Hydrogen mined from the Moon is useless and economically stupid. It costs $133,000 to put a kilogram of hydrogen on the Moon. It would cost in excess of $5 BILLION to build a hydrogen processing plant (remember, it would have to go into a shadowed crater, autonomously, in a 40 kelvin environment, and process the regolith that contains hydrogen, expelling the waste, without ever being serviced or given maintenance) and about $5 BILLION to build the power system (nuclear fission plant) that would enable it to go into that environment and operate a processing plant...and we don't even know if the hydrogen on the Moon is in large amounts, or close enough to the surface to be useful...and sending a robot into that environment to find out if it exists in sufficient amounts would probably cost about $2 BILLION dollars.
So, what we have to ask ourselves is, how much hydrogen can we put on the Moon for $12B? At $133,000 per kg, that's over 90,000 kg...and all we can use hydrogen for is to make rocket fuel.
What makes a lot more sense, though is to mine oxygen from the regolith. Regolith is everywhere, it's approximately 40% oxyen by weight, and it can be used for either rocket fuel or for environmental control/life support systems. Oxygen also accounts for about 5/6ths of the weight of hydrogen/oxygen fuel, so it's a real bang-for-the-buck sort of material to mine.
Sure thing: this site details the five most common misconceptions about evolution. In fact, we have seen species evolve, such as insects developing resistance to pesticides, and moths changing color in Germany within only a few generations as the trees changed color from pollution. This type of change, repeated over thousands of years, is all that it takes for one species to evolve into another.
The website above shows that there are literally thousands of transitional fossils and has links to images of these fossils. To say that there are no transistionary fossils is simply false.
"Looking in a dictionary, I don't see any connection between the concepts of "unusual" and "unpredictable." Unusual literally means "not usual." The usual state of affairs is for Mars to be further away than this. Therefore, Mars is "not usually" this close (God, I can't believe I have to spell it out for you), and this occurrence is "unusual.""
The usual state of affairs is for Mars to be in orbit around the Sun, and for the Earth to be in orbit around the Sun, and for the two of them to be close together every 26 months. An unusual occurence is for one of these planets to suddenly be moving outside of its normal path, which is what the original poster was commenting about.
In fact, this dictionary shows that the second definition of the word unusual includes "unexpected." There is nothing unexpected, strange, or unusual about two celestial bodies coming close to each other in their orbits, it happens many times every year.
"(God, I can't believe I have to spell it out for you)"
Of course you have to spell it out for me; I am a rational, thinking individual who was trying to understand what other people were saying and show them that it was not "unexpected" or "unusual" in any way for planets to orbit the Sun. Your limited understanding of how to use a dictionary (i.e., stopping as soon as you've found the meaning that you are referring to and not reading on or trying to see what other meanings the word has) just shows how shallow and unthinking your post was. If you had attempted to understand what the other person was saying, and looked beyond the first meaning in the dictionary, then perhaps you would have seen what the other person was talking about; instead, you chose to write inflammatory dialogue.
It's still not "unusual" -- these orbits have been known and tracked since ancient times and are fully predictable. It has to do with the different orbital velocities and the slightly eccentric orbits. The two planets will be close to each other again in 2 years and 2 months, just like always, it's just that they'll be slightly further apart the next time that we get close together.
Imagine an egg still in its shell. Looking down at the egg, it's like the shell is the orbit of Mars and the yolk (still inside the shell, of course) is the orbit of the Earth. In 2003, when the two planets got as close as they can get, it was like both were on the wide end of the egg, where the yolk is closest to the shell. Well, Mars' orbit takes about two years and two months to complete, so this year Mars and the Earth meet up near the wide end of the egg again. In two years' time, though, Mars will be a little further along the shell of the egg when it catches up to Earth, which will be a little further from the wide end of the egg.
In 60,000 years or so, the closest approach will have walked all the way around the edge of the egg until it's at the "closest closest approach," the wide end of the egg. There's nothing unusual about it.
