"Only the biggest socialists would say a person can't own land..." Not so. There is a different group, the Georgists, who would say essentially the same thing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George : "In 1886 George ran for mayor of New York, and polled second (ahead of Theodore Roosevelt). He ran again in 1897, but died 4 days before the election. An estimated 100,000 people attended his funeral."
In effect, Americans do not own land now - unless tax is paid, the government evicts the "owner", seizes and auctions the property. This is effectively rent. Also zoning, environmental and other laws restrict what the "owner" can do with the property, even in matters which do not have effects reaching beyond the property.
"However, most people can't create anything worthwhile to copyright, so everyone wants copyright to expire so they can get something for free off of the backs of creative people and their investors."
The difference is that they are printing lots more books, but very little new land. Also, physical property such as real estate is inherently exclusionaty, while arrangements of symbols and sounds aren't.
The federal government is constitutionally prohibited from taxing property. It can tax income and property/money transfers, collect duties, and charge fees for services other than voting. It also sometimes does an end-run around this restriction by not paying full value for condemned property (which is technically illegal - but there are catches), criminal seizure, asset forfiture (civil suit against property alleged to have have been used in the comission of a offense against the State), banning of items (formerly thought to require a constitutional amendment, now done directly by agencies), and forced licenses of and secret classification of some patent applications. One theory (besides intrinsic nat. sec. interest) for the last is that they are not "taking" but simply failing to give. This might be extended to copyrights, or they could structure it as a renewal fee.
Although the exceptions seem to swallow the rule here, the core of the no-direct-taxation principle will almost certainly endure since it is the only thing keeping the feds from taking a percentage of large fortunes while the owner is still alive. (Estate taxes are transfer taxes.)
States, OTOH, can tax property directly. IANAL & YMMV.
From the CNN article: "Kamen's goal is to produce machines that cost $1,000 to $2,000 each. That's a far cry from the $100,000 that each hand-machined prototype cost to build."
This has always been the trouble with Stirling engines. They seem simple until you actually try to make one that outputs a usable amount of power at some reasonable efficiency that doesn't cost a fortune. Many people have tried over the centuries, but so far it's always been a matter of picking which two of the three goals you want to fulfill. Dean Kamen has a nontrivial challenge ahead in trying for the Sterling hat-trick.
One way to avoid bad engineering is to stay away from energy sinks into which bunches of time and money have previously been dumped with no visible effect. I like to call these engineering ratholes. Let's look at a few of the more popular examples coming over my voice helpline...
Stirling engines- Every few years somebody rediscovers the Stirling engine. They build a few prototypes which just barely fail to work, and then just barely go bankrupt. The promise here sure is enticing. A low delta-T engine which accepts anything from oily rags to sunlight. But there's two fundamental gotchas here. First, any engine designed for a low DT temperature differential is inherently inefficient. Carnot and all. More crucially, there is a key component to a Stirling engine that nobody - but nobody - has figured out how to build yet. It is called a regenerator. Any regenerator has to be long and thin and short and fat. Not to mention being an excellent insulator and a superb conductor.
Stirling engines require both input and output heat exchangers which must contain the pressure of the working fluid, and which must resist any corrosive effects due to the heat source. These increase the cost of the engine especially when they are designed to the high level of "effectiveness" (heat exchanger efficiency) needed for optimizing fuel economy.
Stirling engines, especially the type that run on small temperature differentials, are quite large for the amount of power that they produce, due to the heat exchangers....
Power output of a Stirling is constant and hard to change rapidly from one level to another. Typically, changes in output are achieved by varying the displacement of the engine (often through use of a swashplate crankshaft arrangement) or by changing the mass of entrained working fluid (generally helium or hydrogen). This property is less of a drawback in hybrid electric propulsion or base load utility generation.
