Rutan is pretty much world famous after Voyager and X prize, he is widely admired for being the little engine that could,
While this may be the case for a few of his specialty vehicles, its definitely NOT the case for production calibre projects his company has done. The Beech Starship is a classic example of how NOT to do a product. Eventually, after beech was purchased by Raytheon, the legal departments laid down the law. Raytheon would not accept the product liability of those things, and they purchased them all back to get them out of the air, and into the scrapyard.
If you want a highly specialized airframe, to fly a specific mission profile once or twice, Scaled composites is probably as good an option as any of the others to have it designed and built. If you want a production class design that will continue to fly without major issues for years, they are definitely NOT the place to go. The Scaled Composites experience with the Starship program is referenced in all aerospace engineering programs today as the worst example of how NOT to be successful with a production design in airframes, it's often compared to the edsel of the automotive industry.
Actually, if you need 50 little scripts to figure out whats wrong with your network, maybe you shouldn't be trying to be an isp. If you networking skills are so poor that you cannot troubleshoot a network connection by simply typing a few commands at a prompt, maybe you should leave the isp business to those more qualified.
After all, I can still taste Coke when it's icy cold... in fact, I can still taste a lemonade icy-pole well, and it's very cold...?
Did the post say _all_ tastebuds, or many tastebuds ? Some are not affected by the cold, others are. Heat has a similar effect. I'm sure you know at least one food that seems to 'taste better' after it's got cold?
Unless you are already a homebrewer, don't try this recipe - it's a difficult grain recipe, and looking at the recipe, will not will not be a fantastic beer.
A fantastic beer is all a matter of personal preference. The history of beer in north america was changed dramatically by prohibition. During that period, they were brewing awful stuff, and serving it very very green. What was discovered, if you chill the beer till it's 'cold', folks liked it better. If you look into the specific reason why, it's kind of hillarious. A liquid chilled the way north americans prefer beer (ice cold), will numb many of the tastebuds when it flows over the tongue. Those are specifically the buds that react to the flavour of yeast. When prohibition ended, the brewing industry held onto this concept, because it allows one to serve a green beer, and nobody will taste the yeast. Ever notice how much the industry spends promoting 'cold beer'? That simply because they know, if folks are drinking it chilled, they can sell a beer that's got a horrible yeast flavour, and nobody will notice.
The recipe in question as given on the website will produce a very interesting beer, but, its definitely a european beer. That means it should be served just below room temp, not well chilled, and, it does need to be fully and properly cured, to get rid of the yeast flavours. the majority of the flavour from this particular beer will be lost if served chilled the north american way.
If you are doing your own brews, it's a very interesting experiment. Make up a traditional european beer, then try 2 bottles side by side. Chill one 'the north american way', and treat the other exactly the way you would treat a good red wine (8 to 12 degrees below room temp). The chilled variant will taste awful, the room temp bottle will have a host of interesting flavours. Repeat the process with an american beer, and you'll find the room temp bottle will have a horrible yeasty aftertaste, which you dont notice when trying the chilled bottle.
But, that's the beauty of open source beer:) for our north american folks that prefer ice cold beer, they can fork the recipe, and refine it for one that has acceptable flavours when served chilled, and disregard the yeast artifacts, the the chilled serving will hide them.
The timetable from New York would change measured in local time, it would remain constant measured in GMT. Arrival and departure slots are assigned in GMT, the airline cant just decide to change thier departure time because the local politicians changed the local clocks. In this particular case, the Heathrow slots are the most precious, so, the airlines will change the 'local time' for departure/arrival on the other end, cuz they are NOT gonna get an hour offset on the Heathrow slot. The new york departure will leave at the exact same time it used to (gmt), and if that happens to mean it 'looks different' in local time, so be it. Your guy coming from the usa will have no problem with the connection, assuming he's smart enough to figure out the new 'local time' for departure. If not, blame the politicians for coming up with such a hair brained scheme on such short notice. Contrary to popular belief, the world does not revolve around the eastern time, most of the worlds infrastructure that requires synchronization across time zones operates on gmt.
