Frank Herbert most definitely for western Sci/Fi - I wouldn't call it a sci fi class if it didn't have Dune!
Good lord, no. Way to long a book. In the time it takes the students to read this, they could read a hundred short stories.
Though, to be honest, you could spend an entire year on that book alone.
Yep, you got it.
Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" is a crazy dark Fantasy which makes incredible social commentary about early Soviet Society.
Good thinking, but instead I think I'd pick the first novella of Sergei Lukyananko's Night Watch (which is actually a collection of three linked novellas), a bit more modern.
in no particular order.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation Isaac Asimov's I Robot
Both collections of short stories. Pick one from each.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
It's an old standard in high schools; they will have already read it and been bored silly with it.
Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles
A collection of short stories. Pick one.
Frank Herbert's Dune Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita
no (discussed above)
George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones
Way too long. Martin is a brilliant short story writer, though, think about picking one of his stories. (I myself would pick "Way of Cross and Dragon," but probably too controversial for a school text.)
A study of some of HP Lovecraft's best stories, The Mountains of Madness, Herbert West Reanimator, etc
Not a bad idea. You can probably just pick one. If it resonates with them, they'll find the rest!
Edgar Allen Poe's works right after or right before Lovecraft's, to see some of poe's influence on Lovecraft
Good idea, although he actually did very little SF.
No, no, and hell no. Sorry, way too long, and unfortunately, Tolkein was not really a short story writer, so there's no way out that way. In any case, most of the students will have probably already read them.
and that's 12... hmm... you need more for backup:D. Frankenstein is a good book
Because of its role in the genesis of science fiction, you may have to do this one.
as well as 1984
it reads a bit dated these days, I'm afraid.
Ender's Game
Go for the novella version. In any case, all of the male students will have read it.
Brave New World
Mixed feelings on this one-- again, it's a bit quaint, but Hux really had some good stuff in it.
and probably alot more that I can't think of right now.
I want to jump in to agree here: for a class, you want to do short stories. That's not as bad a hit as you might think; a lot of the real classic SF has been in short form-- sure, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is classic, but Heinlein also was one of the greatest short-story writers of SF, as well.
Consider the The SFWA Grand Masters volumes, as a start, but you definitely want to do some modern stuff too, by which I mean things written in the last 20 years or so-- in fact, I'd suggest assigning as a textbook the most recent edition of the Gardner Dozois Year's Best.
You might do a few short novels, but make sure that they realy are short-- The Time Machine, sure (it's actually a novella), for example, or maybe The Stars my Destination (that's "Tyger Tyger," for you Brits.)
Do NOT assign Dune, or The Mote in God's Eye, or anything even approaching those in length, unless you want to make your students hate science fiction. These are books you want your students to read on their own, when they want to, for fun; not cram in in a day of skimming for an exam. These are way huge for a book to force them to read.
This research does little to get us closer to actually bringing life to other planets. A few weeks back, NASA released a report saying that they can't keep running the ISS, the Shuttle, and their other experiments while also gearing up for a return to the Moon or a mission to Mars.
More specifically, the Augustine commission said that a commitment to going to the moon or Mars would require actually budgeting money to do so-- exploration is not going to happen unless money is allocated to do it. And, in fact, despite great words about exploration, the trend has been for NASA's budget to be cut, not increased, with more and bigger cuts projected in the future. NASA's budget was five percent of the federal budget during the Apollo years. It's recently dropped to a little less than half a percent, and the trend is down, not up.
If I could drop the ISS into the ocean next year and use the money for a Moon/Mars venture, I'd definitely do it.
That's flawed thinking in many ways. First, of course, is that the Space Station is bringing us closer to habitation of space. It may seem dull and routine, but in fact you do need to demonstrate the engineering, and demonstrate it in the real space environment, before you're going to put long-duration habitats on the moon, or Mars, or move on into the asteroid belts. It is a necessary precursor. Think of it as the engineering testbed.
And if we can't even keep up the willpower to stick to a relatively simple mission-- testing out our technologies on a space station in low Earth orbit-- what in the world would make anybody believe that we'd have the resolution to accomplish a really long-term exploration project? Even in the vastly unlikely case that the money saved from the Space Station would then be used for the Moon and Mars, why do you think that that project wouldn't then be cancelled in a few years?
The main result of ISS is to demonstrate that the engineering is sound to built a habitat in space that can be permanently occupied for (so far) a period of ten years. This is straightforward, but nevertheless is a critically important step for the long-term expansion of humanity into the universe.
