" It was a purpose-built vehicle designed to meet the demands of a contest. it is no more a spaceship than the Bell X-1. "
Actually its a lot more of a spaceship than the X-1. X-1 never left the atmosphere. It is as much of one as the X-15 which pioneered a lot of early space technology before it was killed in favor of rockets. You wave to wonder where we would be if the X-15 track had been pursued. Maybe we would have space planes today flying in an out of orbit like airliners.
"You can't grow or extend that vehicle into something that can take crew and cargo to and from LEO."
I think dead end is a little harsh. The first Mercury flights were suborbital too. Bigger engines, more fuel, better heat shielding are incremental improvements. Not sure how the math works out on using the feathered wing from the much higher speed of LEO reentry. Would think it might work though you would have to stay in very thin air until you bled off a lot of speed.
All in all you are still missing the point. You are kind of delusional to dismiss SpaceShipOne because didn't build a Space Shuttle or CEV for $25 million dollars. NASA has spent over a $100 billion on the shuttle and its going to be retired in failure.
The key point you will never get is that good engineering is setting obtainable goals and obtaining them. NASA manned space program has, since Apollo and Skylab, set bad goals and failed to achieve them. That is both bad engineering and bad management.
"What failure was that?"
Like I said if the Russians hadn't been supplying the ISS, at their expense, for the last two and a half years it would have been abandoned long ago. The 2 man maintenance crew their supporting isn't great but if it had been up to NASA it would have been unmanned for the last two years and could easily have suffered a catastrophic failure.
I give up, you are like talking to a brick wall. You seem to be one of the NASA and America RULE types in face of glaring evidence to the contrary.
You can trash Soyuz and Progress all you want but they haven't spent 5+ out of the last 25 years grounded due to chronic safety problems. They also don't average $1.3 billion per launch.
Even with the Shuttle supplying the ISS it wont have a crew over 3 because there is no emergency escape vehicle except for that venerable Soyuz again. NASA killed the CRV, which Scaled Composites was building the air frame for, so the ISS will apparently never be fully manned now.
"Finally, I have to say that I can't understand your animosity toward NASA"
If you haven't figured this one out I'm sure I'm not going to be able to explain it to you, but here goes. The Shuttle was grounded for 2 1/2 years after Challenger after which its mission capabilities collapsed. Its just been grounded for another 2 1/2 years and now its only mission profile is fly to the ISS and back without a fatal acccident. It is now grounded again for who knows how long, putting another nail in its coffin. NASA has squandered $100 billion on a half finished space station that serves no useful purpose, which due to the inadequacy of the Space Shuttle they can't properly supply and due to the absence of an escape vehicle they can't even fully man. Even if it was manned the research done there doesn't even remotely justify the staggering price tag.
OK lets put it another way. What has the NASA manned space program done in the last 30 years any one will remember and honor 30 years from now. Only shuttle mission that had any coolness factor was the Hubble repair mission which fixed another massive NASA screw up. The two landmark events people are likely to remember are the two catastrophes.
Dude they won Hugo and Nebula awards, apparently some people disagree with you. They aren't thrillers with complex and fascinating characters and non stop action. They are interesting for all the time he spends talking about all the interesting problems people might encounter trying to colonize Mars in biology, physics, politics and sociology, especially of terraforming and discusses ways to deal with them. Even if he was totally wrong if you are planning tocolonize Mars they are a must read just to get you thinking about all the possible issues.
They aren't for everyone, you probably need a bent for the actual science part of science fiction and not so much the fiction part.
This is a really alarmist article but its actually great people are finally get out of the multidecade fixation on LEO and thinking about these things again.
The first reason you want a moon base is to study, learn to deal with and minimize the radiation exposure.
"Short of hauling up lead plates, I don't know what they'll do."
Put the crew compartment inside a water tank, since you are going to need the water anyway.
Build shields out of lunar regolith since its gravity well is smaller, though you need to have fuel and a vehicle to get it from the moon to the vehicle. It would give the people at the moon base something useful to do.
When they get to Mars bury the habitat, and give them shielded rovers. At least gravity is 1/3 that of earth so they weight wont be as bad on the tires as it would on Earth.
Make the mission to Mars a one way trip, send permanent colonists, not tourists like Apollo. The round trip mission adds a lot of complexity in radiation, G tolerance if you return to Earth and 1G, and fuel for a return trip. For a permanent colony the challenge is finding and harvesting resources you need on planet like water, oxygen, hydrogen for rover fuel. Plus you need nuclear power plants which are heavy which is part of building reliable supply heavy lift supply train from Earth for everything you can't find on planet.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's seminal work on Mars colonization, Red/Green/Blue Mars he used a cheat, gene therapy to repair the radiation damage with the added bonus it cured cancer and provided virtual immortality if you could afford the treatment.
Don't think it so much "worship" as it is observing someone who has been successful at challenging engineering projects recently. Other than the current NASA administrator how many people can you actually name in NASA's manned space program. If you can name any could you also say that person is successful and worth "worshiping". I can't think of one. The astronauts are all good enough people but they are a dime a dozen and most people can't name them unless they've seen their names on the news in the last few days.
"I'm waiting for the private sector to put 100 tons or so in LEO, put people on it, and support them for a few years, all the while making a profit."
Well you might have noticed NASA failed to do that very thing with vast sums at their disposal and without the requirement to turn a profit. You might start shouting they proved themselves doing this with ISS. Well if it wasn't for the Russians building the two core modules, and supporting it for the last two and a half years, something NASA didn't pay them a thin dime to do, the ISS would have been abandoned two years ago. Congress embargoed Russia over Iran so they've been flying NASA astronauts and supplies to ISS for free.
Depending on how long the Shuttle is grounded this next time NASA may be out of business in the ISS, because the Russian's aren't launching their astronauts or supplies for free any more. It could become a Russian only space station if the shuttle is grounded for another year or more, or if its end of lifed before there is a replacement.
"If we go on any ambitious space exploration project we will probably need the ISS to do testing and/or in space assembly."
It is unlikely the ISS will ever do any "in space assembly". The only in space assembly I've seen in any recent proposals are simple dockings of modules as has been done for 40+ years. Space is still a hard and expensive place to build things. You are going to do it if you have to and chances are you don't have to when you know how to dock things.
As for doing experiments, especially on zero g physiology it is great. The problem with it and its a question Mike Griffin raised in congressional testimony before he became administrator, is the knowledge you gain from the experiments worth the price tag? The cost for the remaining ISS assembly missions, ISS support and Shuttle budget when he testified was still a whopping $60 billion. That is $60 billion that would be far better spend on a heavy lift launcher, CEV, and a moon base. Going to the moon is something of a waste in itself but its a lot more useful place to do things than the ISS, especially to prove systems for an eventual long duration base on Mars. The Moon has radiation issues, ISS in LEO is useless for dealing with radiation issues and that is one of the BIGGEST problems to solve in real space exploration. The Moon has resources. ISS has nothing you dont fly to it from Earth. We need to learn to exploit resources on the Moon and Mars to live there for long duration at a reasonable cost.
From Mike Griffin:
"Given that ISS is to be completed, there are specific tasks associated with going to Mars for which it can be useful. Certainly, it can be useful in carrying out controlled experiments to study the effects of microgravity, and proposed countermeasures, on humans, provided of course that it is equipped with a habitat module or modules. It can serve as an aid to crew training, acclimating a proposed Mars crew, or extended-duration lunar crew, to the regimen of spaceflight in company with each other. It can serve as a testbed for the space qualification of specific systems, or even vehicles, prior to their use on extended voyages far from home. In a word, ISS can help us learn to live and work in space."
"But the more important question is whether the return to be obtained from the use of ISS to support exploration objectives is worth the money yet to be invested in its completion. The nation, through the NASA budget, plans to allocate $32 B to ISS (including ISS transport) through 2016, and another $28 B to shuttle operations through 2011. This total of $60 B is significantly higher than NASA's current allocation for human lunar return. It is beyond reason to believe that ISS can help to fulfill any objective, or set of objectives, for space exploration that would be worth the $60 B remaining to be invested in the program."
"Equally important is the delay in pursuing the President's vision. Respecting present budget constraints, we return to the moon in 2020, thus accomplishing in 16 years what it required eight years to achieve in the 1960s. This is not because the task is so much more difficult, or because we are today so much less capable than our predecessors, but because we do not actually begin work on the task until 2011. I do not need to point out to this body the political pitfalls endemic to such a plan."
"I, and others, have elsewhere advocated that the shuttle should be returned to flight and the ISS brought to completion, if only because the program's two-decade advocacy by the United States and commitment to its international partners should not be cavalierly abandoned. But, if there is no additional money to be allocated to space exploration, this position becomes increasingly difficult to justify. It is worth asking whether our international partners might judge the issue similarly."
"As for Rutan, he hasn't demonstrated the ability to do anything but..."
