Couldn't we just use a Scramjet until it becomes inefficient and then a rocket for the rest of the way? It would still get us up to 25% of the way there and that is a large amount of rocket fuel (and cost) you've just saved.
You'd save money on fuel, but contrary to popular belief, fuel (even though there's quite a bit of it) is just ~1% of the total cost of flying a rocket. So you've basically ended up taking a chunk out of that tiny 1%, while in turn significantly increasing engine and production costs, which are a far larger chunk of the total cost.
The other article - SpaceX Cuts Cost By Battling Bureaucracy (subscription required) - gives a lengthy report on SpaceX and its efforts to keep costs down. It begins with an example of a crane needed for their Cape Canaveral pad for which bids came back in the $2M range. Investigating why they were so high, they found the contractors were working according to "requirements for fail-safe redundancies and safety controls" from 30 years that were now made obsolete by smart systems instrumentation and other technologies. Working with the contractors and the range safety office eventually resulted in a $300k crane.
Pushing for these sorts of cost savings across the board add up. Also, Elon Musk cites design choices, such as using the same propellants for both stages (and not using expensive hydrogen) for making the vehicle competitive even with Indian and Chinese launchers.
At the end of the article, there is a brief report on the upcoming Falcon I launch of the Malaysian RazakSAT imaging satellite. Turns out that ITAR rules were a major factor in the recent delay. Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocketâ(TM)s upper stage and the payload adapter.
âoeThe easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but thatâ(TM)s not allowed,â Musk says.
Gold: Absolutely. For example, if you look specifically at the provisos that are written into technical assistance agreements, if the licensing officers were instructed by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) to discern between sensitive, military technologies, and those that are widely available in the commercial marketplace, and not request monitoring and Technology Transfer Control Plans in those instances, that alone could go a long way toward resolving many of these problems. An example is the Genesis test stand. It was a round metal sheet that had several legs sticking out from the bottom. If it was flipped upside down, had a tablecloth and some cups placed on it, the stand would be indistinguishable from a coffee tableâ"it was literally a metal coffee table. Yet, this coffee table was subject to the ITAR. It had to be monitored. We were required to have not one, but two guards to keep an eye on this "vital" technology. I can only imagine the national security repercussions if this technology should leak to the Chinese or the Iranians. They could serve coffeeâ"or in a worst case scenarioâ"even tea on it. The inability to distinguish metal coffee tables from actual militarily sensitive space technology that does deserve protection, demonstrates the broken and counterproductive nature of our export control process. If the system and implementation of the United States Munitions List is so overly broad that it canâ(TM)t distinguish a table from sensitive technology, then I think it is obvious that there is a problem here.
A "car accident" (or heck, a standard homicide, those are common enough, just nick the guy's wallet so it looks apolitical) would have been much more professional.
There were unconfirmed reports that Mohammad Asgari, who was responsible for the security of the IT network in Iran's interior ministry, was killed yesterday in a suspicious car accident in Tehran. Asgari had reportedly leaked evidence that the elections were rigged to alter the votes from the provinces. Asgari was said to have leaked information that showed Mousavi had won almost 19m votes, and should therefore be president.
NASA has even been criticized for not capitalizing on commercial space launch opportunities as Russia and China have done. I, however, applaud them for staying out of the way. NASA's goal is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research." No part of that statement involves commercial interests.
You should check out the 1958 charter which created NASA:
Sec. 203. (a) The Administration [NASA], in order to carry out the purpose of this Act, shall--... (4) seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space; and (5) encourage and provide for Federal Government use of commercially provided space services and hardware, consistent with the requirements of the Federal Government.
Just to clarify, if you RTFA you will find that SpaceX has completed all the milestones so far on time, and they are looking at a 2-4 month schedule slip on future milestones. Now, obviously we'd much rather not have the schedule slip, but in the world of NASA contracting that is like... totally nothing. I have to say that, as a confirmed space nut, SpaceX really impresses me.
It's also worth comparing to something like NASA's Ares I launcher, which has projected costs upwards of $40 billion and just recently announced a schedule slip of 18 months; many are doubtful that even limitless funding and time would enable it to work around its fundamental design faults.
