The cost of the second engine is miniscule compared to the total cost of the F-35 program but it gets trotted out every time to deflect attention from all of the F-35's real problems.
You need to look no further than the A-10 to see that replacing it with an F-35 is completely nuts. The A-10 is slow moving, extremely durable, extremely cheap and a perfect for close air support for ground troops.
Replacing it with an extravagently expensive 5th generation stealth fighter is ⦠COMPLETELY NUTS.
Replacing the F-117 is probably one of the few places where the F-35 would make sense.
I think the B1-B has already been replaced by the B-52, the last B series the Air Force built that wasn't an extravagent waste of money. The B-1B and B-2 sure were. The B-52 is 60 years old, still flying, still seeing way more work than the B-1 or B-2. If you want a stealth bomber to penetrate heavily defended air space, use a drone, way cheaper.
Actually there is a pipeline being built through the United Arab Emirates which is on the south side of the straight, with something like 2 million barrells/day capacity, which would lessen dependence on the straight.
Though I think Iran is threatening to attack the pipeline too if their oil is embargoed and they decide to close the straight.
Most people don't remember but the U.S., Britain and the Dutch embargoing oil going to Japan was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it was neither a a surprise nor a sneak attack. FDR wanted Japan to attack the U.S. so he could overcome resistence from isolationists and enter World War II against Germany.
The Air Force in partnership with Lockjeed has been on a parabolic trajectory of extravagent spending, waste and abuse. The F-15 was a little extravagant, the F-22 was really extravagent especially on per unit cost and the F-35 is insane primarily because some idiot decided to make every service use basically the same air frame for everything so the price tag would be at least $1 trillion though they are already starting to talk about slashing the numbers produced. If everyone is using one airplane what happens when it gets grounded like the F-22 has been reacently because of its oxygen problems.
Someone realized you don't actually need EVERY plane in your inventory to be an expensive 5th generation stealth model especially when most of the time they are bombing mud huts in Afghanistan.
The Israeli's are making contingency plans to buy used American F-15's because they are losing confidence in the F-35 being delivered in a reasonable time, in a functioning state and at a price anyone can afford. The F-15 is still good enough for air to air for just about everything short of an all out war between the U.S., China and or Russia which is fairly improbable in the nuclear age. The Navy is starting to look at a new version of the F-18 for the same reason.
Yea that will probably be better, let the Pentagon do their contracts without any oversight, people who will jump to the private sector and work for the company they just steered that big defense contract too for a high six or seven figure compensation package as soon as its awarded. And of course they will be throwing the contract to their former bosses/generals who are already working at said contractor. The defense/security/industrial complex is riddled with corruption all the way through, it isn't just Congress.
Just look at Lockheed Martin's F-22 and F-35 programs for sterling examples of why the U.S. is going broke buying weapons we really don't need, that don't work right, cost vastly more than Lockheed said they would when they won the contracts, and are years to decades late being delivered. Cost plus contracts are basically letting Lockheed loot the U.S. Treasury.
This thread started when an AC claimed the U.S. saved "Europe" twice. The discussion had nothing at all to do with the Pacific and North Africa was a peripheral event which did divert German resources from the Eastern front, but it was a side show.
The Soviet Union's military casualties were nearly 11 million and somewhat more than that civilian.
I'm not saying the U.S. didn't make a significant contribution to the victory Europe but the U.S. didn't "save" Europe from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union did and at an enormous cost. The cost to the U.S. was trivial in comparison.
The Taliban is alive and well and owns the night in Afghanistan. They will continue to bleed the U.S., NATO and Karzai's government until the inevitable day the U.S. and NATO leaves, possibly as early as 2014, at which point Karzai wont last a month.
I wasn't refering to the Taliban specifically anyway. The Afghans in general have eventually broken every conqueror in recent history. It may take time but eventually they all leave. In the case of the U.S.S.R. its occupation of Afghanistan was a key factor in its collapse soon after it finally fled the country.
The only thing the U.S. saved Europe from in World War II was being completely overrun by our ally at the time, the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1942-1943 when the U.S. was barely even engaged in Europe. Germany's defeat was a foregone conclusion by the time the U.S. landed at Normandy in 1944. The U.S. helped win the war certainly but it simply wasn't the decisive force the Soviet Union was or that you are claiming.
