If you actually looked at third party URL's being called by random web pages platform.twitter.com and api.twitter.com/xd_receiver.html are becoming extremely common. If Twitter isn't doing tracking with these it would be amazing that they are passing up the opportunity.
This bomber probably doesn't have to be remotely controlled in the unmanned mode. If they are attacking a fixed target the coordinates can be preprogrammed on the ground and the mission can be flown autonomously. In this mode it would be very hard to hack. The thing most vulnerable to hacking/jamming is GPS though that isn't trivial to do, and you can have intertial, digitial elevation or star based navigation as a backup though those lack the precision.
Remote control is only needed for moving targets and targets of opportunity, especially those near civilians (civilians you dont want to kill) or friendly forces.
All things considered I predict this bomber will end up staggeringly overpriced, overbudget, a decade or two behing schedule, buggy and incapable because the Air Force brass and their pet contractors do these fighters and bombers primarily to line the pockets of the pet contractors and so the generals will have a lucrative place to retire to at those same contractors. Cases in point, the B-52 and A-10 are still two of the Air Forces most capable work horses, while the B-1, B-2 are seldom used in combat except for a few publicity stunts. The F-22 has never been used in combat and is frequently grounded due to crashes and design flaws.
All stocks are up this year, Microsoft's it just up a little more than the average. Stocks and commodities are going up because central banks the world over are printing staggering quantities of money. Central bank balance sheets are where money is created out of thin air and turned over to banks who then leverage it anywhere from 11X to 50X creating a tidal wave of inceasingly worthless dollars, euros, yuan, and pounds.
Stocks and commodities are going up to counteract the decline of the paper currencies they are denominated in. The actual valuation of the companies hasn't changed that much but their value in dollars and euros soars as the real value of these fiat currencies plunge as more and more are printed (they are not actually printed they are electronically conjured from thin air with a stroke of a key on a computer).
The DOW rally from 6,660 to 12,000 was driven almost entirely by the Federal Reserve flooding the worlds banks with dollars which they mostly plowed back in to stocks and commodities.
The huge rally in the stock market so far this year started on the day the ECB gifted European banks with 500 billion in newly created Euros in exchange for their increasingly worthless PIIGS bonds, in a program called LTRO. The ECB is scheduled to do another round of this at the end of this month that could equal that or go as high as 1 Trillion Euros. The ECB had a German President opposed to printing money in 2011, but he was replaced with an Italian who immediately opened the spigots to save Italy's bonds from collapse. It did miracles for Italy's bonds and stock markets the world over. Its also fueling a new round of inflation in oil and assorted other commodities.
ALSA's main problem is an absurdly overdone API both for app developers and kernel audio driver developers.
I've done audio on a lot of different platforms and ALSA is hands down the most incomprehensible, poorly documented(at least when it originally came out) overdone audio API ever. I seriously don't know why Linus let it go in the kernel like that, though I assume he didn't really care about audio and looked the other way while somebody totally over did the API. The BeOS API is probably the best I've used. OS X is a little complicated depending on the API level you choose to but it is really well thought out and it just works. I'm assuming pulseaudio was done mostly just to hide the mess that is ALSA from GNOME's app developers.
At a kernel driver level I am fairly certain that the ALSA audio drivers under Linux were so bad, for so long, simply because the ALSA API's are too complex for volunteer programmers to want to tear their hair out over, it often ended up only partially implemented, and it took forever to get the bugs out. For a long time after it first came out you would get completely different results in audio apps between two different audio drivers. Maybe ALSA is OK on well supported hardware with good drivers, now, but it took a long time to get it to just be OK, and there is no doubt a lot of audio hardware that will never have a functional ALSA driver because its not worth the effort, and new hardware will take too long to get good drivers because the API is too hard.
Did you stop to think that maybe its audio on Linux that is the train wreck and Flash is just one of the many victims. Until Linux has ONE audio API that is well done, simple and elegant, that just works, and that all apps can reliably use, without having to implement 10 different audio API's, its pretty much doomed as a desktop OS. Audio is just one of the worst instances where fragmentation makes Linux unusable as a desktop OS, GNOME.vs. KDE.vs. a million other window managers is another.