It's a necessary building block that has, now, been demonstrated. After that, everything else is of secondary importance (but I do think that demonstrating VASMIR will be cool.)
"In fact, the actual data shows that newspapers almost always turn out to be very well matched in political slant to their readers. (As should be obvious, since if they weren't, they'd lose readers even faster than they now do.)"
Hmmmm. And yet most large news papers are failing. Would this perhaps be some indication that *maybe* a certain type of political slant is not being represented well?
If it had been the case that particularly papers of "a certain type of political slant" that were failing, perhaps, but it's not.
But, more notably, it turns out that newspapers in general do tend to mirror the politics of their consistencies.
For data, here's a paper.
Here are the salient paragraphs from a summary: [from the data, it turned out that] "...the main driver of any slant was the newspaper's audience, not bias by the newspaper's owner.
A comparison of circulation data (per capita) to the ratio of Republican to Democratic campaign contributions by ZIP code showed that circulation was strongly related to whether the newspaper matched the readers' own ideology...
The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, "The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers' demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.""
3. Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.
That's a myth concocted by the right to explain why they don't win every election even though they claim they represent a majority of Americans.
Yep. It's a self-serving myth that's been pretty thoroughly debunked.
(And, correspondingly, the far left claims that the news has a significant conservative bias. Both are very self-serving myths for the fringe, since they justifies their telling people to ignore the news, and only listen to their carefully shaped and trimmed news, without those inconvenient facts that might disturb the ideology.)
In fact, the actual data shows that newspapers almost always turn out to be very well matched in political slant to their readers. (As should be obvious, since if they weren't, they'd lose readers even faster than they now do.)
Many of the large newspapers that people point to in the US stem from big cities, which have multiple newspapers-- for the most part, these newspapers split the political spectrum, with one newspaper favored by the more conservative readers, and the other favored by the more liberal (e.g., the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald).
Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."
A quick reminder that the movie actually came from a novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth, by Walter Tevis.
(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)
Water molecules are famously resonant at 2.45 GHz, that's where microwave ovens operate,
No, they're not. That's a myth. There's no water resonance at or near 2.45 GHz. Water absorbs at pretty much any microwave frequency, with stronger absorption the higher the frequency.
If anything, you'd want to tune a microwave oven away from strong water resonances, because you want the radiation to penetrate (so as to heat the object evenly) and not be shallowly absorbed, which would result in uneven heating. (Note that a microwave oven is a cavity, so you don't need to absorb energy in a single pass-- it will resonate around until it does get absorbed.).
Unless your password is in the hundreds of thousands of characters, I highly doubt that it is 'un-rememberable'. Just take your normal password, make the p455w0rd 1337, then make one of the letters in the p455W0rd capitalized. There, you have a secure password that only requires that you remember which letter you capitalized.
A secure password?? That would be easy enough if I only needed "a" password, not fifty. (and one of the rules I do follow-- apparently the only person in the universe who does-- is to never use the same password on two different systems). And if I didn't have to change it every month.
Except that even then your system fails, since it has to have upper and lower case and numbers and symbols, and has to start and end with a letter, and one of the first eight characters has to be a number, and a couple of other constraints that I won't mention.
Requiring re-authentication whenever a logged-in user does something suspicious-- i.e., tranferring large amounts of money, installing a keylogger, sending out ten thousand e-mail messages, scanning networks for open ports, etc.-- might be useful.
If you really do need to do this kind of thing (I suppose people sometimes do have legitimate requirements to wire large amounts of money to offshore accounts), it's not a big hassle to log in again.
Actually, I find this extremely annoying, since they have also mandated complicated and impossible-to-remember passwords that take a long time to type and have to be changed to different complicated and un-rememberable passwords on a frequent basis.
Glad to see that someone who stole $9 million is able to once again serve as a corporate executive.
Well, he's an executive at a small company that sells selenium as a treatment for cancer, which is a treatment of very dubious efficiacy. ("dubious" in that the actual clinical trials didn't show any improvement.)
In fact, the most successful "third party" presidential candidates (Libertarian & Green) are forbidden entry into the presidential debates
They're not allowed into the debate because they're marginal, not vice versa. You call them "most successful", but in that context, "most successful" means "they get a percent or two of the vote". Not "they win elections."
The answer would be a different system that does not marginalize third parties (and, as a side effect, would mean that third parties would pick candidates that might have a real shot at winning.)