In the long run, this is probably good for the aviation industry. There's going to be a lot of folks missing international flights for a couple of months, and they will be entitled to refunds because the airlines changed the 'apparent' schedules. It'll probably take one more of the insolvent airlines, and push em over the edge into bankruptcy. The industry needs to lose at least one more big airline if it's going to survive.
Seems to me, when we change to daylight time, the 'published departure time' changes by an hour, but the actual flight time (measured in gmt) remains exactly the same. This is probably related to the fact that slot times are assigned in GMT, and, they dont change just because politicians want to change the clocks a couple of times a year. The international connections will be just fine, you just gotta realize, the 'local time' for departures and arrivals may change, cuz they will stay fixed in GMT.
Been thru this daylight change a time or two, and it's never had any affect on my flight schedule in years gone past. I've always done flight assignments in GMT, dont think that's gonna change just cuz daylight time changes. The reality is, the whole industry does it this way too, it's only the last step along the way, publish for public that you convert arrival/departure times from GMT to local, and, it's trivial to change that conversion factor.
Another detail, on your scenario, the timing of the flight will be driven by the availability of slots in London. A heathrow slot is FAR more precious than any slot in the usa. An airline with an arrival slot for heathrow will schedule the flight to make that slot, all other considerations go out the window. It really doesn't matter how convenient/inconvenient the departure time on this side of the pond is, because the entire schedule is driven by when you are permitted to arrive. It's WAY easier to negotiate/swap slots at JFK than heathrow, so in your scenario, the airline will thank the gods they have an arrival slot for London, and then do whatever it takes to get the departure slot that fits on this side of the pond. Once the slots are in order, they will publish a schedule, and the passengers can take it or leave it.
Aviation is a global industry, where everybody works in the same time zone, gmt. A change in how daylight time is done wont affect operations at all, but it may cause grief for customer service agents dealing with public that's do dumb to understand an hour offset from previously published schedules due to the daylight time changes.
imagine what NASA could do with an extra 5-10 billion dollars.
Well, considering they plan on spending $250K for a pair of gloves, maybe with a few billion they can even go for jeans, t-shirt, helmet and some boots, and have enough left over for lunch.
OTOH, if they took a good look at the current state of the art in gloves currently used for driving, motorcycles, skiing, sailing, diving, and a few more disciplines, they'd likely find something 'off the shelf' that can come damn close to doing the job already. A chat with designers at the companies already making them, and they will probably get gloves that can do the job for less than a kilobuck.
Interesting place. I suppose this extends, ie failure to wear bullet proof clothing would be an affirmative defence for somebody that shot you? Stands to reason, if you dont put on a bullet proof vest, you dont care if somebody shoots you. It's about as obvious as 'failure to secure an access point', and falls in the same line of reason.
For that we need to advance to power over wireless. It's not as big a step as most seem to think. Typical notebook has a 19V supply capable of 2.5 amps, and it's not fully used, so for round figures, lets call that 40 watts. Assuming you get a 25% efficiency in the conversion at the reciever, and you want to power 4 devices off a single access point, you will need 4*4*40=640 watts at 2.4 ghz. Those transmitters are already in mass production, currently in use for microwave ovens, so it's not even a large engineering or manufacturing challenge to get units in mass quantity. The only real issue is designing the reciever.
But, one other detail, there will probably need to be a warning on the box, for use only by folks that have already HAD thier children.
Just read the details folks, the guy is going to work in a lab in china.
Microsoft can sue till they turn blue, but, until the us courts have jurasdiction in china, it wont matter one tiny little bit. I suspect we'll have snowballs in hell prior to seeing us courts having jurasdiction in china.
where the frack are you supposed to take your business to when you have a governement protected never expiring monopoly ?
Take your kids to yellowstone instead of disney. Inspire them to get excited about the place, and run around for a while. They'll grow up healthier, and smarter. If you cant figure out someplace to go other than disney, I pity the poor kids you'll raise (or have raised).