Hydrogen's lowest molecular weight makes it the best working gas to use in a Stirling engine, but as a tiny molecule, it is very hard to keep it inside the engine and auxiliary systems need to be typically added to maintain the proper quantity of working fluid. These systems can be as simple as a gas storage bottle or more complicated such as a gas generator. In any event, they add weight, increase cost, and introduce some undesirable complications.
6,862,883 Kamen, et al. Regenerator for a Stirling engine
A regenerator for a thermal cycle engine and methods for its manufacture. The regenerator has a random network of fibers formed to fill a specified volume and a material for cross-linking the fibers at points of close contact between fibers of the network. A method for manufacturing a regenerator has steps of providing a length
That much water from an air conditioner seems reasonable. Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation: 80 deg. F / 80% humidity = 28mBar H2O = 2.8 molar percent = 3.1-3.2 mass % = ~32g/m^3. Assuming 12hr/day and 12m^3/min as would be reasonable for the system described below, that is ~275 liters equivalent total moisture. Trapping 50 liters per day (18%) seems doable for a third-world setup, and 100 l or more for a 24-hr/day western AC is totally believable.
Dessicant-based solar air-conditioners can be quite cheap if the automatic machinery is mostly replaced with human labor. Drying out the dessicant requres "solar collectors" that are just reasonably sealed flat black containers which might even be made out of plastic sheeting. The exhaust flows over a shaded earthen/ dirty-water-evaporative heatsink covered with glazed tiles, for instance, and you get distilled water. The electricity use is only what's needed for the fans, and even that is lower than the fan use in a typical western air-conditioner. The parts are pretty simple:
plastic sheeting (consumable yearly) - $25 40lb. sack of silica gel (indefinite life) ~$75 fans, 25W each - 2 x $50 50W Solar collector - $200 Locally-produced tile - $100 Misc. - $100
So a ballpark estimate of $600 in hard costs, (~$1000 principal plus interest microloan over 7.5 years = ~$11/mo) plus about $3/mo maintenance = ~ $14 / mo. Let's say I'm being optimistic and say it's actually $18/mo.
Even for a famly of 5 living on $150/mo. (~$1/day ea.) that is affordable, considering the health benefits of air-conditioning and clean water. I'm sure a properly-engineered design could work within that kind of budget.
Not only that, the cartoons were published in the Egyptian paper Al Fagr in mid-October with barely a ripple. Only when the Saudi government needed a distraction from criticisms of the hotel disaster did they start pumping up the cartoon story in their state-controlled media.
FISA requires that wiretapping of US persons requires a warrant. There is no exception for calls that are international at one end. Gonzales has said in a recent interview with Charlie Rose that some calls entirely within the US are tapped, allegedly when both parties are suspected Al Qaeda members. If he got warrants, then OK. But the massive scale of the interception facilities operating at ILEC and long-distance carriers as well as accounts from phone company employees of widespread Federal interference in the phone system indicates to me that there is a lot more illegal Federal electronic monitoring going on than has yet come out.
"if we don't start standing New York Times reporters against the nearest wall for disclosing classified information useful to our enemies in time of War we are going to lose."
How did you get modded up for this fascist claptrap? We aren't at war. The "war on terror" is a ploy to invent a permanent "war" to terrorize the population into giving power to authoritarians. The declared war in Iraq ended with the fall of the Baathist government, now it is an armed conflict, not a proper, declared war. The essential check on presidential war powers is that only the Congress says when it is a war.
The "classified information" you refer to was no such thing - the only news in the NSA scandal was that they were breaking the law for no good reason when they could easily have obtained warrants.
The drugs are expensive because the testing is ridiculously expensive due to regulations and paperwork which have little bearing on the quality of the science. Things are set up that way because big pharma paid for those regulations to keep barriers to entry high, which protects their obscene profit margins from competition. Drugs would cost a lot less if the drug companies took the same long-term net margins as other companies.