The ability to fly an airplane around the world on one tank of gas for the first time in history....
and
He led the first private company to get a person in to what is technically defined as space.
The key point about the second one is he was working to a clearly defined objective set by someone else, he achieved that objective pretty much on time and on budget. If someone had set the target to 100 miles he would have done that. If someone sets the target to LEO, with a suitably large prize, and he can get the funding I'm willing to bet he will do that too.
You see Rutan has some redeeming qualities Rutan that are organizationally absent in NASA:
- he is a pragmatist - he can work on a budget and stay in it - he can work on a schedule and stay in it - he sets obtainable and worthwhile goals - he achieves the goals he sets out to obtain
NASA's manned space program has been failing on all five counts for pretty much the last 30 years, something approach a working lifetime. In particular that can't seem to achieve their goals which is the most damning thing you can say about them. Either the goals are bad, which they have been, and they have been impotent in setting goals that are obtainable and worth obtaining, or there is some element of incompetence there that prevents them from succeeding. There are lots of great and talented people there but the organization as a whole, especially its upper management is disfunctional. Hopefully Griffin will change that but he is bucking political, bureaucratic and contractor empires that will endeavor to destroy him if he doesn't give them what they want. If he gives them what they want then the organization remains mired in disfunctionality and probably fails. He is in a rock and a hard place job.
All these studies you see now are various political, bureaucratic and contractor empires jockeying for position. In particular there are giant jobs programs based on shuttle hardware and they are DESPERATE to keep all those jobs in tact which is why shuttle derived hardware has a 90% chance of winning.
As long as all this stays on an engineering dialog footing its entirely healthy. If it turns political and inferior solutions are chosen due to the aptitude for political maneuvering of one of the fiefdoms that is when it will turn bad and dangerous. Whenever you see a new proposal, figure out who is producing it and what there current vested interest is and how it biased their conclusion.
Geez. The Washington Times is the Fox News of newspapers. In an attempt to compenstate for the "liberal bias" in the Washington Post and New York Times they tilt completely off the deep end of the hard right and this article is proof of that. The NYTimes and Post make a pretense of being unbiased. The Washington Times like Fox News makes no attempt to hide the fact that they have a massive right wing bias.
This article is advocating a right wing police state with complete government control of the media.
Me I have this deep suspicion the whole Plame incident was a setup by the sick minds in the White House, Rove and Scooter in particular, to apply a fatal blow to the free press in the U.S. Leak classified information to a whole bunch of reports, and get a at least one, a wiener like Novak to print it. Then start a multiyear witch hunt in which the only people that go to jail are the gullible reporters who listened and didn't print it. The person who did print it and the people in the White House meanwhile get off scot free. If by some miracle a prosecutor ever does charge them the President just pardons them.
The ultimate objective to completely terrify reporters from using anonymous sources, or worse from doing any investigative journalism at all, and there is precious little of it left. The press we have already spends 99.9% just repeating what they are told at press briefings and by White House and Pentagon sources that are telling the press what they want them to hear and tell the American people, not reality.
I think you are just being an apologist for disfunctional bureaucracy which is as bad or probably worse than the people that ruthlessly bash disfunctional bureaucracy.
"is simple frustration at what people perceive as slow progress by comparison with the Apollo years."
Uh that is because progress has been dreadfully slow since the Apollo years. The shuttle had potential, overhyped as it was, but the day Challenger exploded it all evaporated. Unfortunately the U.S. kept banking everything on the Shuttle anyway. Today it is completely crippled by safety concerns, and going to spend most of its time grounded, not flying, and it costs nearly as much sitting on the ground as it does flying, because all the people that work on it are still getting paid. All the money still pouring in to ISS and Shuttle is money going to dead ends.
The ISS was just a disaster from beginning to end. It was something that was just built at staggering expense, for lack of anything better to do, and to this day no one can explain what it was supposed to do that justified the price tag. Michael Griffin flat said this in congressional testimony before he became administrator. Maybe they made him administrator for having the guts to state the obvious.
The Shuttle was to fly to the ISS and the ISS was a place for the shuttle to fly to, how is that for circular reasoning, progress and purpose.
"(1) space is hard and expensive... no matter who pays for it"
Well the Russians do a lot more at a fraction of the cost.
Of course the DOD is squandering a billion dollars every few days in Iraq so by comparison NASA is a productivity bonanza.
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit?
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" I'm still not entirely sure why NASA wants a new man-rated launcher so badly, given there's a perfectly adequate (and cheap) solution already. Is it just politics, or is there a real reason?)"
The first most obvious reason is political. Congress has slapped an embargo on Russia over their building a nuclear reactor in Iran. I think NASA is precluded by law from buying anything in the way of space services from the Russians. This is why NASA hasn't paid Russia anything for the U.S. astronauts and cargo the Russians have flown to the ISS for the last 2 1/2 years while the Shuttle was grounded. This is also why the Russians recently announced they would no longer fly stuff to the ISS for free. If the Shuttle is grounded for a long time again to fix these two new problems, the ISS or at least NASA involvement in it is in serious trouble.
The second obvious problem is also political. I doubt the DOD will buy in to relying on a Russian vehicle to launch their soldiers in to space. Not exactly sure if the DOD actually has any serious missions for men in space but the Space Command has always had grandiose plans for fighting wars in space. You can't do that if your launch vehicle is provided by a potential adversary.
Third reason is political too. Its a huge blow to American prestige to admit they can't build spacecraft anymore.
Forth reason, is technical, Soyuz is cheap and reliable but its not exactly a really capable craft. the Russians are working to replace it with Kliper.
Fifth reason is political, the manned space program is a jobs program especially in Texas and Florida. Congressmen wont back it if all the jobs are in Russia.
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit?
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NASA's Shuttle Plans
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"Soyuz can't push enough weight into orbit, or at least that's my understanding of it."
The parent wasn't talking about using Soyuz as a shuttle replacement, its clearly not even in the same class. He was talking about using it to put 2-3 people in to LEO where they would dock with the heavy cargo that had been put there by an unmanned, heavy cargo booster. For launching a small number of people to LEO, Soyuz is currently unmatched at a few tens of millions of dollars versus the $1.3 billion average cost per flight of the shuttle.
The Soyuz isn't much good if you want to lift more than 3 people or any cargo at all. The Russians have greenlighted their next gen man rated vehicle, Kliper and the European Space Agency is apparently quite interested in parterning with them on it and kissing NASA good bye.
"For many in this thread, the goal is (1) NASA bashing and (2) celebrating the cult of What Might Have Been, of the Road Not Taken, and of My Powerpoint Works Better Than Your Hardware."
Well maybe that is it, but it could also be called the process of good engineering. Good engineering usually involved thowing ideas out there, proposing new and different ways of doing things, and then tearing apart the ideas on paper before they get torn apart at high altitudes and velocities.
I'm sure NASA does do a lot of this engineering process but within the U.S. they have suffered for far to long from having no competition and no accountability. Their process seems to come down to one fiefdom of bureaucrats and contractors eventually shoving through their approach whether it was a good one or not. Using 20/20 hindsight the Shuttle and the ISS were bad and expensive ones and have cost the U.S. dearly in lost opportunity cost. Those are 2 strikes in a row. One more and they are probably out.
It is a totally great thing to have Scaled Composite, Blue Origin, Armadillo, SpaceX, and Sealaunch try new things and give the NASA/Boeing/Lockheed hegemony a little competition. Only problem is the hegemony has relatively vast amounts of money to spend and no need to turn a profit. Manned space operations so far are still very expensive and have a dubious return on investment. Its tough sledding for private enterprise. Which is why launching satellites is doing a lot better in the private sector, less investment, better return. Maybe space tourism or something will tip the scales but that is thrill seeking by the rich, and not anything of actual economic value.
Only project I've EVER been able to see justifying much manned presence in space is putting a permanent colony on Mars, and start aggressive terraforming and resource exploitation there so we have another biosphere in case something bad happens to this one. That is going to be really expensive and the ROI is way out there.
Well the Delta Clipper had been transfered from the SDIO(DoD Star Wars office) to NASA, and upgraded when the crash occurred. It is propably safe to say that a NASA employee is the one who botched the hydraulic line though who can know if it was malevolence or incompetence that made him do it.
It should probably also be pointed out that when it was under SDIO control a hard landing cracked the shell requiring the rebuild when it was transfered to NASA so are you going to blame that accident on NASA malevolence too? Having a hard landing with this tiny prototype was bad, you can imagine what a hard landing might be like when you have to land the HUGE full size vehicle on those legs.
It should be pointed out to all the Jerry Pournelle worshipers that always sing praises of the Delta Clipper that NASA upgraded DC-XA's record altitude was 3140 meters. It was a really long way from being proved feasible.
If its was such a great idea rumour has it that many of the people that worked on it ended up Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin and they may be trying to revive it with NASA no where in sight. If it was a NASA conspiracy killing it will rise from the ashes like a Phoenix and prove they were wrong. Wouldn't bet on it though.
