Don't mind Threeep, he is also your average, arrogant, stuck on himself and his country, American. Other great comments he's made this weak:
- Suggested Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam are better places thanks to the U.S. (apparently Threeep considers it a form of urban renewal to bomb places to the ground, kill all the women and children so they can start fresh)
- Referred to India or was it Pakistan as "Smellistan"
- Suggested Russian prostitutes need to work harder and turn more tricks to fund the Russian Space Agency.
People like Threeep and the parent in this thread give American's a bad name, a really bad name.
"The Chenyans I think. I am too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I believe they are the ones who took a theater filled with people hostage and then killed a bunch of them..."
Others have hit on most of the flaws in your post, you really should learn to use Google it would make your posts sound a little more informed.
Chechnyans did sieze control of a theater, they killed 2 hostages, and wounded 2 others. But the Russian police killed more than 100 of the hostages when they pumped a gas containing a potent narcotic or nerve agent, possibly supplied by the U.S, in to the theatre to disable the hostage takers. Unfortunately they overdosed many of the hostages. It wouldn't have been so bad but they made bad plans, or no plan at all, to quickly get the hostages out of the gas, to treat them on scene or get them to hospitals. Slow treatment multiplied the death toll.
What Chechan terrorist do is bad, but what the Russians have done to Chechnya is far worse. They've pretty much bombed the entire country in to the stone age, killed an untolled number of civilians and liberally tortured many more. Russian= has been trying to suppress a nationalist and Islamic revolt there for year and they have used the most same brutal tactics they used in Afghanistan(their war in Afghanistan also led to the creation of Al Qaeda which in those days was funded and armed by the CIA because back then they were killing Russians. The Russians failed in Afghanistan and they will probably fail in Chechnya. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, an infidel nation savaging a Muslim population is a very effective recruiting poster for Al Qaeda, Islamic extremists, suicide bombers and terrorists. These wars create Muslim extremism they don't stop it.
We all know you love the Shuttle and NASA ThreeeP and you are going to trash anyone and everyone who is trying to do something better and cheaper. You can trash SpaceShopOne all you want but the people who designed and built it accomplished their objectives, as modest as they were, and they did it with a small number of people, pretty much on budget and on schedule. That is indication of good engineering, versus the mess that is NASA, which is probably what the parent was alluding to.
Scaled Composites' whole budget was equal to about 1/50th of the real cost of a single Shuttle launch. In particular watch the Discovery documentary on it, Black Sky: The Race for Space". It will restore your excitement for space exploration, instead of demoralize you like the Shuttle and NASA did this week. In the 60's and 70's lots of kids wanted to be astronauts. I wonder if its true today. I doubt it, NASA has managed to make being an astronaut tedious, uninteresting and unexciting which was really hard to do.
Let's look at the object of your affection, the Shuttle. Its is once again indefinitely grounded. From one press conference I heard the intermittent failure in the ET sensor has been yet another long running glitch in the Shuttle they never fixed and it just bit them in the ass, thankfully not during a launch. The glitch if it had happened in 2 or more sensor during launch could have either resulted in a premature cut off or running the engines dry at which point they might fly apart and cause fatal damage. NASA as only NASA can do has no less then TWELVE teams working the problem, TWELVE. I could see three maybe four, one for the ET/sensor, one for the wiring to the shuttle and one or two for the shuttle processing the data. I guess you can do TWELVE teams when you have an army of like 6,000 on you payroll who are getting paid whether they launch or not, though one wonders why they couldn't find at least 6 teams to fix it before now before it bit them in the ass.
LAUNCH RATE - The shuttle was supposed to launch every month if not more often. Over its lifetime it has averaged 4 launches a year and its launch rate has gone down every year. It now:
- can't launch at night - can only launch to the ISS and there are daylight windows to the ISS only part of the year - can't launch if there are any clouds in the area with water drops large enough to damage the times - can't launch with wind shear in the area - is launched in Florida where there are perpetually clouds, rain and thunderstorms in the area, especially during the day which is the only time the shuttle can launch
And of course the Shuttle has spent nearly 5 years grounded. The only reason the ISS hasn't been abandoned is the Russians have been supplying it and ferrying astronauts to it at their expense(because NASA wont pay them due to a Congressional boycott against Russia over a reactor in Iran). Russia just recently said enough is enough and aren't going to ferry any more U.S. astronauts, or U.S. supplies to the ISS unless the U.S. pays for it. You see NASA has bad credit bordering on deadbeat status as far as the ISS goes. If the Shuttle continues to fail to fly the U.S. involvement in ISS is in immediate trouble.
COST - The shuttle was supposed be cheap to launch becuase it was so reusable. In fact it is one of the most expensive launchers in history. Counting everything the Shuttle is averaging $1.3 Billion per launch. Part of the problem is there is a full time army of around 6,000 on the direct payroll and even more at contractors providing parts. As the Shuttle remains grounded and its launch rate continues to fall that payroll stays the same so it gets ever more expensive per launch. Amazingly Congressman are mandating they all stay employed during the transition to CEV, NASA being a jobs program, with the possible conclusion CEV will be just as expensive to launch as the Shuttle.
Yay. It appears the Russian government has green lighted Kliper and hopefully other countries, especially ESA might chip in. My horse is off and running. Meanwhile NASA let some multimillion dollar contracts to Boeing and Lockheed to provide paper for a committee meeting.
I notice your current horse, the Shuttle, the one you said was so reliable, such a success and achievement, is for all practical purposes grounded indefinitely. Apparently there was yet another one of long running intermittent failures, this time in the ET fuel sensor they never fixed, one that could have either caused premature engine cut off or failure to cut off the engine when the tank empties and threatened another catastrophic failure.
We should have confidence that it will be fixed because now they have TWELVE, thats right TWELVE, different teams trying to fix it. I guess you can do TWELVE teams when you have 6,000 people working at your jobs program.
Microsoft is preparing for the day when there will be widespread sale of TV programs and feature films via the internet and PC's. To answer your question if you want to buy and view this content legally you will probably have to bow to this requirement eventually unless Microsoft realizes how futile it is and abandons it before it ships. The MPAA is pretty anal about DRM on any PC or settop that is going to get access to full resolution, perfect digital copies of their feature films. Even with DRM on the PC/Settop box can still steal copies off the video signal which is what they are trying to stop.
Of course this will only frustrate the average consumer and the technicly illiterate casual pirate. Chances are the technicly skilled and the hard core pirates(organized crime, Asian gangs etc) will still figure out a way to tap the cable and apply any decryption necessary to the video signal.
Oh, and DVD Jon will probably post a HOWTO on how to break it a day after its out.
"Somehow I feel that the US government will not be happy until we have "secured our borders" until the government is entirely isolated."
I think you misstated the situation. The Bush adminsration and homeland security are really only striving to secure our borders against people who are trying to get here legally and through legitimate channels. Its become incredibly hard to get a visa to live in the U.S. so people who have them now and are living law abiding productive lives here, and I know a few, are being forced to leave when their visa expires, and a lot of very talented undergraduate and graduate students, engineers, etc who have provided a lot of highly educated talent to America's universities and economy are either not able to get in to the U.S. or opting not to try because its to dangerous to come to the U.S. as a non citizen. The U.S. government is establishing a track record of harrassment, denying basic due process(access to a lawyer and your embassy if you are arrested something all civilized countris honer), artbitrary and indefinite arrests, deportations to 3rd world countries for torture etc. so the U.S. is no longer viewed as a safe place for the best and brightest from around the world to come and study or work, especially if you are or look Arab or Muslim. End result massive damage to the economy of a country with a generally bad education system and which is very dependent on foreign educated talent.
But here is the rub, the Dept. of Homeland Security has done next to NOTHING to stem the tide of illegal aliens pouring in to the U.S. especially across the U.S. Mexican border, nor will they other than put on a show now and then. Those illegal aliens represent a vast pool of hard working, easily exploited, ultra low wage labor. Many U.S. businesses are completely dependent on it to compete, and they in turn are pressuring politicians to turn a blind eye to illegal immigrations across the border or illegal immigrants once they are here.
So the irony is its increasingly impossible for the world's best and brightest to get in the the U.S. legally, but if you are unskilled, uneducated, or a suicide bomber, and are willing to swim the Rio Grande its NO problem coming to the U.S. and probably living out your life there, which might be brief in the case of the suicide bomber.
Well yea but no one votes for Vice President. At least until Dick Cheney came along it was largely a ceremonial post. Since Dick Cheney its the office where the real power lies in America today because George is to dumb to run a pathetic little oil company or a baseball team, let alone a superpower.
As soon as the VP who invented the Internet ran for President he lost once again proving there can never be people in the government who understand IT. If that Al Gore had had a better mastery of IT maybe he could have rigged the election in his favor instead of it being rigged so he lost.