How wasteful is the Shuttle, though? To re-use the Shuttle system's Orbiter, it takes several hundred human-YEARS of work to recertify it for flight--and space hardware technicians aren't cheap! And those solids rockets, they have to be cleaned of the toxic chemicals they use, refurbished, test fired, then cleaned of those toxic chemicals again, and refurbished again, then they can be used for the next Shuttle flight.
The Shuttle system is FAR more expensive than throwing away the system every time. If you rebuild, you get learning curve reductions in cost for a while, manufacturing becomes less expensive...and the system can be upgraded easily along the way.
An often-used comparison is baseball, actually. You know when you throw a baseball "parallel" to the surface of the Earth, it falls down and hits the ground. Now if you throw the baseball a bit harder, it goes out further before it hits the ground.
Now imagine throwing it so hard (faster than about 7.5 kilometers/second--that's a pretty good fast ball) that when it falls, it doesn't hit the ground but rather falls around the curve of the Earth. The forward velocity and the downward acceleration work in harmony to keep the baseball in orbit, or "freefall" around the Earth.
What the atmosphere does is it slows down the baseball, which then begins to spiral in towards the Earth. The spiral starts out slowly where the atmosphere is thin, but increases rapidly as you hit the thicker layers of the atmosphere.
Of course, with the Station, it weighs a bit more than a baseball, so it would hurt someone's noggin if it hit them.:)
That means that the solid BOOSTER will now be turned into a man capable rocket.
Um...aren't the SRBs already human-rated? They are used on the Shuttle Transport System, after all, the entirety of which is human-rated.
I think what you meant to say is that the second stage for the "Scotty" rocket, or single stick booster topped by humans, will need to be built and human-rated.
Also, you are underestimating the work that is involved with the Heavy Lift vehicle. You say: That is nothing more than moving the 3 engines from the shuttle to 5 on the bottom of the fuel tank. There's a LOT of engineering that has to go into that. First of all, the O2 and the hydrogen go through feul conduits on the side of the external tank, not down to the bottom; the feul lines (which are 12" diameter) will have to be routed through the tanks. Since the tanks are built to withstand the pressure of the warming cryogenic liquids, this is no small task. Additionally, the structure of the external tank is built to withstand forces from hanging the weight of the Orbiter on the side; the entire tank will need to be tweaked very carefully to withstand longitudinal loads of having engines on the bottom but the payload on the top.
Finally, your comparison of the Shuttle's payload to the heavy lift's payload isn't a good one either--the orbiter weighs something in excess of 60 metric tons, and should be included in the payload amount. It does go into orbit, after all, that's why they call it the Orbiter. If you just removed that and side-mounted a payload bay right now, you could get 80 metric tons into orbit no problem, without redesign of the external tank, and without extending the boosters to five segments, and you'd be using the safest, simplest parts of the Shuttle system..
Pity that it's only around 80 tons, that's not really enough to get to the Moon with the architecture that NASA has right now.
Oh, and the difference between 60 miles and 300 miles isn't actually 240 miles--orbital velocity is sideways velocity, otherwise you just go up and then fall back down into the same general area. The ide is to move sideways fast enough that when you fall, you fall around the Earth, not back to it. To do a suborbital flight you don't need to go very fast. To go into orbit, the minimum velocity is about 7.5 km/sec, and a Lunar flight requires about 11.5 km/sec. The differences are staggering, especially when you think about the problem of slowing down from 11.5 km/sec!
Um...so I used google for this. Maybe I should have used Yahoo search or MSN search to make the point, but:
here's the search
The thing is, this information is widely available, and other sources have far more detailed (and non-blurry) images. Just try typing in "1600 Pennsylvania Ave" into this website and compare it to Google's satellite images at the highest level of detail.
We need to IMMEDIATELY ban all toursit maps of DC!!! The terrorists might use them to navigate through the city and find buildings of importance to bomb!!
I mean, really, variouson-lineresrouces even tell us where the bars are that the congressional staffers hang out at!! What would this country do if the Senators and Representatives had to read those thousands of pages of documents themselves!?
I don't even want to think about what would happen if the terrorists thought about using THIS map.
Think carefully about giving up your freedoms; you won't get them back.
How can you do that? If you "balance" every threat, then there will be no benefit left to the public.
