I take it you knew that the United States is the best and most desirable country in which to live. It's the country to which much of the world's people would go if they could. Its one of the very few countries in the world that even allows immigration in significant numbers. We may have to build a wall to keep people out, but we'll never have to have one to keep people in.
I don't claim to be a smart person, but I can see a...shall we say... ungrateful guest when I smell one.
Since you find the United States distasteful, I'd suggest you rectify the mistake you made in coming here and go back to the,... shall we say..., feces hole you came from and make room for an immigrant who appreciates the privilege of moving to the United States.
Let's take a look and see.
1) low cost reuseable engines: The Scaled hybrid engine is mostly reuseable, and was designed mostly in house by Scaled Composites.
Is it directly useable for an orbital craft? No. It it scaleable for an orbital craft? No.
Wrong. What makes you think hybrid couldn't be used as part of an orbital system? And the bottom line is that its a rocket motor that required real rocket science to design and implement. SS3 may or may not use a hybrid motor, but it will certainly benfit from the rocket scientists that Burt is growing.
2) low cost reusable ablators: The ablators on the leading edges of SS1's wings are a propritary Scaled design that is far cheaper, lighter, and more effective than any other system.
It is useable for an orbital system? No. Is it scaleable for an orbital system? No.
The correct answer is of course 'yes' to both questions. Keep in mind that Rutan is a materials engineer. He's forgotten more than most materials engineers ever know about making composite aero-structures.
3) "Flight test experience is irrelevant". WTF?
Is the flight test program of an orbital craft anything like that of an aerodynamic craft? No.
Wrong again. Both the X-15 and SS1 were a whole lot like oribital spacecraft, and the infrastructure and experience to test either of those is all directly relevant to testing higher performance craft. Certainly the test pilot community has recoginized the Scaled Composite test team with multiple awards and recognition. The Scaled chief pilot, Doug Shane, is president of the The Society of Experimental Test Pilots.
"I have to agree that I prefer to buy products from (and work for) companies that tend to keep their PR under wraps until they actually have something to show for what they have been spending all of their R&D budgets."
Then you should really admire Rutan. He didn't announce SS1 until he had all the major components built and flying. He has a 30 year track record of not disclosing a new design until it is flying or nearly flying.
Note that the mention of SS3 came not from Rutan, but from Richard Branson, who is a scaled customer.
Rutan mentioned recently that he has a number of customers with interests in space flight, but "Virgin likes talking to the press more than the others".
"1) Scaled did not build their engine. They bought it from SpaceDev. It performs too poorly for, and really cannot scale up to performing well enough for, orbit."
You are mistaken. Scaled designed the engine layout and built both the liquid fuel tank and the composite solid rocket motor tube. SpaceDev and ECS manufactured designed the ignition systems.
Burt himself has said many times that SS1 will not scale to orbit! It is a research vehicle like the X-15. But the experience gained in the SS1 and SS2 programs will translate into orbital hardware, and sooner than anyone thinks.
Burt said at the EAA Connevention that he needs "three breakthroughs to go to orbit" and that he has made one of them. He is confident that the problems can be solved.
Remember, Rutan wants to make both suborbital and orbital vehicles that can be certified to a level of safety equivalent to early airliners. These will be 100x safer than the Shuttle, and will operate at a profit.
"He also has several things working *against* him. His team has no experience in designing or building high performance craft. (Nobody really does, not even NASA.) Nobody, anywhere, has any experience in building low cost reuseable engines. Nobody, anywhere, has any experience in low cost reusable ablators. These are two big problems - airframes and materials (his two great strengths) are virtually non problems. Flight test experience is irrelevant."
Actually, Scaled Composites does have experience in each and every one of the areas listed.
1) low cost reuseable engines: The Scaled hybrid engine is mostly reuseable, and was designed mostly in house by Scaled Composites.
2) low cost reusable ablators: The ablators on the leading edges of SS1's wings are a propritary Scaled design that is far cheaper, lighter, and more effective than any other system.