By comparison, the entire COTS program (both SpaceX and Orbital combined) has a total budget of less than $500 million (yes, almost 100x less than the Ares I despite having similar capabilities). Having a schedule slip of just 2-4 months is pretty unprecedented for a program like that.
One item in the article that surprised me: the companies aren't offering information to their clients about diseases they are carriers for. For instance, it would add value to their service if clients knew they carried the gene for cystic fibrosis (a common genetic test).
That's kind of odd, because at least 23andme (haven't checked the others) seems to offer information on whether someone is a cystic fibrosis carrier:
Cystic Fibrosis is one of the conditions that 23andMe analyzes. Our service includes the following information:
* Whether or not you are a carrier for the Delta F508 mutation linked to cystic fibrosis. * Information on i3000001, a marker that influences your carrier status for Cystic Fibrosis. * Background information on Cystic Fibrosis and a list of counselors, links and support groups in your area.
You have to get to very high velocity - that implies a lot of fuel, and very exspensive craft that can survive the high velocity
Although most people believe (somewhat reasonably) that the price of fuel is a big part of the cost of spaceflight, but in actuality it's just about 1% of the total cost. The cost of the hardware itself also tends to be minor compared to the cost of paying all the personnel on the ground to put together and maintain the spacecraft.
The main problems are that NASA because of "security reasons" can't give out a lot of the taxpayer funded research that would help these companies get off the ground. So, what took NASA many years to do doesn't have to be reinvented by a private company.
The bigger problem with "security reasons" that commercial companies like SpaceX has is with things like ITAR export restrictions; these are the same regulations older slashdotter might remember from the late 90s, where strong encryption was regarded as a munition as people were tattooing encryption code to themselves along with the text "this man is a munition." A recent example is with SpaceX's delayed launch of Malaysia's RazakSat satellite:
Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocketâ(TM)s upper stage and the payload adapter.
"The easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but that's not allowed," Musk says.
Also, if anything, reinventing from the ground up is a big part of why SpaceX has been able to get costs as low as they have. Instead of designing their rockets to satisfy the politicians' fetish for spreading assembly over key congressional districts across the country and the engineers' fetish for maximizing performance at the cost of all else, SpaceX has been able to design their system from the get-go to minimize production costs, minimize the size of their ground crew (SpaceX Falcon I just needs something like 20 personnel at the launch site, instead of the 100 or so needed for EELVs), and maximize potential reusability.
I wonder if it would have been cheaper to build *multiple* Hubbles rather than repair them in space, which costs about a half-billion per mission.
The Hubble repair cost was actually well over $1 billion. Even ignoring mass-production, it would have been cheaper to just replace the Hubble instead of repairing it. Let me dig up an old comment of mine from 4 years ago:
An international team led by Johns Hopkins University astronomers have proposed an alternative [spaceref.com] to sending a robotic or manned repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope [wikipedia.org]. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe [jhu.edu], reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to build and launch, approximately the same cost as a robotic service mission.
Here's the official web site, with slideshows and posters explaining the planned scientific instruments:
You do realize that the amount of money spent in the past few months on the so-called "stimulus" has already dwarfed the total amount spent over several years on the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, right?
Of course, everyone fails to mention that Japan has the lowest rape rate per capita [nationmaster.com] in the world.
Besides the potential gender bias that other commentors have mentioned, it should also be noted that crime statistics in Japan should be taken with a very large grain of salt. This news article from a couple years ago talks about how many deaths which were obvious murders were classified as things like "heart disease" to make police statistics look better:
Photos of the teenager's corpse show a deep cut on his right arm, horrific bruising on his neck and chest. His face is swollen and covered with cuts. A silhouette of violence runs from the corner of his left eye over the cheekbone to his jaw, and his legs are pocked with small burns the size of a lighted cigarette.
But police in Japan's Aichi prefecture saw something else when they looked at the body of Takashi Saito, a 17-year-old sumo wrestler who arrived at a hospital in June. The cause of death was "heart disease," police declared....
But Saito's case has given credence to complaints by a group of frustrated doctors, former pathologists and ex-cops who argue that Japan's police culture is the main obstacle.