Uh, this is a compeltely overblown attempt at sensationalism, and its just another embarrassment for Slashdot editors that they bit. Lazarus isn't exposing anything beyond finding someones address in a phone book(or if its unlisted in some other public database), and I image the Wilson's address is widely known at this point. Its not exactly top secret, that once you find someones address, you can get directions or an aerial photo in this day and age. News at 11.....we have this thing called the Internet where you can get maps and photos these days. If you've ever contributed to a political campaign, your name, I think address and how much you gave is online now too.
The only confidential information involved in this whole pitch was that Plame was a CIA agent and THAT was probably not in any public records until Bob Novak published it in a newspaper, probably thanks to Karl Rove or his friends in the White House for leaking that fact to him. Whomever was spreading it around that she was a CIA agent was the only one guilty of anything here, and that was a very low tech ancient offense, leaking and smearing.
The Judith Miller case is potentially interesting though. Maybe she is a crusading journalist fighting for a first ammendment right to protect sources which is the angle most media outlets pitch since she is one of their own. But there are two alternate explanations floating around that are plausible, more interesting, but hard to prove:
A. Judith Miller was a key inciter of the WMD charges against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. She made her career frothing up a panic about the dangers of chemical and biological weapons, and she did half the Bush administrations work for them in trying to build a case that Saddam was an imminent danger to the U.S. because he had them so had to be taken down (at GREAT cost to the U.S. in blood, gold and respect). At this point it appears Miller's multiyear WMD crusade against Saddam was totally wrong. In some circles her career as a journalist is in ruin, because she was both wrong, and looks like a patsy for the Bush administration. Some think she went to jail with glee in an attempt to salvage her reputation by playing the martyr.
B. The second alternate is that Miller is hiding more than just her source. There are indications that her source already released her from any need to maintain confidentiality, so there is a question as to why she still is. One hypothesis is that Miller may have been one of the earlier people who found out Plame was a CIA agent and she may have been calling people, like Karl Rove and saying, "Did you know Joe Wilson's wife is a CIA agent specializing in WMD and sent him on the mission", and people like Rove were repeating something Miller told them, not leaking to Miller. If thats the case, though its a bit of a long shot, then she could be charged for blowing Plame's cover and she might refusing to testify to the grand jury not to protect her source but to protect herself, and in a way that is less obvious than pleading the fifth.
Well I'd have to say she is bright in that she obviously adept at sucking up to a rich and powerful man and and figured out a good plan to get on a fast track to a high paying job in Redmond. A key benefit there being escape from a mostly poverty stricken, very Islamic Pakistan, where she probably doesn't have great prospects in adult life, being a women in a very Islamic country, beyond getting married and raising a lot of kids.
I'm betting she's well on here way to locking up a college scholarship from Microsoft already.
So even if the exams are an exercise in memorization, she is obviously crafty(assuming her parents didn't make here cram for the exams and write the poem).
" The US is one of the strongest forces for "good" in the world today. "Good" is an abstract concept, and in the eye of the beholder, but I think "by every reasonable analysis" this is more than obvious."
I'm pretty sure the only beholders who agree with you are your fellow Americans who are so totally stuck on themselves that they will ALWAYS refuse to believe the U.S. is ever wrong, or makes mistakes or screws over the rest of the world. The U.S. has propped up a plethora of right wing dictators all over the world in the last century, all just as bad as Saddam. The U.S. was A-OK with Saddam when he was bloodying the Iranians and before he invaded Kuwait and threw out the Bush family's friend, the completely corrupt emir of Kuwait who is totally a dictator(so much for "Freedom and Democracy" again).
For the last half of the 20 century as long as a ruthless dictator was anticommunist the U.S. was glad to support them, and could care less about "Freedom and Democracy". The Shah of Iran and Pinochet being sterling examples in a hall of shame.
The dynamics are a little different today with no U.S.S.R and the communists in China being A-OK now as long as the West can turn a profit there.
Pretty much the entire world outside of the U.S. is of the opinion the Iraq invastion was a complete mistake and was pouring gasoline, not water, on the fire burning in the muslim world,
"I care about Iraq because it was/is a security threat to the US and its allies. It no longer is -- mission accomplished. Eliminating a dictator and freeing the country were nice side-effects."
You are completely on drugs again Threeep. Iraq is now the nexus for a rising tied of hatred and resentment directed at the U.S. by the world in general, and the Muslim world in particular. Its also a tinderbox that could easily end up in full fledged civil war as soon as the U.S. gets tired of it and pulls out. Its almost certain to end up as an Iranian style Islamic republic as soon as the U.S. stops pressuring the Shia. The area around Basra, the Shia heartland in the South, is already well on its way to hardline Islamic rule, ala Taliban and Iran, with full fledged oppression of women in particular. Women had more freedoms under Saddam than they are likely to have in the Shia controlled parts of the new Iraq.
Forgot to add the other result of my analysis of shuttle launches, Republican Presidents are dangerous to the manned space program
- Reagan helped encourage the Challenger launch on the coldest day at Kennedy in nearly forever and the Shuttle had a known problem with O-ring blowby on cold days(and on this cold day it destroyed the Shuttle) - George W. Bush and his administration, threatened NASA to stay on schedule finishing the ISS or risk having it canceled and it was a key contributor to the Columbia disaster - Richard Nixon killed Apollo early, and started the monstrosity that is the Shuttle and at the same time underfunded it, and I think he was the one that arm twisted the Air Force to joining in on the Shuttle and they inflated the requirements making it both much heavy and more dangerous. - If memory serves Reagan was the prime mover behind the ISS, the $100 billion dollar hole in space in to which most of the space budgets been going.
Doesn't bode well for CEV, the return to the Moon and going to Mars since it was concieved by a Republican President.
The only two successful president's in terms of manned space exploration, JFK and LBJ, both Democrats. The Moon landing was under Nixon but it was already a fait accompli when he came in to power.
- Shuttle can only launch during daylight now because they have to be able so see the launch to watch for damage since Columbia - Daylight launch window to ISS is available only part of the year - Shuttle can't launch in bad weather - Well no its worse than that. Shuttle can't launch any time there are clouds anywhere near the trajectory that might have water drops big enough to damage the extremely fragile tiles - Shuttle cant launch if there is wind shear in the area - Shuttle launchs in Florida, and during the afternoon especially in the summer, its always cloudy, raining or there are outright thunderstorms with lots of wind shear - Shuttle is an overly complex design, with about a million parts, most of which can fail especially as it gets older, and they are reused(though the ET isn't reused) so the chances of a part failing during the countdown are high
Chances of Shuttle launching on schedule, slim to none. Chances of Shuttle launching close to schedule, slim.
Reliability of the Shuttle, very low.
The two memorable times NASA went all out to launch the Shuttle on schedule, no matter how dangerous:
- Challenger because they had to get a teacher in space before Reagan's State of the Union
- Columbia because they had a countdown clock screensaver on their PC's telling them they had to launch to stay on schedule assembling the ISS because the White House had given them and ultimatum to stay on schedule or else. They didn't adequately pursue the ice strike because they didn't want to threaten the next launch schedule.
Bottomline is the Shuttle is unlikely to launch on schedule.
Yea they dont sound so bad if you just summarize the titles:)
If you actually read what each of those hurdles entails you would find they could easily be onerous, arbitrary and you are completely at the mercy of a whole bunch of agencies and bureaucrats and one of which could shoot your project down on a whim. You have to get approval from the FAA, DOT, DOD, NASA, State, EPA and in some cases other agencies.
DOD and State can shoot you down on "national security" grounds because ANY launch vehicle can be a national security threat if misused and pointed at the White House.
EPA can shoot you down because your exhaust might be considered excessive pollution
FAA has to review EVERY payload you launch. Interestingly U.S. government owned payloads are exempt from said review.
You have to carry liability insurance of an amount arbitrarily set by the DOT and it could easily be prohibitively expensive.
You have to pass a safety review and prove you don't pose a threat to the public. Well the Shuttle fails that one because Columbia rained hazardous debris over half of Texas including peoples homes and farms.
Bottomline all these rules could be either easy or hard. You are at the mercy of the whims of a bunch of bureaucrats. You invest millions or billions on your launcher and they can cut the legs out from under you in a heartbeat and permenently ground you. End result most people wont even want to risk getting in this business in the U.S.
What exactly is it you do Threeep that gives you such a high tolerance and fondness for red tape and out of control bureaucracy.
"They end up reschduling a good deal of all shuttle flights due to weather or other circumstances'
They reschedule Shuttle fights a LOT, probably more than most launch vehicles. You can just write it of to "these things happen" and they do in all space vehicles. The problem with the Shuttle is it has a lot more opportunites for failure due its complexity, age, resuse(though thats not an issue on this tank) so it has real problems launching on schedule and always has. Its just not reliable. NASA completley abadoned the KISS principle when they designed the Shuttle and they have been paying for it ever since. Over its lifttime, all factors considered each Shuttle flight costs $1.3 billion dollars which is ridiculously expensive.