Its true the U.S. helped turn the tide against Germany in World War I, but that was simply due to a huge infusion of fresh troops and supplies in to a war where all the incumbent armies and nations were spent. There wasn't anything exceptional about the U.S. troops, any infusion of a million fresh troops from anywhere would have had the same effect.
All things considered, you proved the grandparents point by flaunting how self infatuated and self inflating American's can be. The grandparent is correct, the Vietnamese were probably the most succesful military in the 20th century, and I would add the Afghans as a close second, because they have defeated every vastly superior force they've faced including the Soviet Union and the U.S.
Those things are done by different parts of NASA than the manned space office at issue for these astronaut slots.
JPL is barely part of NASA, it started out completely independent and still retains substantial distance from the stupidity and bureaucracy that is NASA's manned space program and headquarters.
Goddard also does a lot of great work.
The stupid parts of NASA are at Johnson, Marshall and Kennedy which have done their best to squander their Apollo legacy.
The only problem is the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) which was probably used to adjust those dollars for inflation has been a complete sham since the 80's.
Due to the rampant inflation in the 70's they gutted it to keep the cost of government spending on things indexed to inflation like Social Security from exploding and bankrupting the government.
The core CPI doesn't even food or energy prices which are the two most volatile and most important things people buy every day and the cost of both have been skyrocketing. It does factor in electronics and lots of crap from China which have not been increasing.
Anecdotally I'm almost positive real prices have gone up 20-30% since the 2008 crash mostly due to the Federal Reserve and Treasury creating trillions of dollars out of thin air with the stroke of a key on their computers and dramatically devaluing the dollar.
So if NASA spending has stayed constant in inflation adjusted dollars chances are their money goes no where near as far now as it did in the 1960's.
NASA also has a real talent at squandering money to no good end, like it did on ISS, Shuttle, Ares 1 and pretty much every new launcher they've attemped since Apollo. The next one will be no different. NASA actually sent a team to SpaceX to try to figure out how they've done so much R&D with so little money while NASA does so little with so much by comparison.
Most of NASA's astronauts are resigning because the one and only thing they are going to be doing the rest of this decade is flying to the ISS and spin around in LEO for extended periods. They will mostly be playing janitor and physiology lab rat assuming they can even get one of the precious few available slots.
SpaceX is a lot more interesting place to be an astronaut now. They will be working on Dragon, new launchers and aiming for Mars, instead of being a paying passenger in a Russian space craft and going where so many have gone before.
First strike nukes would seem to me to be a more plausible explanation. A shuttle launch wouldn't trigger the same alarms a ballistic missile launch would. You open the cargo bay doors over the Soviet Union and launch a bunch of small rockets with nukes attached to take out high value targets, especially to decapitate the government and try to disrupt the command and control to initiate the counter strike. Assuming the Soviets let the shuttle launch go unchallenged, their response time to an attack from LEO immediately overhead would be extremely short.
"with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down"
If we were to reach a point the USSR was shooting down U.S. spy satellites the chances are we would be spiraling in to a total war and SLC6 would have been a staggeringly easy target to destroy, with a missile from a submarine for example.
It would also be completely impossible for you to launch a Shuttle and its satellite payload faster than the USSR could launch relatively simple and inexpensive anti satellite missiles to destroy them. You would also need a bottomless stockpile of satellites sitting some place ready to go. If you follow the Air Force and NRO's infatuation with staggeringly expensive spy satellites having a stockpile of them to launch daily would have completely bankrupted the U.S.
So if that was in fact the Air Force's objective for the Shuttle and SLC6, it was pretty much nuts. As best I recall they squandered something like $6 billion on SLC6 and they never used it. I toured it once inside and out after it had been mothballed thanks to a friend. What a complete waste of money, which is something you can say about almost everything the Air Force has done since World War II, its the epitome of defense industrial complex gone mad.
The only way you could actually do what you are suggesting is with large numbers of low cost satellites probably air launched with something like a Pegasus from a B-52, one of the few launchers the USSR couldn't have easily destroyed on the ground.