Police discourage autopsies that might reveal a higher homicide rate in their jurisdiction, and pressure doctors to attribute unnatural deaths to health reasons, usually heart failure, the group alleges. Odds are, it says, that people are getting away with murder in Japan, a country that officially claims one of the lowest per capita homicide rates in the world....
Japan's annual police report says its officers made arrests in 96.6% of the country's 1,392 homicides in 2005.
But Saikawa, who says he became disillusioned by "fishy" police practices and in 1997 left the force in disgust after 30 years, claims that police try to avoid adding homicides to their caseload unless the identity of the killer is obvious. "All the police care about is how they look to people; it's all PR to show that their capabilities are high," Saikawa says. "Without autopsies they can keep their percentage [of solved cases] high. It's all about numbers."...
For one thing, how can a 6 year admitted cover-up, be headline news when the incident happened?
Ok, I actually agree that Waco should get more attention, although I see it as more of a coverup of government ineptitude than anything else.
Still, if you say that you were taught these 3 incidents in school, I'm impressed. I know quite a few people (not long out of school) who couldn't identify the incidents from the information provided.
Sure, if you describe them in an obtuse fashion nobody will have a clue what you're talking about, just like how many people wouldn't immediately get that a man "nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change" is referring to Jesus. However, if you just say "Waco" or "Kent State" everybody will know what you're talking about, and many (especially in NYC) will know what you're referring to with the "Sean Bell shooting in New York."
But within America itself, how many of you know of, or recognise the following incidents?
1) US Government (ATF/FBI) burns to death 76 people in their homes, and the FBI lies about it for six years, when it finally comes clean. No one is ever held accountable.
2) 4 plain-clothed officers shoot an unarmed man standing in his doorway. They shoot a total of 41 times. He is hit 19 times. After the officers are convicted, the court orders them re-tried, and the second time around they are all acquitted.
3) Unarmed students at an anti-war protest, are shot at by the National Guard. 4 die, 9 are injured. Again, no accountability. No convictions.
Um, all three incidents were front page stories on the news (i.e. not suppressed) and the last one has been covered in every American history class I've ever taken.
You might call mainstream journalism crap, and some of the writing along with the various media biases are certainly worthy of that term, but the mainstream media is still the place where we get the boots on the ground to actually find out what's happening in the world. Take that away and I don't know how much 'reporting' the blogosphere can actually support.
Reader-supported independent reporters Michael Yon and Michael Totten have been doing an extraordinary job with their reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locales.
Also, I did some more reading up on him, and it turns out that Bolden received a B.S. in electrical engineering when he was at the US Naval Academy. Experienced pilots (especially test pilots, as he was) also tend to be rather technically astute individuals, so I'm sure Bolden should at least be able to be somewhat in touch with the technical side of things.
The problem is this: If the good manager doesn't know a huge amount about technology and design, he or she cannot know who is good technically, and therefore cannot appoint a good technical staff.
Interesting point. Consider though: How do -we- determine if a manager/administrator is good technically, since we aren't aerospace engineers ourselves? The answer is that we determine this the same way a manager would determine if their staff is technically astute, by looking at their education backgrounds, their track records, and how well regarded they are by experts in the field.
Another thing which I don't think I explained previously and contributes to my view is that I don't think NASA should be in the business of designing and building rockets. It's somewhat similar to how I think the US Postal Service shouldn't be (and isn't) in the business of designing and building airplanes and delivery trucks. An ideal model is one where NASA purchases crew tickets and/or payload space on commercial rockets to particular destinations, in which case having an administrator with an aerospace engineering background becomes almost extraneous.
Now here we have Obama talking about merging NASA and the Air Force. Where are the people disgusted that he is weaponizing space? Where is the outrage?
The parent was being silly. Although the Air Force funded some of their development, the Atlas V and Delta IV are commercial rockets operated by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. In fact, NASA (as well as a number of commercial companies) already launch payloads on them regularly. The only question is whether in the future those payloads will include humans.
What is absolutely necessary is both technical proficiency and managerial ability. If NASA cannot find a leader with both, it would be better to minimize NASA projects until one could be found.