The thing about weather delays, is the Shuttle's tiles are way to fragile for a launch vehicle, especially one launched in Florida which has daily thunderstorms. Its not that they can't launch in bad weather. They can't launch through heavy clouds or if there is any chance they will encounter ANY drops of water above a certain size because they damage the tiles.
"They are just dropping off some supplies"
As others have noted they are carrying gyros, one of four on the ISS is failed, one is shut off and they need to be replaced. If any more fail U.S. built intertial control system will stop working and they are back to the original Russian built rockets which require refueling probably at the expense of the Russians. I think they are really heavy so probably can't be launched in a Progress or Soyuz or it would take a whole launch.
The other key problem is NASA hasn't been paying the Russians for any of their astronauts or supplies the Russians have launched for them in the last 2 1/2 years because of a Congressional boycott due to Russia building a reactor for Iran. Russia pretty much told NASA they were cut off and wouldn't do any more free launches for them so the Shuttle pretty much has to start flying reliably to keep NASA's ISS committments, or Congress would have to rescind the boycott and start paying the Russians if they need to ferry any more U.S. astronauts or cargo to the ISS.
Please, maybe they learn from SOME mistakes. Track record shows they clearly didn't learn from to mistakes that got people killed:
- O-ring blowby was a known problem and had occurred on missions before it doomed Challenger. It was KNOWN to be worse and more dangerous the colder it was, as the O rings got stiffer, and they STILL tried to launch on one of the coldest days ever at Kennedy to keep Ronny Raygun happy so he could talk about the teacher in space for his State of the Union speech
- Ice falling off the external tank and damaging tiles has been happening since the FIRST flight until it finally broke them in a fatal place on Columbia. THey put insulation on the tank, it kept falling. It happened so much they had to write software to do a statistical analysis on whether it we going to cause fatal damage. When it finally did they ignored it.
"Maybe you would like a $3 billion wind tunnel study on tape adhesion on the launch pad or something..."
Nope just ground and abandon the shuttle and ISS and give the money to someone new to build the next manned launch vehicle who understands the KISS principle. The problem with the Shuttle isn't a cover falling off here, an O-ring failing there, tile damge up there. The problem is its an absurdly complex launch vehicle and there is ALWAYS something going wrong with it, either due to bad design, human error or mechanical failure. Any vehicle that requires 6000 people to keep it working is NEVER gonna be reliable, and its ALWAYS going to cost a bloody fortune to launch.
"And we are capable of building better crew and cargo boosters...It's happening now."
As far as crew boosters go why don't you wait until they actually build something for CEV and see how "better" it is, before you start doing your NASA fanboy thing and shouting how great it is. At the moment all NASA has is a massive exercise in bureaucracy called an RFP(Request for Proposal) and Boeing and Lockheed have a couple sets of weak artists conceptions. Lockheed, last I saw. was proposing a mini-me shuttle which has a pretty good shot at being worse than the shuttle especially if you want to get out of LEO. Boeing was just regurgitating Apollo elements with the notable and critical absence of the Saturn V.
As far as cargo boosters go, NASA still hasn't really matched Saturn, 40 years later. The Shuttle stack might do OK assuming you get rid of all the dead weight that is the Shuttle.
The initial Titan/Delta Heavy proposals for CEV were decidely weak, and you were going to have to have multiple launches to get all the stuff in orbit you need to get to the Moon where Saturn did it in one launch.
Geez you've posted this same comment 5 times now. I think everyones figured it out it was a throw away cover. Yea its no big deal, but....... the thing you are totally missing is the IRONY. For a hypersensitive return to flight launch someone goofed, didn't tie down the cover, and managed to damage tiles BEFORE the launch. Damaged tiles being the thing that doomed Columbia so its sure to put everyone, especially the astronauts further on edge, edgy is not a good thing to be in this situation.
You may not have heard of it but there is this thing called the KISS principle in engineering. Soyuz has it, Shuttle doesn't. Soyuz is pretty safe and reliable. Shuttle launches are nail biters now and everyone is just praying they hold together long enough to finish the ISS, so they can be retired before they kill any more people.
Yay, glad to see you came over to my point of view Threeep. Though you are going a little overboard. We just want to shut down the manned space program part of NASA. The great observatories, JPL, aeronautics, earth observation parts all do great work. If we can just get rid of the Shuttle and ISS there will be some money available so they can do more cool stuff AND we can turn some money over to Scaled Composites or the Russians to build some new man rated ships that are affortable.
Maybe they built it on cheap but the staggering launch costs, and inefficiency more than made up for it.
It has some great techical achievements in it, the SSME's as fickle and expensive as they are, are amazing. Unfortunately they are so expensive the wont survive the return to expendible boosters.
As a system the shuttle has really been a complete failure by any unbiased assessment. It was supposed to be cheap to launch and its ended up being staggeringly expensive. It was supposed to have a high launch rate, but the launch rate has gone down pretty much every year on top of the 5 or so years its been completely grounded due to accidents. It was supposed to do everything and now it can't do anything except finish the $100 billion hole in space that is the ISS. You can blame politics, the Air Force got arm twisted in to using it, they forced gross inflation the design requirements making it much heavier, and much more dangerous. Then as soon as Challenger exploded, they dropped it like a rock, went back to expendables, and abandoned a $6 billion dollar launch pad at Vandenburgh.
The Russians started out trying to copy the Shuttle with Buran but they came to their senses early and realized it was an insane design. The Russians it turned out were smart.
At times there has been a standing army of 6,000 people necessary to launch the shuttle, and that doesn't count all the contractors building parts like SSME's for it. No WONDER it costs a fortune, its a giant jobs program.
From Wikipedia:
"While the shuttle has been a reasonably successful launch vehicle, it has been unable to meet its goal of radically reducing flight launch costs, as the average launch expenditures during its operations up to 2005 accumulates to $1.3 billion [1], a rather large figure compared to the initial projections of $10 to $20 million. The total cost of the program has been $145 billion as of early 2005 ($112 billion of which was incurred while the program was operational) and is estimated at $174 billion when the Shuttle will retire in 2010. NASA's budget for 2005 allocates 30 % or 5 billion to Space Shuttle operations."
Though in fairness I should point out the Bush administration has already squandered way more than this on a couple years of stupidity in Iraq. But then too, if that $174 billion, and another $100 billion plus for the ISS, had gone in to space projects that weren't a dead end we might have something to show for it.
Why dont you ever show me some respect ThreeE...... LOL.
You are the one who said Russian prostitutes need to turn more tricks to fund the Russian space program, in one sentance proving you are sexist, racist, petty, immature and have no credibility discussing the Russian space program because you have no respect for them. Having no respect for the Russians is dumb because they do some good work, and the do whole projects on what NASA wastes on a single shuttle launch. They could build Kliper on what NASA wastes on a few Shuttle launchs
"I could just as easily say that the US is the ONLY nation with a proven track record of operating outside of LEO."
Cuz the Russians are the only ones who have built permenantly manned space stations RECENTLY. The U.S. has completely lost the capacity to build Saturn's, LEM's etc. You can deduce this because its going to take NASA 10 years and billions of dollars to build CEV, a weak attempt to just Xerox Apollo in the case of Boeing or build a mini-me Space shuttle in the case of Lockheed that would be an insane vehicle for going to the Moon or the Lagrange points.
" I'd much rather the US take control of them than China, who seems to be the only other power with something like the capability."
It depends on how you define "take control" and "capability". If it means putting an unmanned satellite in them then there are a bunch of nations that could do it.
If you mean put a permenent manned station there, the Russians are the ONLY nation with a proven track record of building and long term manning a space station. The Chinese are pretty much at the Mercury stage in their space progream, they can barely get one or 2 people in orbit. The U.S. has been grounded for 2 1/2 years and the ISS would have been abandoned were it not for the Russians. The Russians built Mir and the core of the ISS. The U.S. hasn't managed to build a space station since Skylab, and then it was only manned for 90 days at a time. Though in 10 or 20 years who knows.
That said I doubt ANYONE outside the U.S. military would be insane enough to squander the vast sums needed to put military outposts at all the Lagrange points. I guess the U.S. has developed a collective mental illness that they can almost justify squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on in the name of "security" and "national defense", at a time their current account deficit indicates the U.S. is borrowing $800-900 billion dollars a year and the biggest threat to the "national security" is eventual financial collapse if they stay on the current course. You really can't borrow a trillion dollars year after year and think you wont eventually have to face the reaper.
"But I'd rather them be in control than the Chinese, Indians, or Russians"
If you are worried about the Chinese or Indians you should be more concerned about the fact that they are going to destroy the U.S. with economic competition long before we need to worry about putting weapons at LaGrange points or fighting a war with them. While the U.S. is squandering vast sums siezing control of the Lagrange points, the Chinese are going to sieze control of all the things that matter:
- All the worlds manufacturing capacity - All the worlds high tech capacity - All the worlds oil they can lay their hands on
Leading to the Chinese having all the jobs and all the wealth. Once the U.S. is bankrupt and unemployed I guess there is comfort in knowing we have tin cans at the Lagrange points.