Personally I could maybe see using it for a cargo transport but the reentry scheme is pretty dangerous in its own right. It comes in nose first and then retro rockets HAVE to fire to turn it around and these heavily reused main engines have to fire to slow the decent and keep it upright otherwise it would be a disaster too. The test program wasn't even close to attempting that complex reentry profile.
The other issues are building a single vehicle big enough to hold all that fuel needed to get to orbit and still have enough to get back down again, and carry a cargo big enough to be worth it. You also need some REALLY big, extremely reliable and very long lived engines. I think they ended up being way beyond Space Shuttle Main Engine class to actually get to orbit and back. SSME's only have to fire once per flight. In the Clipper they have to fire twice. To satisfy the Clipper hype they then have to turn around and do it all over again without any refurbishing. Easy to do flying to 9,000 feet, harder to do to LEO and back multiple times on one set of engines with no maintenance.
The parent is right NASA's manned space program is obviously a jobs program and any launcher that might result in the laying off the small armies in Florida and Texas will likely result in the congressional delegations from Florida and Texas killing it, or mandating the staffing levels stay the same even if they have nothing to do, which is already happening to CEV. The ONLY reason NASA's manned space program has any political support left at all is due to the fact it IS a jobs program, so the congressmen who districts all those jobs are in fight like wildcats to keep it alive even if its a total waste which it is at the moment.
I think the old saying is if you go down the "eye for an eye" road everyone involved just ends up blind.
You, my friend, are certainly blinded by your hatred. Give it up, I'm not wasting any more time on you. I never at any point contended that some Palestinians haven't done bad things. I just wanted you to notice some Jews have done bad things too, just as bad. Two of them Begin and Sharon ended up as Prime Ministers of Israel as the reward for the massacres they initiated. You can't deny that, all you can do is try to ignore it which you obviously are.
Dude you can fixate on that one incident all you want but it is one incident of savagery out of many incidents of savagery on both sides. You apparently choose to forget Deir Yassin even though I've pointed out time and again it was exactly the same kind of savagery and one of the people involved went on to be Prime Minister of Israel. Innocent women and children were killed there too. Are you demanding justice for them too? Why not?
If you want more recent stats here are the Red Crescent statistics on the deaths of Palestinian women and children at the hands of the Israeli's since 2000. 657 children under 18 and of those 153 were under 12. 185 women killed. Total Palestinian deaths of all ages since 2000, 3,626.
Palestinians consistently die at higher rates than Israelis. Innocent civilians killed by bombs from F-16's, missiles from Apache helicopters or machine guns on tanks are just as dead as people killed by suicide bombs.
I really hope someone close to you didn't die in this attack you've fixated on, if so my deepest condolences and I can understand how you can't bring yourself to forgive the people that did it. If that is not the case I really fail to understand how you have acquired such rabid hatred and a fixation over one incident and fail to see there are innocent people getting killed on both sides. Only way you are going to get peace is for everyone to realize its madness on both sides, forget that past and work to prevent it from happening again.
Demanding Hamas pay reparations isn't going to bring back any of the dead, in fact is pretty tawdry on your part to think cash payments fix anything. How much cash is a human life worth. You are mostly cheapening the lives of those killed to set a price tag on their deaths. You want to do something to honor their memory try working for a fair and equitable peace in the region instead of spewing venom and hatred, and demanding cash.
According to Wikipedia in 2003 19% aren't Arab though not sure about Arab Muslim. The arab population in Israel is growing a lot faster than the Jewish much to the dismay of the Jews and immigration of Jews to Israel is also in steep decline because most don't want to put up with the strife there.
"Your use of the term "apartied" was cute."
Well you missed some key facts in trying to deny it applies. Arab citizens of Israel are treated reasonably well but Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza are NOT and they do not have Israeli citizenship. They are the ones for which a case could be made for the term apartheid. We are talking about people that have been in this limbo since 1967, soon to be 40 years or a lifetime for most there.
There is an interesting statistical situation developing and the Israel government knows it very well. If you add up all the Arabs in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza they are just about to eclipse Israeli's in total numbers. The Arabs are reproducing at a much faster rate than Jews so this overtaking is inevitable.
Arabs as nearly as I can tell are around 4.9 million in Israel and the occupied territories and there are around 5 millions Jews in the same. There are 290,000 other ethnic groups.
If Israel doesn't spin off Gaza quick, which it is about to do, there will soon be more Arabs than Jews in greater Israel, most of whom are disenfranchised, so that sure sounds a lot like apartheid to me.
If the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza were given citizenship in Israel the Arabs would soon be able to take control of Israel at the ballot box through Democratic means.
Israel has in fact been passing laws making it more difficult for Arabs from the occupied territories to get citizenship. For example someone from the West Bank who marries an Arab with Israeli citizenship has been denied getting Isreali citizenship by marriage since 2003.. This law was passed precisely to help insure Jews never loose control of their supposed Democracy at the ballot box.
The numbers as best I can tell from the CIA factbook:
West Bank
2,385,615 note: in addition, there are about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and fewer than 177,000 in East Jerusalem (July 2004 est.)
Gaza Strip
1,376,289 note: in addition, there are more than 5,000 Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip (July 2005 est.)
Israel
6,276,883 note: includes about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, more than 5,000 in the Gaza Strip, and fewer
than 177,000 in East Jerusalem (July 2005 est.)
81% Jewish and 290,000 other minorities. 19% Arab or 1,192,608
"It is a violent fascist organized confederation of gangsters,"
Fascist is a pretty east word to throw around. You should read this letter signed by Albert Einstein among others which said the same thing about a Jewish terrorist organization or political party, depending on your viewpoint, in the young state of Israel in 1948 soon after the massacre at Dier Yassin.
It started life as a charity and social work organization and a big part of the organization and funding continues that work today. In fact its one of the few organization that is actively working to ease suffering on the West Bank and Gaza, where there is a LOT of suffering, which is why it is so popular there. If there is any organization that has really popular support among Palestinians its Hamas and it would probably be the governing party except Israel and the U.S. would never stand for it.
It was recognized early in life by....the state of Israel, due to its charity work, though it has radicalized since.
It didn't establish a really militant wing and radicalize until 1987.
Its goal is clearly stated and exactly the same one, though in reverse of many Zionists and Israelis, a Palestinian state in all of Palestine versus a Jewish state in all of Israel (depending on how radical they are, some Jews want all the occupied territories too). So again why is it OK for Jews to want Palestine to be al theirs but when Hamas wants the same thing they are "fascists" and "gangsters".
Its really sad to see people as rabid and blind with rage as yourself. Me I can see a case for both sides in the Middle East. In my book Palestinians and Jews are both pretty wrong most of the time. They are just like you they only see their side, not reality. I could never kid myself into think one side is always right and the other is always wrong, because that is simply not the case there. There has been a whole lot of wrong on both sides.
When you use words like "sub-human" that is straight out of the Nazi playbook and you are sounding more like the Fascist than the people you are railing against. That is an historical irony, people under stress often become like that which they hate and their most bitter enemies. More than a little bit of Nazi Germany unfortunately rubbed off on the Jews that suffered under them. You have to wonder what the people who suffered through the ghettos in Warsaw in World War II would say about the walled ghettos in Israel today.
I really wish the Allies had taken a chunk out of the German coast and created a Jewish state, the size of Palestine, there after World War II. It would have been pretty fair punishment and atonement for Germany. The Zionists may still have insisted on seizing Palestine but if the more moderate Jews had accepted a homeland there, and the Palestinians still had their homeland in Palestine a lot of people wouldn't have been killed over the last half century and the world would be a lot happier and better place. Alas instead we are going to have never ending conflict there. The state being proposed for Palestinians today isn't any such thing, it is a series of walled ghettos still completely dominated by Israel and most Palestinians will never accept it so the bloodshed will go on and on, and the world will continue to carve in to two factions over it. People will be blinded by hatred forever just like you are.
Thought I did. The ISI, Pakistan's secret police, was all over Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban and while Al Qaeda was there and planning 9/11. The U.S. let Pakistan fly all of them out when the Taliban fell, unquestioned and unchallenged. Pakistan's secret service helped put the Taliban in power and keep it there.
Al Qaeda is almost certainly still alive and well in Pakistan's tribal region and the Pakistani government, especially the ISI is letting them regroup there.
The only connection to 9/11 I've heard against Iran is some of them may have travelled through there.
The madrasas in Pakistan are breeding ground #1 for Islamic extremists.
Dude, there wasn't any anti-semitic vitriol at all in that post. You however are a sterling example of why there is NEVER a balanced discussion of the problem in Israel because no one can even being to relate the Palestinian side of the story without someone like yourself SCREAMING ANTI-SEMITE and attempting to end the conversation.
Maybe you could make a case the King David Hotel was a military target but Deir Yassin most decidedly wasn't. I note you didn't mention it in your little rant, because you have selective memory. It was a case of Jews killing innocent women and children too.