Except we are. SpaceX is doing some wonderful work, bringing launch costs down by significant percentages and they are funding themselves with a mix of private and government launches so they aren't completely at the mercy of Congress and the POTUS which NASA's launchers are. They are also keenly focused on manned missions to Mars eventually which is the one manned mission that would be really exciting.
Excellent article on the cool stuff they are doing here.
I recall a recent story that NASA was so taken back by how low SpaceX's R&D costs were for a new launcher compared to NASA's, NASA sent in a team to study their economics. I think one key point was SpaceX does a lot of their work in house instead of contracting parts out to companies that gouge. There is a mention of this in the article linked above. SpaceX asked an outside company for a quote on a part, it was astronomical, so they built it in house instead for a fraction of the price, and when the salesmen called back they rubbed his nose in it.
P.S.
Anyone who thought they could fly the Shuttle as a commercial program and come anywhere close to break even was purely delusional. The Shuttle program was an extravagent jobs program masquerading as a space program at least as far back the Challenger accident which completely crippled everything it was supposed to do.
Elon Musk isn't doing SpaceX to profiteer. He is doing it because he wanted to launch payloads to Mars and all of the previous alternatives tended to suck.
He needs to turn a profit on his launchers so he can plow the money back in to R&D to work on the next steps in the technology. The SpaceX business model is totally the right one, and it has NOTHING to do with the OWS and the 1% strife. We should be cheering him on for putting a bunch of aerospace engineers back to work in California, and for pouring over NASA's engineering docs from Apollo through now and preserving and building on all that hard won knowledge.
One reason NASA is completely dysfunctional is Congress and one president after another keeps forcing them to change their designs and even their goals every 4-8 years, they force them to do things with more focus on which states the jobs programs will be in, Florida in particular being an important swing state, rather than if its the best design for the goal. The Chinese might be able to make the state funded model work since most of their politburo is technocrats and engineers. Letting a bunch of clueless lawyers run your space program⦠really bad idea.
If America is going to get humans to Mars SpaceX is your best bet, not NASA. NASA is completely indifferent to actually building a new launcher. NASA's only goal is to keep Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hatch and Hutchinson happy with perpetual jobs programs in their states so their money keeps flowing. That's why they keep proposing launchers that are always 10 years away from ever launching.
The beauty of SpaceX is they get some money from Congress but they can probably support themselves on commercial and military launch contracts and ride out the sheer stupidity of America's political system.
Elon Musk's goal is almost entirely aiming towards colonize Mars and disrupting launcher design so thoroughly that we can actually afford to get big things in to LEO and beyond.
Article has excellent stuff on the really innovative stuff they are doing, like their heat shield. They aren't patenting anything because they don't want to give China a HOWTO so they can rip off all the cool stuff they are doing. They also give the finger to all the existing aerospace companies that try to gouge them on parts. If the price isn't reasonable they build their own and often improve on existing designs. They are probably going to undercut China's Long March on LEO launch cost which is impressive with their plant being in very expensive California and having a relatively expensive American work force. They are beating China on cost using innovation.
A really compelling part in the article is an engineer at one of their competitors rooting for them to succeed. They are almost the only shot America has of recapturing the Apollo magic and beating China in the new space race.
SpaceX seems pretty pragmatic about their funding. They are going after as much of the existing satellite launch business as they can get, take what they can from NASA for ISS support or other government launches and use the money to build both cheaper small launchers for LEO and cheaper big launchers that would enable deep space missions.
Not sure if SpaceX cares about Moon missions or asteroids, Elon seems pretty focused on Mars as his real deep space goal. I imagine he is hoping that if he has off the shelf launchers that make Mars viable the missions will come (i.e. some government(s) will see the possibilities and fund actual missions). This is as opposed to now where no one has anything that will makes Mars feasible so it never gets off the drawing board. If you are waiting for NASA to build a heavy launcher you will be waiting forever it would appear. All that buearacracy cares about is keeping the jobs program going in the home states of Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hutchinson and Hatch.
Its kind of out there but opening a whole new planet to habitation would seem to offer future economic incentives. Also as we exhaust our mineral reserves moving mineral rich asteroids in to earth orbit and mining them also would have huge economic payoffs. Someone in China wrote a paper on this recently. One asteroid could yield trillions of dollars in returns... though it could also crash the price of the commodities involved if, for example, someone found an asteroid laden with gold.