P.S. ALSA isn't it that one API because ALSA is a head on wreck between two trains at full speed, Neither is OSS, pulseaudio, jack, esd, OpenAL, aRts, OK, I'll stop now.
I dont think its actually necessary to have the heavy launch capability man-rated. Its somewhat more rational to use it to launch big cargos as cheaply as possible and you send the people up to those cargos as necessary in Dragon on a smaller, safer, easier to certify rocket.
It makes more sense to man rate only one launcher and not every different vehicle they are building
Its not a "may have something". JSC is in Texas only because LBJ wanted it in Texas.
Sts a totally horrible idea to have so much geographic separation between the major centers involved in the manned space program, mainly Johnson, Kennedy and Marshall. As best I recall the horrible communication between Johnson and Kennedy was a direct contributor to the Columbia disaster.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Morton Thiokol team would have done a better job of stopping the Challenger launch if everyone had been sitting in the same room when they were trying to stop the launch.
Its a massive waste of precious time making everyone travel so much, it saps energy, it wastes money on travel expenses and duplicative administrative overhead running so many centers, it creates a bunch of feuding fiefdoms and turf wars, and its just devestating on effective communication.
NASA's manned space program is pure pork and has been since Apollo ended. JPL and the observatories are still doing good work. But Shuttle, ISS, a string of proposed new launchers like SLS/Orion and NASP, and pretty much every proposed plan for bases on the Moon and manned missions to Mars are nothing but cynical ploys for Presidential votes in the most crucial swing state of them all, Florida. You also need to add in influential senators who will fight to the death to keep the major NASA centers in their states funded even if its a total make work program. In particular, Nelson in Florida(Kennedy), Hutchinson in Texas(Johnson), Hatch in Utah(ATK formerly Thiokol), Shelby in Alabama(Marshal), Mikulski in Maryland (Hubble and Web) and a bunch of lesser Senators and Congressmen.
One cynical presidential candidate after another always does a space policy speech in Florida, they propose a grand new program different from the one being done by the current administration because they can't just endorse the program of the President they want to replace and actually maintain any continuity so something gets done.
Bush's was SLS/Orion and return to the Moon. All the people who live on the Space Coast tend to vote for the person who is promising them the most lucrative and extended employment deal, and its enough people to swing Florida as close as its been in recent years.
New launcher programs like SLS/Orion, NASP, etc are designed to squander billions of dollars to buy votes and to get cancelled when a new President is elected so they never have to actually deliver working hardware.
SpaceX is developing much better and simpler hardware, much faster and much cheaper than NASA can even dream of. NASA sent a team to SpaceX to explore why they can do so much with so little as opposed to NASA's manned space program which does so little with so much.
I think Obama is planning to move two brigades out of Germany which is long overdue. Only problem is he is planning to move troops/naval bases to Australia, Singapore and the Phillipines to prepare for the coming confrontation with China. War is peace.
Its a bit of an exaggeration to say NASA is "pouring money" in to SpaceX. They are certainly contributing substantial funds to develop the COTS and CCDev capability but its a LOT less money than NASA squandered on Ares 1 and they got nothing at all for that money wasted.
NASA is mostly contracting for the services SpaceX will be providing and they are pretty reasonably priced compared to old school NASA, Boeing and Lockheed prices.
SpaceX has a large contract to launch the nex gen Iridium satellites, it has a large contract from the Air Force, its launching satellites for private companies. All things considered it looks pretty well diversified, and its just selling space access, and developing the tech to do it, which is what a private company should be doing.
I could be wrong but I dont think this is Elon's plan for Mars. He will, no doubt, take all the Federal money he can get to go to Mars but I think he trying to corner the market for LEO launches, turn it in to a profit center, and use that money to do the more advanced missions to Mars.
If you actually WANT to go to Mars you totally cant sit around and wait for Congress and the President to fund it. A) in the current budget climate they probably won't B) as soon as the Congress/POTUS change hands they will defund the previous regimes programs and start on something totally different.
Presidents only do space programs now to buy votes in Florida, Texas, Alabama and Utah, mostly Florida because its a crucial swing state. They totally dont care if anything actually gets done.
SpaceX, to succeed, in going to Mars, needs all the money they can get but be free of the strings and whims of our completely screwed up Federal government.
