don't need to actually land on planetary bodies (or even on asteroids for that matter), and space stations or habitats that can be consumers of resources in space as well as factories for doing other things or even becoming a destination in and of themselves. Sure, some "near-earth objects" might have lower delta-v, but going to a geosynchronous orbit is even cheaper, and the Earht-Moon LaGrangian points are pretty good too... all of which are better than going to the Moon.... but the Moon certainly can be one of those destinations. This wikipedia article does a very good job of explaining not just how much delta-v is needed to get around the solar system, but even how much from one general location to another including a very intuitive graph that helps you calculate almost any delta v for common destination in the Solar System with nothing more than a simple calculator and 3rd grade math skills.
All of this is presuming that going into the Solar System in some significant manner, which would include bases on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and other locations. If that is the goal, then the reason for building cheap transporations systems to get there is axiomatic. If you don't care to go into space and build this kind of infrastructure to begin seriously exploiting the resources of space and instead want to continue the current status quo where multi-billion dollar communications and spy satellites that only need to be lofted up into the sky about once a decade or so and only a couple of launches per year in total, then we don't need cheap transportation into space. Define the goal, then the rest can be explained much more easily and more easily justified.
It also takes a change in mentality here, where you can't presume that a government bureaucracy is going to be the only customer, and that some central planning bureau is going to be making all of the decisions. If we are going to return to the Moon, it can't be with a Soviet-style ten year plan with the whole thing built at government expense. If that is the plan, I would also agree it would be wildly expensive and wasteful. I argue that it doesn't have to be so nearly expensive and could even be largely self-supporting.... but that would require opening up space for private individuals and organizations to get into the act as well in a meaningful way and not merely as contractors for the big government enterprise.
If there is a secret American military base on Mars, when Robert Zurbin finally gets there he'll get to have a house warming party put on by the staff of that base.
There are so many legitimate stories about spaceflight and real spaceships that it boggles the mind to think that it is worthwhile to even bother reading tripe like this stuff from the "psychics". Sadly, they are drawn to policy discussions about spaceflight and are a part of the conversation even if you think they need to be dismissed completely.
I do like Buzz Aldrin's solution to nut jobs that say he never walked on the Moon: Simply punching them in the face and telling them to go to hell.
How can you do a reciprocal without a divide?
ROM look-up tables can do wonders if you aren't begging for high accuracy (or even if you are) and are screaming fast (one extra fetch cycle). Trig functions are often done that way in FPUs as well, so it isn't without precedent. The hard part is simply silicon real estate being traded for circuit complexity.
To explain, a ROM table simply maps one to one for every value (or high order bits if you are looking for less accuracy but smaller ROM real estate) that you want to change over to another value. ROM is also something that can be built quite efficiently, so it isn't all that big of a deal either. With a single extra clock cycle as the "penalty" for culling out the dividing circuity, it is a good way to significantly simplify the CPU design and still give you most of the performance that you need.
Campaign funds can't be used for personal use.
While there have been some changes recently on the federal level, once a campaign is over the candidate is pretty much free to use whatever money is left over for their own use. It wasn't until very recently that members of congress could take all of the "leftover" campaign money and simply put it into their retirement account directly for when they finally leave office (and some of the long-time members of congress are "grandfathered" into that situation still).
The "Super PAC" money, as you point out, is still that way. As you've pointed out there are also "charities" being run by politicians where money they would have spent anyway is being spent by the charity. Perhaps for "worthy causes", but a sort of a joke in the first place. Perhaps setting up scholarships for their grandkids is useful, but is that a real "charity"?
I understand the metaphor here, but even that notion of "Hollywood" being merely a collection of entertainment companies is also largely dead, for many of the very same reasons... and most of what I wrote even applies in that context. Those traditional entertainment companies had their stranglehold upon the entertainment industry when the studio system broke down. It has been a very slow process and the remnants of that old studio production system is still around, but it is gradually being dismantled.
The actual municipality of Hollywood, California did and still does to a significantly lesser extent have a whole bunch of the "infrastructure needs" to produce a motion picture. You can still go to Hollywood (and nearby towns) with nothing more than a line of credit and an idea to make a motion picture with some of the top talent in the world. That time is fading, as is the traditional distribution companies and studios.