I'm not sure I agree. Both are preferable, but only managerial ability is absolutely necessary. A good manager can make up for gaps in their technical knowledge by appointing a good technical staff and setting up an environment in which they can give quality advice. If you have a bad manager, there's really nothing you can do to make up for their management shortcomings. In fact, I think if you have a scenario where you have an organization as vast as NASA and you have the head administrator trying to micromanage technical decisions, something's gone horribly wrong.
Also, if anything the main jobs of NASA administrator are making sure the various NASA centers and programs are running smoothly, and dealing with Congress and the President. If anything, the political role is the most important part of being administrator.
Obama wants to combine efforts with the the Air Force, which has a MUCH larger space program and a proven launch capability (Delta IV, Atlas V) already in hand.
Strictly speaking, the EELV rockets are more commercial boosters than the Air Force, and NASA would be dealing with Boeing and Lockheed-Martin rather than the Air Force. I do have a lot of hope for the EELV-based approach though, and it's also likely that a capsule adapted to the EELVs could also adapt later on to commercial vehicles from companies like SpaceX or Orbital.
As things currently stand, NASA's Ares I has been running into major problems, many believe it to have fundamental design flaws, and projected development costs are running into the $30-$50 billion range. Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago a NASA-commissioned independent study confirmed that the commercial EELVs would be able to fulfill NASA's needs of transporting NASA's orbital and lunar spacecraft, with estimated costs of a few billion dollars (about an order of magnitude less than the Ares program). There's also SpaceX and COTS-D, which could do the job for around $1.5 billion dollars of development costs. The independent study contradicts a previous flawed NASA study which concluded that the the EELVs would be incapable of doing the job.
The path that NASA was heading down with previous administrator Michael Griffin was really bizarre and backwards, and I have my fingers crossed that Charles Bolden will be able to turn things around.
(adapted slightly from a comment I made a few weeks ago)
What's uncertain is how well an experienced pilot with very little technical knowledge [wikipedia.org] can run a huge agency that has extremely complicated technical problems.
This is a popular meme amongst the technically-inclined (a group in which I include myself), but when it comes down to it, a NASA administrator with a high level of technical expertise is largely what got us into the current mess we're in. Nobody would dispute that the prior administrator, Michael Griffin is a technical expert, with several masters degrees (aerospace, civil, and electrical engineering) and a PhD in aerospace engineering.
Unfortunately, as often happens with us technical types, he ended up getting obsessed with a particular technical idea and ended up blocking out potentially-superior alternatives. In Griffin's case, he designed a novel shuttle-based manned rocket (using a solid rocket as a first-stage) prior to becoming administrator, and once he became administrator he put NASA's weight behind his pet design and clamped down on engineers who raised concerns. According to some recently-leaked NASA documents, the supposedly-unbiased ESAS study which selected NASA's current rocket design in fact gave safety exemptions to Griffin's pet design while unfairly penalizing competing designs. Fast forward to the present, and it's looking like the issues with Griffin's design (now called the Ares I) are fundamental design problems with costs ballooning skywards.
While technical proficiency is nice, it's not the most important thing in a manager of a program like NASA. Far more important is the ability to judge things in an unbiased manner, and being able to listen to your subordinates when they voice concerns.
Please, don't let the 'new generation of Ghostbusters' consist of a goth girl, a hispanic guy, a guy in a wheelchair, and black mechanic... This sounds more like a script for an episode of Family Guy or South Park.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't we just use a Scramjet until it becomes inefficient and then a rocket for the rest of the way? It would still get us up to 25% of the way there and that is a large amount of rocket fuel (and cost) you've just saved.
You'd save money on fuel, but contrary to popular belief, fuel (even though there's quite a bit of it) is just ~1% of the total cost of flying a rocket. So you've basically ended up taking a chunk out of that tiny 1%, while in turn significantly increasing engine and production costs, which are a far larger chunk of the total cost.
And just remember when you hear people arguing about government red tape, inspection and regulation is supposed to protect the public.