Three or four years ago at the EAA Convention where Burt announced SpaceShip One he gave full credit to the X-15 program. He said he studied each X-15 flight and talked to Scott Crossfield (the father of the X-15) about it extensively.
The thing that a lot of people here don't seem to get is how incredibly cheap SS1 was compared to any NASA space or air vehicle ever.
SpaceShip was developed and flown for less than $25 million dollars with a core team of ~20 people. Pick any NASA space vehicle that could carry 3 people to 60km, or any NASA airplane for that matter, and perform the calculation:
BUCKS/BANG = NASA COST / SCALED COST
You'll soon see that in most cases $25 million rounds to zero when compare to any similar NASA project, and the bucks per bang ratio is infinity!!!! Rutan produces infinetly more bang for each buch he is given when compared to NASA.
Look at all the Space Station rescue vehicles that NASA has funded and decided not fly, and in many cases not to build.
NASA's manned space flight program has become a self-licking ice cream cone. It can't take a risk, instead it just transfers tax money to LockMart and Boeing for paper studies
There is some hope. NASA recently gave a contract for a paper study to T-Space, a new consortium of companies that includes Scaled Composites and other "can-do" companies. Instead of just paper, they built real hardware and demonstrated real new techniques for orbital crew transfer vehicles.
Scaled Composites should be give 5% of the NASA budget and told to use it to get people into space. No power points, No other specs, just get people into space.
One of the things that Rutan does far, far better than BoeingLockMart is produce a lot with just a handful of people for not much money.
The core team on SpaceShip One was twenty people. BoeingLockMart would have had 2000 secretaries on such a project.
Note that the entire SS1 project, including the vehicle, a supply of new engines, a simulator, control room, carrier aircraft, and three trained pilots cost less than US$25 million. By comparison, a Gulfstream IV business jet costs $US25 million. BoeingLockMart would spend that much on postit notes.
The poster who said manned suborbital flight was not really space flight and was very easy is wrong. The North American X-15 burned up on reentry on one of the two suborbital flights it attempted, flying a profile very similar to that of SpaceShip One. SpaceShip Ones high drag "feathered" configuration was a huge safety breakthrough that never occured to NASA or the big contractors.
At the Oshkosh Convention Rutan said on a number of occasions that his new "Space Ship Company" the joint venture that will build SpaceShip Two will be located at the Mohave. He was very adminate about this. A few years ago Scaled Composites opens an office in Colorado, which Rutan closed when he bought out Scaled from the initial investor group. Rutan said a geographically spread out orgainization can't keep focus like one where everyone knows everyone else.
The orgainization for the SpaceShip Two project is as follows. Scaled Composites will design the craft. The Space Ship Company will build it. Scaled will conduct flight tests and will work with the FAA to certifiy each carrier aircraft and SS2 individually. Once each craft is certified it will be delivered to customers, the first of which is Virgin Galactic.
Rutan also said that he's not yet ready to go to orbit. He said he needs "three breakthroughs" to build an oribiter with a level of safety comparable to the early airliers, and so far he's made only one. Orbiters will come, and I suspect sooner rather than latter.
(and they're not supposed to lose money at all, ever
Oh yes, sure. I'm sure your "vantage" fund promised that you could invest in the stock market with no risk that it could ever go down. It must be nice living in your dream world with all the fuzzy animals. Next time, read the prospectus.
Management of most IRAs and 401Ks is handed over to professional fund managers.
If the management of your IRA and/or 401K has been "handed over to professional managers" then it can only be because you have been found incompentant to manage your own affairs.
Those of us who are compentant adults manage our own 401's and IRAs. You can invest in almost anything in an IRA, and virtually every 401K has serveral choices, including money market funds that are highly unlikely to lose principal. But of since you didn't save anything anyway, its kind of academic, isn't it?
What did pensioners ever do to you?
Nothing you have said has the slightest thing to with "pensioners".
Your moonbat screed boils down to "I'M A VICTUM....WAAAAAAAA".