Only approach I can see the U.S. angling for is borrowing and spending its way to bankrupty and then using its vast military superiority to take back all the wealth from the rest of the world. Its not exactly a free market approach though;)
The people in Space Command are long range thinkers bordering on psychotic. They need to think of stuff like this to justify their existence and their budgets. It must be tough for them to be the only armed force that for the most part can't even get to their battlefield because the worlds manned launch capability is so weak that they can't really do the "Starfighter" thing.
Space command does need to worry about protecting all the GPS, comm and spy satellite assets they are so dependent on. Anything beyond that is mostly fantasy, instanity or propaganda. Maybe they are trying to sucker China and Russia in to squandering hundreds of billions on a race to the LaGrange points while they kick back and laugh.
Not having read the article but the only use Space command could make of the lagrange points or a moon base it put big beam weapons there. They are to far away to be useful for anything else, other than maybe "last strike" nuclear weapons. You aren't going to spend the vast energy and money needed to get conventional weapons to them and back. They are to far away to be much good for spying. I for one shudder at the idea of spending hundreds of billions of dollars putting beam weapons in space, or that the U.S. could or should have the capacity to instantly vaporize people from space.
All in all this is just another case of the wacko'
I developed this fine attitude towards NASA because I've known way to many people at NASA. There are some great people at NASA but they are shining stars in a bureaucratic wasteland. There is a sea of mediocre civil servants there building little empires and who can't be fired no matter how bad they are, like all government agencies. The true conservatives are right, the ever exanding and ever incompetent civil service is sucking the life out of America. And there is an army of contractors there who are looking for a paycheck, not to push back any frontiers, though its so cool to brag about working at NASA, ooooo. The number 1 priority for all of them is to maximize the quanity of our tax dollars they gain control over so they can squander them.
NASA took a nation of young people who in 1969 reveled in Star Trek and Apollo dreams about space exploration, and pushing back frontiers, me included, and they completely crushed every one of those dreams. When I was younger I marvelled at Apollo and now it will be a miracle if anyone manages to get back to the Moon before I die. I have zero chance of ever making it out of Earth's gravity well now unless its on a Rutan spaceship. Back in 1969 me and Von Braun figured we would be on Mars by now, and pushing even further.
I had a roommate in college who worked at JPL and I kick myself for not having done anything to get my foot in there. They are one of the few places still living the dream, there and Scaled Composites.
Please stop being a whiny apologist for NASA's manned space ministry. Just face it, it hasn't worked in 30 years, anyone with a clue can see and state the obvious.
"Being right doesn't equate to being arrogant, and I for one am happy to keep foreigners out of the critical path and out of the militarily strategic high ground."
Well all you are is arrogant, and a xenophobe. Me I judge and respect people based on their ability and accomplishment and not on blind nationalism. The increasingly xenophobic American approach to the world creates a high probability of isolation. I have high hopes the ESA will partner with Russia on Kliper, give them much needed cash and the result is ESA and Russia will have a good man rated vehicle and the ESA will be free of NASA's petty tyrannies.
"Speaking of dissing, you should lay of the Shuttle. "
Stick it. The shuttle deserves a heavy dose of reality and the truth. Its managed to avoid it for way to long.
"It's humanity's best and most reliable (both in absolute and statistically significant) manned vehicle to LEO."
Bullshit again. Soyuz is by any definiton more reliable. The Shuttle has killed more astronauts than any space vehicle in history. Like I said the Soyuz kept the ISS going for the last 2 1/2 years. Don't think Soyuz has ever been ground for 2 1/2 years. That is not realiable especially when you have a space station that REQUIRES regular launches.
If the Shuttle were reliable it wouldn't be flying with the massive safety constraints its now flying with it.
"Yeah, it's expensive. So what -- we can afford it."
As for affording it that is OBVIOUSLY untrue. Griffin is struggling to scrape together the money for CEV because the Shuttle and ISS are bleeding NASA white. They've been draining NASA white for decades. You need to judge the cost based on lost opportunity. How many cool things could NASA have done that would have had real long term benefit but couldn't because they were pouring billions in to two vert dead ends.
Oh and again if you face reality in both budget deficit and current account deficit the U.S. can't afford it any more, for the most part your dreaded foreigners are paying for it.
Interesting irony you are so keen on "keep foreigners out of the critical path" but you are totally dependent on borrowing money from them to keep the U.S. afloat and to squander their money on NASA.
Is this C code you wrote written to do specific and simplish things on the TI, nice clean loops, with not much functions or logic or use of pointers. Were you being careful to write code that the compiler could fathom and do well on it, or is it some arbitrarily complex C code like a web browser or an email program using pointers, unions, templates, GUI layers, tons of function calls and massive numbers of if statements, etc. My experience optimizing compiler might do OK on the first kind, not so good on the second kind and most code on the desktop is the second kind.
At runtime the CPU can deduce two pointers aren't pointing to the same data and its safe to put them in parallel. That is a lot harder to do at compile time unless there is a coder there to say, don't worry none of these pointers are working on the same data so you can do them in parallel. The compiler has to opt for the safe and slow approach by default.
Fortran's absence of pointers make it a lot easier for optimizing compilers to work on.
Most of the optimizing compilers I've used, none recently, did OK on clean vectorizable loops with no function calls or login in the middle, array indexing and no pointers. You throw typical ugly C and C++ code at them and they throw up their hands, give up and turn in to dogs.
"Apollo did just fine without collocation and with Kennedy and the Manned Space Flight Center"
Apollo had VAST funding and could spend its way through any problem and any excess. Apollo had a precisely defined mission and schedule, thank you JFK, and uninterrupted funding to achieve it. Apollo happened before NASA had a chance to fully atrophy and bureaucratize. It was young then, the people were all the best, and they were there because they wanted to do the impossible. It was a set of teams a lot more like Skunkworks teams. None of that is true of today's NASA soviet ministry of space. Also note that scattered Apollo team built some pretty crappy hardware in the beginning. As you recall they killed 3 astronauts in a fire because their first attempt at a capsule was a badly designed death trap.
I'm not saying you can't do distributed space craft development, I'm just saying its a great way to waste money, blow schedules, and cripple the project with communication problems. Just because its the only way NASA has done development doesn't prove its right and its obviously gotten less right with the passage of each new decade.
"Remember, politics are not bad -- it is how large groups of people in a democracy make decisions."
In your post of five minutes ago you were pointing out what a great job the Shuttle team and that you had to give them allowances due to "the constraints they had to work within." Most of thost constraints were politically induced, between Presidents Congress, NASA, and the Air Force. To win DOD funding and support they had to make design changes that made the vehicle vastly more expensive and dangerous. As soon as Challenger blew up the DOD dropped the Shuttle like a rock, even though they were key contributors to making it the overpriced mess it is.
ISS was nothing but an exercise in politics and it is a complete disaster as a result. Politics doesn't belong anywhere near successful engineering. Good engineers do things becuase they are right not because they are politically correct.
If you are going to develop successful, complex spacecraft for a reasonable price, the politicians or corprate executives need to set the objective, insure an adequate funding steam, and then get out of the way and let engineers like Von Braun, Kelly Johnson or Burt Rutan figure out how. JFK mostly did that with Apollo. It hasn't been done that way since and NASA hasn't succeeded since.
"Kelly Johnson's "rules" are fine and dandy for single vehicle development efforts -- in fact they are fantastic. But the systems we are discussing are far beyond even the remarkable SR-71 and U-2."
Bullshit. The team is going to be bigger than the original skunkworks but his approach would work just as well for CEV as it did for SR-71. The key point is hiring a team half or a quarter the size of the one NASA would hire, and to be selective so you don't hire the worst fraction of the people.
Its not really about rules, its about an approach that is obviously superior to NASA's, unless you like bureaucracies, and no one in their right mind does.
"Finally, any successful team requires mutual respect."
Respect is something you earn. If you give it to people who don't deserve it it isn't respect, its pandering. Dude I don't know either of you, I haven't read any posts you've written that command respect. If you ever write one I'll consider it. Your concept of mutual respect sounds like modern NASA kind of politically correct mutual respect you practive during consenus building. Hire a bunch of people and "mutually respect" each other even if they're losers, and end up with a losing team with one failure after another. Respect is earned and the best way to earn it is to succeed.
Rutan commands respect because he's done two hard things no one else has done, Voyager and SpaceShipOne, on tiny budgets and with tiny teams, teams so small that teammebers can said I made that happen, versus NASA where the team is so large half of them can do nothing useful and you wont notice.