The only reason to allow these companies to do business is to serve the public. If a company allows people to die to boost its share price, that is not OK. Any alleged indirect harms from imposing standards of corporate responsibility must be great and certain if they are to outweigh the benefits of lives saved, and that certainty and magnitude has never been shown by people who are statist enough to believe in FDA drug testing requirements but laissez-faire when it comes to corporations extorting money from poor people with terminal illneses.
If drug trials were integrated into the developing electronic medical records system the cost would be far, far lower, and the effectiveness and side-effects of drugs could be measured using every patient who took the drug, even after approval.
Well, sometimes they just pretend there isn't anybody but Covad even when you can see not only the ILEC's remote DSLAM out your window, but also the ILEC's sole DSL provisioning center.
"pure tones dont do any more damage then impure ones"
For a given amount of energy, they do. It's the difference between sunlight and a laser, but worse as far as the sensor for that particular frequency is concerned. Your brain can compensate with adjacent frequency sensors to a certain extent, but the basic sensor ability for the affected frequency is degraded or lost. The effect is nonlinearly energy-dependent and frequency-specific, and virtually everybody is affected to some extent, and everybody who listens to music at "realistic" levels is considerably affected. I think that much of the modern decline in high-frequency hearing with age is caused by simply wearing the ears out.
IANAL but it does in Maryland, at least. I believe it is a state crime mingled with laws on champerty and IIRC, with the prohibition on corporations practicing law. As a result all law firms are sole proprietorships, partnerships, or lately and perhaps illegally in some jurisdictions as LLCs. The surprising downside for lawyers is that they cannot sell their practices as doctors can.
Of course there is the totally different case of barratry in the ancient and peculiar specialty of admiralty law, which also provides the proper legal definition of piracy.
"Some 52% of people predicted that a marriage would last forever when told how long it had already lasted. As the authors report, "this accurately reflects the proportion of marriages that end in divorce", so the participants had clearly got the right idea. But they had got the detail wrong. Even the best marriages do not last forever. Somebody dies. And "forever" is not a mathematically tractable quantity, so Dr Griffiths and Dr Tenenbaum abandoned their analysis of this set of data."
Perhaps it wasn't a forced-response question or perhaps they slipped up in offering this answer, but their hypothesis wasn't that people are always statistically right, but that their answers reveal the use of bayesian priors. Here it was revealed that these people's mental constructs of how marriages end only appear to include divorce. This reveals a deficit in considering all the paths that could lead to a result, in this case likely affected by an unwillingness to spontaneously think about the long-term odds death as well as subjective experience that divorce is far more common than death. It also may reveal an attitude about the meaning of "forever" as indefinitely long rather than numerically infinite.
"If you don't settle your statistical methods before starting to analyze the data, then it ain't science."
You misunderstand the nature of Bayesian statistics. The data and the initial prior determine the analysis, the analysis generates a prediction, which becomes the new prior. It not only tests hypotheses but generates new hypotheses. You can construct an accurate Bayesian model from nearly any initial prior given sufficient data.
The original poster wrote: "If you want to put a small group of people to work on a problem, you'd better separate them, otherwise Bayes's rule is not strictly applicable", which is actually not true in most situations. In company meetings it could be a problem. In random focus groups, open markets, internet chat rooms and so forth, the cost of social disapproval is usually too low for people to base their changes in answers on anything other than their honest (and likely accurate) evaluations of other people's relative knowledge or guessing ability and the overall distributions of other people's answers. In most situations communications would improve the estimates.
Saudis Import Slaves to America by Daniel Pipes (New York Sun June 16, 2005) http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2687 "Although slavery was abolished in the kingdom in 1962, the practice still flourishes there. Ranking Saudi religious authorities endorse slavery; for example, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan insisted recently that "Slavery is a part of Islam" and whoever wants it abolished is 'an infidel.'"
The ancient greeks were quite aware that the Earth and the Moon were spheres.