Private citizens pouring money in the bureacratic maw of NASA is futility incarnate, though if you could channel it directly to JPL it might work. At least JPL still has technical and engineering competence, is somewhat isolated from NASA's bureaucracy, and gets things done.
If you could funnel a few billion to SpaceX they could do some exciting stuff aimed at Mars. Since Elon Musk is aiming there anyway he just needs more funding. SpaceX has a truly phenomonal efficiency in getting engineering bang for their bucks. As I recall NASA spent a team their to study how they were doing so much for so little compared to NASA. Of course, one answer they probably missed is SpaceX probably doesn't squander money on doing studies on why other organizations are efficient, they just build stuff, efficiently, economically and quickly.
The shuttle is immensely more fragile than an expendable booster. In particular the thermal protection system (the tiles) were known to be extremely vulnerable to ice strikes, its why they put a thermal blanket on the external tank. Capsules on top of the stack are much less vulnerable, compared to the Shuttle which sits alongside the entire length of the stack, which is why no one is considering ever doing that design again, it was flawed and everyone came to realize it, and they paid for it in both accidents.
There simply was NO good reason to continue with a launch on that abnormally cold of a day in Florida when there was ice all over the launch pad and there were signifcant risks of broken pipes, etc on the launch pad even.
They could have waited a day and they would have never had a problem. They delay shuttle launches all the time for weather, since the tiles can't stand flying through clouds or rain either.
Its likely though often denied that senior managers felt pressure to launch that day because Reagan was going to give a speech that night praising the teacher in space and NASA. The White House didn't even have to explicitly pressure them to stay on schedule, the NASA managers just had to know what kind of a mess it would be for him to give that speech if they hadn't launched, and Reagan controlled their purse strings so they needed to make him happy and make him look good.
All of the Morton Thiokol engineers responsible for the O rings were telling them to stop, they new the O rings had issues with cold temperatures. It was an anomolously cold day in Florida. It almost never freezes at Kennedy but that morning there was ice all over the launch pad. Even setting the O rings aside it was enormously foolish to launch that morning and it was pretty obvious they should postpone a day until temperatures weren't aberrant.
As I recall Reagan was giving a speech about the space program and timing it to coincide with the launch and the teacher-in-space and the bureaucrats were unwisely feeling political pressure to launch with all engineering and safety factors screamed for them to stop.
You overlook the fact that, as a result of the Challenger accident, the Shuttle program was severly damaged. Prior to Challenger it was an aggressive program pushing boundaries, afterward it become conservative, limited and cautious. In the wake of Columbia it was crippled, and was relegated to almost the bare essential missions needed to finish and support the ISS. The Air Force largely abandoned the Shuttle and returned to expendable launchers, though many think they wanted to do that anyway and Challenger was just a convenient excuse.
Shuttles were also different than expendable launchers. They were very limited in number, expensive and difficult to build especially after the assembly line had shut down so you couldn't afford to lose any of them without damaging the whole program.
The loss of life aside, the consequences of the twin disasters were the entire program was wrecked, the U.S. manned spaced program was crippled, may never recover at NASA, and it was all preventable and unnecessary. At this point companies like SpaceX are probably the only hope for a recovery because they are culturally free of most of the problems afflicting NASA's culture. To be successful in a technology intensive endeavor like space exploration engineers need to have a dominant voice in the program. Their voice can't be drowned out by bureaucrats and program managers with insufficient regard for the engineering.
Roger Boisjoly recently passed away. He was one of the engineers who tried to stop the ill fated launch of Challenger on an abnormally cold morning in Florida. He knew there was a high risk of the O rings leaking if they were cold, NASA management refused to listen to him, an O ring did failt, it ended in catastrophe. The Shuttle program was crippled from that day on.
From the article:
"It was the end of the dream," said John Pike, executive director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime analyst of U.S. aerospace. "Before the Challenger, you could think about the idea of going boldly where no one had gone before. The accident ended it."
Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward. When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.
The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.
When the space shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in 2003, killing its crew of seven, the accident was blamed on the same kinds of management failures that occurred with the Challenger. By that time, Boisjoly believed that NASA was beyond reform, some of its officials should be indicted on manslaughter charges and the agency abolished.
NASA's mismanagement "is not going to stop until somebody gets sent to hard rock hotel," Boisjoly said. "I don't care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense."