We're talking about Google maps, here, people. You can find much better satellite pictures from the website Globe Explorer This stuff is public information, available from many sources. Picking on Google is a fun pastime, it's true, but they are not even showing us the most detailed public information available. For instance, you can see the White House in all its glory, zoomed much further in, on Globe Explorer than you can on Google, a website that masks the roof of the building and doesn't have the level of detail that the other site has.
Think carefully before giving up your freedoms; you will not get them back.
I've just always found it amazing most pro global warming folks toss aside with little worry solar effects. Measuring solar energy output is not very easy and hasn't been done over long periods of time.
I would have to disagree with this...we have solar panels in space, where there is no atmosphere to interfere. We can measure EXACTLY how much energy is incident on these solar panels. It's quite well-known how the panels decay over time, and we have hundreds of them up there. The textbook says that we have 1,367 W/m^2 at 1 AU...if the power output of the Sun were changing, it wshould be easy to measure...
The reason why NASA didn't go with a winged vehicle is because they are too cutting edge of a technology. Not only does the vehicle need to withstand the pressure, vibration, and general exitedness of launch, but the vehicle also has to be very good at the extremely tough re-entry problems of EXTREME heat and aerodynamic loads.
The Shuttle is probably the most complex vehicle ever made by man, and it shows--we've lost two of them, we can hardly launch them because there are so many sensors to fail, they are very heavy (80 metric tons of lost cargo!), and have to remain as a single piece (i.e., you can't leave some of the vehicle behind to improve the effectiveness of your thrust) so they are limited to Low Earth Orbit.
This is a false comparison. Planes fly in predetermined paths and each one is carefully monitored by humans in air traffic control at all times.
There are hundreds of activities you do to drive your car, it's a complex machine that has thousands of parts that have to work. Its maintenance is up to the user, and not carefully controlled and checked by the FAA.
Autonomy in software is EXTREMELY hard to test. Every combination of action, fault, and surroundings has to have an experiment to show the software works. This software will need to deal with every possible reality that can exist on the US freeways, city and town roads.
This software can't be fully tested in a lab, either, since in a lab you can only test what you can think of. Real life causes problems that nobody ever anticipates. If you can't anticipate it, you certainly can't expect a programmer to plan for that eventuality.
This problem is FAR more complex than people realize and will take time to solve. Even then, if a majority of people don't trust it, it will not come to be--since it will increase the price of vehicles, it will take legislation to make it happen, and that takes at least a majority vote.
The high radiation environment of space keeps us from using this method for humans.
However, it would be quite useful to use this technology to bring cargo to the Moon for possible astronauts to use. For instance, it's possible to deploy an entire habitat--crew quarters, energy producer, perhaps even in-situ resource production ("mining" water-ice for oxygen and hydrogen to feul your return vehicle)--all before we launch humans on a high-energy tracjectory that will get them there in three days, thus avoiding high radiation exposure.
You could do similar things with Mars. Here's a reference done by the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts part of NASA:
Well, that's the point, isn't it? If things get F-ed up here, regardless of if it's a huge asteroid hitting our planet or some "W"ild and crazy guy pressing the shiny red button, there will be an outpost somewhere else that can continue.
You are absolutely correct that the engineers knew: Columbia's disintegration was predicted by computer modeling; Challenger's disintegration (not a real explosion) was predicted by the Thiokol engineers, who were suprised it even got off the launchpad without exploding.
The question is, though, can a smaller company avoid these problems? To some extent, yes it can. The managers are closer to the engineers and can communicate more directly.
Another problem, though, is "go fever," much of the problem with Challenger was the strong desire to launch. I don't think that any company, regardless of size, is immune to this--just look at what happened with one of the powered flights of SpaceShipOne, where the nav computer winked out during the main rocket engine burn. The pilot should have cancelled the burn immediately, but he pushed it and was successful. Luckily the computer came back on when the burn finished, but still! (This came from watching the documentary "Black Sky", by the way, so I don't have a link. Sorry.)