I'm not "tickled " that someone lost money in the stock market. I am highly irratated when people, of their own free will, chose to invest in highly speclative stocks of companies that in many cases have no income, let alone profits, and then whine and cry when they go down.
Grow up, and quit blaming other people for your own personal failings.
What was then the Fidelity Vantage Fund lost 16% in one year: mostly IRAs and 401Ks, retirement money. Were all the pension managers on the take?
Here's a free clue: IRAs and 401Ks do not have pension managers! IRAs and 401Ks are managed by individual owners. So by your own statement, you're totally wrong.
There is no such fund as "Fidelity Vantage", but I bet that if you read the prospects for the fund you're thinking about you'll find that it told you that there is risk in the stock market. A 16% loss hurts, but it's hardly being wiped out.
I'm sorry you were too stupid to get out before the bubble burst, but its not like there wasn't plenty of warning that it was going to happen. Stop blaming Bush for your own personal failings.
I just got back from the Experimental Aircraft Association convention and flyin at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Richard Branson, Mike Melville, Brian Bennie and a bunch of Scaled Composite and Virgin people were there. Mike Melville flew the White Knight to the show, carrying Mr and Mrs Rutan in SpaceShip One.
I heard a press conference and no less than six 90 minute talks about Rutan's space program from SpaceShip One and SpaceShip Two principles.
Here are some more or less random factoids that were discussed in detail at Oshkosh:
1) The White Knight with attached SpaceShip One were remarkably graceful in flight, far more so than the videos I had seen would have suggested.
2) Allen said that the cost of the entire SpaceShip One program were about the same as a ride to the ISS on Soyuz, i.e. on the order of $20 million dollars.
3) Rutan and his people reveled a number of problems that I had not seen in the press prior to this week. For example, on one of the early White Knight flights one of the nose wheels struck a rough spot in the runway during the take off roll. This nose wheel shimmied to the point were the nose wheel detached from the airframe. White Knight had to make a three wheel one stump landing.
4) The first flight into space exceeded 100km of altitude by only a little more than 100 meters. There was great concern that the motor didn't have sufficient impulse to attain the X-Prize goal of 100km altitude when carrying one human pilot and two passengers or 400 pounds of ballast. They went so far as to buy solid rocket booster motors from Thiokol. In the end they were able to improve the performance of the basic engine without needing these extra boosters. Rutan was coy about exactly how this was done, but the two official X Prize flights did exceed 100Km by comfortable margins. He did mention that engineers from both the winning motor company, SpaceDev of California, and the losing company, EAC of Florida, assisted in improving the motor. They have one more complete motor that was not used.
5) The maximum temperature during reentry was on the order of 200F. The craft experienced greater heating on ascent rather than descent. This heat was control by 14 pounds of Scaled proprietary thermal protection material on the leading edges of the wing.
6) Both pilots were effusive in their praise of the "care free" feathered reentry system. They both said that flying the ascent was very demanding, but that during re-entry they had nothing to do except enjoy the ride.
7) SpaceShip Two will be "one hundred times safer than any previous manned space system" according to Rutan. His goal is to attain a safety level equivalent to the airliners of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
8) Scaled Composites will design SpaceShip Two. The SpaceShip Company will manufacture the craft, Scaled will test and certify the craft. Spacelines such as Virgin Galactic will purchase and operate SpaceShip Two and its carrier aircraft.
10) Each SpaceShip Two and carrier will be individually flight tested and certified. This is an approved alternate certification method to that used for mass produced aircraft. By testing each craft individually, they do not have to provide conformity data back to raw materials as is done with airliners.
11) Rutan anticipates 50 to 100 test flights prior to certification and paid passenger travel. Rutan will fly on some of these flights. In fact, he expects that during the test phase, prior to paid passenger flights, more people will fly into space on SpaceShip Two than have ever flown in space by all other craft.