You sound pretty bitter dude. Let me guess, you either work at NASA, Boeing or Lockheed, right?
I admit to being guilty of being something of a SpaceX fanboy but thats because I haven't seen anything happen the U.S. as far as launchers go worth cheering since Apollo died. SpaceX may crash and burn but I sure hope they don't because NASA, Boeing and Lockheed aren't doing much except milk the status quo.
It would suck for a while but it would probably be a huge win in the long run.
It would be one of the few ways the U.S. could regain a manufacturing base. It is nearly impossible for a country to stay solvent for the long run with the massive current accounts deficit the U.S. is running, Yea there would be short term pain until the U.S. rebuilt its industrial base along with probably rebuilding it other cheap places like Mexico or South America. It would be kind of win to get the manufacturing base closer to the U.S. whatever because as fossil fuel prices explode so do shipping costs.
All things considered a quick crisis would be better than maintaining the status quo which will inevitably lead to a U.S. default, a dollar collapse and truly massive upheaval in the U.S. and in the rest of the world.
Either the U.S. needs to return to running trade surpluses or its going to have to go old school and use its massive military to plunder the rest of the world. Squandering nearly a trillion a year on your military and producing nothing but failed money sinks like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan has to be some of the most flawed strategic thinking in history.
SpaceX is doing everything they are doing for a tiny fraction of the money NASA squanders. In particular NASA spent billions on Ares 1, it was a horrible design, they wasted years on it, they managed one faked suborbital launch before the program was wisely killed.
SpaceX isn't NASA's problem, NASA's hopeless bureaucracy is their problem. SpaceX is just a long overdue solution, to get America innovating in space exploration again after 30 years of disturbing decay caused by NASA's stagnant bureaucracy and the deeply confused agendas of a series of Presidents and congressmen in funding and defunding it.
SpaceX and Elon Musk's goals aren't to create a monopoly or milk this for profit. He started SpaceX because he personally wanted to send payloads to Mars and all of the existing launchers were too expensive and or they sucked. He is trying to make LEO launches profitable so he has a sustainable business model to fund his future projects. His primary goal is to send people to Mars to live.
Bottomline is you completely don't understand what SpaceX is all about. They may not succeed in what the are doing but at the moment they are probably America's last best shot at regaining and retaining supremecy in space exploration.
They should have either not been allowed in to WTO if they were going to continue rampant IP theft since I'm pretty sure its frowned on under WTO protocols, or they should have been subjected to trade barriers preventing them from selling their products based on stolen IP in the West.
The West pretty much bent over for them, let them steal all their IP, removed all the trade barriers for goods coming out of China, while letting China retain massive barriers preventing western goods and companies from entering China or if they did it was with crippling restrictions (like Chinese partners with the controller interest of the joint venture).
It was a policy designed to insure the destruction of most western economies and thats pretty much exactly what it did, Germany being one of the few survivors. Makes you wonder whose side those politicians were on when the let China in to WTO.
Kind of a moot point now since China's stolen nearly everything worth stealing at this point outside of a few high tech bastions like CPU's, some software, aircraft and jet engines. China has pretty much made the great leap in many fields now and is starting to innovate domestically.
An innovation specifically referenced was a major advance in the PICA-X heat shield on Dragon which should allow hundreds of reentries without needing to be replaced. Good article here where I read it.
I think they are mostly young and single. If they have families they usually live far away and the workers at Foxconn send them money. I think they live in bunk beds with large numbers of people in each room. I wager it is the the most brutually efficient mass production framework ever. Though as Chinese workers have declined in numbers thanks to China's one child policy, and their wages have increased I think Foxconn is planning to discard many of them in favor of machines. They were only competive to do so much hand labor when they were dirt cheap.
Most of the workers at Foxconn live in dormatories at Foxconn. They are therefor never not at work, ergo if they are going to do it, they pretty much have to commit suicide at work.
It offers some obvious efficieny advantages if your work force is warehoused at your factory, no commute, meals in cafetires, but you have to wonder about the toll it takes on a workers mental well being to be warehoused at a factory.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually looked at third party URL's being called by random web pages platform.twitter.com and api.twitter.com/xd_receiver.html are becoming extremely common. If Twitter isn't doing tracking with these it would be amazing that they are passing up the opportunity.