[Eratosthenes 276-194BC] gave the length of the circumference of the Earth as 250,000 stadia.... a good result, even a remarkable result if one takes 157.2 metres for the stadium as some have deduced from values given by Pliny. It is less good if 166.7 metres was the value used by Eratosthenes as Gulbekian suggests.... Eratosthenes also measured the distance to the sun as 804,000,000 stadia and the distance to the Moon as 780,000 stadia.
So enlighten us. What have the middle-class population percentages been in sub-saharan Africa? Pretty damn low, judging from the present Gini indexes and GDPs per capita in those countries. The literacy rates are low, too.
"The *only* thing that affects the damage to your ears is the amount of energy being transferred to the eardrum."
Well, actually it's the energy transmitted to the hair cells in the cochlea corresponding to specific frequencies. Pure tones are more likely to damage hearing.
Three, actually, plus Physics, Applied Physics, Aerospace Science and an MBA, just for the hell of it.
"...but he's a cold-hearted politician."
And if he weren't, and didn't deal with the organizational and political situation as it is and triage NASA priorities, NASA would actually achieve less. If he were king and could do anything he wanted and had an unlimited budget, then yeah, you'd be right, but the fact is NASA does not turn on a dime, in fact it is a deeply screwed up organization.
Technically, he needs to be more cold-hearted and admit that manned space exploration demands expecting and bugeting for astronaut deaths and not trying to make everything perfectly safe. Treat astronauts as hundred-million dollar pieces of equipment for purposes of deciding how much to spend in paperwork and engineering on extra safety. The politics is totally on the soft-hearted side on this issue. Over 5,000 miners died in China last year -- how many of those to feed factories that make stuff we buy but don't even need? Big projects that push the limits of the species always cost lives, and not that many by conparison.
Another issue on which M.G. could do some good is: costing out the opportunity costs of not having rapid development cycles in launch vehicles and associated systems. This is where the waste is. The failure to take risks, to have multiple production craft, to have a development pipeline of craft that will have a good chance of actually getting built, to change the insanely expensive way things are currently done in contracting and to set rapidly improving $/kg/reliability targets are the reasons why NASA has made essentially no progress in Earth to orbit capability in forty years.
For the $600,000,000+ that it costs to lauch the Shuttle once, a lean private firm could create a fully realized new launch vehicle, and with a few iterations it would be intrinsically safer than anything built with the traditional approach of attempting to manage rather than engineer risks away. Once the price to orbit comes down, the payloads become much cheaper, too, the demand goes up, expanding the industry, thus leading to far more science payloads.
The problem is, with limited resources and with the Shuttle still eating cash, to achieve long-term goals some stuff has to go now and that is going to be painful for the people affected, butiven the situation as it is, I don't think anyone else could do more than Michael Griffin to get maximum NASA improvement.
No. The insulation is there to keep the H2 liquid and has no need to protect the metal itself from heat. The big tank does not have to deal with reentry-level heat.
Slashdot Mirror
"Only the biggest socialists would say a person can't own land..."
Not so. There is a different group, the Georgists, who would say essentially the same thing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George : "In 1886 George ran for mayor of New York, and polled second (ahead of Theodore Roosevelt). He ran again in 1897, but died 4 days before the election. An estimated 100,000 people attended his funeral."
In effect, Americans do not own land now - unless tax is paid, the government evicts the "owner", seizes and auctions the property. This is effectively rent. Also zoning, environmental and other laws restrict what the "owner" can do with the property, even in matters which do not have effects reaching beyond the property.
"However, most people can't create anything worthwhile to copyright, so everyone wants copyright to expire so they can get something for free off of the backs of creative people and their investors."
The difference is that they are printing lots more books, but very little new land. Also, physical property such as real estate is inherently exclusionaty, while arrangements of symbols and sounds aren't.