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Don't mind Threeep, he is also your average, arrogant, stuck on himself and his country, American. Other great comments he's made this weak:
- Suggested Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam are better places thanks to the U.S. (apparently Threeep considers it a form of urban renewal to bomb places to the ground, kill all the women and children so they can start fresh)
- Referred to India or was it Pakistan as "Smellistan"
- Suggested Russian prostitutes need to work harder and turn more tricks to fund the Russian Space Agency.
People like Threeep and the parent in this thread give American's a bad name, a really bad name.
"The Chenyans I think. I am too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I believe they are the ones who took a theater filled with people hostage and then killed a bunch of them..."
Others have hit on most of the flaws in your post, you really should learn to use Google it would make your posts sound a little more informed.
Chechnyans did sieze control of a theater, they killed 2 hostages, and wounded 2 others. But the Russian police killed more than 100 of the hostages when they pumped a gas containing a potent narcotic or nerve agent, possibly supplied by the U.S, in to the theatre to disable the hostage takers. Unfortunately they overdosed many of the hostages. It wouldn't have been so bad but they made bad plans, or no plan at all, to quickly get the hostages out of the gas, to treat them on scene or get them to hospitals. Slow treatment multiplied the death toll.
What Chechan terrorist do is bad, but what the Russians have done to Chechnya is far worse. They've pretty much bombed the entire country in to the stone age, killed an untolled number of civilians and liberally tortured many more. Russian= has been trying to suppress a nationalist and Islamic revolt there for year and they have used the most same brutal tactics they used in Afghanistan(their war in Afghanistan also led to the creation of Al Qaeda which in those days was funded and armed by the CIA because back then they were killing Russians. The Russians failed in Afghanistan and they will probably fail in Chechnya. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, an infidel nation savaging a Muslim population is a very effective recruiting poster for Al Qaeda, Islamic extremists, suicide bombers and terrorists. These wars create Muslim extremism they don't stop it.
We all know you love the Shuttle and NASA ThreeeP and you are going to trash anyone and everyone who is trying to do something better and cheaper. You can trash SpaceShopOne all you want but the people who designed and built it accomplished their objectives, as modest as they were, and they did it with a small number of people, pretty much on budget and on schedule. That is indication of good engineering, versus the mess that is NASA, which is probably what the parent was alluding to.
Scaled Composites' whole budget was equal to about 1/50th of the real cost of a single Shuttle launch. In particular watch the Discovery documentary on it, Black Sky: The Race for Space". It will restore your excitement for space exploration, instead of demoralize you like the Shuttle and NASA did this week. In the 60's and 70's lots of kids wanted to be astronauts. I wonder if its true today. I doubt it, NASA has managed to make being an astronaut tedious, uninteresting and unexciting which was really hard to do.
Let's look at the object of your affection, the Shuttle. Its is once again indefinitely grounded. From one press conference I heard the intermittent failure in the ET sensor has been yet another long running glitch in the Shuttle they never fixed and it just bit them in the ass, thankfully not during a launch. The glitch if it had happened in 2 or more sensor during launch could have either resulted in a premature cut off or running the engines dry at which point they might fly apart and cause fatal damage. NASA as only NASA can do has no less then TWELVE teams working the problem, TWELVE. I could see three maybe four, one for the ET/sensor, one for the wiring to the shuttle and one or two for the shuttle processing the data. I guess you can do TWELVE teams when you have an army of like 6,000 on you payroll who are getting paid whether they launch or not, though one wonders why they couldn't find at least 6 teams to fix it before now before it bit them in the ass.
LAUNCH RATE - The shuttle was supposed to launch every month if not more often. Over its lifetime it has averaged 4 launches a year and its launch rate has gone down every year. It now:
- can't launch at night
- can only launch to the ISS and there are daylight windows to the ISS only part of the year
- can't launch if there are any clouds in the area with water drops large enough to damage the times
- can't launch with wind shear in the area
- is launched in Florida where there are perpetually clouds, rain and thunderstorms in the area, especially during the day which is the only time the shuttle can launch
And of course the Shuttle has spent nearly 5 years grounded. The only reason the ISS hasn't been abandoned is the Russians have been supplying it and ferrying astronauts to it at their expense(because NASA wont pay them due to a Congressional boycott against Russia over a reactor in Iran). Russia just recently said enough is enough and aren't going to ferry any more U.S. astronauts, or U.S. supplies to the ISS unless the U.S. pays for it. You see NASA has bad credit bordering on deadbeat status as far as the ISS goes. If the Shuttle continues to fail to fly the U.S. involvement in ISS is in immediate trouble.
COST - The shuttle was supposed be cheap to launch becuase it was so reusable. In fact it is one of the most expensive launchers in history. Counting everything the Shuttle is averaging $1.3 Billion per launch. Part of the problem is there is a full time army of around 6,000 on the direct payroll and even more at contractors providing parts. As the Shuttle remains grounded and its launch rate continues to fall that payroll stays the same so it gets ever more expensive per launch. Amazingly Congressman are mandating they all stay employed during the transition to CEV, NASA being a jobs program, with the possible conclusion CEV will be just as expensive to launch as the Shuttle.
RELIABILITY -
Yay. It appears the Russian government has green lighted Kliper and hopefully other countries, especially ESA might chip in. My horse is off and running. Meanwhile NASA let some multimillion dollar contracts to Boeing and Lockheed to provide paper for a committee meeting.
I notice your current horse, the Shuttle, the one you said was so reliable, such a success and achievement, is for all practical purposes grounded indefinitely. Apparently there was yet another one of long running intermittent failures, this time in the ET fuel sensor they never fixed, one that could have either caused premature engine cut off or failure to cut off the engine when the tank empties and threatened another catastrophic failure.
We should have confidence that it will be fixed because now they have TWELVE, thats right TWELVE, different teams trying to fix it. I guess you can do TWELVE teams when you have 6,000 people working at your jobs program.
GO TEAM GO.
Microsoft is preparing for the day when there will be widespread sale of TV programs and feature films via the internet and PC's. To answer your question if you want to buy and view this content legally you will probably have to bow to this requirement eventually unless Microsoft realizes how futile it is and abandons it before it ships. The MPAA is pretty anal about DRM on any PC or settop that is going to get access to full resolution, perfect digital copies of their feature films. Even with DRM on the PC/Settop box can still steal copies off the video signal which is what they are trying to stop.
Of course this will only frustrate the average consumer and the technicly illiterate casual pirate. Chances are the technicly skilled and the hard core pirates(organized crime, Asian gangs etc) will still figure out a way to tap the cable and apply any decryption necessary to the video signal.
Oh, and DVD Jon will probably post a HOWTO on how to break it a day after its out.
"Somehow I feel that the US government will not be happy until we have "secured our borders" until the government is entirely isolated."
I think you misstated the situation. The Bush adminsration and homeland security are really only striving to secure our borders against people who are trying to get here legally and through legitimate channels. Its become incredibly hard to get a visa to live in the U.S. so people who have them now and are living law abiding productive lives here, and I know a few, are being forced to leave when their visa expires, and a lot of very talented undergraduate and graduate students, engineers, etc who have provided a lot of highly educated talent to America's universities and economy are either not able to get in to the U.S. or opting not to try because its to dangerous to come to the U.S. as a non citizen. The U.S. government is establishing a track record of harrassment, denying basic due process(access to a lawyer and your embassy if you are arrested something all civilized countris honer), artbitrary and indefinite arrests, deportations to 3rd world countries for torture etc. so the U.S. is no longer viewed as a safe place for the best and brightest from around the world to come and study or work, especially if you are or look Arab or Muslim. End result massive damage to the economy of a country with a generally bad education system and which is very dependent on foreign educated talent.
But here is the rub, the Dept. of Homeland Security has done next to NOTHING to stem the tide of illegal aliens pouring in to the U.S. especially across the U.S. Mexican border, nor will they other than put on a show now and then. Those illegal aliens represent a vast pool of hard working, easily exploited, ultra low wage labor. Many U.S. businesses are completely dependent on it to compete, and they in turn are pressuring politicians to turn a blind eye to illegal immigrations across the border or illegal immigrants once they are here.
So the irony is its increasingly impossible for the world's best and brightest to get in the the U.S. legally, but if you are unskilled, uneducated, or a suicide bomber, and are willing to swim the Rio Grande its NO problem coming to the U.S. and probably living out your life there, which might be brief in the case of the suicide bomber.
Well yea but no one votes for Vice President. At least until Dick Cheney came along it was largely a ceremonial post. Since Dick Cheney its the office where the real power lies in America today because George is to dumb to run a pathetic little oil company or a baseball team, let alone a superpower.
As soon as the VP who invented the Internet ran for President he lost once again proving there can never be people in the government who understand IT. If that Al Gore had had a better mastery of IT maybe he could have rigged the election in his favor instead of it being rigged so he lost.