While it is cute to say "let's kill Hollywood", there isn't really much there anymore except for the banks, movie financiers, and a whole lot of pornography being made in the San Fernando Valley behind the Hollywood Hills. A whole lot of production has moved to places like Vancouver or even to other continents like Bollywood or the production facilities Peter Jackson has built up in New Zealand.
In spite of being a double negative, you can't say that there is no traditional filmmaking in Hollywood. There is some stuff that is happening due to sheer inertia of having all of the infrastructure in place to make stuff there, including costume shops, props, sound stages, post-production suites, and special effects shops of various kinds as well as a concentration of talented actors, directors, and producers. This said, Hollywood is dying anyway and it is not nearly the center of the entertainment business that it once was say 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. Music production is even less significant, and forms of entertainment like video games really aren't being done at all in the Los Angeles region.
More to the point, if you want to make a major feature film, have world-wide distribution, and get it considered a major block-buster film with a significant cultural impact.... you no longer need to even stop in Hollywood at all any more to get it done or even to screen the film in the first place. About the only reason you would need to have a theater in Los Angeles County show your film (much less do any other business in LA County) is both because the audience is big enough that you don't want to ignore it as well as the fact you need a screening there simply to get an Academy Award (as if that means anything either).
If the goal is to kill Hollywood, you are stabbing something on life-support as it is taking its last gasp of air in the first place. Some group of hactivists are more likely to revive this comatose industry than to simply walk away and just hope it dies a peaceful death due to sheer neglect.
If anything, the reason why the Hollywood lobbyists are so busy in Washington DC is mainly because they have nothing better to do as the companies they are working for no longer are doing anything productive, as if making movies in the first place was considered productive. With no product to make and dropping revenue streams due to a lack of making anything new, it is no wonder that they are trying to grasp at straws trying to hang onto whatever other source of revenue they could have missed and skipped over in the past.
Something that must be established if you are going to suggest something here is that the basic concept of a district seat is not going to go away in America. In other words, single representative will always be accountable to a specific geographic region and the voters in that region. On top of that multiple overlapping governments and jurisdictions that don't view each other in some kind of hierarchy but rather as peers even if from the outside they appear to be in a neat and orderly hierarchy. Well, the federal government thinks they are the top dog, but in reality they really aren't and from the viewpoint of an ordinary citizen that government is insignificant.
All this said, the way those representatives have been selected over the years has changed dramatically, with "innovations", tweaks, and even basic rules for how those votes are cast, who is even eligible, and how the votes are even counted has changed considerably even in my lifetime. Over the past 100 years or so it has been even more dramatic where the minimum age has been lowered to 18, women have been allowed to vote, and even the concept of an "Australian Ballot" was introduced (aka you could cast a vote in private and your vote would remain anonymous in terms of who you in particular voted for). At the beginning of the American Republic, votes were cast out in the open in public assemblies, usually by raising hands in a show of support for a particular candidate. It was usually accompanied by some free beer or whiskey being offered to those who would support a particular candidate.
Variations of transferable votes, Condorcet voting, Instant run-off voting, and other preferential voting systems have been discussed and even tried at multiple locations. For myself, I think it is just a matter of time before such a system is ultimately accepted in America. Given modern computing technology, the perceived difficulties in actually counting such ballots is largely a thing of the past.
With statements like you've made in this post, you would be surprised what the FAA does require when they issue a flight worthiness certificate. No, the inspectors from the FAA don't review every line of code nor do they demand x-rays and microscopic details of all critical parts, but manufacturers to keep track of much of that information and have it stored away "just in case" there is an accident investigation board held on that aircraft that is being made. This is even more true when somebody sell a vehicle to the U.S. government.... where the paperwork for most vehicles weighs more than the vehicle being delivered.
No, I'm not kidding here either. There are warehouses larger than most aircraft hangers (including more than a few former aircraft hangers themselves) that hold boxes and pallets of this paperwork. Some of it has been put into microfilm or digitized.... but that seems to just increase the stack of paperwork even more. When the proverbial stuff hits the fan, all of that is examined including every single line of code used in the flight control computers as well.