Could you elaborate on how burdensome over-regulation like this helps protect the public?
http://hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=13078
The other article - SpaceX Cuts Cost By Battling Bureaucracy (subscription required) - gives a lengthy report on SpaceX and its efforts to keep costs down. It begins with an example of a crane needed for their Cape Canaveral pad for which bids came back in the $2M range. Investigating why they were so high, they found the contractors were working according to "requirements for fail-safe redundancies and safety controls" from 30 years that were now made obsolete by smart systems instrumentation and other technologies. Working with the contractors and the range safety office eventually resulted in a $300k crane.
Pushing for these sorts of cost savings across the board add up. Also, Elon Musk cites design choices, such as using the same propellants for both stages (and not using expensive hydrogen) for making the vehicle competitive even with Indian and Chinese launchers.
At the end of the article, there is a brief report on the upcoming Falcon I launch of the Malaysian RazakSAT imaging satellite. Turns out that ITAR rules were a major factor in the recent delay.
Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocketâ(TM)s upper stage and the payload adapter.
âoeThe easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but thatâ(TM)s not allowed,â Musk says.
http://rescommunis.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/interview-mike-gold-corporate-counsel-bigelow-aerospace/
Gold: Absolutely. For example, if you look specifically at the provisos that are written into technical assistance agreements, if the licensing officers were instructed by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) to discern between sensitive, military technologies, and those that are widely available in the commercial marketplace, and not request monitoring and Technology Transfer Control Plans in those instances, that alone could go a long way toward resolving many of these problems. An example is the Genesis test stand. It was a round metal sheet that had several legs sticking out from the bottom. If it was flipped upside down, had a tablecloth and some cups placed on it, the stand would be indistinguishable from a coffee tableâ"it was literally a metal coffee table. Yet, this coffee table was subject to the ITAR. It had to be monitored. We were required to have not one, but two guards to keep an eye on this "vital" technology. I can only imagine the national security repercussions if this technology should leak to the Chinese or the Iranians. They could serve coffeeâ"or in a worst case scenarioâ"even tea on it. The inability to distinguish metal coffee tables from actual militarily sensitive space technology that does deserve protection, demonstrates the broken and counterproductive nature of our export control process. If the system and implementation of the United States Munitions List is so overly broad that it canâ(TM)t distinguish a table from sensitive technology, then I think it is obvious that there is a problem here.
A "car accident" (or heck, a standard homicide, those are common enough, just nick the guy's wallet so it looks apolitical) would have been much more professional.
Speaking of...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/17/iran-protests-day-five
There were unconfirmed reports that Mohammad Asgari, who was responsible for the security of the IT network in Iran's interior ministry, was killed yesterday in a suspicious car accident in Tehran. Asgari had reportedly leaked evidence that the elections were rigged to alter the votes from the provinces. Asgari was said to have leaked information that showed Mousavi had won almost 19m votes, and should therefore be president.
NASA has even been criticized for not capitalizing on commercial space launch opportunities as Russia and China have done. I, however, applaud them for staying out of the way. NASA's goal is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research." No part of that statement involves commercial interests.
You should check out the 1958 charter which created NASA:
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html#NASA
Sec. 203. (a) The Administration [NASA], in order to carry out the purpose of this Act, shall-- ...
(4) seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space; and
(5) encourage and provide for Federal Government use of commercially provided space services and hardware, consistent with the requirements of the Federal Government.
Just to clarify, if you RTFA you will find that SpaceX has completed all the milestones so far on time, and they are looking at a 2-4 month schedule slip on future milestones. Now, obviously we'd much rather not have the schedule slip, but in the world of NASA contracting that is like... totally nothing. I have to say that, as a confirmed space nut, SpaceX really impresses me.
It's also worth comparing to something like NASA's Ares I launcher, which has projected costs upwards of $40 billion and just recently announced a schedule slip of 18 months; many are doubtful that even limitless funding and time would enable it to work around its fundamental design faults.
By comparison, the entire COTS program (both SpaceX and Orbital combined) has a total budget of less than $500 million (yes, almost 100x less than the Ares I despite having similar capabilities). Having a schedule slip of just 2-4 months is pretty unprecedented for a program like that.