"Name the only organization to have sent a man on an extra-orbital space flight"
That organization hasn't done that for nearly 40 years. Most of the people at that organization who did do that have retired or passed away. You simply can't keep milking your long past accomplishments forever. You pretty much have to stop when none of the people who did the great things is in that organization now.
If you saw the feeble attempt that was the first test launch of Ares, or watched every other one of NASA's failed attempts at a new launcher design since the Space Shuttle you seriously have to question if NASA can ever build a successful new launcher. The Space Shuttle, though it had some positives, was a pretty flawed one too and its over 30 years old.
SpaceX may ultimately fail but a lot of people are really pegging their hopes on it being the best shot the U.S. has of actually leading and innovating in space again.
If you've actually watched NASA, Boeing or Lockheed over the last 40 years you can be pretty confident they've just been milking Congress to perpetuate a high tech jobs program, while feeding the states and districts of a few poweful Congressmen who are adept at doling out port. They seem to have very little fire in their belly to do ANYTHING interesting, innovative or risky. When youÂclosely couple that with a political system that completely changes direction every 4-8 years you have a system designed to go nowhere. SpaceX is at least somewhat decoupled from all that BS.
Last I remember Pincus was planning on making the class of shares he owns worth 10X or 20X more votes than everyone else's shares when they IPO. This was so he could sell a large number of shares but would retain majority control of the company. If the SEC allowed it absolutely no other share holders could touch him in any way and he would still have absolute control of the company.
Yes he is a total scumbag, this is not news, anyone who started working for him within the last few years should have been expecting to be screwed and should have had their head examined for taking a job there in the first place.
The US is actually on a trajectory for fossil fuel independence thanks largely to fracking, horizontal drilling and improved seismic analysis tools. The U.S. is already producing so much natural gas its becoming a net exporter.
A Goldman Sachs estimate has the U.S. becoming the world's #1 producer by 2017. If the U.S. reduces consumption with things like improved fuel efficiency it could eventually break even, something Presidents have promised but failed to deliver since the 70's
North Dakota's fields are putting out so much oil they are having pipeline capacity problems. Production from Texas and California's ancient oil fields is also booming. Drillers passed over rich, shallow deposits in Santa Barbara fields because it was hard to tap. With current technology its producing windfalls. California just sacked the commissioner that was blocking new drilling permits so its probably going to throw open the doors to new production.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think the cost comparison needs to factor in the lifetime cost of a soldier. In particular a lifetime of health care through the VA and if you stay in the military for at least 30 years the fat pension.
If you put in 20 years you get a pension equal to 50% of your last paycheck, or at 40 years you get 100%. So⦠you can start drawing a pension at age 38 and if you live to 90, which is increasingly common, you draw a pension for 52 years.
As life expectancy and health care costs have skyrocketed, there is a rationale for outsourcing everything except actual war fighting, the benefits have become exorbinantly too expensive to have soldiers do house keeping work.
You can tell how condescending this site is because their response is written by a former "police chief" the demographic probably most likely to condemn all drugs. I think back to the convention scenes in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas".
Is alcohol addictive and does it cause severe cognitive impairment when abusedâ¦. yesâ¦totally. OK so that means you are also in favor of reinstituting prohibition just so you are consistent on the issueâ¦. didn't think so.
Never go to University of Phoenix, Kaplan or any other for profit online university if you can get in to Western Governor's University. Its an accredited non profit and tuition is like $6K versus the $15K at for profits. It doesn't advertise, which is where the for profits squander huge amounts of money, so no one has ever heard of it. I have no first hand experience but it does have 25K students. It was created by 19 Western governors to try to stop the for profit scam that is higher education, thanks to the ready availability of â¦. government sponsored loans⦠which have encouraged universities to jack up tuition since people can just borrow to pay for it.
Read the first line of the submission before speaking and making a fool out of yourselfâ¦. it was bought by the county sherrif where Houston is. Houston isn't any where near the border.
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The cost of the second engine is miniscule compared to the total cost of the F-35 program but it gets trotted out every time to deflect attention from all of the F-35's real problems.