The situation is analogous here, where if somebody dies from a pacemaker or life-saving device, that all of that will come out into the open. That somebody is being preemptive and expecting this ahead of time is the only difference. Good engineers document everything they do. Lousy engineers sort of pretend to document everything..... but the worst thing you can do is to sit in a deposition and have to explain to a room full of lawyers why you didn't make the documentation when a major screw up happens. I've seen it happen, and it isn't pretty.
I'm curious how you have come to the conclusion that there is no afterlife? I take it that you have lived until the heat death of the universe, visited every possible habitable world, experienced all that could possibly be experienced by mankind, and then came back in a time machine with this sudden revelation?
Do you really believe that when you die that that is the end and your existence is no more? Are you absolutely positive that even future advanced technology won't be able to revive you from the dead in a million years or so? Are you staking an absolute hard stance that time-travel is not possible and will never be possible?
Hard absolute statements like this make me question the motives of anybody who makes statements like this. In a couple hundred years everybody reading this will know for themselves if there is an "afterlife" or not, and I promise that I'm going to track you down eventually if one exists to get you to apologize for even making such a statement like this. Of course by that time you will write it off as the impetuous nature of youth speaking from sheer ignorance so that would be a pointless exercise. I'm sure we'll meet if there is an afterlife.
Besides, even presuming that your existence does end, the legacy of these two captains still is going to be different... and that is something which has endured and will endure for some time to come. Even if for some reason this particular captain of the Costa Concordia is tired and acquitted of all criminal charges and set free, his career as a merchant marine is over. I seriously doubt anybody would let him be in command of anything larger than a bathtub.
On top of that, this story has legs. I think it is going to be worse than a few weeks of public ridicule, and on top of that he has also tarnished his family's name in a way that very few in history have been able to pull off. His name will be mentioned with derision and score for every generation of future sea captains as an example of what never to do if you get into that position.
GM didn't bother to even make more than about 10,000 of their Volt model either. I put that more something that is a problem with their marketing team than anything that is a problem with the engineering.
If you want me to nitpick about problems with the Volt, I could go on, and there are numerous issues that I see which GM didn't need to get into, but none the less the Volt is a sign that General Motors wants to stay relevant and continue to be involved with the electric automobile "just in case" it starts to take off in terms of public acceptance.
If electricity was made incredibly cheap due to fusion power, losses would be trivial and irrelevant. I have no idea what that does to the overall environment, but that is a completely separate issue. Besides, who says you need to have power lines that extend for thousands of miles? On top of that, the grid with power lines is already built and designed to handle Gigawatts of energy, while something like a Hydrogen gas pipeline would require a whole new infrastructure.
Natural Gas pipelines are interesting, but they couldn't easily be used to mix Methane and Hydrogen at the same time. Perhaps a method could be created to do that, but it isn't easy or cheap.
I also think you missed the point I was making that Hydrogen generation being made at a very local level, and note also that Hydrogen can also be produced through methods that don't require electrolysis or even electricity at all. Fusion plants could also simply heat up water to the point of disassociation, allowing simple separation of Oxygen and Hydrogen as separate gasses. You just have to think outside of the box.
Hydrogen can be produced at the point of delivery or even in your home, so the distribution system doesn't need to be nearly so extensive as natural gas or other fuel distribution systems. It can also be shipped in bulk as ordinary water for those few places that may need to have it shipped in from a distance. A tanker truck full of water is not really a significant danger on a highway other than the sheer mass of the vehicle.
Getting fueling stations set up is a bit harder for hydrogen, and by far and away the hardest part is simply getting the chicken or egg problem going where you need a sizable enough fleet of hydrogen vehicles to justify building the fueling stations in the first place. There is a fleet of natural gas vehicles, and even then it is hard to come by fueling stations for that fuel source.
A similar problem is happening with electric vehicles, but recharging stations are beginning to appear now that you can find electric vehicles that would be able to use them in the first place. Home charging stations are the key here that makes it work. I'm just suggesting that a similar kind of set-up could be used for hydrogen cars as well.