One item in the article that surprised me: the companies aren't offering information to their clients about diseases they are carriers for. For instance, it would add value to their service if clients knew they carried the gene for cystic fibrosis (a common genetic test).
That's kind of odd, because at least 23andme (haven't checked the others) seems to offer information on whether someone is a cystic fibrosis carrier:
https://www.23andme.com/health/cysticfibrosis/
Cystic Fibrosis (Delta F508 mutation)
Cystic Fibrosis is one of the conditions that 23andMe analyzes. Our service includes the following information:
* Whether or not you are a carrier for the Delta F508 mutation linked to cystic fibrosis.
* Information on i3000001, a marker that influences your carrier status for Cystic Fibrosis.
* Background information on Cystic Fibrosis and a list of counselors, links and support groups in your area.
You have to get to very high velocity - that implies a lot of fuel, and very exspensive craft that can survive the high velocity
Although most people believe (somewhat reasonably) that the price of fuel is a big part of the cost of spaceflight, but in actuality it's just about 1% of the total cost. The cost of the hardware itself also tends to be minor compared to the cost of paying all the personnel on the ground to put together and maintain the spacecraft.
The main problems are that NASA because of "security reasons" can't give out a lot of the taxpayer funded research that would help these companies get off the ground. So, what took NASA many years to do doesn't have to be reinvented by a private company.
The bigger problem with "security reasons" that commercial companies like SpaceX has is with things like ITAR export restrictions; these are the same regulations older slashdotter might remember from the late 90s, where strong encryption was regarded as a munition as people were tattooing encryption code to themselves along with the text "this man is a munition." A recent example is with SpaceX's delayed launch of Malaysia's RazakSat satellite:
Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocketâ(TM)s upper stage and the payload adapter.
"The easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but that's not allowed," Musk says.
Also, if anything, reinventing from the ground up is a big part of why SpaceX has been able to get costs as low as they have. Instead of designing their rockets to satisfy the politicians' fetish for spreading assembly over key congressional districts across the country and the engineers' fetish for maximizing performance at the cost of all else, SpaceX has been able to design their system from the get-go to minimize production costs, minimize the size of their ground crew (SpaceX Falcon I just needs something like 20 personnel at the launch site, instead of the 100 or so needed for EELVs), and maximize potential reusability.
I wonder if it would have been cheaper to build *multiple* Hubbles rather than repair them in space, which costs about a half-billion per mission.
The Hubble repair cost was actually well over $1 billion. Even ignoring mass-production, it would have been cheaper to just replace the Hubble instead of repairing it. Let me dig up an old comment of mine from 4 years ago:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141507&cid=11856177
An international team led by Johns Hopkins University astronomers have proposed an alternative [spaceref.com] to sending a robotic or manned repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope [wikipedia.org]. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe [jhu.edu], reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to build and launch, approximately the same cost as a robotic service mission.
Here's the official web site, with slideshows and posters explaining the planned scientific instruments:
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/
You do realize that the amount of money spent in the past few months on the so-called "stimulus" has already dwarfed the total amount spent over several years on the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, right?
Of course, everyone fails to mention that Japan has the lowest rape rate per capita [nationmaster.com] in the world.
Besides the potential gender bias that other commentors have mentioned, it should also be noted that crime statistics in Japan should be taken with a very large grain of salt. This news article from a couple years ago talks about how many deaths which were obvious murders were classified as things like "heart disease" to make police statistics look better:
Photos of the teenager's corpse show a deep cut on his right arm, horrific bruising on his neck and chest. His face is swollen and covered with cuts. A silhouette of violence runs from the corner of his left eye over the cheekbone to his jaw, and his legs are pocked with small burns the size of a lighted cigarette.
But police in Japan's Aichi prefecture saw something else when they looked at the body of Takashi Saito, a 17-year-old sumo wrestler who arrived at a hospital in June. The cause of death was "heart disease," police declared. ...
But Saito's case has given credence to complaints by a group of frustrated doctors, former pathologists and ex-cops who argue that Japan's police culture is the main obstacle.