You need to look no further than the A-10 to see that replacing it with an F-35 is completely nuts. The A-10 is slow moving, extremely durable, extremely cheap and a perfect for close air support for ground troops.
Replacing it with an extravagently expensive 5th generation stealth fighter is ⦠COMPLETELY NUTS.
Replacing the F-117 is probably one of the few places where the F-35 would make sense.
I think the B1-B has already been replaced by the B-52, the last B series the Air Force built that wasn't an extravagent waste of money. The B-1B and B-2 sure were. The B-52 is 60 years old, still flying, still seeing way more work than the B-1 or B-2. If you want a stealth bomber to penetrate heavily defended air space, use a drone, way cheaper.
Actually there is a pipeline being built through the United Arab Emirates which is on the south side of the straight, with something like 2 million barrells/day capacity, which would lessen dependence on the straight.
Though I think Iran is threatening to attack the pipeline too if their oil is embargoed and they decide to close the straight.
Most people don't remember but the U.S., Britain and the Dutch embargoing oil going to Japan was the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it was neither a a surprise nor a sneak attack. FDR wanted Japan to attack the U.S. so he could overcome resistence from isolationists and enter World War II against Germany.
The Air Force in partnership with Lockjeed has been on a parabolic trajectory of extravagent spending, waste and abuse. The F-15 was a little extravagant, the F-22 was really extravagent especially on per unit cost and the F-35 is insane primarily because some idiot decided to make every service use basically the same air frame for everything so the price tag would be at least $1 trillion though they are already starting to talk about slashing the numbers produced. If everyone is using one airplane what happens when it gets grounded like the F-22 has been reacently because of its oxygen problems.
Someone realized you don't actually need EVERY plane in your inventory to be an expensive 5th generation stealth model especially when most of the time they are bombing mud huts in Afghanistan.
The Israeli's are making contingency plans to buy used American F-15's because they are losing confidence in the F-35 being delivered in a reasonable time, in a functioning state and at a price anyone can afford. The F-15 is still good enough for air to air for just about everything short of an all out war between the U.S., China and or Russia which is fairly improbable in the nuclear age. The Navy is starting to look at a new version of the F-18 for the same reason.
Yea that will probably be better, let the Pentagon do their contracts without any oversight, people who will jump to the private sector and work for the company they just steered that big defense contract too for a high six or seven figure compensation package as soon as its awarded. And of course they will be throwing the contract to their former bosses/generals who are already working at said contractor. The defense/security/industrial complex is riddled with corruption all the way through, it isn't just Congress.
Pretty good new article in The Atlantic, The Tyranny of Defense Inc.
Just look at Lockheed Martin's F-22 and F-35 programs for sterling examples of why the U.S. is going broke buying weapons we really don't need, that don't work right, cost vastly more than Lockheed said they would when they won the contracts, and are years to decades late being delivered. Cost plus contracts are basically letting Lockheed loot the U.S. Treasury.
Nazi Germany's V-2, so did the U.S.
This thread started when an AC claimed the U.S. saved "Europe" twice. The discussion had nothing at all to do with the Pacific and North Africa was a peripheral event which did divert German resources from the Eastern front, but it was a side show.
The Soviet Union's military casualties were nearly 11 million and somewhat more than that civilian.
I'm not saying the U.S. didn't make a significant contribution to the victory Europe but the U.S. didn't "save" Europe from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union did and at an enormous cost. The cost to the U.S. was trivial in comparison.
The Taliban is alive and well and owns the night in Afghanistan. They will continue to bleed the U.S., NATO and Karzai's government until the inevitable day the U.S. and NATO leaves, possibly as early as 2014, at which point Karzai wont last a month.
I wasn't refering to the Taliban specifically anyway. The Afghans in general have eventually broken every conqueror in recent history. It may take time but eventually they all leave. In the case of the U.S.S.R. its occupation of Afghanistan was a key factor in its collapse soon after it finally fled the country.
The only thing the U.S. saved Europe from in World War II was being completely overrun by our ally at the time, the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1942-1943 when the U.S. was barely even engaged in Europe. Germany's defeat was a foregone conclusion by the time the U.S. landed at Normandy in 1944. The U.S. helped win the war certainly but it simply wasn't the decisive force the Soviet Union was or that you are claiming.