So, despite engineering usually knowing what the problem is, we're still dealing with fantastically complex machines that, when something goes wrong, there are large consequences. And we'll always have managers making decisions who understand the problems only partially. So I'm still glad that NASA is around, even if they (understandably) sometimes mess up. This IS rocket science.:)
Just think about this for a second. Here we have Rocket Scientists, real actual rocket scientists, who have done this before, and things still get messed up. What if we do leave this to amateurs? How many people will die because of small problems that private companies--who have never done this before--don't anticipate?
And your cost estimate is waaay off. While NASA as a whole gets about $15 billion a year, the Genesis mission had a total cost to NASA of about $216 million, spread over several years for design, development, launch, and operations. You were two orders of magnitude wrong: http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/genesis.html
And really, Space Ship One had problems on its first flight. Just check out http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/06/21/suborbita l.test/
It's just lucky that the problems weren't such that they would be fatal. After all, who would expect that a cold day could blow up a Space Shuttle? Or that a piece of foam the size of a backpack would cause another to disintegrate, when dozens of pieces of foam usually strike the leading edge of the wing?
Your comment actually shows that you don't know how complex spacecraft are. Take a look at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/index.cfm
Consider how bad the radiation environment of space is. Without a magnetosphere to guard it, a spacecraft has to take the full brunt of the radiation put out by the sun, as well as any quasars, pulsars, black holes, and other sources. It's not like you can go buy a radiation hardened computer at your local Best Buy.
So, really, you might be tired of NASA, but nobody, and I mean NOBODY but NASA could have made the two Mars rovers, put them on Mars, and kept them functioning as long as they have.
You might be tired of NASA, but we are only just now beginning to understand how the solar system formed, and the Cassini probe is a large part of why we might be able to figure it out.
Ah, but that would mean that we couldn't go out and do what we do best: build nations, interfere with other people's governments, ignore international attempts to save the world from global warming, etc., etc....
If we just paid attention to the US, we would have no fun at all!
The shuttle had to be redesigned to lower initial costs. The original design was 100% reusable and would not have had either of the problems that caused the shuttles to be lost.
The problem is that the initial design and construction costs come from a different "barrel of money" than operations costs, so NASA engineers were forced to change the design because of congress. The original design would have been much less to launch and maintain, but cost more up front.
As it was, funding was so tight that NASA had to
look for more customers...eventually enlisting parts of the military. They wanted a larger payload capacity, which complicated things further.
They should have been using the SAR during this pass. I don't actually work for the mission, though, so I can only go with the press releases and the website...I'm such a newbie to html that I don't know how to do links, so you'll have to cut-and-paste:
This link has a complete description of the RADAR instrument (along with the other instruments), which has a SAR built in but for height measurements is using a straight radar altimeter with "resolution between 90 and 150m"
Risk is a very technical term. I work for NASA, and we calculate risks all the time. Your definition above is incomplete.
The key to understanding risk is that you have to multiply the probability an event happening by the negative effects of the event. So, there's a relatively high risk of you having a fender-bender in your lifetime, but the potential downside is only a few thousand dollars.
Compare that to the very small, but non-zero, chance of a nuclear meltdown occuring. Even with today's technologies, that number is not vanishingly small. Multiply that number by the economic damage that a real nuclear accident would cause, and you have a fairly high dollar amount. I am not a nuclear engineer, so I won't hazard a guess as to how much this would be.
Any highly coupled, highly complex system will have accidents eventually. Unless the new reactor designs are not highly coupled and highly complex, then there will, eventually, be an accident. Just look at Three Mile Island, where several problems happened at the same time, causing the readouts to be confusing to the engineers. Unless and until a nuclear reactor is a simple and uncoupled system, we shouldn't be using them. As soon as a design can simplify the system, we should be going all out. I believe that so-called "pebble-bed" reactors are a good start, but I don't know enough about them to comment, sorry.
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So, what we have to ask ourselves is, how much hydrogen can we put on the Moon for $12B? At $133,000 per kg, that's over 90,000 kg...and all we can use hydrogen for is to make rocket fuel.
What makes a lot more sense, though is to mine oxygen from the regolith. Regolith is everywhere, it's approximately 40% oxyen by weight, and it can be used for either rocket fuel or for environmental control/life support systems. Oxygen also accounts for about 5/6ths of the weight of hydrogen/oxygen fuel, so it's a real bang-for-the-buck sort of material to mine.