Uh, this is a compeltely overblown attempt at sensationalism, and its just another embarrassment for Slashdot editors that they bit. Lazarus isn't exposing anything beyond finding someones address in a phone book(or if its unlisted in some other public database), and I image the Wilson's address is widely known at this point. Its not exactly top secret, that once you find someones address, you can get directions or an aerial photo in this day and age. News at 11.....we have this thing called the Internet where you can get maps and photos these days. If you've ever contributed to a political campaign, your name, I think address and how much you gave is online now too.
The only confidential information involved in this whole pitch was that Plame was a CIA agent and THAT was probably not in any public records until Bob Novak published it in a newspaper, probably thanks to Karl Rove or his friends in the White House for leaking that fact to him. Whomever was spreading it around that she was a CIA agent was the only one guilty of anything here, and that was a very low tech ancient offense, leaking and smearing.
The Judith Miller case is potentially interesting though. Maybe she is a crusading journalist fighting for a first ammendment right to protect sources which is the angle most media outlets pitch since she is one of their own. But there are two alternate explanations floating around that are plausible, more interesting, but hard to prove:
A. Judith Miller was a key inciter of the WMD charges against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. She made her career frothing up a panic about the dangers of chemical and biological weapons, and she did half the Bush administrations work for them in trying to build a case that Saddam was an imminent danger to the U.S. because he had them so had to be taken down (at GREAT cost to the U.S. in blood, gold and respect). At this point it appears Miller's multiyear WMD crusade against Saddam was totally wrong. In some circles her career as a journalist is in ruin, because she was both wrong, and looks like a patsy for the Bush administration. Some think she went to jail with glee in an attempt to salvage her reputation by playing the martyr.
B. The second alternate is that Miller is hiding more than just her source. There are indications that her source already released her from any need to maintain confidentiality, so there is a question as to why she still is. One hypothesis is that Miller may have been one of the earlier people who found out Plame was a CIA agent and she may have been calling people, like Karl Rove and saying, "Did you know Joe Wilson's wife is a CIA agent specializing in WMD and sent him on the mission", and people like Rove were repeating something Miller told them, not leaking to Miller. If thats the case, though its a bit of a long shot, then she could be charged for blowing Plame's cover and she might refusing to testify to the grand jury not to protect her source but to protect herself, and in a way that is less obvious than pleading the fifth.
Well I'd have to say she is bright in that she obviously adept at sucking up to a rich and powerful man and and figured out a good plan to get on a fast track to a high paying job in Redmond. A key benefit there being escape from a mostly poverty stricken, very Islamic Pakistan, where she probably doesn't have great prospects in adult life, being a women in a very Islamic country, beyond getting married and raising a lot of kids.
I'm betting she's well on here way to locking up a college scholarship from Microsoft already.
So even if the exams are an exercise in memorization, she is obviously crafty(assuming her parents didn't make here cram for the exams and write the poem).
" The US is one of the strongest forces for "good" in the world today. "Good" is an abstract concept, and in the eye of the beholder, but I think "by every reasonable analysis" this is more than obvious."
I'm pretty sure the only beholders who agree with you are your fellow Americans who are so totally stuck on themselves that they will ALWAYS refuse to believe the U.S. is ever wrong, or makes mistakes or screws over the rest of the world. The U.S. has propped up a plethora of right wing dictators all over the world in the last century, all just as bad as Saddam. The U.S. was A-OK with Saddam when he was bloodying the Iranians and before he invaded Kuwait and threw out the Bush family's friend, the completely corrupt emir of Kuwait who is totally a dictator(so much for "Freedom and Democracy" again).
For the last half of the 20 century as long as a ruthless dictator was anticommunist the U.S. was glad to support them, and could care less about "Freedom and Democracy". The Shah of Iran and Pinochet being sterling examples in a hall of shame.
The dynamics are a little different today with no U.S.S.R and the communists in China being A-OK now as long as the West can turn a profit there.
Pretty much the entire world outside of the U.S. is of the opinion the Iraq invastion was a complete mistake and was pouring gasoline, not water, on the fire burning in the muslim world,
"I care about Iraq because it was/is a security threat to the US and its allies. It no longer is -- mission accomplished. Eliminating a dictator and freeing the country were nice side-effects."
You are completely on drugs again Threeep. Iraq is now the nexus for a rising tied of hatred and resentment directed at the U.S. by the world in general, and the Muslim world in particular. Its also a tinderbox that could easily end up in full fledged civil war as soon as the U.S. gets tired of it and pulls out. Its almost certain to end up as an Iranian style Islamic republic as soon as the U.S. stops pressuring the Shia. The area around Basra, the Shia heartland in the South, is already well on its way to hardline Islamic rule, ala Taliban and Iran, with full fledged oppression of women in particular. Women had more freedoms under Saddam than they are likely to have in the Shia controlled parts of the new Iraq.
Forgot to add the other result of my analysis of shuttle launches, Republican Presidents are dangerous to the manned space program
- Reagan helped encourage the Challenger launch on the coldest day at Kennedy in nearly forever and the Shuttle had a known problem with O-ring blowby on cold days(and on this cold day it destroyed the Shuttle)
- George W. Bush and his administration, threatened NASA to stay on schedule finishing the ISS or risk having it canceled and it was a key contributor to the Columbia disaster
- Richard Nixon killed Apollo early, and started the monstrosity that is the Shuttle and at the same time underfunded it, and I think he was the one that arm twisted the Air Force to joining in on the Shuttle and they inflated the requirements making it both much heavy and more dangerous.
- If memory serves Reagan was the prime mover behind the ISS, the $100 billion dollar hole in space in to which most of the space budgets been going.
Doesn't bode well for CEV, the return to the Moon and going to Mars since it was concieved by a Republican President.
The only two successful president's in terms of manned space exploration, JFK and LBJ, both Democrats. The Moon landing was under Nixon but it was already a fait accompli when he came in to power.
What's wrong with this picture:
- Shuttle can only launch during daylight now because they have to be able so see the launch to watch for damage since Columbia
- Daylight launch window to ISS is available only part of the year
- Shuttle can't launch in bad weather
- Well no its worse than that. Shuttle can't launch any time there are clouds anywhere near the trajectory that might have water drops big enough to damage the extremely fragile tiles
- Shuttle cant launch if there is wind shear in the area
- Shuttle launchs in Florida, and during the afternoon especially in the summer, its always cloudy, raining or there are outright thunderstorms with lots of wind shear
- Shuttle is an overly complex design, with about a million parts, most of which can fail especially as it gets older, and they are reused(though the ET isn't reused) so the chances of a part failing during the countdown are high
Chances of Shuttle launching on schedule, slim to none.
Chances of Shuttle launching close to schedule, slim.
Reliability of the Shuttle, very low.
The two memorable times NASA went all out to launch the Shuttle on schedule, no matter how dangerous:
- Challenger because they had to get a teacher in space before Reagan's State of the Union
- Columbia because they had a countdown clock screensaver on their PC's telling them they had to launch to stay on schedule assembling the ISS because the White House had given them and ultimatum to stay on schedule or else. They didn't adequately pursue the ice strike because they didn't want to threaten the next launch schedule.
Bottomline is the Shuttle is unlikely to launch on schedule.
Yea they dont sound so bad if you just summarize the titles :)
If you actually read what each of those hurdles entails you would find they could easily be onerous, arbitrary and you are completely at the mercy of a whole bunch of agencies and bureaucrats and one of which could shoot your project down on a whim. You have to get approval from the FAA, DOT, DOD, NASA, State, EPA and in some cases other agencies.
DOD and State can shoot you down on "national security" grounds because ANY launch vehicle can be a national security threat if misused and pointed at the White House.
EPA can shoot you down because your exhaust might be considered excessive pollution
FAA has to review EVERY payload you launch. Interestingly U.S. government owned payloads are exempt from said review.
You have to carry liability insurance of an amount arbitrarily set by the DOT and it could easily be prohibitively expensive.
You have to pass a safety review and prove you don't pose a threat to the public. Well the Shuttle fails that one because Columbia rained hazardous debris over half of Texas including peoples homes and farms.
Bottomline all these rules could be either easy or hard. You are at the mercy of the whims of a bunch of bureaucrats. You invest millions or billions on your launcher and they can cut the legs out from under you in a heartbeat and permenently ground you. End result most people wont even want to risk getting in this business in the U.S.
What exactly is it you do Threeep that gives you such a high tolerance and fondness for red tape and out of control bureaucracy.
"They end up reschduling a good deal of all shuttle flights due to weather or other circumstances'
They reschedule Shuttle fights a LOT, probably more than most launch vehicles. You can just write it of to "these things happen" and they do in all space vehicles. The problem with the Shuttle is it has a lot more opportunites for failure due its complexity, age, resuse(though thats not an issue on this tank) so it has real problems launching on schedule and always has. Its just not reliable. NASA completley abadoned the KISS principle when they designed the Shuttle and they have been paying for it ever since. Over its lifttime, all factors considered each Shuttle flight costs $1.3 billion dollars which is ridiculously expensive.