11) SpaceShip One flew straight up, and recovered straight down. SpaceShip Two will fly 200 to 300 miles down range. Rutan anticipates that Virgin will launch SpaceShip Two over the Pacific Ocean and recovering it at Mohave. This will provide several minutes of atmospheric flight at Mach 2-3 during ascent and descent, providing a Concorde like experience.
Anyway, I don't think you get the point. I am not trying to somehow prove that Allies did things equally bad to what Axis did. Merely that many of their actions also can and should be considered crimes against humanity. Yes, I know that Nazi death camps were much worse than American internment camps. This does not mean that American Japanese interment was not a crime.
The net effect of this "see no evil" head-in-the-sand refusal to see evil when it confronts is very sad. Had this kind of thinking been popular in 1941 the net effect would be that today the world would be one giant prison camp, administered from Berlin and Tokyo.
Soviet Union far surpassed Germany in that regard. UK and especially US also had their share of concentration camps; of course, the number of victims was much smaller, but a crime remains a crime: whether you murder one or ten people, you are still a criminal.
The U.S. did intern people, but there were no "concentration camps" as the term applies to the death camps operated by Japan and Germany. Nobody held by the U.S. or U.K. was starved, raped, tortured, or worked to death.
No, the killing increased. It just became cleaner and neater because the victums were rounded up and taken away in boxcars, never to be seen again. No messy explosions, just the steady hum and warmth of european ovens going 24x7.
I'm sure the attack on Pearl Harbor had nothing to do with the Naval Blockade of their OIL and other resources!
Did you support the boycott of South Africa under the former all white goverment? That goverment was a democractic paridise compared to Japan in the 30s.
Japan was under an embargo because they were invading other countries to bring them in to the Japanese "co-prosperity sphere".
And WTF do you mean "their oil"? They didn't have oil dude.
It all pretty much boils down to this. Axis countries killed a lot of innocent people. Allied countries killed a lot of innocent people. Axis killed more. It doesn't mean that Allies were good - just that Axis were worse. Simple as that.
Wrong wrong wrong!
The allied countries were minding their own business when they were invaded by the Axis countries. The Axis countries practiced orgainized genocide and slavery on a huge scale. The Allied powers liberated the camps and freed the slaves.
There is no moral equivilance between the Axis and Allied powers in World War II. Japan, Germany, and Italy were as close to pure evil as any three countries in history.
I would argue that the same applies to all participants of WWII, as carpet bombings and especially firebombings are nothing but giving no reguards for the lives of civilians in other countries. Though I agree that the Axis countries engaged in atrocities to a greater extent.
That gets the award for massive understatement!!!!!!
The Japanese held competitions to see who could behead the most Chinese in the shortest amount of time. These were featured in newsreels shown all over the country to the "innocent civilian" Japanese.
The Japanese starved whole populations in the Phillipines as they proceeded to systematically loot the country.
The Japanese kidnapped thousands of Koreans, forcing the women to work as sex slaves and the men to be worked to death in mines.
There is no equivilence between the actions of the Allies and the Axis in World War II.
Read the summary for this [loc.gov] proposed bill. Future seems a little shaky now doesn't it -- How does "Darth Bush" sound to you? (Amendment 22 is concerned with that little thing about only having two terms as president, for those non USoAians)
Funny, all the sponsers of this bill are Democrats. Bush has nothing to do with it.
I suspect that this is another joke bill, like the bills to reintroduce the draft that Democrats often submit in place of serious policy proposals.
Democrat Congressmen introduce these silly bills so that their huge moonbat constituency can then have something to fuel their paranoid delusional ravings.
The fact that Japan of that time did not have the slightest regard for the lives of the many countries they invaded and occupied was troubling. The fact that Japan routinely comitted mass murder was troubling. The fact that Japan enslaved hundreds of thousands of people and worked them to death was troubling. The fact that the U.S. suffered 12000 dead and 30000 wounded, and the Japanese about 5x those numbers, in order to occupy one half of the island of Okinawa, which is only 2 miles wide and 50 miles long is troubling.
Most troubling is the fact that people in Japan today would dare to question to any action that civilized nations took to stop their evil dictatorship.