You might also want to remember Sabra and Shatila in 1982. These were Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon where some of those who fled Jewish control of Palestine ended up. When Israel invaded Lebanon and gained control of these camps the IDF, in particular Ariel Sharon, intentionally let Christian militia in to the camp that they knew had a blood feud to settle with the Palestinians. The militia proceeded to massacre everyone in the camps over 36 hours, many women and children while the IDF sat outside and listened and ignored reports of what was happening inside. The number of dead is unknown the estimates range from 350 to 3500. It was massacre by proxy.
The key point here is that yes Palestinian terrorism is abominable, but so are all the instances when Israelis have killed innocent civilians and they have killed a lot of them over the last 60 years just like the Palestinians.
One thing I really can't stand are people who selectively choose to ignore all the atrocities their side commits, while they rant about the other side and call them animals for doing pretty much the same things.
The old saying is wrong. History never repeats itself"
Another old saying is "Never say Never" because when you do you are usually wrong.
Your entitled to your opinion but most people will disagree with you. Things are never exactly the same but someone with good historical perspective can spot the important similarities and tendencies that count.
"The situation in Iraq is not a civil war. America had a civil war."
Yes it is though its a low grade civil war in an insurgency stage. If American troops were to pull out wholesale you would see a full fledged, hot, civil war. The Sunni's are unlikely to ever accept living under Shia domination. The Kurds are biding their time but if they see an opportunity, especially if American troops withdraw or if the Shia stop power sharing, they will try to secede too. The Kurds have had an independent Kurdistan as their rallying point for nearly ever.
The second part of your post is gross oversimplification. I imagine most Iraqi's are glad to get rid of Saddam but it doesn't mean they like the new situation any better. A key reason there is an insurgency is because everyone in the Sunni triangle is unemployed, hungry, without electricity, A/C or a seqage system. All past politics aside those are ingredients for discontent and rebellion. Saddam sucked but the new situtation is totally different but equally bad. If you are Sunni it is way worse because the people you have oppressed for so long are now running the place and Sunnis have been completely driven out of the political process by the insurgency. All that propaganda about how great the elections were was just that, propaganda. the Kurds and Shias turned out in massive numbers, the Sunni didn't and that kicked the legs out from under any pretense of a real Democracy.
"I must take issue, however, with you saying that we "changed" who was responsible for 9/11. "
Come on Dave, you are not that dumb. Everyone knows the Bush administration did everything they could to tie Iraq to 9/11 in the minds of the average America, if not in reality. The famous meeting in Prague was the classic one. Dick Cheney flat out said on Meet the Press that it was a link though that meeting has largely been discredited as fantasy and he tried to deny he said it later though it was on video tape.
"As to Iraq's secular nature, as I said, that's exactly why it was picked opposed to others"
OK I guess you really are just that dumb Dave. So in your war against Islamic fundamentalism you take down one of the most secular Arab government in the Middle East, one that was fighting Islamic fundamentalism more than just about any other. Saddam and the Baathist are Panarab not Panislam, huge difference.
God damn Dave, you should get a job in the Bush administration because you seem to have their same talent for completely twisted and moronic reasoning.
"I would also take issue that Iraq is "increasingly fundamentalist" or that it will grow to be an oppressive state. That would run counter to the very reasons we started this in the first place."
Well stick your head in the sand Dave because its a fact. Reports from around Basra, the seat of Shia fundamentalism, indicate it is starting to resemble Iran or the Taliban. Reports from their constitutional convention I heard a week or two go indicate it is nearly inevitable its going to be largely based on Islamic law unless the U.S. intervenes and stops it (which shoots down any pretense that they are a sovereign government). The Shia majority are devout Muslims and their leaders are devout Muslims. Left to their own devices they are going to create a fundamentalist Islamic state unless some outside force stops them.
This is what you get for trying to institute a democracy in a country where fundamentalist Muslims are in the majority. Saddam had his reputation for ruthlessness because he was fighting a Kurdish independence movement in the north that was using its own share of violence and a fundamentalist Islamic rebellion from the Shia in the South that outnumbered his Baathist Sunnis. Why do you think George H.W. Bush left Saddam in power? They wanted Saddam to suppress the Kurds and the Shia and serve as a balance to Iran without the U.S. getting mixed up in it. His kid unfortunately was to dumb to understanding the complexity of the situation and was bent on showing up his dad by finishing what he started in the first Gulf War.
If the Kurds try to declare independence once U.S. gets tired of Iraq a new war will start involve Iraq the Kurds AND Turkey. Turkey hates the Kurds as much as Saddam did.
"reading their mail" was a bad choice of wording. These are public web sites, I just meant watch everything posted on them, and maybe worst case watch who is looking at them on a regular basis. You aren't exactly violating anyones privacy when you are monitoring very public web sites.
I'd probably write this same post when I'm adopting my "liberal" devil's advocate facade.
The key problem here is you aren't going to fix most of the underlying problems in under a century. The only one the U.S. could fixed is U.S. foreign and economic policy but to fix that you would have to get the electorate to stop electing people who like strong arm tactics. At the moment the U.S. is electing people who LOVE strong arm tactics and you can't change that with all the liberal idealism in the world. Even if you get the Democrats in office they use most of the same strong arm policies, they just aren't as blatant about it as the Republican's.
If you are attacked like you are on 9/11 and as a response your plan is to fix global poverty your attackers will still be there, you will look weak and they will keep attacking you. They aren't going to wake up one day and forgive the U.S. for all its past wrongs because they U.S. is handing out food or economic aid someplace. The U.S. also isn't going to cut Israel to the wind anytime soon.
" a long-term strategy to change the face of the middle east by changing governments that CAN be changed"
Any government CAN be changed if you have the worlds best equipped military. So CAN change the contries where Al Qaeda has its origins, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. I guess you are saying we CAN'T change them because for some reason they are our allies even though they are the ones where all the people who are attacking the U.S. come from and are based in the case of Pakistan.
So instead we changed places that were responsible for 9/11 the U.S. opted for the one government they COULD change, Iraq.
Basic problem here Dave, Iraq was working against Islamic fundamentalism, not for it. The Baathist's are secular socialists not Islamic fundamentalist. They are Muslim only when its convenient. Ever notice how most Iraqis wear mustaches. Saddam had for the most part outlawed full beards because it was a way to frustrate hard core muslims who wear beards as part of their faith. Women had more rights in Saddam's Iraq than they will ever get in the new Shia dominated increasingly fundamentalist Iraq, the one writing its constitution based on Islamic law.
There simple is no way to rationalize invading Iraq as a response to Al Qaeda and 9/11, in fact it was exactly the wrong thing to do. The only way you could explain it is the Bush administration was creating a honey pot in Iraq to draw Islamic fighters from all over the world who want to kill American soldiers. I'm pretty sure that was the plan the Bush administration had in mind though. The neocon plan was take down Iraq in a few weeks, then Syria and Iran and then all of Israel's remaining state enemies in the region would be gone. They got bogged down in Iraq so the rest isn't likely to happen anytime soon.
The CIA backing stopped after Russia was beaten. The ISI is the one that helped the Taliban take control of Afghanistan in the vacaum left when Russia pulled out and they were completely intertwined with the Taliban and Al Qaeda when 9/11 happened.
The ISI is as much to blame for 9/11 as much as the Taliban was. The U.S. let them get away with it and punished Saddam instead who had NOTHING to do with it. Explain that. Its no accident that a lot of continuing Al Qaeda terrorism has some Pakistani origin.
"America did just about the smartest thing it could do in Afgahnistan - it played local politics. It bought an army and supplimented it with assests we could project into the area."
Yes and it completely failed to crush the Taliban and Al Qaeda while it had the chance at places like Tora Bora. The mercenary army they bought was both badly trained, badly equipped, badly motivated and easy to bribe. They, on numerous occasions, sat on their hands while Al Qaeda and the Taliban scattered.
If the U.S. had had the will it could have put a lot more force in Afghanistan than it did, and turning a blind eye to the ISI, and the tribal areas in Pakistan insured the U.S. would fail in defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The tribal region sanctuary in Pakistan was a key reason Russia lost in Afghanistan. You have to eliminate sanctuaries in a conflict like that.
"First off, there's no major power backing the insurgency."
Al Qaeda is a major power though a shadowy one. They can almost certainly pump men, explosives and strategy in to it for a really long time.
"Second, the majority of the population has a vested interest in seeing the insurgency fail."
The majority of Sunni's have a vested interested in seeing the insurgency succeed and they are a majority in the Sunni triangle which is why the insurgency flourishes there. Thats all an insurgency needs, popular support in the area its being waged.
There isn't one insurgency in Iraq there are probably three:
- Baathist Saddam loyalists - Sunnis in general who have been completely disempowered. Kind of a superset of Baathists - External Arab Jihadi's with Al Qaeda in the lead.