It may be, but that would defeat the purpose of broadband in the airplanes to begin with. Broadband on the plane is EXPENSIVE, so it's not like your average/. junkie is going to use it for browsing pron. On the other hand, if you have an executive that has 2 hours to sit in the plane, and they can establish a vpn to the office, they can get real work done in that 2 hours. That's the target customer for airborne broadband, and as soon as you rule out use of encrypted vpn, you exclude the only customers that are actually going to pay for the service.
What's next, detainment? "Well we're pretty sure this guy is a terrorist so let's hold him indefinetly
That's already happening. Us government has a whole jail full of folks like that down at gitmo. I wonder how loud americans would scream, if the chinese government came to the usa, grabbed a few hundred folks, flew them into china and held em for years without any formal charge or any means of representation, yet that's EXACTLY what the usa is doing these days...
Building a positioning system based on wifi access points, and doing it all in java. These guys forgot to take the courses on 'choose the right technology for the task'.
I wouldn't reccomend making a long term career bet on this one...
The elevator is all find and dandy, but the real money is gonna be made by those that develop the unobtanium mine. That elevator is almost entirely out of this stuff.
That would be a huge wasted effort. Anybody serious about wanting to really screw up the elevator will just buy an old ballistic missle. It will be used to put 100 pounds of sand into a polar orbit with a bit of a fanout on the delivery. The probability of getting the cable within the next 100 revolutions approaches certainty for at least one grain of sand, and, that's all it'll take. For a very modest cost, one entire orbital altitude can be rendered useless, and that long skinny cable has to pass the altitude at some point.
It'd still take a lot less energy budget to get you to one of those from a space elevator stop than it would by ground-based rocket
Actually, that's not true, but, as long as folks dont really understand the physics, the snake oil salesmen will sell it as such.
The reality is, the energy for a low orbit is almost entirely expended in acceleration, and stepping off the 'elevator' at the 500km mark you'll just fall down, unless you do a LOT of acceleration. It cant be 'low g' acceleration either, because you will have to get up to orbital velocity before falling down. On the reverse side of the equation, it wont be physically possible to decelerate from orbital velocity down to that of the cable, you will start falling. by the time your forward velocity matches that of the cable, your vertical velocity will be far to great to actually dock with the cable, so you better be prepared for a bit of a ride down. Odds are, you'll do like most spacecraft, and hit the atmosphere long before you have finished decelerating, and probably need some heat shielding.
Skyhook, space elevator, all the same stuff, wrapped up in a different name. It's a mythical device manufactured mostly out of unobtanium. It's primary purpose is to bamboozle the uninformed, and nobody has really mastered just how to cash in on the hype yet, but it wont be to long and somebody will figure that part out too.
You dont understand the concept. The original 90 day estimate of lifetime was solely to keep the total mission budget down to a point it would be 'acceptable'. If they had actually added another 18 months of operations to the original budget, the project never would have got off the ground. Enter some 'creative engineering'.
Start by factoring a worst case scenario for all the components on the rover, and come up with an expected mission time of 180 days (assuming a successful landing). Sprinkle in a safety factor of 2, and you have a 'design mission' of 90 days. Plan all budgets going forward with a '90 days on planet' segment for the mission, keeping budget numbers as small as possible, ie easier to get approved, and the likelihood of a 'successful mission' as high as possible.
After a successful landing, and the rovers run around for most of the 90 days, you come to the 'amazing' conclusion that they are still going strong, and could well do so for a long time yet. Re-do all mission life calculations, but, factor in some best case scenarios for component life, rather than worst case, and remove you fudge factor of 2, and voila, you come to the conclusion rovers can easily go another year, maybe longer. Now you go back to the budget folks, and present it as 'ok, we spent 150 million getting these things onto mars, we only need another 10 million to run them for another year after a hugely successful primary mission'.
From a budget point of view, it becomes a no brainer, for a mere 10 million more, you can triple or quadruple the science value of the original 150 million investment, whereas the whole project could well have been scrapped if the 10 million more was factored in from the get go.