"Western Allies didn't WANT a conditional surrender" It's kind of hilarious to think that anyone in their right mind would consider for minute any sort of "conditional" surrender from Japan, after the total barbarity of the Japanese towards anyone who surrendered to Japan.
And of course, it's not like the Japanese actually proposed even a conditional surrender. At most they sent vague hints through third parties of the possibility that maybe they might consider talking about something at some future date.
And of course they never relaxed their campaigns of mass murder, torture, and enslavement of the countries they conquered by sheer brute force
You're just spouting nonesense. There was no "signal" from the Japanese in any form that indicated anything other than their willingness to fight to the last man, woman, and child. That's exactly what they did on Okinawa.
AS far as Russia invading, that's even sillier. The Russians were not even at war with Japan until after we dropped the bomb!!!!!!!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
"Because of my knowledge"
... shall we say..., feces hole you came from and make room for an immigrant who appreciates the privilege of moving to the United States.
I take it you knew that the United States is the best and most desirable country in which to live. It's the country to which much of the world's people would go if they could. Its one of the very few countries in the world that even allows immigration in significant numbers. We may have to build a wall to keep people out, but we'll never have to have one to keep people in.
I don't claim to be a smart person, but I can see a...shall we say... ungrateful guest when I smell one.
Since you find the United States distasteful, I'd suggest you rectify the mistake you made in coming here and go back to the,
Honestly, why did you come to this country?
Wrong. What makes you think hybrid couldn't be used as part of an orbital system? And the bottom line is that its a rocket motor that required real rocket science to design and implement. SS3 may or may not use a hybrid motor, but it will certainly benfit from the rocket scientists that Burt is growing.
2) low cost reusable ablators: The ablators on the leading edges of SS1's wings are a propritary Scaled design that is far cheaper, lighter, and more effective than any other system. It is useable for an orbital system? No. Is it scaleable for an orbital system? No.
The correct answer is of course 'yes' to both questions. Keep in mind that Rutan is a materials engineer. He's forgotten more than most materials engineers ever know about making composite aero-structures.
3) "Flight test experience is irrelevant". WTF?
Is the flight test program of an orbital craft anything like that of an aerodynamic craft? No.
Wrong again. Both the X-15 and SS1 were a whole lot like oribital spacecraft, and the infrastructure and experience to test either of those is all directly relevant to testing higher performance craft. Certainly the test pilot community has recoginized the Scaled Composite test team with multiple awards and recognition. The Scaled chief pilot, Doug Shane, is president of the The Society of Experimental Test Pilots.
"I have to agree that I prefer to buy products from (and work for) companies that tend to keep their PR under wraps until they actually have something to show for what they have been spending all of their R&D budgets."
Then you should really admire Rutan. He didn't announce SS1 until he had all the major components built and flying. He has a 30 year track record of not disclosing a new design until it is flying or nearly flying.
Note that the mention of SS3 came not from Rutan, but from Richard Branson, who is a scaled customer.
Rutan mentioned recently that he has a number of customers with interests in space flight, but "Virgin likes talking to the press more than the others".
"1) Scaled did not build their engine. They bought it from SpaceDev. It performs too poorly for, and really cannot scale up to performing well enough for, orbit."
You are mistaken. Scaled designed the engine layout and built both the liquid fuel tank and the composite solid rocket motor tube. SpaceDev and ECS manufactured designed the ignition systems.
Burt himself has said many times that SS1 will not scale to orbit! It is a research vehicle like the X-15. But the experience gained in the SS1 and SS2 programs will translate into orbital hardware, and sooner than anyone thinks.
Burt said at the EAA Connevention that he needs "three breakthroughs to go to orbit" and that he has made one of them. He is confident that the problems can be solved.
Remember, Rutan wants to make both suborbital and orbital vehicles that can be certified to a level of safety equivalent to early airliners. These will be 100x safer than the Shuttle, and will operate at a profit.
Actually, Scaled Composites does have experience in each and every one of the areas listed.