Slashdot Mirror
" It was a purpose-built vehicle designed to meet the demands of a contest. it is no more a spaceship than the Bell X-1. "
Actually its a lot more of a spaceship than the X-1. X-1 never left the atmosphere. It is as much of one as the X-15 which pioneered a lot of early space technology before it was killed in favor of rockets. You wave to wonder where we would be if the X-15 track had been pursued. Maybe we would have space planes today flying in an out of orbit like airliners.
"You can't grow or extend that vehicle into something that can take crew and cargo to and from LEO."
I think dead end is a little harsh. The first Mercury flights were suborbital too. Bigger engines, more fuel, better heat shielding are incremental improvements. Not sure how the math works out on using the feathered wing from the much higher speed of LEO reentry. Would think it might work though you would have to stay in very thin air until you bled off a lot of speed.
All in all you are still missing the point. You are kind of delusional to dismiss SpaceShipOne because didn't build a Space Shuttle or CEV for $25 million dollars. NASA has spent over a $100 billion on the shuttle and its going to be retired in failure.
The key point you will never get is that good engineering is setting obtainable goals and obtaining them. NASA manned space program has, since Apollo and Skylab, set bad goals and failed to achieve them. That is both bad engineering and bad management.
"What failure was that?"
Like I said if the Russians hadn't been supplying the ISS, at their expense, for the last two and a half years it would have been abandoned long ago. The 2 man maintenance crew their supporting isn't great but if it had been up to NASA it would have been unmanned for the last two years and could easily have suffered a catastrophic failure.
I give up, you are like talking to a brick wall. You seem to be one of the NASA and America RULE types in face of glaring evidence to the contrary.
You can trash Soyuz and Progress all you want but they haven't spent 5+ out of the last 25 years grounded due to chronic safety problems. They also don't average $1.3 billion per launch.
Even with the Shuttle supplying the ISS it wont have a crew over 3 because there is no emergency escape vehicle except for that venerable Soyuz again. NASA killed the CRV, which Scaled Composites was building the air frame for, so the ISS will apparently never be fully manned now.
"Finally, I have to say that I can't understand your animosity toward NASA"
If you haven't figured this one out I'm sure I'm not going to be able to explain it to you, but here goes. The Shuttle was grounded for 2 1/2 years after Challenger after which its mission capabilities collapsed. Its just been grounded for another 2 1/2 years and now its only mission profile is fly to the ISS and back without a fatal acccident. It is now grounded again for who knows how long, putting another nail in its coffin. NASA has squandered $100 billion on a half finished space station that serves no useful purpose, which due to the inadequacy of the Space Shuttle they can't properly supply and due to the absence of an escape vehicle they can't even fully man. Even if it was manned the research done there doesn't even remotely justify the staggering price tag.
OK lets put it another way. What has the NASA manned space program done in the last 30 years any one will remember and honor 30 years from now. Only shuttle mission that had any coolness factor was the Hubble repair mission which fixed another massive NASA screw up. The two landmark events people are likely to remember are the two catastrophes.
Later dude, you aren't worth the energy.
Dude they won Hugo and Nebula awards, apparently some people disagree with you. They aren't thrillers with complex and fascinating characters and non stop action. They are interesting for all the time he spends talking about all the interesting problems people might encounter trying to colonize Mars in biology, physics, politics and sociology, especially of terraforming and discusses ways to deal with them. Even if he was totally wrong if you are planning tocolonize Mars they are a must read just to get you thinking about all the possible issues.
They aren't for everyone, you probably need a bent for the actual science part of science fiction and not so much the fiction part.
This is a really alarmist article but its actually great people are finally get out of the multidecade fixation on LEO and thinking about these things again.
The first reason you want a moon base is to study, learn to deal with and minimize the radiation exposure.
"Short of hauling up lead plates, I don't know what they'll do."
Put the crew compartment inside a water tank, since you are going to need the water anyway.
Build shields out of lunar regolith since its gravity well is smaller, though you need to have fuel and a vehicle to get it from the moon to the vehicle. It would give the people at the moon base something useful to do.
When they get to Mars bury the habitat, and give them shielded rovers. At least gravity is 1/3 that of earth so they weight wont be as bad on the tires as it would on Earth.
Make the mission to Mars a one way trip, send permanent colonists, not tourists like Apollo. The round trip mission adds a lot of complexity in radiation, G tolerance if you return to Earth and 1G, and fuel for a return trip. For a permanent colony the challenge is finding and harvesting resources you need on planet like water, oxygen, hydrogen for rover fuel. Plus you need nuclear power plants which are heavy which is part of building reliable supply heavy lift supply train from Earth for everything you can't find on planet.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's seminal work on Mars colonization, Red/Green/Blue Mars he used a cheat, gene therapy to repair the radiation damage with the added bonus it cured cancer and provided virtual immortality if you could afford the treatment.
Don't think it so much "worship" as it is observing someone who has been successful at challenging engineering projects recently. Other than the current NASA administrator how many people can you actually name in NASA's manned space program. If you can name any could you also say that person is successful and worth "worshiping". I can't think of one. The astronauts are all good enough people but they are a dime a dozen and most people can't name them unless they've seen their names on the news in the last few days.
"I'm waiting for the private sector to put 100 tons or so in LEO, put people on it, and support them for a few years, all the while making a profit."
Well you might have noticed NASA failed to do that very thing with vast sums at their disposal and without the requirement to turn a profit. You might start shouting they proved themselves doing this with ISS. Well if it wasn't for the Russians building the two core modules, and supporting it for the last two and a half years, something NASA didn't pay them a thin dime to do, the ISS would have been abandoned two years ago. Congress embargoed Russia over Iran so they've been flying NASA astronauts and supplies to ISS for free.
Depending on how long the Shuttle is grounded this next time NASA may be out of business in the ISS, because the Russian's aren't launching their astronauts or supplies for free any more. It could become a Russian only space station if the shuttle is grounded for another year or more, or if its end of lifed before there is a replacement.
"If we go on any ambitious space exploration project we will probably need the ISS to do testing and/or in space assembly."
It is unlikely the ISS will ever do any "in space assembly". The only in space assembly I've seen in any recent proposals are simple dockings of modules as has been done for 40+ years. Space is still a hard and expensive place to build things. You are going to do it if you have to and chances are you don't have to when you know how to dock things.
As for doing experiments, especially on zero g physiology it is great. The problem with it and its a question Mike Griffin raised in congressional testimony before he became administrator, is the knowledge you gain from the experiments worth the price tag? The cost for the remaining ISS assembly missions, ISS support and Shuttle budget when he testified was still a whopping $60 billion. That is $60 billion that would be far better spend on a heavy lift launcher, CEV, and a moon base. Going to the moon is something of a waste in itself but its a lot more useful place to do things than the ISS, especially to prove systems for an eventual long duration base on Mars. The Moon has radiation issues, ISS in LEO is useless for dealing with radiation issues and that is one of the BIGGEST problems to solve in real space exploration. The Moon has resources. ISS has nothing you dont fly to it from Earth. We need to learn to exploit resources on the Moon and Mars to live there for long duration at a reasonable cost.
From Mike Griffin:
"Given that ISS is to be completed, there are specific tasks associated with going to Mars for which it can be useful. Certainly, it can be useful in carrying out controlled experiments to study the effects of microgravity, and proposed countermeasures, on humans, provided of course that it is equipped with a habitat module or modules. It can serve as an aid to crew training, acclimating a proposed Mars crew, or extended-duration lunar crew, to the regimen of spaceflight in company with each other. It can serve as a testbed for the space qualification of specific systems, or even vehicles, prior to their use on extended voyages far from home. In a word, ISS can help us learn to live and work in space."
"But the more important question is whether the return to be obtained from the use of ISS to support exploration objectives is worth the money yet to be invested in its completion. The nation, through the NASA budget, plans to allocate $32 B to ISS (including ISS transport) through 2016, and another $28 B to shuttle operations through 2011. This total of $60 B is significantly higher than NASA's current allocation for human lunar return. It is beyond reason to believe that ISS can help to fulfill any objective, or set of objectives, for space exploration that would be worth the $60 B remaining to be invested in the program."
"Equally important is the delay in pursuing the President's vision. Respecting present budget constraints, we return to the moon in 2020, thus accomplishing in 16 years what it required eight years to achieve in the 1960s. This is not because the task is so much more difficult, or because we are today so much less capable than our predecessors, but because we do not actually begin work on the task until 2011. I do not need to point out to this body the political pitfalls endemic to such a plan."
"I, and others, have elsewhere advocated that the shuttle should be returned to flight and the ISS brought to completion, if only because the program's two-decade advocacy by the United States and commitment to its international partners should not be cavalierly abandoned. But, if there is no additional money to be allocated to space exploration, this position becomes increasingly difficult to justify. It is worth asking whether our international partners might judge the issue similarly."
"As for Rutan, he hasn't demonstrated the ability to do anything but..."
The ability to fly an airplane around the world on one tank of gas for the first time in history....
and
He led the first private company to get a person in to what is technically defined as space.