The federal government is constitutionally prohibited from taxing property. It can tax income and property/money transfers, collect duties, and charge fees for services other than voting. It also sometimes does an end-run around this restriction by not paying full value for condemned property (which is technically illegal - but there are catches), criminal seizure, asset forfiture (civil suit against property alleged to have have been used in the comission of a offense against the State), banning of items (formerly thought to require a constitutional amendment, now done directly by agencies), and forced licenses of and secret classification of some patent applications. One theory (besides intrinsic nat. sec. interest) for the last is that they are not "taking" but simply failing to give. This might be extended to copyrights, or they could structure it as a renewal fee.
Although the exceptions seem to swallow the rule here, the core of the no-direct-taxation principle will almost certainly endure since it is the only thing keeping the feds from taking a percentage of large fortunes while the owner is still alive. (Estate taxes are transfer taxes.)
States, OTOH, can tax property directly. IANAL & YMMV.
This has always been the trouble with Stirling engines. They seem simple until you actually try to make one that outputs a usable amount of power at some reasonable efficiency that doesn't cost a fortune. Many people have tried over the centuries, but so far it's always been a matter of picking which two of the three goals you want to fulfill. Dean Kamen has a nontrivial challenge ahead in trying for the Sterling hat-trick.
Don Lancaster's Blatant Opportunist #32
Wikipedia - Problems with Stirling Engines:
U.S. Patents:
6,862,883 Kamen, et al. Regenerator for a Stirling engine
That much water from an air conditioner seems reasonable. Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation: 80 deg. F / 80% humidity = 28mBar H2O = 2.8 molar percent = 3.1-3.2 mass % = ~32g/m^3. Assuming 12hr/day and 12m^3/min as would be reasonable for the system described below, that is ~275 liters equivalent total moisture. Trapping 50 liters per day (18%) seems doable for a third-world setup, and 100 l or more for a 24-hr/day western AC is totally believable.
Dessicant-based solar air-conditioners can be quite cheap if the automatic machinery is mostly replaced with human labor. Drying out the dessicant requres "solar collectors" that are just reasonably sealed flat black containers which might even be made out of plastic sheeting. The exhaust flows over a shaded earthen/ dirty-water-evaporative heatsink covered with glazed tiles, for instance, and you get distilled water. The electricity use is only what's needed for the fans, and even that is lower than the fan use in a typical western air-conditioner. The parts are pretty simple:
plastic sheeting (consumable yearly) - $25
40lb. sack of silica gel (indefinite life) ~$75
fans, 25W each - 2 x $50
50W Solar collector - $200
Locally-produced tile - $100
Misc. - $100
So a ballpark estimate of $600 in hard costs, (~$1000 principal plus interest microloan over 7.5 years = ~$11/mo) plus about $3/mo maintenance = ~ $14 / mo. Let's say I'm being optimistic and say it's actually $18/mo.
Even for a famly of 5 living on $150/mo. (~$1/day ea.) that is affordable, considering the health benefits of air-conditioning and clean water. I'm sure a properly-engineered design could work within that kind of budget.
Not only that, the cartoons were published in the Egyptian paper Al Fagr in mid-October with barely a ripple. Only when the Saudi government needed a distraction from criticisms of the hotel disaster did they start pumping up the cartoon story in their state-controlled media.
You'd have to ask To Mega Turion
ummm.... Finland? 8-}
[ducks]
FISA requires that wiretapping of US persons requires a warrant. There is no exception for calls that are international at one end. Gonzales has said in a recent interview with Charlie Rose that some calls entirely within the US are tapped, allegedly when both parties are suspected Al Qaeda members. If he got warrants, then OK. But the massive scale of the interception facilities operating at ILEC and long-distance carriers as well as accounts from phone company employees of widespread Federal interference in the phone system indicates to me that there is a lot more illegal Federal electronic monitoring going on than has yet come out.
"if we don't start standing New York Times reporters against the nearest wall for disclosing classified information useful to our enemies in time of War we are going to lose."