Police discourage autopsies that might reveal a higher homicide rate in their jurisdiction, and pressure doctors to attribute unnatural deaths to health reasons, usually heart failure, the group alleges. Odds are, it says, that people are getting away with murder in Japan, a country that officially claims one of the lowest per capita homicide rates in the world. ...
Japan's annual police report says its officers made arrests in 96.6% of the country's 1,392 homicides in 2005.
But Saikawa, who says he became disillusioned by "fishy" police practices and in 1997 left the force in disgust after 30 years, claims that police try to avoid adding homicides to their caseload unless the identity of the killer is obvious. "All the police care about is how they look to people; it's all PR to show that their capabilities are high," Saikawa says. "Without autopsies they can keep their percentage [of solved cases] high. It's all about numbers."...
There's a couple videos of the system in action here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKd56D2mvN0
http://edgeofvision.com/2007/10/11/video-of-brainport-on-today-show/
For one thing, how can a 6 year admitted cover-up, be headline news when the incident happened?
Ok, I actually agree that Waco should get more attention, although I see it as more of a coverup of government ineptitude than anything else.
Still, if you say that you were taught these 3 incidents in school, I'm impressed. I know quite a few people (not long out of school) who couldn't identify the incidents from the information provided.
Sure, if you describe them in an obtuse fashion nobody will have a clue what you're talking about, just like how many people wouldn't immediately get that a man "nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change" is referring to Jesus. However, if you just say "Waco" or "Kent State" everybody will know what you're talking about, and many (especially in NYC) will know what you're referring to with the "Sean Bell shooting in New York."
But within America itself, how many of you know of, or recognise the following incidents?
1) US Government (ATF/FBI) burns to death 76 people in their homes, and the FBI lies about it for six years, when it finally comes clean. No one is ever held accountable.
2) 4 plain-clothed officers shoot an unarmed man standing in his doorway. They shoot a total of 41 times. He is hit 19 times. After the officers are convicted, the court orders them re-tried, and the second time around they are all acquitted.
3) Unarmed students at an anti-war protest, are shot at by the National Guard. 4 die, 9 are injured. Again, no accountability. No convictions.
Um, all three incidents were front page stories on the news (i.e. not suppressed) and the last one has been covered in every American history class I've ever taken.
Every step on an animals tail? That noise it makes is proof of its sentience.
Actually, that's proof of its responsiveness. Sentience is a subset of responsiveness, but they're not the same thing.
You might call mainstream journalism crap, and some of the writing along with the various media biases are certainly worthy of that term, but the mainstream media is still the place where we get the boots on the ground to actually find out what's happening in the world. Take that away and I don't know how much 'reporting' the blogosphere can actually support.
Reader-supported independent reporters Michael Yon and Michael Totten have been doing an extraordinary job with their reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locales.
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/
http://www.michaeltotten.com/
Pride 'N Prejudice RPGs?
A Pride and Prejudice and Zombies RPG would be pretty sweet.
Also, I did some more reading up on him, and it turns out that Bolden received a B.S. in electrical engineering when he was at the US Naval Academy. Experienced pilots (especially test pilots, as he was) also tend to be rather technically astute individuals, so I'm sure Bolden should at least be able to be somewhat in touch with the technical side of things.
My original comment [slashdot.org] is moderated to -1, Troll, at present, after being moderated up.
Slashdot moderators are crazy. Even if I disagreed with your original comment, it was still a good point to make and in no way trolling.
The problem is this: If the good manager doesn't know a huge amount about technology and design, he or she cannot know who is good technically, and therefore cannot appoint a good technical staff.
Interesting point. Consider though: How do -we- determine if a manager/administrator is good technically, since we aren't aerospace engineers ourselves? The answer is that we determine this the same way a manager would determine if their staff is technically astute, by looking at their education backgrounds, their track records, and how well regarded they are by experts in the field.
Another thing which I don't think I explained previously and contributes to my view is that I don't think NASA should be in the business of designing and building rockets. It's somewhat similar to how I think the US Postal Service shouldn't be (and isn't) in the business of designing and building airplanes and delivery trucks. An ideal model is one where NASA purchases crew tickets and/or payload space on commercial rockets to particular destinations, in which case having an administrator with an aerospace engineering background becomes almost extraneous.