The key point about the second one is he was working to a clearly defined objective set by someone else, he achieved that objective pretty much on time and on budget. If someone had set the target to 100 miles he would have done that. If someone sets the target to LEO, with a suitably large prize, and he can get the funding I'm willing to bet he will do that too.
You see Rutan has some redeeming qualities Rutan that are organizationally absent in NASA:
- he is a pragmatist
- he can work on a budget and stay in it
- he can work on a schedule and stay in it
- he sets obtainable and worthwhile goals
- he achieves the goals he sets out to obtain
NASA's manned space program has been failing on all five counts for pretty much the last 30 years, something approach a working lifetime. In particular that can't seem to achieve their goals which is the most damning thing you can say about them. Either the goals are bad, which they have been, and they have been impotent in setting goals that are obtainable and worth obtaining, or there is some element of incompetence there that prevents them from succeeding. There are lots of great and talented people there but the organization as a whole, especially its upper management is disfunctional. Hopefully Griffin will change that but he is bucking political, bureaucratic and contractor empires that will endeavor to destroy him if he doesn't give them what they want. If he gives them what they want then the organization remains mired in disfunctionality and probably fails. He is in a rock and a hard place job.
All these studies you see now are various political, bureaucratic and contractor empires jockeying for position. In particular there are giant jobs programs based on shuttle hardware and they are DESPERATE to keep all those jobs in tact which is why shuttle derived hardware has a 90% chance of winning.
As long as all this stays on an engineering dialog footing its entirely healthy. If it turns political and inferior solutions are chosen due to the aptitude for political maneuvering of one of the fiefdoms that is when it will turn bad and dangerous. Whenever you see a new proposal, figure out who is producing it and what there current vested interest is and how it biased their conclusion.
Geez. The Washington Times is the Fox News of newspapers. In an attempt to compenstate for the "liberal bias" in the Washington Post and New York Times they tilt completely off the deep end of the hard right and this article is proof of that. The NYTimes and Post make a pretense of being unbiased. The Washington Times like Fox News makes no attempt to hide the fact that they have a massive right wing bias.
This article is advocating a right wing police state with complete government control of the media.
Me I have this deep suspicion the whole Plame incident was a setup by the sick minds in the White House, Rove and Scooter in particular, to apply a fatal blow to the free press in the U.S. Leak classified information to a whole bunch of reports, and get a at least one, a wiener like Novak to print it. Then start a multiyear witch hunt in which the only people that go to jail are the gullible reporters who listened and didn't print it. The person who did print it and the people in the White House meanwhile get off scot free. If by some miracle a prosecutor ever does charge them the President just pardons them.
The ultimate objective to completely terrify reporters from using anonymous sources, or worse from doing any investigative journalism at all, and there is precious little of it left. The press we have already spends 99.9% just repeating what they are told at press briefings and by White House and Pentagon sources that are telling the press what they want them to hear and tell the American people, not reality.
I think you are just being an apologist for disfunctional bureaucracy which is as bad or probably worse than the people that ruthlessly bash disfunctional bureaucracy.
"is simple frustration at what people perceive as slow progress by comparison with the Apollo years."
Uh that is because progress has been dreadfully slow since the Apollo years. The shuttle had potential, overhyped as it was, but the day Challenger exploded it all evaporated. Unfortunately the U.S. kept banking everything on the Shuttle anyway. Today it is completely crippled by safety concerns, and going to spend most of its time grounded, not flying, and it costs nearly as much sitting on the ground as it does flying, because all the people that work on it are still getting paid. All the money still pouring in to ISS and Shuttle is money going to dead ends.
The ISS was just a disaster from beginning to end. It was something that was just built at staggering expense, for lack of anything better to do, and to this day no one can explain what it was supposed to do that justified the price tag. Michael Griffin flat said this in congressional testimony before he became administrator. Maybe they made him administrator for having the guts to state the obvious.
The Shuttle was to fly to the ISS and the ISS was a place for the shuttle to fly to, how is that for circular reasoning, progress and purpose.
"(1) space is hard and expensive... no matter who pays for it"
Well the Russians do a lot more at a fraction of the cost.
Of course the DOD is squandering a billion dollars every few days in Iraq so by comparison NASA is a productivity bonanza.
" I'm still not entirely sure why NASA wants a new man-rated launcher so badly, given there's a perfectly adequate (and cheap) solution already. Is it just politics, or is there a real reason?)"
The first most obvious reason is political. Congress has slapped an embargo on Russia over their building a nuclear reactor in Iran. I think NASA is precluded by law from buying anything in the way of space services from the Russians. This is why NASA hasn't paid Russia anything for the U.S. astronauts and cargo the Russians have flown to the ISS for the last 2 1/2 years while the Shuttle was grounded. This is also why the Russians recently announced they would no longer fly stuff to the ISS for free. If the Shuttle is grounded for a long time again to fix these two new problems, the ISS or at least NASA involvement in it is in serious trouble.
The second obvious problem is also political. I doubt the DOD will buy in to relying on a Russian vehicle to launch their soldiers in to space. Not exactly sure if the DOD actually has any serious missions for men in space but the Space Command has always had grandiose plans for fighting wars in space. You can't do that if your launch vehicle is provided by a potential adversary.
Third reason is political too. Its a huge blow to American prestige to admit they can't build spacecraft anymore.
Forth reason, is technical, Soyuz is cheap and reliable but its not exactly a really capable craft. the Russians are working to replace it with Kliper.
Fifth reason is political, the manned space program is a jobs program especially in Texas and Florida. Congressmen wont back it if all the jobs are in Russia.
"Soyuz can't push enough weight into orbit, or at least that's my understanding of it."
The parent wasn't talking about using Soyuz as a shuttle replacement, its clearly not even in the same class. He was talking about using it to put 2-3 people in to LEO where they would dock with the heavy cargo that had been put there by an unmanned, heavy cargo booster. For launching a small number of people to LEO, Soyuz is currently unmatched at a few tens of millions of dollars versus the $1.3 billion average cost per flight of the shuttle.
The Soyuz isn't much good if you want to lift more than 3 people or any cargo at all. The Russians have greenlighted their next gen man rated vehicle, Kliper and the European Space Agency is apparently quite interested in parterning with them on it and kissing NASA good bye.
"For many in this thread, the goal is (1) NASA bashing and (2) celebrating the cult of What Might Have Been, of the Road Not Taken, and of My Powerpoint Works Better Than Your Hardware."
Well maybe that is it, but it could also be called the process of good engineering. Good engineering usually involved thowing ideas out there, proposing new and different ways of doing things, and then tearing apart the ideas on paper before they get torn apart at high altitudes and velocities.
I'm sure NASA does do a lot of this engineering process but within the U.S. they have suffered for far to long from having no competition and no accountability. Their process seems to come down to one fiefdom of bureaucrats and contractors eventually shoving through their approach whether it was a good one or not. Using 20/20 hindsight the Shuttle and the ISS were bad and expensive ones and have cost the U.S. dearly in lost opportunity cost. Those are 2 strikes in a row. One more and they are probably out.
It is a totally great thing to have Scaled Composite, Blue Origin, Armadillo, SpaceX, and Sealaunch try new things and give the NASA/Boeing/Lockheed hegemony a little competition. Only problem is the hegemony has relatively vast amounts of money to spend and no need to turn a profit. Manned space operations so far are still very expensive and have a dubious return on investment. Its tough sledding for private enterprise. Which is why launching satellites is doing a lot better in the private sector, less investment, better return. Maybe space tourism or something will tip the scales but that is thrill seeking by the rich, and not anything of actual economic value.
Only project I've EVER been able to see justifying much manned presence in space is putting a permanent colony on Mars, and start aggressive terraforming and resource exploitation there so we have another biosphere in case something bad happens to this one. That is going to be really expensive and the ROI is way out there.
Well the Delta Clipper had been transfered from the SDIO(DoD Star Wars office) to NASA, and upgraded when the crash occurred. It is propably safe to say that a NASA employee is the one who botched the hydraulic line though who can know if it was malevolence or incompetence that made him do it.
It should probably also be pointed out that when it was under SDIO control a hard landing cracked the shell requiring the rebuild when it was transfered to NASA so are you going to blame that accident on NASA malevolence too? Having a hard landing with this tiny prototype was bad, you can imagine what a hard landing might be like when you have to land the HUGE full size vehicle on those legs.
It should be pointed out to all the Jerry Pournelle worshipers that always sing praises of the Delta Clipper that NASA upgraded DC-XA's record altitude was 3140 meters. It was a really long way from being proved feasible.
If its was such a great idea rumour has it that many of the people that worked on it ended up Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin and they may be trying to revive it with NASA no where in sight. If it was a NASA conspiracy killing it will rise from the ashes like a Phoenix and prove they were wrong. Wouldn't bet on it though.