Its true the U.S. helped turn the tide against Germany in World War I, but that was simply due to a huge infusion of fresh troops and supplies in to a war where all the incumbent armies and nations were spent. There wasn't anything exceptional about the U.S. troops, any infusion of a million fresh troops from anywhere would have had the same effect.
All things considered, you proved the grandparents point by flaunting how self infatuated and self inflating American's can be. The grandparent is correct, the Vietnamese were probably the most succesful military in the 20th century, and I would add the Afghans as a close second, because they have defeated every vastly superior force they've faced including the Soviet Union and the U.S.
Those things are done by different parts of NASA than the manned space office at issue for these astronaut slots.
JPL is barely part of NASA, it started out completely independent and still retains substantial distance from the stupidity and bureaucracy that is NASA's manned space program and headquarters.
Goddard also does a lot of great work.
The stupid parts of NASA are at Johnson, Marshall and Kennedy which have done their best to squander their Apollo legacy.
The only problem is the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) which was probably used to adjust those dollars for inflation has been a complete sham since the 80's.
Due to the rampant inflation in the 70's they gutted it to keep the cost of government spending on things indexed to inflation like Social Security from exploding and bankrupting the government.
The core CPI doesn't even food or energy prices which are the two most volatile and most important things people buy every day and the cost of both have been skyrocketing. It does factor in electronics and lots of crap from China which have not been increasing.
Anecdotally I'm almost positive real prices have gone up 20-30% since the 2008 crash mostly due to the Federal Reserve and Treasury creating trillions of dollars out of thin air with the stroke of a key on their computers and dramatically devaluing the dollar.
So if NASA spending has stayed constant in inflation adjusted dollars chances are their money goes no where near as far now as it did in the 1960's.
NASA also has a real talent at squandering money to no good end, like it did on ISS, Shuttle, Ares 1 and pretty much every new launcher they've attemped since Apollo. The next one will be no different. NASA actually sent a team to SpaceX to try to figure out how they've done so much R&D with so little money while NASA does so little with so much by comparison.
Exactly right. Mod parent up.
Most of NASA's astronauts are resigning because the one and only thing they are going to be doing the rest of this decade is flying to the ISS and spin around in LEO for extended periods. They will mostly be playing janitor and physiology lab rat assuming they can even get one of the precious few available slots.
SpaceX is a lot more interesting place to be an astronaut now. They will be working on Dragon, new launchers and aiming for Mars, instead of being a paying passenger in a Russian space craft and going where so many have gone before.
First strike nukes would seem to me to be a more plausible explanation. A shuttle launch wouldn't trigger the same alarms a ballistic missile launch would. You open the cargo bay doors over the Soviet Union and launch a bunch of small rockets with nukes attached to take out high value targets, especially to decapitate the government and try to disrupt the command and control to initiate the counter strike. Assuming the Soviets let the shuttle launch go unchallenged, their response time to an attack from LEO immediately overhead would be extremely short.
"with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down"
If we were to reach a point the USSR was shooting down U.S. spy satellites the chances are we would be spiraling in to a total war and SLC6 would have been a staggeringly easy target to destroy, with a missile from a submarine for example.
It would also be completely impossible for you to launch a Shuttle and its satellite payload faster than the USSR could launch relatively simple and inexpensive anti satellite missiles to destroy them. You would also need a bottomless stockpile of satellites sitting some place ready to go. If you follow the Air Force and NRO's infatuation with staggeringly expensive spy satellites having a stockpile of them to launch daily would have completely bankrupted the U.S.
So if that was in fact the Air Force's objective for the Shuttle and SLC6, it was pretty much nuts. As best I recall they squandered something like $6 billion on SLC6 and they never used it. I toured it once inside and out after it had been mothballed thanks to a friend. What a complete waste of money, which is something you can say about almost everything the Air Force has done since World War II, its the epitome of defense industrial complex gone mad.
The only way you could actually do what you are suggesting is with large numbers of low cost satellites probably air launched with something like a Pegasus from a B-52, one of the few launchers the USSR couldn't have easily destroyed on the ground.