1) low cost reuseable engines: The Scaled hybrid engine is mostly reuseable, and was designed mostly in house by Scaled Composites.
2) low cost reusable ablators: The ablators on the leading edges of SS1's wings are a propritary Scaled design that is far cheaper, lighter, and more effective than any other system.
3) "Flight test experience is irrelevant". WTF?
The thing that a lot of people here don't seem to get is how incredibly cheap SS1 was compared to any NASA space or air vehicle ever.
SpaceShip was developed and flown for less than $25 million dollars with a core team of ~20 people. Pick any NASA space vehicle that could carry 3 people to 60km, or any NASA airplane for that matter, and perform the calculation:
BUCKS/BANG = NASA COST / SCALED COST
You'll soon see that in most cases $25 million rounds to zero when compare to any similar NASA project, and the bucks per bang ratio is infinity!!!! Rutan produces infinetly more bang for each buch he is given when compared to NASA.
Look at all the Space Station rescue vehicles that NASA has funded and decided not fly, and in many cases not to build.
NASA's manned space flight program has become a self-licking ice cream cone. It can't take a risk, instead it just transfers tax money to LockMart and Boeing for paper studies
There is some hope. NASA recently gave a contract for a paper study to T-Space, a new consortium of companies that includes Scaled Composites and other "can-do" companies. Instead of just paper, they built real hardware and demonstrated real new techniques for orbital crew transfer vehicles.
Scaled Composites should be give 5% of the NASA budget and told to use it to get people into space. No power points, No other specs, just get people into space.
One of the things that Rutan does far, far better than BoeingLockMart is produce a lot with just a handful of people for not much money.
The core team on SpaceShip One was twenty people. BoeingLockMart would have had 2000 secretaries on such a project.
Note that the entire SS1 project, including the vehicle, a supply of new engines, a simulator, control room, carrier aircraft, and three trained pilots cost less than US$25 million. By comparison, a Gulfstream IV business jet costs $US25 million. BoeingLockMart would spend that much on postit notes.
The poster who said manned suborbital flight was not really space flight and was very easy is wrong. The North American X-15 burned up on reentry on one of the two suborbital flights it attempted, flying a profile very similar to that of SpaceShip One. SpaceShip Ones high drag "feathered" configuration was a huge safety breakthrough that never occured to NASA or the big contractors.
At the Oshkosh Convention Rutan said on a number of occasions that his new "Space Ship Company" the joint venture that will build SpaceShip Two will be located at the Mohave. He was very adminate about this. A few years ago Scaled Composites opens an office in Colorado, which Rutan closed when he bought out Scaled from the initial investor group. Rutan said a geographically spread out orgainization can't keep focus like one where everyone knows everyone else.
The orgainization for the SpaceShip Two project is as follows. Scaled Composites will design the craft. The Space Ship Company will build it. Scaled will conduct flight tests and will work with the FAA to certifiy each carrier aircraft and SS2 individually. Once each craft is certified it will be delivered to customers, the first of which is Virgin Galactic.
Rutan also said that he's not yet ready to go to orbit. He said he needs "three breakthroughs" to build an oribiter with a level of safety comparable to the early airliers, and so far he's made only one. Orbiters will come, and I suspect sooner rather than latter.
Oh yes, sure. I'm sure your "vantage" fund promised that you could invest in the stock market with no risk that it could ever go down. It must be nice living in your dream world with all the fuzzy animals. Next time, read the prospectus.
Management of most IRAs and 401Ks is handed over to professional fund managers.
If the management of your IRA and/or 401K has been "handed over to professional managers" then it can only be because you have been found incompentant to manage your own affairs.
Those of us who are compentant adults manage our own 401's and IRAs. You can invest in almost anything in an IRA, and virtually every 401K has serveral choices, including money market funds that are highly unlikely to lose principal. But of since you didn't save anything anyway, its kind of academic, isn't it?
What did pensioners ever do to you?
Nothing you have said has the slightest thing to with "pensioners".