This is so much BS. There is nothing stopping voters from voting from candidates they like (or from joining a party and actually becoming a candidate).
Well, yes, but the present balloting system effectively marginalizes third parties. I've commented on this on slashdot before-- there are other balloting systems, such as approval voting, in which third parties are not marginalized.
If local politics actually worked better than state and national politics, I might believe it, but (in my experience) they are often worse, with even more blatant favoritism and abuses of power.
And that's a major problem, because local elections are the step for candidates to enter state and national elections.
30% (current maximum light efficiency) * 40% (current maximum solar efficiency) = 12% efficiency for light based energy transmission.
Actually, photovoltaic cells are more efficient when illuminated by monochromatic light than they are when illuminated by sunlight (narrower spectral spread means you can pick a semiconductor to hit the peak efficiency). You can easily get 50-60 percent conversion of laser light.
Point taken on my selection of STS missions showing DoD involvement with NASA. I believe I underscored that extensively because your initial comment was that "NASA doesn't do military".
I'm sorry, but my comment was a response to your statement that NASA should be reformed by moving military missions to the military. Congratulations. This was done. It was done decades ago.
With that issue clarified, I'd now like to draw your important attention to this:
1. The White House mandated that the Department of Defense must coordinate with NASA on new vehicles.
2. The NASA response was that they'll continue to buy expendable launch vehicles from the same launch providers they buy them from now, except if any new providers come up, they may buy from them.
3. The Department of Defense said "the Pentagon will consider using NASA's proposed heavy-lift launcher for any future military missions that might require such a powerful rocket."
That's it: the Pentagon will "consider" using the new launch vehicle.
We apparently have different ideas of the meaning of the word "now." The most recent of the launches you list was seventeen years ago. That's not what I call "now."
Once again. When congress approved the space shuttle program, they mandated there would be a single launch vehicle, which would be used by both the Air Force and NASA (and, for that matter, for commercial launches.) The Air Force would have their own vehicles, and their own launch site.
After the first few shuttle flights-- but before the Air Force ("blue") shuttles were delivered-- the Air Force announced that they would pull out of this agreement (and actually did so in 1986, after the Challenger disaster). A handful of military satellites that had been designed during this period, and could only be launched by the shuttle, remained to be launched, but the last of these left the pad in 1992.
I would categorically disagree with you, sir. NASA has been in the manned military business for years. One of the stipulations (aka limitations) that the Pentagon placed on the Space Transportation System program was for the Space Shuttle to have low-earth orbit capability for satellite retrieval.
Are you aware that the Air Force withdrew out of the shuttle program over twenty years ago?
You're right that, by congressional mandate, the shuttle was mandated to be a vehicle that would meet requirements to launch both NASA and the Air Force's payloads-- and even then, the Air Force built their own shuttle launch pad at Vandenberg (SLC-6) and had every intention to do their own shuttle launches, with their own dedicated Air-Force crews and their own Air-Force shuttles. As it turned out, though, they pulled out of the program, the program was shut down, and the Vandenberg shuttle launch facility, built at a cost of about ten billion dollars, was never used.
That was over twenty years ago. I was talking about now.
I think that NASA should be stripped down and restructured. All manned missions and support operations with a military application should be converted to their respective military counterparts, the whole thing headed up by Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Done!
NASA doesn't do any manned military space. It's the civilian space program.
In fact, there is a military space program, run by the pentagon, and the military space program has a considerably larger budget than NASA does. For some reason, though, it doesn't get the endless armchair quarterbacking that the much smaller NASA programs do. (Possibly because the military space applications don't send humans into space, and don't send probes to other planets, and human spaceflight and planetary exploration are what gets the public excited.)
It's the same thing with movies and music. There's a certain "standard" price everyone goes with, because if they didn't, it'll affect their sales. Going a bit over the standard decreases sales, going a bit less than the standard can increase them.
That's close, but I think the second part of that sentence is "...and there's no reason to go less, since consumers are willing to pay $60."
Slashdot Mirror
Mir was a step. ISS is another step. You know what? If we're actually going to expand civilization into space, we're going to need a lot of steps.
Or we can chose not to. It's our choice.
Frank Herbert most definitely for western Sci/Fi - I wouldn't call it a sci fi class if it didn't have Dune!
Good lord, no. Way to long a book. In the time it takes the students to read this, they could read a hundred short stories.
Though, to be honest, you could spend an entire year on that book alone.
Yep, you got it.
Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" is a crazy dark Fantasy which makes incredible social commentary about early Soviet Society.
Good thinking, but instead I think I'd pick the first novella of Sergei Lukyananko's Night Watch (which is actually a collection of three linked novellas), a bit more modern.
in no particular order.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation
Isaac Asimov's I Robot
Both collections of short stories. Pick one from each.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
It's an old standard in high schools; they will have already read it and been bored silly with it.
Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles
A collection of short stories. Pick one.
Frank Herbert's Dune
Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita
no (discussed above)
George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones
Way too long. Martin is a brilliant short story writer, though, think about picking one of his stories. (I myself would pick "Way of Cross and Dragon," but probably too controversial for a school text.)
A study of some of HP Lovecraft's best stories, The Mountains of Madness, Herbert West Reanimator, etc
Not a bad idea. You can probably just pick one. If it resonates with them, they'll find the rest!
Edgar Allen Poe's works right after or right before Lovecraft's, to see some of poe's influence on Lovecraft
Good idea, although he actually did very little SF.
Tolkien's Fellowship
Tolkien's Towers
Tolkien's Return
No, no, and hell no. Sorry, way too long, and unfortunately, Tolkein was not really a short story writer, so there's no way out that way. In any case, most of the students will have probably already read them.
and that's 12... hmm... you need more for backup :D. Frankenstein is a good book
Because of its role in the genesis of science fiction, you may have to do this one.
as well as 1984
it reads a bit dated these days, I'm afraid.
Ender's Game
Go for the novella version. In any case, all of the male students will have read it.
Brave New World
Mixed feelings on this one-- again, it's a bit quaint, but Hux really had some good stuff in it.
and probably alot more that I can't think of right now.
I want to jump in to agree here: for a class, you want to do short stories. That's not as bad a hit as you might think; a lot of the real classic SF has been in short form-- sure, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is classic, but Heinlein also was one of the greatest short-story writers of SF, as well.
Consider the The SFWA Grand Masters volumes, as a start, but you definitely want to do some modern stuff too, by which I mean things written in the last 20 years or so-- in fact, I'd suggest assigning as a textbook the most recent edition of the Gardner Dozois Year's Best.
You might do a few short novels, but make sure that they realy are short-- The Time Machine, sure (it's actually a novella), for example, or maybe The Stars my Destination (that's "Tyger Tyger," for you Brits.)
Do NOT assign Dune, or The Mote in God's Eye, or anything even approaching those in length, unless you want to make your students hate science fiction. These are books you want your students to read on their own, when they want to, for fun; not cram in in a day of skimming for an exam. These are way huge for a book to force them to read.
"engineering is sound to built a habitat in space"
The Russians already proved that for a LOT less money with Mir.
If a baby learns to take one step, do you think there's no point in its taking a two steps; it can just go right on from there to climb Mount Everest?
Mir was a step. 350 m2, 120 tons.
This research does little to get us closer to actually bringing life to other planets. A few weeks back, NASA released a report saying that they can't keep running the ISS, the Shuttle, and their other experiments while also gearing up for a return to the Moon or a mission to Mars.
More specifically, the Augustine commission said that a commitment to going to the moon or Mars would require actually budgeting money to do so-- exploration is not going to happen unless money is allocated to do it. And, in fact, despite great words about exploration, the trend has been for NASA's budget to be cut, not increased, with more and bigger cuts projected in the future. NASA's budget was five percent of the federal budget during the Apollo years. It's recently dropped to a little less than half a percent, and the trend is down, not up.
If I could drop the ISS into the ocean next year and use the money for a Moon/Mars venture, I'd definitely do it.
That's flawed thinking in many ways. First, of course, is that the Space Station is bringing us closer to habitation of space. It may seem dull and routine, but in fact you do need to demonstrate the engineering, and demonstrate it in the real space environment, before you're going to put long-duration habitats on the moon, or Mars, or move on into the asteroid belts. It is a necessary precursor. Think of it as the engineering testbed.
And if we can't even keep up the willpower to stick to a relatively simple mission-- testing out our technologies on a space station in low Earth orbit-- what in the world would make anybody believe that we'd have the resolution to accomplish a really long-term exploration project? Even in the vastly unlikely case that the money saved from the Space Station would then be used for the Moon and Mars, why do you think that that project wouldn't then be cancelled in a few years?
It's a necessary building block that has, now, been demonstrated. After that, everything else is of secondary importance (but I do think that demonstrating VASMIR will be cool.)