Management played the game exceptionally well on this one, they back end loaded the budget with 'extras' that end up impossible to be declined after the rovers actually ended up on planet, and survived the first 90 days of 'primary mission'. They knew this was the plan already prior to launch, but, by back end loading the budget, they kept the initial approval numbers a lot smaller (easier), and left the long running mission plans to be bonus, ie only presented up the food chain after the rovers survived the first 90 days, and then validated the 'real scenarios' for actual expected mission life.
The real problem they have now, rovers are going strong even after the real planned life, and now they are in an ongoing game of keeping budget topped up. From this point forward, it's still going to be a no brainer though, with all the space hype focussing on mars talk, topping the budget for the rovers is the cheapest publicity that can be bought today, and it'll continue to help deflect criticism away from _other programs_ that soak up billions, and possibly even help justify the sacrifice of those programs since mars is now the focus of all the forward looking hype.
There are some politicians that are hoping and dreaming the 2 rovers can go for another year plus, because, it'll give them a wonderful chance to do some funds diversions. You can bet your last dollar that there are plans afoot in washington to divert more funds to the rover operations, and use that as the excuse to claim not enough funding left to service hubble. It'll be a political coup, but it'll only work if the rovers are still roaming mars when hubble service mission gets to a 'now or never' state.
You have missed the most important detail. In the 60's, America was a society of risk takers, and leaders. The apollo program was the epitamy of that society. People took risks, people died. There were investigations to correct problems, there wasn't a witch hunt, and the program went on.
Today america is a society of risk adverse citizens, liberally interspersed with ambualance chasing lawyers. They are more concerned with 'chain of blame' than with 'achievements'.
The Nasa of apollo days was made up of thousands of geeks with a passion to succeed, and a few astronauts with more guts than brains. The public loved it, the geeks gave them technology, and the astronauts gave them heros. The public gave money, the geeks spent that money to 'make it happen'. the astronauts were along for the ride, lots of great photo ops. This crowd built and launched onto a lunar trajectory 9 copies of the saturn+apollo lunar trajectory package. 8 of those vehicles performed the intended mission, and one blew up enroute, altho the crew did ultimately survive. the program was considered a resounding success with an 88% success rate on lunar missions.
Today, the risk adverse society expects perfection, and will not tolerate a program that operates by exploding 12% of it's missions. Heck, the shuttle program is virtually shut down with a 2% failure rate. A program today is going to take a lot longer, and cost a lot more, because the public today is not willing to accept the kind of risks that were taken during the apollo program.
With today's technology, all the money in the world is not going to buy a lunar program that has less than 2% chance of mission failure. Humanity just doesnt have the requisite technology. Unless american society re-evaluates the risk management process, and defines a reachable 'acceptable risk' for a lunar program, it's not going to happen, period, no matter how much money is tossed that way. The risk factors in space launches are not going to reduce until we figure out a way to climb out of this gravity well that doesn't include using high explosive chemical ingredients as the main component of a launch vehicle. Until that technological breakthru happens, folks are going to have to accept the risk, or, forget the concept. In the meantime, it's going to cost a lot more than it did in the 60's, and take a lot longer, in a vain attempt to build a 'safe' vehicle powered by some of the most explosive elements known to mankind. the end result will be a lot of pork, but, it wont be a vehicle that can complete a lunar trajectory at a risk level acceptable to american society today.
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While this may be the case for a few of his specialty vehicles, its definitely NOT the case for production calibre projects his company has done. The Beech Starship is a classic example of how NOT to do a product. Eventually, after beech was purchased by Raytheon, the legal departments laid down the law. Raytheon would not accept the product liability of those things, and they purchased them all back to get them out of the air, and into the scrapyard.
If you want a highly specialized airframe, to fly a specific mission profile once or twice, Scaled composites is probably as good an option as any of the others to have it designed and built. If you want a production class design that will continue to fly without major issues for years, they are definitely NOT the place to go. The Scaled Composites experience with the Starship program is referenced in all aerospace engineering programs today as the worst example of how NOT to be successful with a production design in airframes, it's often compared to the edsel of the automotive industry.