How did you get modded up for this fascist claptrap? We aren't at war. The "war on terror" is a ploy to invent a permanent "war" to terrorize the population into giving power to authoritarians. The declared war in Iraq ended with the fall of the Baathist government, now it is an armed conflict, not a proper, declared war. The essential check on presidential war powers is that only the Congress says when it is a war.
The "classified information" you refer to was no such thing - the only news in the NSA scandal was that they were breaking the law for no good reason when they could easily have obtained warrants.
The drugs are expensive because the testing is ridiculously expensive due to regulations and paperwork which have little bearing on the quality of the science. Things are set up that way because big pharma paid for those regulations to keep barriers to entry high, which protects their obscene profit margins from competition. Drugs would cost a lot less if the drug companies took the same long-term net margins as other companies.
The only reason to allow these companies to do business is to serve the public. If a company allows people to die to boost its share price, that is not OK. Any alleged indirect harms from imposing standards of corporate responsibility must be great and certain if they are to outweigh the benefits of lives saved, and that certainty and magnitude has never been shown by people who are statist enough to believe in FDA drug testing requirements but laissez-faire when it comes to corporations extorting money from poor people with terminal illneses.
If drug trials were integrated into the developing electronic medical records system the cost would be far, far lower, and the effectiveness and side-effects of drugs could be measured using every patient who took the drug, even after approval.
Well, sometimes they just pretend there isn't anybody but Covad even when you can see not only the ILEC's remote DSLAM out your window, but also the ILEC's sole DSL provisioning center.
Plus, there's always the odd chance that you get a native english speaker on the phone that knows more than what's written on a script.
They have been cracking down on this. Why pay somebody $12/hr. who can fix 98% of issues when you can get Elbonians for $3/hr. who can fix 48%?
"pure tones dont do any more damage then impure ones"
For a given amount of energy, they do. It's the difference between sunlight and a laser, but worse as far as the sensor for that particular frequency is concerned. Your brain can compensate with adjacent frequency sensors to a certain extent, but the basic sensor ability for the affected frequency is degraded or lost. The effect is nonlinearly energy-dependent and frequency-specific, and virtually everybody is affected to some extent, and everybody who listens to music at "realistic" levels is considerably affected. I think that much of the modern decline in high-frequency hearing with age is caused by simply wearing the ears out.
So, could plasma dynamics help explain the velocities of stars at varying distances from galactic centers that has been ascribed to dark matter?
IANAL but it does in Maryland, at least. I believe it is a state crime mingled with laws on champerty and IIRC, with the prohibition on corporations practicing law. As a result all law firms are sole proprietorships, partnerships, or lately and perhaps illegally in some jurisdictions as LLCs. The surprising downside for lawyers is that they cannot sell their practices as doctors can.
Of course there is the totally different case of barratry in the ancient and peculiar specialty of admiralty law, which also provides the proper legal definition of piracy.
"Some 52% of people predicted that a marriage would last forever when told how long it had already lasted. As the authors report, "this accurately reflects the proportion of marriages that end in divorce", so the participants had clearly got the right idea. But they had got the detail wrong. Even the best marriages do not last forever. Somebody dies. And "forever" is not a mathematically tractable quantity, so Dr Griffiths and Dr Tenenbaum abandoned their analysis of this set of data."
Perhaps it wasn't a forced-response question or perhaps they slipped up in offering this answer, but their hypothesis wasn't that people are always statistically right, but that their answers reveal the use of bayesian priors. Here it was revealed that these people's mental constructs of how marriages end only appear to include divorce. This reveals a deficit in considering all the paths that could lead to a result, in this case likely affected by an unwillingness to spontaneously think about the long-term odds death as well as subjective experience that divorce is far more common than death. It also may reveal an attitude about the meaning of "forever" as indefinitely long rather than numerically infinite.
"If you don't settle your statistical methods before starting to analyze the data, then it ain't science."
You misunderstand the nature of Bayesian statistics. The data and the initial prior determine the analysis, the analysis generates a prediction, which becomes the new prior. It not only tests hypotheses but generates new hypotheses. You can construct an accurate Bayesian model from nearly any initial prior given sufficient data.