What would make hydrogen become a viable fuel source in my own opinion would be the development of nuclear fusion as a viable energy source. Discounting cold fusion completely, if something like the Polywell or even the Tokamak fusion reactors ever got to a production power situation, they could make hydrogen gas cheap enough as a fuel source to make it practical. Since neither of those fusion reactor types can ever be scaled down to the size of a consumer automobile, something like hydrogen would be the next best thing.
So the reason why Toyota decided to make a major cash investment into Tesla Motors and had the CEO come to California to meet with Elon Musk was because they already were the world leader in electric vehicle transportation and didn't need to copy or learn anything from Tesla?
Seriously, please explain that one.
BTW, it was the CEO of General Motors who met with Martin Eberhardt when Tesla was in Detroit (doing a sales demo in that city) that was the clinching case to build the Chevy Volt. The Roadster really was the inspiration for getting the Volt built. The Volt was also the only new vehicle project that survived the GM bankruptcy as well. I think that says Tesla was a bit more than a "boutique electric car manufacturer".
I could get into more details, and certainly the inspiration to use standard Li-ion cells was something that neither Toyota nor Daimler ever got the gumption to try out. Keep in mind the EV-1 used ordinary Lead-acid batteries, and until Tesla came out with their battery packs it was not even considered something possible to try Lithium technology for automobiles.
For components that matter and are in areas that need to be protected, I'm pretty sure Tesla uses milspec components, and Elon Musk publicly announced that for most of the interior components they use stuff found in more ordinary consumer electronics.
The really complex part electrically is the battery monitoring system, where Tesla has a dedicated system monitoring the voltage levels and maintaining consistent heat levels in an attempt to keep the Li-ion battery pack from overheating or "melting down"... as sometimes happens with the technology. The cells are isolated with the system in a way that if one cell burns up, it won't take the whole battery pack out with it. That is mechanical engineering, but it doesn't have moving parts.
As for the moving parts themselves are concerned, the Tesla vehicles have a simple electric motor (AC variable frequency induction motors) with a transmission to match wheel speed.... and the transmission is rather simple compared to internal combustion engine transmissions. The hard part there is simply getting a transmission built that would handle the torque put out by the electric motor. Going from 0-60 in under 4 seconds (the Model S appears to match this same performance spec that the Roadster also had) is a whole lot of torque to put onto the drive shaft. An auto mechanic would have no problem recognizing or repairing the transmission. Electric motors are quite famous for being rugged, and would likely outlast the chassis of the vehicle it is mounted in.
The other miscellaneous gizmos you are talking about are what you would find on any luxury automobile. Yes, they are potential points of failure, but it won't stop the vehicle from operation and they are also repaired quite easily. Replacing those components is no different than trying to change a bulb inside the dash of a more ordinary automobile. None of those components should take more than an hour to replaced even if your were a novice mechanic.
Seriously, I fail to see where the complexity is at, other than simply putting together the whole thing. Compared to modern ICE automobiles, it is significantly less complexity. Compared to a hammer or a crowbar, yes it is more complex. What is your standard here?
The Roadster was not an Elise with a different nameplate. Yes, the chassis was made at the same factory for both vehicles, but that is pretty much where the similarity ended.
You miss the whole point of what happened here. Walking the length of the plane was not merely to prove you could walk around inside, he was making sure he was the very last person to leave, making sure all passengers and crew left before him as it was his responsibility to ensure their safety. That "rescuers" were around to help Captain Sully out was also part of his plan of action as he notified the air control towers and anybody else he could contact about where he was going and what he was doing. Taking the maintenance log was not just "covering his butt" but even further taking responsibility for his action and making sure that a full accounting of what took place could be entered into the official record.
The point is that the captain of the Costa Concordia not only abandoned ship with crew and passengers still on board, he didn't even bother to survey what could be done to help them out or to even acknowledge that there might even be a problem in the first place. His one and only goal was to save his own behind, and he did a pretty lousy job of even doing that.
As to being a hero or not, that is for others to decide and for you to proclaim if you think the title fits. Obviously you don't think it applies in the case of Captain Sully, and I'm not going to even bother trying to convince you otherwise. I certainly don't think the title applies to the captain of the Costa Concordia, as he didn't even perform the job of being captain.