Except we are. SpaceX is doing some wonderful work, bringing launch costs down by significant percentages and they are funding themselves with a mix of private and government launches so they aren't completely at the mercy of Congress and the POTUS which NASA's launchers are. They are also keenly focused on manned missions to Mars eventually which is the one manned mission that would be really exciting.
Excellent article on the cool stuff they are doing here.
I recall a recent story that NASA was so taken back by how low SpaceX's R&D costs were for a new launcher compared to NASA's, NASA sent in a team to study their economics. I think one key point was SpaceX does a lot of their work in house instead of contracting parts out to companies that gouge. There is a mention of this in the article linked above. SpaceX asked an outside company for a quote on a part, it was astronomical, so they built it in house instead for a fraction of the price, and when the salesmen called back they rubbed his nose in it.
P.S.
Anyone who thought they could fly the Shuttle as a commercial program and come anywhere close to break even was purely delusional. The Shuttle program was an extravagent jobs program masquerading as a space program at least as far back the Challenger accident which completely crippled everything it was supposed to do.
Elon Musk isn't doing SpaceX to profiteer. He is doing it because he wanted to launch payloads to Mars and all of the previous alternatives tended to suck.
He needs to turn a profit on his launchers so he can plow the money back in to R&D to work on the next steps in the technology. The SpaceX business model is totally the right one, and it has NOTHING to do with the OWS and the 1% strife. We should be cheering him on for putting a bunch of aerospace engineers back to work in California, and for pouring over NASA's engineering docs from Apollo through now and preserving and building on all that hard won knowledge.
One reason NASA is completely dysfunctional is Congress and one president after another keeps forcing them to change their designs and even their goals every 4-8 years, they force them to do things with more focus on which states the jobs programs will be in, Florida in particular being an important swing state, rather than if its the best design for the goal. The Chinese might be able to make the state funded model work since most of their politburo is technocrats and engineers. Letting a bunch of clueless lawyers run your space program⦠really bad idea.
If America is going to get humans to Mars SpaceX is your best bet, not NASA. NASA is completely indifferent to actually building a new launcher. NASA's only goal is to keep Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hatch and Hutchinson happy with perpetual jobs programs in their states so their money keeps flowing. That's why they keep proposing launchers that are always 10 years away from ever launching.
The beauty of SpaceX is they get some money from Congress but they can probably support themselves on commercial and military launch contracts and ride out the sheer stupidity of America's political system.
Here is an excellent article on SpaceX in Air and Space Mag.
Elon Musk's goal is almost entirely aiming towards colonize Mars and disrupting launcher design so thoroughly that we can actually afford to get big things in to LEO and beyond.
Article has excellent stuff on the really innovative stuff they are doing, like their heat shield. They aren't patenting anything because they don't want to give China a HOWTO so they can rip off all the cool stuff they are doing. They also give the finger to all the existing aerospace companies that try to gouge them on parts. If the price isn't reasonable they build their own and often improve on existing designs. They are probably going to undercut China's Long March on LEO launch cost which is impressive with their plant being in very expensive California and having a relatively expensive American work force. They are beating China on cost using innovation.
A really compelling part in the article is an engineer at one of their competitors rooting for them to succeed. They are almost the only shot America has of recapturing the Apollo magic and beating China in the new space race.
SpaceX seems pretty pragmatic about their funding. They are going after as much of the existing satellite launch business as they can get, take what they can from NASA for ISS support or other government launches and use the money to build both cheaper small launchers for LEO and cheaper big launchers that would enable deep space missions.
Not sure if SpaceX cares about Moon missions or asteroids, Elon seems pretty focused on Mars as his real deep space goal. I imagine he is hoping that if he has off the shelf launchers that make Mars viable the missions will come (i.e. some government(s) will see the possibilities and fund actual missions). This is as opposed to now where no one has anything that will makes Mars feasible so it never gets off the drawing board. If you are waiting for NASA to build a heavy launcher you will be waiting forever it would appear. All that buearacracy cares about is keeping the jobs program going in the home states of Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hutchinson and Hatch.