This bomber probably doesn't have to be remotely controlled in the unmanned mode. If they are attacking a fixed target the coordinates can be preprogrammed on the ground and the mission can be flown autonomously. In this mode it would be very hard to hack. The thing most vulnerable to hacking/jamming is GPS though that isn't trivial to do, and you can have intertial, digitial elevation or star based navigation as a backup though those lack the precision.
Remote control is only needed for moving targets and targets of opportunity, especially those near civilians (civilians you dont want to kill) or friendly forces.
All things considered I predict this bomber will end up staggeringly overpriced, overbudget, a decade or two behing schedule, buggy and incapable because the Air Force brass and their pet contractors do these fighters and bombers primarily to line the pockets of the pet contractors and so the generals will have a lucrative place to retire to at those same contractors. Cases in point, the B-52 and A-10 are still two of the Air Forces most capable work horses, while the B-1, B-2 are seldom used in combat except for a few publicity stunts. The F-22 has never been used in combat and is frequently grounded due to crashes and design flaws.
All stocks are up this year, Microsoft's it just up a little more than the average. Stocks and commodities are going up because central banks the world over are printing staggering quantities of money. Central bank balance sheets are where money is created out of thin air and turned over to banks who then leverage it anywhere from 11X to 50X creating a tidal wave of inceasingly worthless dollars, euros, yuan, and pounds.
Stocks and commodities are going up to counteract the decline of the paper currencies they are denominated in. The actual valuation of the companies hasn't changed that much but their value in dollars and euros soars as the real value of these fiat currencies plunge as more and more are printed (they are not actually printed they are electronically conjured from thin air with a stroke of a key on a computer).
The DOW rally from 6,660 to 12,000 was driven almost entirely by the Federal Reserve flooding the worlds banks with dollars which they mostly plowed back in to stocks and commodities.
The huge rally in the stock market so far this year started on the day the ECB gifted European banks with 500 billion in newly created Euros in exchange for their increasingly worthless PIIGS bonds, in a program called LTRO. The ECB is scheduled to do another round of this at the end of this month that could equal that or go as high as 1 Trillion Euros. The ECB had a German President opposed to printing money in 2011, but he was replaced with an Italian who immediately opened the spigots to save Italy's bonds from collapse. It did miracles for Italy's bonds and stock markets the world over. Its also fueling a new round of inflation in oil and assorted other commodities.
ALSA's main problem is an absurdly overdone API both for app developers and kernel audio driver developers.
I've done audio on a lot of different platforms and ALSA is hands down the most incomprehensible, poorly documented(at least when it originally came out) overdone audio API ever. I seriously don't know why Linus let it go in the kernel like that, though I assume he didn't really care about audio and looked the other way while somebody totally over did the API. The BeOS API is probably the best I've used. OS X is a little complicated depending on the API level you choose to but it is really well thought out and it just works. I'm assuming pulseaudio was done mostly just to hide the mess that is ALSA from GNOME's app developers.
At a kernel driver level I am fairly certain that the ALSA audio drivers under Linux were so bad, for so long, simply because the ALSA API's are too complex for volunteer programmers to want to tear their hair out over, it often ended up only partially implemented, and it took forever to get the bugs out. For a long time after it first came out you would get completely different results in audio apps between two different audio drivers. Maybe ALSA is OK on well supported hardware with good drivers, now, but it took a long time to get it to just be OK, and there is no doubt a lot of audio hardware that will never have a functional ALSA driver because its not worth the effort, and new hardware will take too long to get good drivers because the API is too hard.
Did you stop to think that maybe its audio on Linux that is the train wreck and Flash is just one of the many victims. Until Linux has ONE audio API that is well done, simple and elegant, that just works, and that all apps can reliably use, without having to implement 10 different audio API's, its pretty much doomed as a desktop OS. Audio is just one of the worst instances where fragmentation makes Linux unusable as a desktop OS, GNOME .vs. KDE .vs. a million other window managers is another.
P.S. ALSA isn't it that one API because ALSA is a head on wreck between two trains at full speed, Neither is OSS, pulseaudio, jack, esd, OpenAL, aRts, OK, I'll stop now.