Your moonbat screed boils down to "I'M A VICTUM....WAAAAAAAA".
I'm not "tickled " that someone lost money in the stock market. I am highly irratated when people, of their own free will, chose to invest in highly speclative stocks of companies that in many cases have no income, let alone profits, and then whine and cry when they go down.
Grow up, and quit blaming other people for your own personal failings.
Here's a free clue: IRAs and 401Ks do not have pension managers! IRAs and 401Ks are managed by individual owners. So by your own statement, you're totally wrong.
There is no such fund as "Fidelity Vantage", but I bet that if you read the prospects for the fund you're thinking about you'll find that it told you that there is risk in the stock market. A 16% loss hurts, but it's hardly being wiped out.
I'm sorry you were too stupid to get out before the bubble burst, but its not like there wasn't plenty of warning that it was going to happen. Stop blaming Bush for your own personal failings.
"The ones who lost were pensioners" (followed by paranoid ravings).
Most of the VC money came from individual millionaires who wanted to be billionaires. Very little, if any, came from pension funds.
As I pointed out above, Rutan will ride SpaceShip Two during the 50-100 test flights.
The passengers on the first revenue flight of SpaceShip Two will include Richard Branson, his wife, and his children.
I just got back from the Experimental Aircraft Association convention and flyin at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Richard Branson, Mike Melville, Brian Bennie and a bunch of Scaled Composite and Virgin people were there. Mike Melville flew the White Knight to the show, carrying Mr and Mrs Rutan in SpaceShip One.
I heard a press conference and no less than six 90 minute talks about Rutan's space program from SpaceShip One and SpaceShip Two principles.
Here are some more or less random factoids that were discussed in detail at Oshkosh:
1) The White Knight with attached SpaceShip One were remarkably graceful in flight, far more so than the videos I had seen would have suggested.
2) Allen said that the cost of the entire SpaceShip One program were about the same as a ride to the ISS on Soyuz, i.e. on the order of $20 million dollars.
3) Rutan and his people reveled a number of problems that I had not seen in the press prior to this week. For example, on one of the early White Knight flights one of the nose wheels struck a rough spot in the runway during the take off roll. This nose wheel shimmied to the point were the nose wheel detached from the airframe. White Knight had to make a three wheel one stump landing.
4) The first flight into space exceeded 100km of altitude by only a little more than 100 meters. There was great concern that the motor didn't have sufficient impulse to attain the X-Prize goal of 100km altitude when carrying one human pilot and two passengers or 400 pounds of ballast. They went so far as to buy solid rocket booster motors from Thiokol. In the end they were able to improve the performance of the basic engine without needing these extra boosters. Rutan was coy about exactly how this was done, but the two official X Prize flights did exceed 100Km by comfortable margins. He did mention that engineers from both the winning motor company, SpaceDev of California, and the losing company, EAC of Florida, assisted in improving the motor. They have one more complete motor that was not used.
5) The maximum temperature during reentry was on the order of 200F. The craft experienced greater heating on ascent rather than descent. This heat was control by 14 pounds of Scaled proprietary thermal protection material on the leading edges of the wing.
6) Both pilots were effusive in their praise of the "care free" feathered reentry system. They both said that flying the ascent was very demanding, but that during re-entry they had nothing to do except enjoy the ride.
7) SpaceShip Two will be "one hundred times safer than any previous manned space system" according to Rutan. His goal is to attain a safety level equivalent to the airliners of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
8) Scaled Composites will design SpaceShip Two. The SpaceShip Company will manufacture the craft, Scaled will test and certify the craft. Spacelines such as Virgin Galactic will purchase and operate SpaceShip Two and its carrier aircraft.
10) Each SpaceShip Two and carrier will be individually flight tested and certified. This is an approved alternate certification method to that used for mass produced aircraft. By testing each craft individually, they do not have to provide conformity data back to raw materials as is done with airliners.
11) Rutan anticipates 50 to 100 test flights prior to certification and paid passenger travel. Rutan will fly on some of these flights. In fact, he expects that during the test phase, prior to paid passenger flights, more people will fly into space on SpaceShip Two than have ever flown in space by all other craft.