The website above shows that there are literally thousands of transitional fossils and has links to images of these fossils. To say that there are no transistionary fossils is simply false.
The usual state of affairs is for Mars to be in orbit around the Sun, and for the Earth to be in orbit around the Sun, and for the two of them to be close together every 26 months. An unusual occurence is for one of these planets to suddenly be moving outside of its normal path, which is what the original poster was commenting about.
In fact, this dictionary shows that the second definition of the word unusual includes "unexpected." There is nothing unexpected, strange, or unusual about two celestial bodies coming close to each other in their orbits, it happens many times every year.
"(God, I can't believe I have to spell it out for you)"
Of course you have to spell it out for me; I am a rational, thinking individual who was trying to understand what other people were saying and show them that it was not "unexpected" or "unusual" in any way for planets to orbit the Sun. Your limited understanding of how to use a dictionary (i.e., stopping as soon as you've found the meaning that you are referring to and not reading on or trying to see what other meanings the word has) just shows how shallow and unthinking your post was. If you had attempted to understand what the other person was saying, and looked beyond the first meaning in the dictionary, then perhaps you would have seen what the other person was talking about; instead, you chose to write inflammatory dialogue.
Imagine an egg still in its shell. Looking down at the egg, it's like the shell is the orbit of Mars and the yolk (still inside the shell, of course) is the orbit of the Earth. In 2003, when the two planets got as close as they can get, it was like both were on the wide end of the egg, where the yolk is closest to the shell. Well, Mars' orbit takes about two years and two months to complete, so this year Mars and the Earth meet up near the wide end of the egg again. In two years' time, though, Mars will be a little further along the shell of the egg when it catches up to Earth, which will be a little further from the wide end of the egg.
In 60,000 years or so, the closest approach will have walked all the way around the edge of the egg until it's at the "closest closest approach," the wide end of the egg. There's nothing unusual about it.
The Shuttle system is FAR more expensive than throwing away the system every time. If you rebuild, you get learning curve reductions in cost for a while, manufacturing becomes less expensive...and the system can be upgraded easily along the way.
Now imagine throwing it so hard (faster than about 7.5 kilometers/second--that's a pretty good fast ball) that when it falls, it doesn't hit the ground but rather falls around the curve of the Earth. The forward velocity and the downward acceleration work in harmony to keep the baseball in orbit, or "freefall" around the Earth.
What the atmosphere does is it slows down the baseball, which then begins to spiral in towards the Earth. The spiral starts out slowly where the atmosphere is thin, but increases rapidly as you hit the thicker layers of the atmosphere.
Of course, with the Station, it weighs a bit more than a baseball, so it would hurt someone's noggin if it hit them. :)
Um...aren't the SRBs already human-rated? They are used on the Shuttle Transport System, after all, the entirety of which is human-rated.
I think what you meant to say is that the second stage for the "Scotty" rocket, or single stick booster topped by humans, will need to be built and human-rated.
Also, you are underestimating the work that is involved with the Heavy Lift vehicle. You say: That is nothing more than moving the 3 engines from the shuttle to 5 on the bottom of the fuel tank. There's a LOT of engineering that has to go into that. First of all, the O2 and the hydrogen go through feul conduits on the side of the external tank, not down to the bottom; the feul lines (which are 12" diameter) will have to be routed through the tanks. Since the tanks are built to withstand the pressure of the warming cryogenic liquids, this is no small task. Additionally, the structure of the external tank is built to withstand forces from hanging the weight of the Orbiter on the side; the entire tank will need to be tweaked very carefully to withstand longitudinal loads of having engines on the bottom but the payload on the top.
Finally, your comparison of the Shuttle's payload to the heavy lift's payload isn't a good one either--the orbiter weighs something in excess of 60 metric tons, and should be included in the payload amount. It does go into orbit, after all, that's why they call it the Orbiter. If you just removed that and side-mounted a payload bay right now, you could get 80 metric tons into orbit no problem, without redesign of the external tank, and without extending the boosters to five segments, and you'd be using the safest, simplest parts of the Shuttle system..