There's 2 kinds of software developer working in Washington State. Those with your attitude, live in Redmond. Those that know better, work for Boeing.
Actually, if you need 50 little scripts to figure out whats wrong with your network, maybe you shouldn't be trying to be an isp. If you networking skills are so poor that you cannot troubleshoot a network connection by simply typing a few commands at a prompt, maybe you should leave the isp business to those more qualified.
Did the post say _all_ tastebuds, or many tastebuds ? Some are not affected by the cold, others are. Heat has a similar effect. I'm sure you know at least one food that seems to 'taste better' after it's got cold?
A fantastic beer is all a matter of personal preference. The history of beer in north america was changed dramatically by prohibition. During that period, they were brewing awful stuff, and serving it very very green. What was discovered, if you chill the beer till it's 'cold', folks liked it better. If you look into the specific reason why, it's kind of hillarious. A liquid chilled the way north americans prefer beer (ice cold), will numb many of the tastebuds when it flows over the tongue. Those are specifically the buds that react to the flavour of yeast. When prohibition ended, the brewing industry held onto this concept, because it allows one to serve a green beer, and nobody will taste the yeast. Ever notice how much the industry spends promoting 'cold beer'? That simply because they know, if folks are drinking it chilled, they can sell a beer that's got a horrible yeast flavour, and nobody will notice.
The recipe in question as given on the website will produce a very interesting beer, but, its definitely a european beer. That means it should be served just below room temp, not well chilled, and, it does need to be fully and properly cured, to get rid of the yeast flavours. the majority of the flavour from this particular beer will be lost if served chilled the north american way.
If you are doing your own brews, it's a very interesting experiment. Make up a traditional european beer, then try 2 bottles side by side. Chill one 'the north american way', and treat the other exactly the way you would treat a good red wine (8 to 12 degrees below room temp). The chilled variant will taste awful, the room temp bottle will have a host of interesting flavours. Repeat the process with an american beer, and you'll find the room temp bottle will have a horrible yeasty aftertaste, which you dont notice when trying the chilled bottle.
But, that's the beauty of open source beer :) for our north american folks that prefer ice cold beer, they can fork the recipe, and refine it for one that has acceptable flavours when served chilled, and disregard the yeast artifacts, the the chilled serving will hide them.
In the long run, this is probably good for the aviation industry. There's going to be a lot of folks missing international flights for a couple of months, and they will be entitled to refunds because the airlines changed the 'apparent' schedules. It'll probably take one more of the insolvent airlines, and push em over the edge into bankruptcy. The industry needs to lose at least one more big airline if it's going to survive.
Been thru this daylight change a time or two, and it's never had any affect on my flight schedule in years gone past. I've always done flight assignments in GMT, dont think that's gonna change just cuz daylight time changes. The reality is, the whole industry does it this way too, it's only the last step along the way, publish for public that you convert arrival/departure times from GMT to local, and, it's trivial to change that conversion factor.
Another detail, on your scenario, the timing of the flight will be driven by the availability of slots in London. A heathrow slot is FAR more precious than any slot in the usa. An airline with an arrival slot for heathrow will schedule the flight to make that slot, all other considerations go out the window. It really doesn't matter how convenient/inconvenient the departure time on this side of the pond is, because the entire schedule is driven by when you are permitted to arrive. It's WAY easier to negotiate/swap slots at JFK than heathrow, so in your scenario, the airline will thank the gods they have an arrival slot for London, and then do whatever it takes to get the departure slot that fits on this side of the pond. Once the slots are in order, they will publish a schedule, and the passengers can take it or leave it.
Aviation is a global industry, where everybody works in the same time zone, gmt. A change in how daylight time is done wont affect operations at all, but it may cause grief for customer service agents dealing with public that's do dumb to understand an hour offset from previously published schedules due to the daylight time changes.
To late, thats already been done. Remember the big hoo-haa about y2k. Gotta wonder if the public is dumb enough to fall for that again...