Personally I could maybe see using it for a cargo transport but the reentry scheme is pretty dangerous in its own right. It comes in nose first and then retro rockets HAVE to fire to turn it around and these heavily reused main engines have to fire to slow the decent and keep it upright otherwise it would be a disaster too. The test program wasn't even close to attempting that complex reentry profile.
The other issues are building a single vehicle big enough to hold all that fuel needed to get to orbit and still have enough to get back down again, and carry a cargo big enough to be worth it. You also need some REALLY big, extremely reliable and very long lived engines. I think they ended up being way beyond Space Shuttle Main Engine class to actually get to orbit and back. SSME's only have to fire once per flight. In the Clipper they have to fire twice. To satisfy the Clipper hype they then have to turn around and do it all over again without any refurbishing. Easy to do flying to 9,000 feet, harder to do to LEO and back multiple times on one set of engines with no maintenance.
The parent is right NASA's manned space program is obviously a jobs program and any launcher that might result in the laying off the small armies in Florida and Texas will likely result in the congressional delegations from Florida and Texas killing it, or mandating the staffing levels stay the same even if they have nothing to do, which is already happening to CEV. The ONLY reason NASA's manned space program has any political support left at all is due to the fact it IS a jobs program, so the congressmen who districts all those jobs are in fight like wildcats to keep it alive even if its a total waste which it is at the moment.
I think the old saying is if you go down the "eye for an eye" road everyone involved just ends up blind.
You, my friend, are certainly blinded by your hatred. Give it up, I'm not wasting any more time on you. I never at any point contended that some Palestinians haven't done bad things. I just wanted you to notice some Jews have done bad things too, just as bad. Two of them Begin and Sharon ended up as Prime Ministers of Israel as the reward for the massacres they initiated. You can't deny that, all you can do is try to ignore it which you obviously are.
Dude you can fixate on that one incident all you want but it is one incident of savagery out of many incidents of savagery on both sides. You apparently choose to forget Deir Yassin even though I've pointed out time and again it was exactly the same kind of savagery and one of the people involved went on to be Prime Minister of Israel. Innocent women and children were killed there too. Are you demanding justice for them too? Why not?
If you want more recent stats here are the Red Crescent statistics on the deaths of Palestinian women and children at the hands of the Israeli's since 2000. 657 children under 18 and of those 153 were under 12. 185 women killed. Total Palestinian deaths of all ages since 2000, 3,626.
Palestinians consistently die at higher rates than Israelis. Innocent civilians killed by bombs from F-16's, missiles from Apache helicopters or machine guns on tanks are just as dead as people killed by suicide bombs.
I really hope someone close to you didn't die in this attack you've fixated on, if so my deepest condolences and I can understand how you can't bring yourself to forgive the people that did it. If that is not the case I really fail to understand how you have acquired such rabid hatred and a fixation over one incident and fail to see there are innocent people getting killed on both sides. Only way you are going to get peace is for everyone to realize its madness on both sides, forget that past and work to prevent it from happening again.
Demanding Hamas pay reparations isn't going to bring back any of the dead, in fact is pretty tawdry on your part to think cash payments fix anything. How much cash is a human life worth. You are mostly cheapening the lives of those killed to set a price tag on their deaths. You want to do something to honor their memory try working for a fair and equitable peace in the region instead of spewing venom and hatred, and demanding cash.
"15% of the population is arab muslim"
According to Wikipedia in 2003 19% aren't Arab though not sure about Arab Muslim. The arab population in Israel is growing a lot faster than the Jewish much to the dismay of the Jews and immigration of Jews to Israel is also in steep decline because most don't want to put up with the strife there.
"Your use of the term "apartied" was cute."
Well you missed some key facts in trying to deny it applies. Arab citizens of Israel are treated reasonably well but Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza are NOT and they do not have Israeli citizenship. They are the ones for which a case could be made for the term apartheid. We are talking about people that have been in this limbo since 1967, soon to be 40 years or a lifetime for most there.
There is an interesting statistical situation developing and the Israel government knows it very well. If you add up all the Arabs in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza they are just about to eclipse Israeli's in total numbers. The Arabs are reproducing at a much faster rate than Jews so this overtaking is inevitable.
Arabs as nearly as I can tell are around 4.9 million in Israel and the occupied territories and there are around 5 millions Jews in the same. There are 290,000 other ethnic groups.
If Israel doesn't spin off Gaza quick, which it is about to do, there will soon be more Arabs than Jews in greater Israel, most of whom are disenfranchised, so that sure sounds a lot like apartheid to me.
If the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza were given citizenship in Israel the Arabs would soon be able to take control of Israel at the ballot box through Democratic means.
Israel has in fact been passing laws making it more difficult for Arabs from the occupied territories to get citizenship. For example someone from the West Bank who marries an Arab with Israeli citizenship has been denied getting Isreali citizenship by marriage since 2003.. This law was passed precisely to help insure Jews never loose control of their supposed Democracy at the ballot box.
The numbers as best I can tell from the CIA factbook:
West Bank
2,385,615
note: in addition, there are about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and fewer than 177,000 in East Jerusalem (July 2004 est.)
Gaza Strip
1,376,289
note: in addition, there are more than 5,000 Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip (July 2005 est.)
Israel
6,276,883
note: includes about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in
the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, more than 5,000 in the Gaza Strip, and fewer
than 177,000 in East Jerusalem (July 2005 est.)
81% Jewish and 290,000 other minorities.
19% Arab or 1,192,608
"It is a violent fascist organized confederation of gangsters,"
Fascist is a pretty east word to throw around. You should read this letter signed by Albert Einstein among others which said the same thing about a Jewish terrorist organization or political party, depending on your viewpoint, in the young state of Israel in 1948 soon after the massacre at Dier Yassin.
Try reading Wikipedia on Hamas.
It started life as a charity and social work organization and a big part of the organization and funding continues that work today. In fact its one of the few organization that is actively working to ease suffering on the West Bank and Gaza, where there is a LOT of suffering, which is why it is so popular there. If there is any organization that has really popular support among Palestinians its Hamas and it would probably be the governing party except Israel and the U.S. would never stand for it.
It was recognized early in life by....the state of Israel, due to its charity work, though it has radicalized since.
It didn't establish a really militant wing and radicalize until 1987.
Its goal is clearly stated and exactly the same one, though in reverse of many Zionists and Israelis, a Palestinian state in all of Palestine versus a Jewish state in all of Israel (depending on how radical they are, some Jews want all the occupied territories too). So again why is it OK for Jews to want Palestine to be al theirs but when Hamas wants the same thing they are "fascists" and "gangsters".
Its really sad to see people as rabid and blind with rage as yourself. Me I can see a case for both sides in the Middle East. In my book Palestinians and Jews are both pretty wrong most of the time. They are just like you they only see their side, not reality. I could never kid myself into think one side is always right and the other is always wrong, because that is simply not the case there. There has been a whole lot of wrong on both sides.
When you use words like "sub-human" that is straight out of the Nazi playbook and you are sounding more like the Fascist than the people you are railing against. That is an historical irony, people under stress often become like that which they hate and their most bitter enemies. More than a little bit of Nazi Germany unfortunately rubbed off on the Jews that suffered under them. You have to wonder what the people who suffered through the ghettos in Warsaw in World War II would say about the walled ghettos in Israel today.
I really wish the Allies had taken a chunk out of the German coast and created a Jewish state, the size of Palestine, there after World War II. It would have been pretty fair punishment and atonement for Germany. The Zionists may still have insisted on seizing Palestine but if the more moderate Jews had accepted a homeland there, and the Palestinians still had their homeland in Palestine a lot of people wouldn't have been killed over the last half century and the world would be a lot happier and better place. Alas instead we are going to have never ending conflict there. The state being proposed for Palestinians today isn't any such thing, it is a series of walled ghettos still completely dominated by Israel and most Palestinians will never accept it so the bloodshed will go on and on, and the world will continue to carve in to two factions over it. People will be blinded by hatred forever just like you are.
Thought I did. The ISI, Pakistan's secret police, was all over Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban and while Al Qaeda was there and planning 9/11. The U.S. let Pakistan fly all of them out when the Taliban fell, unquestioned and unchallenged. Pakistan's secret service helped put the Taliban in power and keep it there.
Al Qaeda is almost certainly still alive and well in Pakistan's tribal region and the Pakistani government, especially the ISI is letting them regroup there.
The only connection to 9/11 I've heard against Iran is some of them may have travelled through there.
The madrasas in Pakistan are breeding ground #1 for Islamic extremists.
Dude, there wasn't any anti-semitic vitriol at all in that post. You however are a sterling example of why there is NEVER a balanced discussion of the problem in Israel because no one can even being to relate the Palestinian side of the story without someone like yourself SCREAMING ANTI-SEMITE and attempting to end the conversation.
Maybe you could make a case the King David Hotel was a military target but Deir Yassin most decidedly wasn't. I note you didn't mention it in your little rant, because you have selective memory. It was a case of Jews killing innocent women and children too.