Pity that it's only around 80 tons, that's not really enough to get to the Moon with the architecture that NASA has right now.
Oh, and the difference between 60 miles and 300 miles isn't actually 240 miles--orbital velocity is sideways velocity, otherwise you just go up and then fall back down into the same general area. The ide is to move sideways fast enough that when you fall, you fall around the Earth, not back to it. To do a suborbital flight you don't need to go very fast. To go into orbit, the minimum velocity is about 7.5 km/sec, and a Lunar flight requires about 11.5 km/sec. The differences are staggering, especially when you think about the problem of slowing down from 11.5 km/sec!
The thing is, this information is widely available, and other sources have far more detailed (and non-blurry) images. Just try typing in "1600 Pennsylvania Ave" into this website and compare it to Google's satellite images at the highest level of detail.
I mean, really, various on-line resrouces even tell us where the bars are that the congressional staffers hang out at!! What would this country do if the Senators and Representatives had to read those thousands of pages of documents themselves!?
I don't even want to think about what would happen if the terrorists thought about using THIS map.
Think carefully about giving up your freedoms; you won't get them back.
We're talking about Google maps, here, people. You can find much better satellite pictures from the website Globe Explorer This stuff is public information, available from many sources. Picking on Google is a fun pastime, it's true, but they are not even showing us the most detailed public information available. For instance, you can see the White House in all its glory, zoomed much further in, on Globe Explorer than you can on Google, a website that masks the roof of the building and doesn't have the level of detail that the other site has.
Think carefully before giving up your freedoms; you will not get them back.
Don't forget the smoot!
I would have to disagree with this...we have solar panels in space, where there is no atmosphere to interfere. We can measure EXACTLY how much energy is incident on these solar panels. It's quite well-known how the panels decay over time, and we have hundreds of them up there. The textbook says that we have 1,367 W/m^2 at 1 AU...if the power output of the Sun were changing, it wshould be easy to measure...
The reason why NASA didn't go with a winged vehicle is because they are too cutting edge of a technology. Not only does the vehicle need to withstand the pressure, vibration, and general exitedness of launch, but the vehicle also has to be very good at the extremely tough re-entry problems of EXTREME heat and aerodynamic loads.
The Shuttle is probably the most complex vehicle ever made by man, and it shows--we've lost two of them, we can hardly launch them because there are so many sensors to fail, they are very heavy (80 metric tons of lost cargo!), and have to remain as a single piece (i.e., you can't leave some of the vehicle behind to improve the effectiveness of your thrust) so they are limited to Low Earth Orbit.
"The light pole near the flash has been inspected and does not show any damage, although the light inside was not working."
Read the article before you comment!
There are hundreds of activities you do to drive your car, it's a complex machine that has thousands of parts that have to work. Its maintenance is up to the user, and not carefully controlled and checked by the FAA.
Autonomy in software is EXTREMELY hard to test. Every combination of action, fault, and surroundings has to have an experiment to show the software works. This software will need to deal with every possible reality that can exist on the US freeways, city and town roads.
This software can't be fully tested in a lab, either, since in a lab you can only test what you can think of. Real life causes problems that nobody ever anticipates. If you can't anticipate it, you certainly can't expect a programmer to plan for that eventuality.
This problem is FAR more complex than people realize and will take time to solve. Even then, if a majority of people don't trust it, it will not come to be--since it will increase the price of vehicles, it will take legislation to make it happen, and that takes at least a majority vote.
However, it would be quite useful to use this technology to bring cargo to the Moon for possible astronauts to use. For instance, it's possible to deploy an entire habitat--crew quarters, energy producer, perhaps even in-situ resource production ("mining" water-ice for oxygen and hydrogen to feul your return vehicle)--all before we launch humans on a high-energy tracjectory that will get them there in three days, thus avoiding high radiation exposure.
You could do similar things with Mars. Here's a reference done by the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts part of NASA:
OASIS
It will take a suite of technologies to get safely to other planets, and possibly another suite of technologies to get back.