The original poster wrote: "If you want to put a small group of people to work on a problem, you'd better separate them, otherwise Bayes's rule is not strictly applicable", which is actually not true in most situations. In company meetings it could be a problem. In random focus groups, open markets, internet chat rooms and so forth, the cost of social disapproval is usually too low for people to base their changes in answers on anything other than their honest (and likely accurate) evaluations of other people's relative knowledge or guessing ability and the overall distributions of other people's answers. In most situations communications would improve the estimates.
Saudis Import Slaves to America by Daniel Pipes (New York Sun June 16, 2005)
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2687
"Although slavery was abolished in the kingdom in 1962, the practice still flourishes there. Ranking Saudi religious authorities endorse slavery; for example, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan insisted recently that "Slavery is a part of Islam" and whoever wants it abolished is 'an infidel.'"
Serfs were slaves, albeit ones that went with the real estate. IIRC, serfdom in England was not abolished until Queen Elizabeth.
So enlighten us. What have the middle-class population percentages been in sub-saharan Africa? Pretty damn low, judging from the present Gini indexes and GDPs per capita in those countries. The literacy rates are low, too.
"The *only* thing that affects the damage to your ears is the amount of energy being transferred to the eardrum."
Well, actually it's the energy transmitted to the hair cells in the cochlea corresponding to specific frequencies. Pure tones are more likely to damage hearing.
You forgot the really important issue: in 18 of the tests, some pretty important, Wine didn't complete the test at all.
"Griffin may have an engineering degree..."
Three, actually, plus Physics, Applied Physics, Aerospace Science and an MBA, just for the hell of it.
"...but he's a cold-hearted politician."
And if he weren't, and didn't deal with the organizational and political situation as it is and triage NASA priorities, NASA would actually achieve less. If he were king and could do anything he wanted and had an unlimited budget, then yeah, you'd be right, but the fact is NASA does not turn on a dime, in fact it is a deeply screwed up organization.
Technically, he needs to be more cold-hearted and admit that manned space exploration demands expecting and bugeting for astronaut deaths and not trying to make everything perfectly safe. Treat astronauts as hundred-million dollar pieces of equipment for purposes of deciding how much to spend in paperwork and engineering on extra safety. The politics is totally on the soft-hearted side on this issue. Over 5,000 miners died in China last year -- how many of those to feed factories that make stuff we buy but don't even need? Big projects that push the limits of the species always cost lives, and not that many by conparison.
Another issue on which M.G. could do some good is: costing out the opportunity costs of not having rapid development cycles in launch vehicles and associated systems. This is where the waste is. The failure to take risks, to have multiple production craft, to have a development pipeline of craft that will have a good chance of actually getting built, to change the insanely expensive way things are currently done in contracting and to set rapidly improving $/kg/reliability targets are the reasons why NASA has made essentially no progress in Earth to orbit capability in forty years.
For the $600,000,000+ that it costs to lauch the Shuttle once, a lean private firm could create a fully realized new launch vehicle, and with a few iterations it would be intrinsically safer than anything built with the traditional approach of attempting to manage rather than engineer risks away. Once the price to orbit comes down, the payloads become much cheaper, too, the demand goes up, expanding the industry, thus leading to far more science payloads.
The problem is, with limited resources and with the Shuttle still eating cash, to achieve long-term goals some stuff has to go now and that is going to be painful for the people affected, butiven the situation as it is, I don't think anyone else could do more than Michael Griffin to get maximum NASA improvement.
Scary thing is, I don't think that was sarcasm.
I'm not that into core dumps, but Michael Griffin rules!
No. The insulation is there to keep the H2 liquid and has no need to protect the metal itself from heat. The big tank does not have to deal with reentry-level heat.
Hauling wings and aircraft-style landing gear to orbit was a bad engineering decision in the first place. All that mass could have been payload.