I dont think its actually necessary to have the heavy launch capability man-rated. Its somewhat more rational to use it to launch big cargos as cheaply as possible and you send the people up to those cargos as necessary in Dragon on a smaller, safer, easier to certify rocket.
It makes more sense to man rate only one launcher and not every different vehicle they are building
Its not a "may have something". JSC is in Texas only because LBJ wanted it in Texas.
Sts a totally horrible idea to have so much geographic separation between the major centers involved in the manned space program, mainly Johnson, Kennedy and Marshall. As best I recall the horrible communication between Johnson and Kennedy was a direct contributor to the Columbia disaster.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Morton Thiokol team would have done a better job of stopping the Challenger launch if everyone had been sitting in the same room when they were trying to stop the launch.
Its a massive waste of precious time making everyone travel so much, it saps energy, it wastes money on travel expenses and duplicative administrative overhead running so many centers, it creates a bunch of feuding fiefdoms and turf wars, and its just devestating on effective communication.
Nice way to not make an argument. Your original was devoid of useful argument too.
NASA's manned space program is pure pork and has been since Apollo ended. JPL and the observatories are still doing good work. But Shuttle, ISS, a string of proposed new launchers like SLS/Orion and NASP, and pretty much every proposed plan for bases on the Moon and manned missions to Mars are nothing but cynical ploys for Presidential votes in the most crucial swing state of them all, Florida. You also need to add in influential senators who will fight to the death to keep the major NASA centers in their states funded even if its a total make work program. In particular, Nelson in Florida(Kennedy), Hutchinson in Texas(Johnson), Hatch in Utah(ATK formerly Thiokol), Shelby in Alabama(Marshal), Mikulski in Maryland (Hubble and Web) and a bunch of lesser Senators and Congressmen.
One cynical presidential candidate after another always does a space policy speech in Florida, they propose a grand new program different from the one being done by the current administration because they can't just endorse the program of the President they want to replace and actually maintain any continuity so something gets done.
Bush's was SLS/Orion and return to the Moon. All the people who live on the Space Coast tend to vote for the person who is promising them the most lucrative and extended employment deal, and its enough people to swing Florida as close as its been in recent years.
New launcher programs like SLS/Orion, NASP, etc are designed to squander billions of dollars to buy votes and to get cancelled when a new President is elected so they never have to actually deliver working hardware.
SpaceX is developing much better and simpler hardware, much faster and much cheaper than NASA can even dream of. NASA sent a team to SpaceX to explore why they can do so much with so little as opposed to NASA's manned space program which does so little with so much.
Reminds me of an ad campaign by the pork industry a while back:
"Pork, the one you love"
I think Obama is planning to move two brigades out of Germany which is long overdue. Only problem is he is planning to move troops/naval bases to Australia, Singapore and the Phillipines to prepare for the coming confrontation with China. War is peace.
Its a bit of an exaggeration to say NASA is "pouring money" in to SpaceX. They are certainly contributing substantial funds to develop the COTS and CCDev capability but its a LOT less money than NASA squandered on Ares 1 and they got nothing at all for that money wasted.
NASA is mostly contracting for the services SpaceX will be providing and they are pretty reasonably priced compared to old school NASA, Boeing and Lockheed prices.
SpaceX has a large contract to launch the nex gen Iridium satellites, it has a large contract from the Air Force, its launching satellites for private companies. All things considered it looks pretty well diversified, and its just selling space access, and developing the tech to do it, which is what a private company should be doing.
I could be wrong but I dont think this is Elon's plan for Mars. He will, no doubt, take all the Federal money he can get to go to Mars but I think he trying to corner the market for LEO launches, turn it in to a profit center, and use that money to do the more advanced missions to Mars.
If you actually WANT to go to Mars you totally cant sit around and wait for Congress and the President to fund it. A) in the current budget climate they probably won't B) as soon as the Congress/POTUS change hands they will defund the previous regimes programs and start on something totally different.
Presidents only do space programs now to buy votes in Florida, Texas, Alabama and Utah, mostly Florida because its a crucial swing state. They totally dont care if anything actually gets done.
SpaceX, to succeed, in going to Mars, needs all the money they can get but be free of the strings and whims of our completely screwed up Federal government.
Put a SpaceX Mars mission on Kickstarter?
FTFY.