Now here we have Obama talking about merging NASA and the Air Force. Where are the people disgusted that he is weaponizing space? Where is the outrage?
The parent was being silly. Although the Air Force funded some of their development, the Atlas V and Delta IV are commercial rockets operated by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. In fact, NASA (as well as a number of commercial companies) already launch payloads on them regularly. The only question is whether in the future those payloads will include humans.
What is absolutely necessary is both technical proficiency and managerial ability. If NASA cannot find a leader with both, it would be better to minimize NASA projects until one could be found.
I'm not sure I agree. Both are preferable, but only managerial ability is absolutely necessary. A good manager can make up for gaps in their technical knowledge by appointing a good technical staff and setting up an environment in which they can give quality advice. If you have a bad manager, there's really nothing you can do to make up for their management shortcomings. In fact, I think if you have a scenario where you have an organization as vast as NASA and you have the head administrator trying to micromanage technical decisions, something's gone horribly wrong.
Also, if anything the main jobs of NASA administrator are making sure the various NASA centers and programs are running smoothly, and dealing with Congress and the President. If anything, the political role is the most important part of being administrator.
Obama wants to combine efforts with the the Air Force, which has a MUCH larger space program and a proven launch capability (Delta IV, Atlas V) already in hand.
Strictly speaking, the EELV rockets are more commercial boosters than the Air Force, and NASA would be dealing with Boeing and Lockheed-Martin rather than the Air Force. I do have a lot of hope for the EELV-based approach though, and it's also likely that a capsule adapted to the EELVs could also adapt later on to commercial vehicles from companies like SpaceX or Orbital.
As things currently stand, NASA's Ares I has been running into major problems, many believe it to have fundamental design flaws, and projected development costs are running into the $30-$50 billion range. Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago a NASA-commissioned independent study confirmed that the commercial EELVs would be able to fulfill NASA's needs of transporting NASA's orbital and lunar spacecraft, with estimated costs of a few billion dollars (about an order of magnitude less than the Ares program). There's also SpaceX and COTS-D, which could do the job for around $1.5 billion dollars of development costs. The independent study contradicts a previous flawed NASA study which concluded that the the EELVs would be incapable of doing the job.
The path that NASA was heading down with previous administrator Michael Griffin was really bizarre and backwards, and I have my fingers crossed that Charles Bolden will be able to turn things around.
(adapted slightly from a comment I made a few weeks ago)
What's uncertain is how well an experienced pilot with very little technical knowledge [wikipedia.org] can run a huge agency that has extremely complicated technical problems.
This is a popular meme amongst the technically-inclined (a group in which I include myself), but when it comes down to it, a NASA administrator with a high level of technical expertise is largely what got us into the current mess we're in. Nobody would dispute that the prior administrator, Michael Griffin is a technical expert, with several masters degrees (aerospace, civil, and electrical engineering) and a PhD in aerospace engineering.
Unfortunately, as often happens with us technical types, he ended up getting obsessed with a particular technical idea and ended up blocking out potentially-superior alternatives. In Griffin's case, he designed a novel shuttle-based manned rocket (using a solid rocket as a first-stage) prior to becoming administrator, and once he became administrator he put NASA's weight behind his pet design and clamped down on engineers who raised concerns. According to some recently-leaked NASA documents, the supposedly-unbiased ESAS study which selected NASA's current rocket design in fact gave safety exemptions to Griffin's pet design while unfairly penalizing competing designs. Fast forward to the present, and it's looking like the issues with Griffin's design (now called the Ares I) are fundamental design problems with costs ballooning skywards.
While technical proficiency is nice, it's not the most important thing in a manager of a program like NASA. Far more important is the ability to judge things in an unbiased manner, and being able to listen to your subordinates when they voice concerns.
Please, don't let the 'new generation of Ghostbusters' consist of a goth girl, a hispanic guy, a guy in a wheelchair, and black mechanic... This sounds more like a script for an episode of Family Guy or South Park.
Or the Burger King Kids Club Gang?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_advertising#Kids_Club