11) SpaceShip One flew straight up, and recovered straight down. SpaceShip Two will fly 200 to 300 miles down range. Rutan anticipates that Virgin will launch SpaceShip Two over the Pacific Ocean and recovering it at Mohave. This will provide several minutes of atmospheric flight at Mach 2-3 during ascent and descent, providing a Concorde like experience.
12) Li
You don't know Jack! The CEO must be over six feet tall and have silver hair!
The net effect of this "see no evil" head-in-the-sand refusal to see evil when it confronts is very sad. Had this kind of thinking been popular in 1941 the net effect would be that today the world would be one giant prison camp, administered from Berlin and Tokyo.
The U.S. did intern people, but there were no "concentration camps" as the term applies to the death camps operated by Japan and Germany. Nobody held by the U.S. or U.K. was starved, raped, tortured, or worked to death.
Words mean things.
No, the killing increased. It just became cleaner and neater because the victums were rounded up and taken away in boxcars, never to be seen again. No messy explosions, just the steady hum and warmth of european ovens going 24x7.
Did you support the boycott of South Africa under the former all white goverment? That goverment was a democractic paridise compared to Japan in the 30s.
Japan was under an embargo because they were invading other countries to bring them in to the Japanese "co-prosperity sphere".
And WTF do you mean "their oil"? They didn't have oil dude.
Wrong wrong wrong!
The allied countries were minding their own business when they were invaded by the Axis countries. The Axis countries practiced orgainized genocide and slavery on a huge scale. The Allied powers liberated the camps and freed the slaves.
There is no moral equivilance between the Axis and Allied powers in World War II. Japan, Germany, and Italy were as close to pure evil as any three countries in history.
That gets the award for massive understatement!!!!!!
The Japanese held competitions to see who could behead the most Chinese in the shortest amount of time. These were featured in newsreels shown all over the country to the "innocent civilian" Japanese.
The Japanese starved whole populations in the Phillipines as they proceeded to systematically loot the country.
The Japanese kidnapped thousands of Koreans, forcing the women to work as sex slaves and the men to be worked to death in mines.
There is no equivilence between the actions of the Allies and the Axis in World War II.
Funny, all the sponsers of this bill are Democrats. Bush has nothing to do with it.
I suspect that this is another joke bill, like the bills to reintroduce the draft that Democrats often submit in place of serious policy proposals.
Democrat Congressmen introduce these silly bills so that their huge moonbat constituency can then have something to fuel their paranoid delusional ravings.
The fact that Japan of that time did not have the slightest regard for the lives of the many countries they invaded and occupied was troubling. The fact that Japan routinely comitted mass murder was troubling. The fact that Japan enslaved hundreds of thousands of people and worked them to death was troubling. The fact that the U.S. suffered 12000 dead and 30000 wounded, and the Japanese about 5x those numbers, in order to occupy one half of the island of Okinawa, which is only 2 miles wide and 50 miles long is troubling.
Most troubling is the fact that people in Japan today would dare to question to any action that civilized nations took to stop their evil dictatorship.
You say that likes its a bad thing.
"Western Allies didn't WANT a conditional surrender"
It's kind of hilarious to think that anyone in their right mind would consider for minute any sort of "conditional" surrender from Japan, after the total barbarity of the Japanese towards anyone who surrendered to Japan.
And of course, it's not like the Japanese actually proposed even a conditional surrender. At most they sent vague hints through third parties of the possibility that maybe they might consider talking about something at some future date.
And of course they never relaxed their campaigns of mass murder, torture, and enslavement of the countries they conquered by sheer brute force
You're just spouting nonesense. There was no "signal" from the Japanese in any form that indicated anything other than their willingness to fight to the last man, woman, and child. That's exactly what they did on Okinawa.
AS far as Russia invading, that's even sillier. The Russians were not even at war with Japan until after we dropped the bomb!!!!!!!!!!