Private citizens pouring money in the bureacratic maw of NASA is futility incarnate, though if you could channel it directly to JPL it might work. At least JPL still has technical and engineering competence, is somewhat isolated from NASA's bureaucracy, and gets things done.
If you could funnel a few billion to SpaceX they could do some exciting stuff aimed at Mars. Since Elon Musk is aiming there anyway he just needs more funding. SpaceX has a truly phenomonal efficiency in getting engineering bang for their bucks. As I recall NASA spent a team their to study how they were doing so much for so little compared to NASA. Of course, one answer they probably missed is SpaceX probably doesn't squander money on doing studies on why other organizations are efficient, they just build stuff, efficiently, economically and quickly.
The shuttle is immensely more fragile than an expendable booster. In particular the thermal protection system (the tiles) were known to be extremely vulnerable to ice strikes, its why they put a thermal blanket on the external tank. Capsules on top of the stack are much less vulnerable, compared to the Shuttle which sits alongside the entire length of the stack, which is why no one is considering ever doing that design again, it was flawed and everyone came to realize it, and they paid for it in both accidents.
There simply was NO good reason to continue with a launch on that abnormally cold of a day in Florida when there was ice all over the launch pad and there were signifcant risks of broken pipes, etc on the launch pad even.
They could have waited a day and they would have never had a problem. They delay shuttle launches all the time for weather, since the tiles can't stand flying through clouds or rain either.
Its likely though often denied that senior managers felt pressure to launch that day because Reagan was going to give a speech that night praising the teacher in space and NASA. The White House didn't even have to explicitly pressure them to stay on schedule, the NASA managers just had to know what kind of a mess it would be for him to give that speech if they hadn't launched, and Reagan controlled their purse strings so they needed to make him happy and make him look good.
All of the Morton Thiokol engineers responsible for the O rings were telling them to stop, they new the O rings had issues with cold temperatures. It was an anomolously cold day in Florida. It almost never freezes at Kennedy but that morning there was ice all over the launch pad. Even setting the O rings aside it was enormously foolish to launch that morning and it was pretty obvious they should postpone a day until temperatures weren't aberrant.
As I recall Reagan was giving a speech about the space program and timing it to coincide with the launch and the teacher-in-space and the bureaucrats were unwisely feeling political pressure to launch with all engineering and safety factors screamed for them to stop.
You overlook the fact that, as a result of the Challenger accident, the Shuttle program was severly damaged. Prior to Challenger it was an aggressive program pushing boundaries, afterward it become conservative, limited and cautious. In the wake of Columbia it was crippled, and was relegated to almost the bare essential missions needed to finish and support the ISS. The Air Force largely abandoned the Shuttle and returned to expendable launchers, though many think they wanted to do that anyway and Challenger was just a convenient excuse.
Shuttles were also different than expendable launchers. They were very limited in number, expensive and difficult to build especially after the assembly line had shut down so you couldn't afford to lose any of them without damaging the whole program.
The loss of life aside, the consequences of the twin disasters were the entire program was wrecked, the U.S. manned spaced program was crippled, may never recover at NASA, and it was all preventable and unnecessary. At this point companies like SpaceX are probably the only hope for a recovery because they are culturally free of most of the problems afflicting NASA's culture. To be successful in a technology intensive endeavor like space exploration engineers need to have a dominant voice in the program. Their voice can't be drowned out by bureaucrats and program managers with insufficient regard for the engineering.
Roger Boisjoly recently passed away. He was one of the engineers who tried to stop the ill fated launch of Challenger on an abnormally cold morning in Florida. He knew there was a high risk of the O rings leaking if they were cold, NASA management refused to listen to him, an O ring did failt, it ended in catastrophe. The Shuttle program was crippled from that day on.
From the article:
"It was the end of the dream," said John Pike, executive director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime analyst of U.S. aerospace. "Before the Challenger, you could think about the idea of going boldly where no one had gone before. The accident ended it."
Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward. When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.
The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.
When the space shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in 2003, killing its crew of seven, the accident was blamed on the same kinds of management failures that occurred with the Challenger. By that time, Boisjoly believed that NASA was beyond reform, some of its officials should be indicted on manslaughter charges and the agency abolished.