Well, considering they plan on spending $250K for a pair of gloves, maybe with a few billion they can even go for jeans, t-shirt, helmet and some boots, and have enough left over for lunch.
OTOH, if they took a good look at the current state of the art in gloves currently used for driving, motorcycles, skiing, sailing, diving, and a few more disciplines, they'd likely find something 'off the shelf' that can come damn close to doing the job already. A chat with designers at the companies already making them, and they will probably get gloves that can do the job for less than a kilobuck.
Interesting place. I suppose this extends, ie failure to wear bullet proof clothing would be an affirmative defence for somebody that shot you? Stands to reason, if you dont put on a bullet proof vest, you dont care if somebody shoots you. It's about as obvious as 'failure to secure an access point', and falls in the same line of reason.
yet...
But, one other detail, there will probably need to be a warning on the box, for use only by folks that have already HAD thier children.
Microsoft can sue till they turn blue, but, until the us courts have jurasdiction in china, it wont matter one tiny little bit. I suspect we'll have snowballs in hell prior to seeing us courts having jurasdiction in china.
Take your kids to yellowstone instead of disney. Inspire them to get excited about the place, and run around for a while. They'll grow up healthier, and smarter. If you cant figure out someplace to go other than disney, I pity the poor kids you'll raise (or have raised).
It may be, but that would defeat the purpose of broadband in the airplanes to begin with. Broadband on the plane is EXPENSIVE, so it's not like your average /. junkie is going to use it for browsing pron. On the other hand, if you have an executive that has 2 hours to sit in the plane, and they can establish a vpn to the office, they can get real work done in that 2 hours. That's the target customer for airborne broadband, and as soon as you rule out use of encrypted vpn, you exclude the only customers that are actually going to pay for the service.
That's already happening. Us government has a whole jail full of folks like that down at gitmo. I wonder how loud americans would scream, if the chinese government came to the usa, grabbed a few hundred folks, flew them into china and held em for years without any formal charge or any means of representation, yet that's EXACTLY what the usa is doing these days...
I wouldn't reccomend making a long term career bet on this one...
That motto basically precludes them from doing work for the us federal government.
Just about anyplace south of 49N qualifies to be considered as hell...
The elevator is all find and dandy, but the real money is gonna be made by those that develop the unobtanium mine. That elevator is almost entirely out of this stuff.
That would be a huge wasted effort. Anybody serious about wanting to really screw up the elevator will just buy an old ballistic missle. It will be used to put 100 pounds of sand into a polar orbit with a bit of a fanout on the delivery. The probability of getting the cable within the next 100 revolutions approaches certainty for at least one grain of sand, and, that's all it'll take. For a very modest cost, one entire orbital altitude can be rendered useless, and that long skinny cable has to pass the altitude at some point.
Actually, that's not true, but, as long as folks dont really understand the physics, the snake oil salesmen will sell it as such.
The reality is, the energy for a low orbit is almost entirely expended in acceleration, and stepping off the 'elevator' at the 500km mark you'll just fall down, unless you do a LOT of acceleration. It cant be 'low g' acceleration either, because you will have to get up to orbital velocity before falling down. On the reverse side of the equation, it wont be physically possible to decelerate from orbital velocity down to that of the cable, you will start falling. by the time your forward velocity matches that of the cable, your vertical velocity will be far to great to actually dock with the cable, so you better be prepared for a bit of a ride down. Odds are, you'll do like most spacecraft, and hit the atmosphere long before you have finished decelerating, and probably need some heat shielding.
Skyhook, space elevator, all the same stuff, wrapped up in a different name. It's a mythical device manufactured mostly out of unobtanium. It's primary purpose is to bamboozle the uninformed, and nobody has really mastered just how to cash in on the hype yet, but it wont be to long and somebody will figure that part out too.
Start by factoring a worst case scenario for all the components on the rover, and come up with an expected mission time of 180 days (assuming a successful landing). Sprinkle in a safety factor of 2, and you have a 'design mission' of 90 days. Plan all budgets going forward with a '90 days on planet' segment for the mission, keeping budget numbers as small as possible, ie easier to get approved, and the likelihood of a 'successful mission' as high as possible.