"In fact, the actual data shows that newspapers almost always turn out to be very well matched in political slant to their readers. (As should be obvious, since if they weren't, they'd lose readers even faster than they now do.)" Hmmmm. And yet most large news papers are failing. Would this perhaps be some indication that *maybe* a certain type of political slant is not being represented well?
If it had been the case that particularly papers of "a certain type of political slant" that were failing, perhaps, but it's not.
But, more notably, it turns out that newspapers in general do tend to mirror the politics of their consistencies.
For data, here's a paper.
Here are the salient paragraphs from a summary: [from the data, it turned out that] "...the main driver of any slant was the newspaper's audience, not bias by the newspaper's owner. A comparison of circulation data (per capita) to the ratio of Republican to Democratic campaign contributions by ZIP code showed that circulation was strongly related to whether the newspaper matched the readers' own ideology... The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, "The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers' demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.""
3. Most print newspapers have journalist with a very liberal slant, and people don't want that anymore, witness the success of Fox News and online bloggers.
That's a myth concocted by the right to explain why they don't win every election even though they claim they represent a majority of Americans.
Yep. It's a self-serving myth that's been pretty thoroughly debunked.
(And, correspondingly, the far left claims that the news has a significant conservative bias. Both are very self-serving myths for the fringe, since they justifies their telling people to ignore the news, and only listen to their carefully shaped and trimmed news, without those inconvenient facts that might disturb the ideology.)
In fact, the actual data shows that newspapers almost always turn out to be very well matched in political slant to their readers. (As should be obvious, since if they weren't, they'd lose readers even faster than they now do.)
Many of the large newspapers that people point to in the US stem from big cities, which have multiple newspapers-- for the most part, these newspapers split the political spectrum, with one newspaper favored by the more conservative readers, and the other favored by the more liberal (e.g., the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald).
Reminds me of the technology that Bowie's character came up with in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."
A quick reminder that the movie actually came from a novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth, by Walter Tevis.
(Movie was a moderately faithful adaptation, as such things go-- unlike some SF movies, where little is taken from the book other than the name, and--in the case of Bladerunner--not even that.)
Unfortunately, disbarring him didn't seem to stop him... only changed the direction of his frivolous litigation.
Water molecules are famously resonant at 2.45 GHz, that's where microwave ovens operate,
No, they're not. That's a myth. There's no water resonance at or near 2.45 GHz. Water absorbs at pretty much any microwave frequency, with stronger absorption the higher the frequency.
If anything, you'd want to tune a microwave oven away from strong water resonances, because you want the radiation to penetrate (so as to heat the object evenly) and not be shallowly absorbed, which would result in uneven heating. (Note that a microwave oven is a cavity, so you don't need to absorb energy in a single pass-- it will resonate around until it does get absorbed.).
If you're sure.
Unless your password is in the hundreds of thousands of characters, I highly doubt that it is 'un-rememberable'. Just take your normal password, make the p455w0rd 1337, then make one of the letters in the p455W0rd capitalized. There, you have a secure password that only requires that you remember which letter you capitalized.
A secure password?? That would be easy enough if I only needed "a" password, not fifty. (and one of the rules I do follow-- apparently the only person in the universe who does-- is to never use the same password on two different systems). And if I didn't have to change it every month.
Except that even then your system fails, since it has to have upper and lower case and numbers and symbols, and has to start and end with a letter, and one of the first eight characters has to be a number, and a couple of other constraints that I won't mention.
If you really do need to do this kind of thing (I suppose people sometimes do have legitimate requirements to wire large amounts of money to offshore accounts), it's not a big hassle to log in again.
Actually, I find this extremely annoying, since they have also mandated complicated and impossible-to-remember passwords that take a long time to type and have to be changed to different complicated and un-rememberable passwords on a frequent basis.
Glad to see that someone who stole $9 million is able to once again serve as a corporate executive.
Well, he's an executive at a small company that sells selenium as a treatment for cancer, which is a treatment of very dubious efficiacy. ("dubious" in that the actual clinical trials didn't show any improvement.)
In the US, the "two party system" is a sham designed to keep the real power(s) (in power) and no one could ever have a successful third party.
Again-- continuing to beat the same horse-- this is an artifact of the balloting system. There are other balloting systems, some of which do not marginalize third parties.