The thing about weather delays, is the Shuttle's tiles are way to fragile for a launch vehicle, especially one launched in Florida which has daily thunderstorms. Its not that they can't launch in bad weather. They can't launch through heavy clouds or if there is any chance they will encounter ANY drops of water above a certain size because they damage the tiles.
"They are just dropping off some supplies"
As others have noted they are carrying gyros, one of four on the ISS is failed, one is shut off and they need to be replaced. If any more fail U.S. built intertial control system will stop working and they are back to the original Russian built rockets which require refueling probably at the expense of the Russians. I think they are really heavy so probably can't be launched in a Progress or Soyuz or it would take a whole launch.
The other key problem is NASA hasn't been paying the Russians for any of their astronauts or supplies the Russians have launched for them in the last 2 1/2 years because of a Congressional boycott due to Russia building a reactor for Iran. Russia pretty much told NASA they were cut off and wouldn't do any more free launches for them so the Shuttle pretty much has to start flying reliably to keep NASA's ISS committments, or Congress would have to rescind the boycott and start paying the Russians if they need to ferry any more U.S. astronauts or cargo to the ISS.
"NASA just DOES happen to learn from mistakes"
Please, maybe they learn from SOME mistakes. Track record shows they clearly didn't learn from to mistakes that got people killed:
- O-ring blowby was a known problem and had occurred on missions before it doomed Challenger. It was KNOWN to be worse and more dangerous the colder it was, as the O rings got stiffer, and they STILL tried to launch on one of the coldest days ever at Kennedy to keep Ronny Raygun happy so he could talk about the teacher in space for his State of the Union speech
- Ice falling off the external tank and damaging tiles has been happening since the FIRST flight until it finally broke them in a fatal place on Columbia. THey put insulation on the tank, it kept falling. It happened so much they had to write software to do a statistical analysis on whether it we going to cause fatal damage. When it finally did they ignored it.
"Maybe you would like a $3 billion wind tunnel study on tape adhesion on the launch pad or something..."
Nope just ground and abandon the shuttle and ISS and give the money to someone new to build the next manned launch vehicle who understands the KISS principle. The problem with the Shuttle isn't a cover falling off here, an O-ring failing there, tile damge up there. The problem is its an absurdly complex launch vehicle and there is ALWAYS something going wrong with it, either due to bad design, human error or mechanical failure. Any vehicle that requires 6000 people to keep it working is NEVER gonna be reliable, and its ALWAYS going to cost a bloody fortune to launch.
"And we are capable of building better crew and cargo boosters...It's happening now."
As far as crew boosters go why don't you wait until they actually build something for CEV and see how "better" it is, before you start doing your NASA fanboy thing and shouting how great it is. At the moment all NASA has is a massive exercise in bureaucracy called an RFP(Request for Proposal) and Boeing and Lockheed have a couple sets of weak artists conceptions. Lockheed, last I saw. was proposing a mini-me shuttle which has a pretty good shot at being worse than the shuttle especially if you want to get out of LEO. Boeing was just regurgitating Apollo elements with the notable and critical absence of the Saturn V.
As far as cargo boosters go, NASA still hasn't really matched Saturn, 40 years later. The Shuttle stack might do OK assuming you get rid of all the dead weight that is the Shuttle.
The initial Titan/Delta Heavy proposals for CEV were decidely weak, and you were going to have to have multiple launches to get all the stuff in orbit you need to get to the Moon where Saturn did it in one launch.
Geez you've posted this same comment 5 times now. I think everyones figured it out it was a throw away cover. Yea its no big deal, but.... ... the thing you are totally missing is the IRONY. For a hypersensitive return to flight launch someone goofed, didn't tie down the cover, and managed to damage tiles BEFORE the launch. Damaged tiles being the thing that doomed Columbia so its sure to put everyone, especially the astronauts further on edge, edgy is not a good thing to be in this situation.
You may not have heard of it but there is this thing called the KISS principle in engineering. Soyuz has it, Shuttle doesn't. Soyuz is pretty safe and reliable. Shuttle launches are nail biters now and everyone is just praying they hold together long enough to finish the ISS, so they can be retired before they kill any more people.
"I guess we better shut down NASA..."
Yay, glad to see you came over to my point of view Threeep. Though you are going a little overboard. We just want to shut down the manned space program part of NASA. The great observatories, JPL, aeronautics, earth observation parts all do great work. If we can just get rid of the Shuttle and ISS there will be some money available so they can do more cool stuff AND we can turn some money over to Scaled Composites or the Russians to build some new man rated ships that are affortable.
Maybe they built it on cheap but the staggering launch costs, and inefficiency more than made up for it.
It has some great techical achievements in it, the SSME's as fickle and expensive as they are, are amazing. Unfortunately they are so expensive the wont survive the return to expendible boosters.
As a system the shuttle has really been a complete failure by any unbiased assessment. It was supposed to be cheap to launch and its ended up being staggeringly expensive. It was supposed to have a high launch rate, but the launch rate has gone down pretty much every year on top of the 5 or so years its been completely grounded due to accidents. It was supposed to do everything and now it can't do anything except finish the $100 billion hole in space that is the ISS. You can blame politics, the Air Force got arm twisted in to using it, they forced gross inflation the design requirements making it much heavier, and much more dangerous. Then as soon as Challenger exploded, they dropped it like a rock, went back to expendables, and abandoned a $6 billion dollar launch pad at Vandenburgh.
The Russians started out trying to copy the Shuttle with Buran but they came to their senses early and realized it was an insane design. The Russians it turned out were smart.
At times there has been a standing army of 6,000 people necessary to launch the shuttle, and that doesn't count all the contractors building parts like SSME's for it. No WONDER it costs a fortune, its a giant jobs program.
From Wikipedia:
"While the shuttle has been a reasonably successful launch vehicle, it has been unable to meet its goal of radically reducing flight launch costs, as the average launch expenditures during its operations up to 2005 accumulates to $1.3 billion [1], a rather large figure compared to the initial projections of $10 to $20 million. The total cost of the program has been $145 billion as of early 2005 ($112 billion of which was incurred while the program was operational) and is estimated at $174 billion when the Shuttle will retire in 2010. NASA's budget for 2005 allocates 30 % or 5 billion to Space Shuttle operations."
Though in fairness I should point out the Bush administration has already squandered way more than this on a couple years of stupidity in Iraq. But then too, if that $174 billion, and another $100 billion plus for the ISS, had gone in to space projects that weren't a dead end we might have something to show for it.
Yawn....
...... LOL.
Why dont you ever show me some respect ThreeE
You are the one who said Russian prostitutes need to turn more tricks to fund the Russian space program, in one sentance proving you are sexist, racist, petty, immature and have no credibility discussing the Russian space program because you have no respect for them. Having no respect for the Russians is dumb because they do some good work, and the do whole projects on what NASA wastes on a single shuttle launch. They could build Kliper on what NASA wastes on a few Shuttle launchs
"I could just as easily say that the US is the ONLY nation with a proven track record of operating outside of LEO."
Cuz the Russians are the only ones who have built permenantly manned space stations RECENTLY. The U.S. has completely lost the capacity to build Saturn's, LEM's etc. You can deduce this because its going to take NASA 10 years and billions of dollars to build CEV, a weak attempt to just Xerox Apollo in the case of Boeing or build a mini-me Space shuttle in the case of Lockheed that would be an insane vehicle for going to the Moon or the Lagrange points.
" I'd much rather the US take control of them than China, who seems to be the only other power with something like the capability."
It depends on how you define "take control" and "capability". If it means putting an unmanned satellite in them then there are a bunch of nations that could do it.
If you mean put a permenent manned station there, the Russians are the ONLY nation with a proven track record of building and long term manning a space station. The Chinese are pretty much at the Mercury stage in their space progream, they can barely get one or 2 people in orbit. The U.S. has been grounded for 2 1/2 years and the ISS would have been abandoned were it not for the Russians. The Russians built Mir and the core of the ISS. The U.S. hasn't managed to build a space station since Skylab, and then it was only manned for 90 days at a time. Though in 10 or 20 years who knows.
That said I doubt ANYONE outside the U.S. military would be insane enough to squander the vast sums needed to put military outposts at all the Lagrange points. I guess the U.S. has developed a collective mental illness that they can almost justify squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on in the name of "security" and "national defense", at a time their current account deficit indicates the U.S. is borrowing $800-900 billion dollars a year and the biggest threat to the "national security" is eventual financial collapse if they stay on the current course. You really can't borrow a trillion dollars year after year and think you wont eventually have to face the reaper.