NASA's mismanagement "is not going to stop until somebody gets sent to hard rock hotel," Boisjoly said. "I don't care how many commissions you have. These guys have a way of numbing their brains. They have destroyed $5 billion worth of hardware and 14 lives because of their nonsense."
You sound pretty bitter dude. Let me guess, you either work at NASA, Boeing or Lockheed, right?
I admit to being guilty of being something of a SpaceX fanboy but thats because I haven't seen anything happen the U.S. as far as launchers go worth cheering since Apollo died. SpaceX may crash and burn but I sure hope they don't because NASA, Boeing and Lockheed aren't doing much except milk the status quo.
It would suck for a while but it would probably be a huge win in the long run.
It would be one of the few ways the U.S. could regain a manufacturing base. It is nearly impossible for a country to stay solvent for the long run with the massive current accounts deficit the U.S. is running, Yea there would be short term pain until the U.S. rebuilt its industrial base along with probably rebuilding it other cheap places like Mexico or South America. It would be kind of win to get the manufacturing base closer to the U.S. whatever because as fossil fuel prices explode so do shipping costs.
All things considered a quick crisis would be better than maintaining the status quo which will inevitably lead to a U.S. default, a dollar collapse and truly massive upheaval in the U.S. and in the rest of the world.
Either the U.S. needs to return to running trade surpluses or its going to have to go old school and use its massive military to plunder the rest of the world. Squandering nearly a trillion a year on your military and producing nothing but failed money sinks like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan has to be some of the most flawed strategic thinking in history.
SpaceX is doing everything they are doing for a tiny fraction of the money NASA squanders. In particular NASA spent billions on Ares 1, it was a horrible design, they wasted years on it, they managed one faked suborbital launch before the program was wisely killed.
SpaceX isn't NASA's problem, NASA's hopeless bureaucracy is their problem. SpaceX is just a long overdue solution, to get America innovating in space exploration again after 30 years of disturbing decay caused by NASA's stagnant bureaucracy and the deeply confused agendas of a series of Presidents and congressmen in funding and defunding it.
SpaceX and Elon Musk's goals aren't to create a monopoly or milk this for profit. He started SpaceX because he personally wanted to send payloads to Mars and all of the existing launchers were too expensive and or they sucked. He is trying to make LEO launches profitable so he has a sustainable business model to fund his future projects. His primary goal is to send people to Mars to live.
Bottomline is you completely don't understand what SpaceX is all about. They may not succeed in what the are doing but at the moment they are probably America's last best shot at regaining and retaining supremecy in space exploration.
They should have either not been allowed in to WTO if they were going to continue rampant IP theft since I'm pretty sure its frowned on under WTO protocols, or they should have been subjected to trade barriers preventing them from selling their products based on stolen IP in the West.
The West pretty much bent over for them, let them steal all their IP, removed all the trade barriers for goods coming out of China, while letting China retain massive barriers preventing western goods and companies from entering China or if they did it was with crippling restrictions (like Chinese partners with the controller interest of the joint venture).
It was a policy designed to insure the destruction of most western economies and thats pretty much exactly what it did, Germany being one of the few survivors. Makes you wonder whose side those politicians were on when the let China in to WTO.
Kind of a moot point now since China's stolen nearly everything worth stealing at this point outside of a few high tech bastions like CPU's, some software, aircraft and jet engines. China has pretty much made the great leap in many fields now and is starting to innovate domestically.
An innovation specifically referenced was a major advance in the PICA-X heat shield on Dragon which should allow hundreds of reentries without needing to be replaced. Good article here where I read it.
I think they are mostly young and single. If they have families they usually live far away and the workers at Foxconn send them money. I think they live in bunk beds with large numbers of people in each room. I wager it is the the most brutually efficient mass production framework ever. Though as Chinese workers have declined in numbers thanks to China's one child policy, and their wages have increased I think Foxconn is planning to discard many of them in favor of machines. They were only competive to do so much hand labor when they were dirt cheap.
Most of the workers at Foxconn live in dormatories at Foxconn. They are therefor never not at work, ergo if they are going to do it, they pretty much have to commit suicide at work.
It offers some obvious efficieny advantages if your work force is warehoused at your factory, no commute, meals in cafetires, but you have to wonder about the toll it takes on a workers mental well being to be warehoused at a factory.