Well, that's the point, isn't it? If things get F-ed up here, regardless of if it's a huge asteroid hitting our planet or some "W"ild and crazy guy pressing the shiny red button, there will be an outpost somewhere else that can continue.
You mean like our simplified tax code?
The question is, though, can a smaller company avoid these problems? To some extent, yes it can. The managers are closer to the engineers and can communicate more directly.
Another problem, though, is "go fever," much of the problem with Challenger was the strong desire to launch. I don't think that any company, regardless of size, is immune to this--just look at what happened with one of the powered flights of SpaceShipOne, where the nav computer winked out during the main rocket engine burn. The pilot should have cancelled the burn immediately, but he pushed it and was successful. Luckily the computer came back on when the burn finished, but still! (This came from watching the documentary "Black Sky", by the way, so I don't have a link. Sorry.)
So, despite engineering usually knowing what the problem is, we're still dealing with fantastically complex machines that, when something goes wrong, there are large consequences. And we'll always have managers making decisions who understand the problems only partially. So I'm still glad that NASA is around, even if they (understandably) sometimes mess up. This IS rocket science. :)
I don't know how! I've never used HTML before about a month ago and I've only ever used it for /.! :) Sorry!
And your cost estimate is waaay off. While NASA as a whole gets about $15 billion a year, the Genesis mission had a total cost to NASA of about $216 million, spread over several years for design, development, launch, and operations. You were two orders of magnitude wrong: http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/genesis.html
And really, Space Ship One had problems on its first flight. Just check out http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/06/21/suborbita l.test/
It's just lucky that the problems weren't such that they would be fatal. After all, who would expect that a cold day could blow up a Space Shuttle? Or that a piece of foam the size of a backpack would cause another to disintegrate, when dozens of pieces of foam usually strike the leading edge of the wing?
Your comment actually shows that you don't know how complex spacecraft are. Take a look at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/index.cfm
Consider how bad the radiation environment of space is. Without a magnetosphere to guard it, a spacecraft has to take the full brunt of the radiation put out by the sun, as well as any quasars, pulsars, black holes, and other sources. It's not like you can go buy a radiation hardened computer at your local Best Buy.
So, really, you might be tired of NASA, but nobody, and I mean NOBODY but NASA could have made the two Mars rovers, put them on Mars, and kept them functioning as long as they have.
You might be tired of NASA, but we are only just now beginning to understand how the solar system formed, and the Cassini probe is a large part of why we might be able to figure it out.
You might be tired of NASA, but I'm not.
If we just paid attention to the US, we would have no fun at all!
The problem is that the initial design and construction costs come from a different "barrel of money" than operations costs, so NASA engineers were forced to change the design because of congress. The original design would have been much less to launch and maintain, but cost more up front.
As it was, funding was so tight that NASA had to look for more customers...eventually enlisting parts of the military. They wanted a larger payload capacity, which complicated things further.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/archive/general/ethic s/shuttle.html
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/inst-cassini -radar-details.cfm
This link has a complete description of the RADAR instrument (along with the other instruments), which has a SAR built in but for height measurements is using a straight radar altimeter with "resolution between 90 and 150m"
Risk is a very technical term. I work for NASA, and we calculate risks all the time. Your definition above is incomplete.
The key to understanding risk is that you have to multiply the probability an event happening by the negative effects of the event. So, there's a relatively high risk of you having a fender-bender in your lifetime, but the potential downside is only a few thousand dollars.
Compare that to the very small, but non-zero, chance of a nuclear meltdown occuring. Even with today's technologies, that number is not vanishingly small. Multiply that number by the economic damage that a real nuclear accident would cause, and you have a fairly high dollar amount. I am not a nuclear engineer, so I won't hazard a guess as to how much this would be.
Any highly coupled, highly complex system will have accidents eventually. Unless the new reactor designs are not highly coupled and highly complex, then there will, eventually, be an accident. Just look at Three Mile Island, where several problems happened at the same time, causing the readouts to be confusing to the engineers. Unless and until a nuclear reactor is a simple and uncoupled system, we shouldn't be using them. As soon as a design can simplify the system, we should be going all out. I believe that so-called "pebble-bed" reactors are a good start, but I don't know enough about them to comment, sorry.