"But I'd rather them be in control than the Chinese, Indians, or Russians"
If you are worried about the Chinese or Indians you should be more concerned about the fact that they are going to destroy the U.S. with economic competition long before we need to worry about putting weapons at LaGrange points or fighting a war with them. While the U.S. is squandering vast sums siezing control of the Lagrange points, the Chinese are going to sieze control of all the things that matter:
- All the worlds manufacturing capacity
- All the worlds high tech capacity
- All the worlds oil they can lay their hands on
Leading to the Chinese having all the jobs and all the wealth. Once the U.S. is bankrupt and unemployed I guess there is comfort in knowing we have tin cans at the Lagrange points.
Only approach I can see the U.S. angling for is borrowing and spending its way to bankrupty and then using its vast military superiority to take back all the wealth from the rest of the world. Its not exactly a free market approach though
The people in Space Command are long range thinkers bordering on psychotic. They need to think of stuff like this to justify their existence and their budgets. It must be tough for them to be the only armed force that for the most part can't even get to their battlefield because the worlds manned launch capability is so weak that they can't really do the "Starfighter" thing.
Space command does need to worry about protecting all the GPS, comm and spy satellite assets they are so dependent on. Anything beyond that is mostly fantasy, instanity or propaganda. Maybe they are trying to sucker China and Russia in to squandering hundreds of billions on a race to the LaGrange points while they kick back and laugh.
Not having read the article but the only use Space command could make of the lagrange points or a moon base it put big beam weapons there. They are to far away to be useful for anything else, other than maybe "last strike" nuclear weapons. You aren't going to spend the vast energy and money needed to get conventional weapons to them and back. They are to far away to be much good for spying. I for one shudder at the idea of spending hundreds of billions of dollars putting beam weapons in space, or that the U.S. could or should have the capacity to instantly vaporize people from space.
All in all this is just another case of the wacko'
"You obviously don't know anyone at NASA."
I developed this fine attitude towards NASA because I've known way to many people at NASA. There are some great people at NASA but they are shining stars in a bureaucratic wasteland. There is a sea of mediocre civil servants there building little empires and who can't be fired no matter how bad they are, like all government agencies. The true conservatives are right, the ever exanding and ever incompetent civil service is sucking the life out of America. And there is an army of contractors there who are looking for a paycheck, not to push back any frontiers, though its so cool to brag about working at NASA, ooooo. The number 1 priority for all of them is to maximize the quanity of our tax dollars they gain control over so they can squander them.
NASA took a nation of young people who in 1969 reveled in Star Trek and Apollo dreams about space exploration, and pushing back frontiers, me included, and they completely crushed every one of those dreams. When I was younger I marvelled at Apollo and now it will be a miracle if anyone manages to get back to the Moon before I die. I have zero chance of ever making it out of Earth's gravity well now unless its on a Rutan spaceship. Back in 1969 me and Von Braun figured we would be on Mars by now, and pushing even further.
I had a roommate in college who worked at JPL and I kick myself for not having done anything to get my foot in there. They are one of the few places still living the dream, there and Scaled Composites.
Please stop being a whiny apologist for NASA's manned space ministry. Just face it, it hasn't worked in 30 years, anyone with a clue can see and state the obvious.
"Being right doesn't equate to being arrogant, and I for one am happy to keep foreigners out of the critical path and out of the militarily strategic high ground."
Well all you are is arrogant, and a xenophobe. Me I judge and respect people based on their ability and accomplishment and not on blind nationalism. The increasingly xenophobic American approach to the world creates a high probability of isolation. I have high hopes the ESA will partner with Russia on Kliper, give them much needed cash and the result is ESA and Russia will have a good man rated vehicle and the ESA will be free of NASA's petty tyrannies.
"Speaking of dissing, you should lay of the Shuttle. "
Stick it. The shuttle deserves a heavy dose of reality and the truth. Its managed to avoid it for way to long.
"It's humanity's best and most reliable (both in absolute and statistically significant) manned vehicle to LEO."
Bullshit again. Soyuz is by any definiton more reliable. The Shuttle has killed more astronauts than any space vehicle in history. Like I said the Soyuz kept the ISS going for the last 2 1/2 years. Don't think Soyuz has ever been ground for 2 1/2 years. That is not realiable especially when you have a space station that REQUIRES regular launches.
If the Shuttle were reliable it wouldn't be flying with the massive safety constraints its now flying with it.
"Yeah, it's expensive. So what -- we can afford it."
As for affording it that is OBVIOUSLY untrue. Griffin is struggling to scrape together the money for CEV because the Shuttle and ISS are bleeding NASA white. They've been draining NASA white for decades. You need to judge the cost based on lost opportunity. How many cool things could NASA have done that would have had real long term benefit but couldn't because they were pouring billions in to two vert dead ends.
Oh and again if you face reality in both budget deficit and current account deficit the U.S. can't afford it any more, for the most part your dreaded foreigners are paying for it.
Interesting irony you are so keen on "keep foreigners out of the critical path" but you are totally dependent on borrowing money from them to keep the U.S. afloat and to squander their money on NASA.
Is this C code you wrote written to do specific and simplish things on the TI, nice clean loops, with not much functions or logic or use of pointers. Were you being careful to write code that the compiler could fathom and do well on it, or is it some arbitrarily complex C code like a web browser or an email program using pointers, unions, templates, GUI layers, tons of function calls and massive numbers of if statements, etc. My experience optimizing compiler might do OK on the first kind, not so good on the second kind and most code on the desktop is the second kind.
At runtime the CPU can deduce two pointers aren't pointing to the same data and its safe to put them in parallel. That is a lot harder to do at compile time unless there is a coder there to say, don't worry none of these pointers are working on the same data so you can do them in parallel. The compiler has to opt for the safe and slow approach by default.
Fortran's absence of pointers make it a lot easier for optimizing compilers to work on.
Most of the optimizing compilers I've used, none recently, did OK on clean vectorizable loops with no function calls or login in the middle, array indexing and no pointers. You throw typical ugly C and C++ code at them and they throw up their hands, give up and turn in to dogs.
"Apollo did just fine without collocation and with Kennedy and the Manned Space Flight Center"
Apollo had VAST funding and could spend its way through any problem and any excess. Apollo had a precisely defined mission and schedule, thank you JFK, and uninterrupted funding to achieve it. Apollo happened before NASA had a chance to fully atrophy and bureaucratize. It was young then, the people were all the best, and they were there because they wanted to do the impossible. It was a set of teams a lot more like Skunkworks teams. None of that is true of today's NASA soviet ministry of space. Also note that scattered Apollo team built some pretty crappy hardware in the beginning. As you recall they killed 3 astronauts in a fire because their first attempt at a capsule was a badly designed death trap.
I'm not saying you can't do distributed space craft development, I'm just saying its a great way to waste money, blow schedules, and cripple the project with communication problems. Just because its the only way NASA has done development doesn't prove its right and its obviously gotten less right with the passage of each new decade.
"Remember, politics are not bad -- it is how large groups of people in a democracy make decisions."
In your post of five minutes ago you were pointing out what a great job the Shuttle team and that you had to give them allowances due to "the constraints they had to work within." Most of thost constraints were politically induced, between Presidents Congress, NASA, and the Air Force. To win DOD funding and support they had to make design changes that made the vehicle vastly more expensive and dangerous. As soon as Challenger blew up the DOD dropped the Shuttle like a rock, even though they were key contributors to making it the overpriced mess it is.
ISS was nothing but an exercise in politics and it is a complete disaster as a result. Politics doesn't belong anywhere near successful engineering. Good engineers do things becuase they are right not because they are politically correct.
If you are going to develop successful, complex spacecraft for a reasonable price, the politicians or corprate executives need to set the objective, insure an adequate funding steam, and then get out of the way and let engineers like Von Braun, Kelly Johnson or Burt Rutan figure out how. JFK mostly did that with Apollo. It hasn't been done that way since and NASA hasn't succeeded since.
"Kelly Johnson's "rules" are fine and dandy for single vehicle development efforts -- in fact they are fantastic. But the systems we are discussing are far beyond even the remarkable SR-71 and U-2."
Bullshit. The team is going to be bigger than the original skunkworks but his approach would work just as well for CEV as it did for SR-71. The key point is hiring a team half or a quarter the size of the one NASA would hire, and to be selective so you don't hire the worst fraction of the people.
Its not really about rules, its about an approach that is obviously superior to NASA's, unless you like bureaucracies, and no one in their right mind does.
"Finally, any successful team requires mutual respect."
Respect is something you earn. If you give it to people who don't deserve it it isn't respect, its pandering. Dude I don't know either of you, I haven't read any posts you've written that command respect. If you ever write one I'll consider it. Your concept of mutual respect sounds like modern NASA kind of politically correct mutual respect you practive during consenus building. Hire a bunch of people and "mutually respect" each other even if they're losers, and end up with a losing team with one failure after another. Respect is earned and the best way to earn it is to succeed.
Rutan commands respect because he's done two hard things no one else has done, Voyager and SpaceShipOne, on tiny budgets and with tiny teams, teams so small that teammebers can said I made that happen, versus NASA where the team is so large half of them can do nothing useful and you wont notice.