In fact, the most successful "third party" presidential candidates (Libertarian & Green) are forbidden entry into the presidential debates
They're not allowed into the debate because they're marginal, not vice versa. You call them "most successful", but in that context, "most successful" means "they get a percent or two of the vote". Not "they win elections."
The answer would be a different system that does not marginalize third parties (and, as a side effect, would mean that third parties would pick candidates that might have a real shot at winning.)
This is so much BS. There is nothing stopping voters from voting from candidates they like (or from joining a party and actually becoming a candidate).
Well, yes, but the present balloting system effectively marginalizes third parties. I've commented on this on slashdot before-- there are other balloting systems, such as approval voting, in which third parties are not marginalized.
If local politics actually worked better than state and national politics, I might believe it, but (in my experience) they are often worse, with even more blatant favoritism and abuses of power.
And that's a major problem, because local elections are the step for candidates to enter state and national elections.
OK, [! soapbox-mode off]
30% (current maximum light efficiency) * 40% (current maximum solar efficiency) = 12% efficiency for light based energy transmission.
Actually, photovoltaic cells are more efficient when illuminated by monochromatic light than they are when illuminated by sunlight (narrower spectral spread means you can pick a semiconductor to hit the peak efficiency). You can easily get 50-60 percent conversion of laser light.
Point taken on my selection of STS missions showing DoD involvement with NASA. I believe I underscored that extensively because your initial comment was that "NASA doesn't do military".
I'm sorry, but my comment was a response to your statement that NASA should be reformed by moving military missions to the military. Congratulations. This was done. It was done decades ago.
With that issue clarified, I'd now like to draw your important attention to this:
http://www.space.com/news/050810_dod_launcher.html
Let me summarize this for you:
1. The White House mandated that the Department of Defense must coordinate with NASA on new vehicles.
2. The NASA response was that they'll continue to buy expendable launch vehicles from the same launch providers they buy them from now, except if any new providers come up, they may buy from them.
3. The Department of Defense said "the Pentagon will consider using NASA's proposed heavy-lift launcher for any future military missions that might require such a powerful rocket."
That's it: the Pentagon will "consider" using the new launch vehicle.
I also am talking about now.
We apparently have different ideas of the meaning of the word "now." The most recent of the launches you list was seventeen years ago. That's not what I call "now."
Once again. When congress approved the space shuttle program, they mandated there would be a single launch vehicle, which would be used by both the Air Force and NASA (and, for that matter, for commercial launches.) The Air Force would have their own vehicles, and their own launch site.
After the first few shuttle flights-- but before the Air Force ("blue") shuttles were delivered-- the Air Force announced that they would pull out of this agreement (and actually did so in 1986, after the Challenger disaster). A handful of military satellites that had been designed during this period, and could only be launched by the shuttle, remained to be launched, but the last of these left the pad in 1992.
I would categorically disagree with you, sir. NASA has been in the manned military business for years. One of the stipulations (aka limitations) that the Pentagon placed on the Space Transportation System program was for the Space Shuttle to have low-earth orbit capability for satellite retrieval.
Are you aware that the Air Force withdrew out of the shuttle program over twenty years ago?
You're right that, by congressional mandate, the shuttle was mandated to be a vehicle that would meet requirements to launch both NASA and the Air Force's payloads-- and even then, the Air Force built their own shuttle launch pad at Vandenberg (SLC-6) and had every intention to do their own shuttle launches, with their own dedicated Air-Force crews and their own Air-Force shuttles. As it turned out, though, they pulled out of the program, the program was shut down, and the Vandenberg shuttle launch facility, built at a cost of about ten billion dollars, was never used.
That was over twenty years ago. I was talking about now.
Nah, that headline would be too obvious.
I think that NASA should be stripped down and restructured. All manned missions and support operations with a military application should be converted to their respective military counterparts, the whole thing headed up by Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Done!
NASA doesn't do any manned military space. It's the civilian space program.
In fact, there is a military space program, run by the pentagon, and the military space program has a considerably larger budget than NASA does. For some reason, though, it doesn't get the endless armchair quarterbacking that the much smaller NASA programs do. (Possibly because the military space applications don't send humans into space, and don't send probes to other planets, and human spaceflight and planetary exploration are what gets the public excited.)
It's the same thing with movies and music. There's a certain "standard" price everyone goes with, because if they didn't, it'll affect their sales. Going a bit over the standard decreases sales, going a bit less than the standard can increase them.
That's close, but I think the second part of that sentence is "...and there's no reason to go less, since consumers are willing to pay $60."