You might also want to remember Sabra and Shatila in 1982. These were Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon where some of those who fled Jewish control of Palestine ended up. When Israel invaded Lebanon and gained control of these camps the IDF, in particular Ariel Sharon, intentionally let Christian militia in to the camp that they knew had a blood feud to settle with the Palestinians. The militia proceeded to massacre everyone in the camps over 36 hours, many women and children while the IDF sat outside and listened and ignored reports of what was happening inside. The number of dead is unknown the estimates range from 350 to 3500. It was massacre by proxy.
The key point here is that yes Palestinian terrorism is abominable, but so are all the instances when Israelis have killed innocent civilians and they have killed a lot of them over the last 60 years just like the Palestinians.
One thing I really can't stand are people who selectively choose to ignore all the atrocities their side commits, while they rant about the other side and call them animals for doing pretty much the same things.
The old saying is wrong. History never repeats itself"
Another old saying is "Never say Never" because when you do you are usually wrong.
Your entitled to your opinion but most people will disagree with you. Things are never exactly the same but someone with good historical perspective can spot the important similarities and tendencies that count.
"The situation in Iraq is not a civil war. America had a civil war."
Yes it is though its a low grade civil war in an insurgency stage. If American troops were to pull out wholesale you would see a full fledged, hot, civil war. The Sunni's are unlikely to ever accept living under Shia domination. The Kurds are biding their time but if they see an opportunity, especially if American troops withdraw or if the Shia stop power sharing, they will try to secede too. The Kurds have had an independent Kurdistan as their rallying point for nearly ever.
The second part of your post is gross oversimplification. I imagine most Iraqi's are glad to get rid of Saddam but it doesn't mean they like the new situation any better. A key reason there is an insurgency is because everyone in the Sunni triangle is unemployed, hungry, without electricity, A/C or a seqage system. All past politics aside those are ingredients for discontent and rebellion. Saddam sucked but the new situtation is totally different but equally bad. If you are Sunni it is way worse because the people you have oppressed for so long are now running the place and Sunnis have been completely driven out of the political process by the insurgency. All that propaganda about how great the elections were was just that, propaganda. the Kurds and Shias turned out in massive numbers, the Sunni didn't and that kicked the legs out from under any pretense of a real Democracy.
"I must take issue, however, with you saying that we "changed" who was responsible for 9/11. "
Come on Dave, you are not that dumb. Everyone knows the Bush administration did everything they could to tie Iraq to 9/11 in the minds of the average America, if not in reality. The famous meeting in Prague was the classic one. Dick Cheney flat out said on Meet the Press that it was a link though that meeting has largely been discredited as fantasy and he tried to deny he said it later though it was on video tape.
"As to Iraq's secular nature, as I said, that's exactly why it was picked opposed to others"
OK I guess you really are just that dumb Dave. So in your war against Islamic fundamentalism you take down one of the most secular Arab government in the Middle East, one that was fighting Islamic fundamentalism more than just about any other. Saddam and the Baathist are Panarab not Panislam, huge difference.
God damn Dave, you should get a job in the Bush administration because you seem to have their same talent for completely twisted and moronic reasoning.
"I would also take issue that Iraq is "increasingly fundamentalist" or that it will grow to be an oppressive state. That would run counter to the very reasons we started this in the first place."
Well stick your head in the sand Dave because its a fact. Reports from around Basra, the seat of Shia fundamentalism, indicate it is starting to resemble Iran or the Taliban. Reports from their constitutional convention I heard a week or two go indicate it is nearly inevitable its going to be largely based on Islamic law unless the U.S. intervenes and stops it (which shoots down any pretense that they are a sovereign government). The Shia majority are devout Muslims and their leaders are devout Muslims. Left to their own devices they are going to create a fundamentalist Islamic state unless some outside force stops them.
This is what you get for trying to institute a democracy in a country where fundamentalist Muslims are in the majority. Saddam had his reputation for ruthlessness because he was fighting a Kurdish independence movement in the north that was using its own share of violence and a fundamentalist Islamic rebellion from the Shia in the South that outnumbered his Baathist Sunnis. Why do you think George H.W. Bush left Saddam in power? They wanted Saddam to suppress the Kurds and the Shia and serve as a balance to Iran without the U.S. getting mixed up in it. His kid unfortunately was to dumb to understanding the complexity of the situation and was bent on showing up his dad by finishing what he started in the first Gulf War.
If the Kurds try to declare independence once U.S. gets tired of Iraq a new war will start involve Iraq the Kurds AND Turkey. Turkey hates the Kurds as much as Saddam did.
"reading their mail" was a bad choice of wording. These are public web sites, I just meant watch everything posted on them, and maybe worst case watch who is looking at them on a regular basis. You aren't exactly violating anyones privacy when you are monitoring very public web sites.
I'd probably write this same post when I'm adopting my "liberal" devil's advocate facade.
The key problem here is you aren't going to fix most of the underlying problems in under a century. The only one the U.S. could fixed is U.S. foreign and economic policy but to fix that you would have to get the electorate to stop electing people who like strong arm tactics. At the moment the U.S. is electing people who LOVE strong arm tactics and you can't change that with all the liberal idealism in the world. Even if you get the Democrats in office they use most of the same strong arm policies, they just aren't as blatant about it as the Republican's.
If you are attacked like you are on 9/11 and as a response your plan is to fix global poverty your attackers will still be there, you will look weak and they will keep attacking you. They aren't going to wake up one day and forgive the U.S. for all its past wrongs because they U.S. is handing out food or economic aid someplace. The U.S. also isn't going to cut Israel to the wind anytime soon.
Unfortunately you plan is idealism, not reality.
" a long-term strategy to change the face of the middle east by changing governments that CAN be changed"
Any government CAN be changed if you have the worlds best equipped military. So CAN change the contries where Al Qaeda has its origins, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. I guess you are saying we CAN'T change them because for some reason they are our allies even though they are the ones where all the people who are attacking the U.S. come from and are based in the case of Pakistan.
So instead we changed places that were responsible for 9/11 the U.S. opted for the one government they COULD change, Iraq.
Basic problem here Dave, Iraq was working against Islamic fundamentalism, not for it. The Baathist's are secular socialists not Islamic fundamentalist. They are Muslim only when its convenient. Ever notice how most Iraqis wear mustaches. Saddam had for the most part outlawed full beards because it was a way to frustrate hard core muslims who wear beards as part of their faith. Women had more rights in Saddam's Iraq than they will ever get in the new Shia dominated increasingly fundamentalist Iraq, the one writing its constitution based on Islamic law.
There simple is no way to rationalize invading Iraq as a response to Al Qaeda and 9/11, in fact it was exactly the wrong thing to do. The only way you could explain it is the Bush administration was creating a honey pot in Iraq to draw Islamic fighters from all over the world who want to kill American soldiers. I'm pretty sure that was the plan the Bush administration had in mind though. The neocon plan was take down Iraq in a few weeks, then Syria and Iran and then all of Israel's remaining state enemies in the region would be gone. They got bogged down in Iraq so the rest isn't likely to happen anytime soon.
The CIA backing stopped after Russia was beaten. The ISI is the one that helped the Taliban take control of Afghanistan in the vacaum left when Russia pulled out and they were completely intertwined with the Taliban and Al Qaeda when 9/11 happened.
The ISI is as much to blame for 9/11 as much as the Taliban was. The U.S. let them get away with it and punished Saddam instead who had NOTHING to do with it. Explain that. Its no accident that a lot of continuing Al Qaeda terrorism has some Pakistani origin.
"America did just about the smartest thing it could do in Afgahnistan - it played local politics. It bought an army and supplimented it with assests we could project into the area."
Yes and it completely failed to crush the Taliban and Al Qaeda while it had the chance at places like Tora Bora. The mercenary army they bought was both badly trained, badly equipped, badly motivated and easy to bribe. They, on numerous occasions, sat on their hands while Al Qaeda and the Taliban scattered.
If the U.S. had had the will it could have put a lot more force in Afghanistan than it did, and turning a blind eye to the ISI, and the tribal areas in Pakistan insured the U.S. would fail in defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The tribal region sanctuary in Pakistan was a key reason Russia lost in Afghanistan. You have to eliminate sanctuaries in a conflict like that.
"First off, there's no major power backing the insurgency."
Al Qaeda is a major power though a shadowy one. They can almost certainly pump men, explosives and strategy in to it for a really long time.
"Second, the majority of the population has a vested interest in seeing the insurgency fail."
The majority of Sunni's have a vested interested in seeing the insurgency succeed and they are a majority in the Sunni triangle which is why the insurgency flourishes there. Thats all an insurgency needs, popular support in the area its being waged.
There isn't one insurgency in Iraq there are probably three:
- Baathist Saddam loyalists
- Sunnis in general who have been completely disempowered. Kind of a superset of Baathists
- External Arab Jihadi's with Al Qaeda in the lead.