After a successful landing, and the rovers run around for most of the 90 days, you come to the 'amazing' conclusion that they are still going strong, and could well do so for a long time yet. Re-do all mission life calculations, but, factor in some best case scenarios for component life, rather than worst case, and remove you fudge factor of 2, and voila, you come to the conclusion rovers can easily go another year, maybe longer. Now you go back to the budget folks, and present it as 'ok, we spent 150 million getting these things onto mars, we only need another 10 million to run them for another year after a hugely successful primary mission'.
From a budget point of view, it becomes a no brainer, for a mere 10 million more, you can triple or quadruple the science value of the original 150 million investment, whereas the whole project could well have been scrapped if the 10 million more was factored in from the get go.
Management played the game exceptionally well on this one, they back end loaded the budget with 'extras' that end up impossible to be declined after the rovers actually ended up on planet, and survived the first 90 days of 'primary mission'. They knew this was the plan already prior to launch, but, by back end loading the budget, they kept the initial approval numbers a lot smaller (easier), and left the long running mission plans to be bonus, ie only presented up the food chain after the rovers survived the first 90 days, and then validated the 'real scenarios' for actual expected mission life.
The real problem they have now, rovers are going strong even after the real planned life, and now they are in an ongoing game of keeping budget topped up. From this point forward, it's still going to be a no brainer though, with all the space hype focussing on mars talk, topping the budget for the rovers is the cheapest publicity that can be bought today, and it'll continue to help deflect criticism away from _other programs_ that soak up billions, and possibly even help justify the sacrifice of those programs since mars is now the focus of all the forward looking hype.
There are some politicians that are hoping and dreaming the 2 rovers can go for another year plus, because, it'll give them a wonderful chance to do some funds diversions. You can bet your last dollar that there are plans afoot in washington to divert more funds to the rover operations, and use that as the excuse to claim not enough funding left to service hubble. It'll be a political coup, but it'll only work if the rovers are still roaming mars when hubble service mission gets to a 'now or never' state.
Today america is a society of risk adverse citizens, liberally interspersed with ambualance chasing lawyers. They are more concerned with 'chain of blame' than with 'achievements'.
The Nasa of apollo days was made up of thousands of geeks with a passion to succeed, and a few astronauts with more guts than brains. The public loved it, the geeks gave them technology, and the astronauts gave them heros. The public gave money, the geeks spent that money to 'make it happen'. the astronauts were along for the ride, lots of great photo ops. This crowd built and launched onto a lunar trajectory 9 copies of the saturn+apollo lunar trajectory package. 8 of those vehicles performed the intended mission, and one blew up enroute, altho the crew did ultimately survive. the program was considered a resounding success with an 88% success rate on lunar missions.
Today, the risk adverse society expects perfection, and will not tolerate a program that operates by exploding 12% of it's missions. Heck, the shuttle program is virtually shut down with a 2% failure rate. A program today is going to take a lot longer, and cost a lot more, because the public today is not willing to accept the kind of risks that were taken during the apollo program.
With today's technology, all the money in the world is not going to buy a lunar program that has less than 2% chance of mission failure. Humanity just doesnt have the requisite technology. Unless american society re-evaluates the risk management process, and defines a reachable 'acceptable risk' for a lunar program, it's not going to happen, period, no matter how much money is tossed that way. The risk factors in space launches are not going to reduce until we figure out a way to climb out of this gravity well that doesn't include using high explosive chemical ingredients as the main component of a launch vehicle. Until that technological breakthru happens, folks are going to have to accept the risk, or, forget the concept. In the meantime, it's going to cost a lot more than it did in the 60's, and take a lot longer, in a vain attempt to build a 'safe' vehicle powered by some of the most explosive elements known to mankind. the end result will be a lot of pork, but, it wont be a vehicle that can complete a lunar trajectory at a risk level acceptable to american society today.
Much easier question to answer. What are they being honest about ?
Much shorter and simpler answers available.