Its kind of out there but opening a whole new planet to habitation would seem to offer future economic incentives. Also as we exhaust our mineral reserves moving mineral rich asteroids in to earth orbit and mining them also would have huge economic payoffs. Someone in China wrote a paper on this recently. One asteroid could yield trillions of dollars in returns... though it could also crash the price of the commodities involved if, for example, someone found an asteroid laden with gold.
"Name the only organization to have sent a man on an extra-orbital space flight"
That organization hasn't done that for nearly 40 years. Most of the people at that organization who did do that have retired or passed away. You simply can't keep milking your long past accomplishments forever. You pretty much have to stop when none of the people who did the great things is in that organization now.
If you saw the feeble attempt that was the first test launch of Ares, or watched every other one of NASA's failed attempts at a new launcher design since the Space Shuttle you seriously have to question if NASA can ever build a successful new launcher. The Space Shuttle, though it had some positives, was a pretty flawed one too and its over 30 years old.
SpaceX may ultimately fail but a lot of people are really pegging their hopes on it being the best shot the U.S. has of actually leading and innovating in space again.
If you've actually watched NASA, Boeing or Lockheed over the last 40 years you can be pretty confident they've just been milking Congress to perpetuate a high tech jobs program, while feeding the states and districts of a few poweful Congressmen who are adept at doling out port. They seem to have very little fire in their belly to do ANYTHING interesting, innovative or risky. When youÂclosely couple that with a political system that completely changes direction every 4-8 years you have a system designed to go nowhere. SpaceX is at least somewhat decoupled from all that BS.
Last I remember Pincus was planning on making the class of shares he owns worth 10X or 20X more votes than everyone else's shares when they IPO. This was so he could sell a large number of shares but would retain majority control of the company. If the SEC allowed it absolutely no other share holders could touch him in any way and he would still have absolute control of the company.
Yes he is a total scumbag, this is not news, anyone who started working for him within the last few years should have been expecting to be screwed and should have had their head examined for taking a job there in the first place.
The US is actually on a trajectory for fossil fuel independence thanks largely to fracking, horizontal drilling and improved seismic analysis tools. The U.S. is already producing so much natural gas its becoming a net exporter.
A Goldman Sachs estimate has the U.S. becoming the world's #1 producer by 2017. If the U.S. reduces consumption with things like improved fuel efficiency it could eventually break even, something Presidents have promised but failed to deliver since the 70's
North Dakota's fields are putting out so much oil they are having pipeline capacity problems. Production from Texas and California's ancient oil fields is also booming. Drillers passed over rich, shallow deposits in Santa Barbara fields because it was hard to tap. With current technology its producing windfalls. California just sacked the commissioner that was blocking new drilling permits so its probably going to throw open the doors to new production.
I think the cost comparison needs to factor in the lifetime cost of a soldier. In particular a lifetime of health care through the VA and if you stay in the military for at least 30 years the fat pension.
If you put in 20 years you get a pension equal to 50% of your last paycheck, or at 40 years you get 100%. So⦠you can start drawing a pension at age 38 and if you live to 90, which is increasingly common, you draw a pension for 52 years.
As life expectancy and health care costs have skyrocketed, there is a rationale for outsourcing everything except actual war fighting, the benefits have become exorbinantly too expensive to have soldiers do house keeping work.
Department of Homeland Insecurity which is what it actually is too.
You can tell how condescending this site is because their response is written by a former "police chief" the demographic probably most likely to condemn all drugs. I think back to the convention scenes in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas".
Is alcohol addictive and does it cause severe cognitive impairment when abusedâ¦. yesâ¦totally. OK so that means you are also in favor of reinstituting prohibition just so you are consistent on the issueâ¦. didn't think so.
Never go to University of Phoenix, Kaplan or any other for profit online university if you can get in to Western Governor's University. Its an accredited non profit and tuition is like $6K versus the $15K at for profits. It doesn't advertise, which is where the for profits squander huge amounts of money, so no one has ever heard of it. I have no first hand experience but it does have 25K students. It was created by 19 Western governors to try to stop the for profit scam that is higher education, thanks to the ready availability of â¦. government sponsored loans⦠which have encouraged universities to jack up tuition since people can just borrow to pay for it.
Read the first line of the submission before speaking and making a fool out of yourselfâ¦. it was bought by the county sherrif where Houston is. Houston isn't any where near the border.