Is anyone arguing with that? I'm a commercial space proponent and I work on NASA-funded planetary science missions.
The commercial space community states explicitly that NASA should be performing the "Lewis and Clark" job -- in fact thats the exact phrase we use. However, rides to orbit are no longer cutting edge technology, and have a proven opportunity for profit, and this is why we call for the government to stop insisting on its own launchers and use commercially available ones wherever possible, and to foster a market where it is possible to form one.
In planetary science we actively support this model, since Juno, MSL and GRAIL (the three recently launched missions) all launched on commercially purchased launch vehicles (though ULA is a bit of a monopoly so its not the healthiest commercial market).
Its not a replacement for all rockets. Its a replacement for giant rockets that are required to get huge payloads with lots of fuel to space.
The Apollo capsule could have launched easily on many of our current launch vehicles (it was tested on the Saturn I). It was the fuel required to inject towards the moon that required the huge Saturn V.
You're not trying to refuel the launch vehicle, you're trying to refuel the payload. It could be an injection stage for an interplanetary probe, the stationkeeping propellant for a satellite, or the fuel required to take an Apollo-style capsule to the moon.
So you'll need re-designed payloads, but not redesigned launch vehicles. The idea is that this reduces the need for a $50B monster like SLS by allowing larger missions with our current stable of launchers.
What do you suggest as an alternative CMS/Blogging system. I've recently taken over the web presence for a non-profit, and we are currently wordpress-based, though I'm in the process of completely revamping the site.
So far I really have come to like it, despite the fact that its PHP-based. Its easy enough to customize, once you buy-in to their design patterns, and it allows me to do a lot of the heavy lifting to get the site ready, while leaving the press and content writers perfectly capable of doing their jobs without needing/bothering me. Its easy to install and has lots of available plugins. And it makes it easy to use primarily as a CMS with the blog-like component active but in the background. Once I got past my own NIH symptom of wanting to build a custom framework, its treated me quite well.
Of course I am only an amateur, so I guess I may be part of the 'ignorant' market its intended for.
Thats how its supposed to work. Governments should be doing the things private industry and individuals can't -- in this case development of technologies that have the potential to benefit society as a whole that are expensive enough and uncertain enough to never make a valid business plan or hobby project.
Then, those developments should be fed back to the citizens (and the companies they form), so that when its possible for the private entities to take advantage of it, they can. I work for NASA, and personally I'd much rather SpaceX/Boeing/Lockheed/Orbital build launch vehicles and let us worry about high-risk tech development and exploration.
Well, to be fair, a satellite in an extremely low Earth orbit with significant drag throughout its entire orbit is probably the most difficult place for us to track a live satellite.
The atmosphere is unpredictable, so its constantly rephasing the orbit in ways you can't predict, and when its that low, a ground station has a very brief time to get acquisition, get some data, and send it to the controllers for orbit determination. Compare to a deep space vehicle (say Juno instead of an alien spaceship), where even if you're uncertain by 100s of km you're still within the beam-width of a DSN tracking station, and you only need three stations around the globe to track it at any point in time. Plus the orbital dynamics are known well enough that you should be able to find it again 6 months or a year later pretty easily even if you lose all tracking data from now till then.
That is unless you're worrying about Webb and its partner money sponge SLS soaking up funds from other programs.
Personally, my interests are in seeing CCDEV/COTS, tech development, and planetary science advance. Sadly, unless things (I'll give management the benefit of the doubt and just leave it at luck) improves drastically I can't help but worry as costs keep going up and launch keeps getting delayed.
I think scientific interest would be more along the lines of using it more like GRACE, tracking climatic changes associated with carbon and water ice moving around. Additionally, you couldn't get data from as close to the surface, since you've got to stay out of the atmosphere, just like you do on Earth, making it harder to get 'crust to core' data.
The other problem is that flying these things in formation is *hard*, and around Mars it would be even harder. You depend on tracking data to and from Earth, in addition to the spacecraft-to-spacecraft range, and thats harder to do since its further away. Maintaining data to Earth on a higher-gain antenna while maintaining orbiter point would be difficult, since the pointing constraints are not guaranteed to get along. Plus trying to get them into synchronized orbits is hard enough around the Moon, so Mars sounds potentially nightmarish -- of course, for that you might just have to put them on a common bus and separate them after Mars entry. Additionally, you'd need a bigger motor than GRAIL/GRACE have, in order to achieve Mars orbit.
Given the new development required -- new antennae, figuring out the pointing, a common bus with its own attitude control system and thrusters, and a larger launch vehicle, my WAG for the cost is probably around $800M (compared to ~$495M for GRAIL). Definitely doable under a New Frontiers program. Plus, my experience is with GRAIL and Mars orbiters, so I'd be employed for quite a while and thus like the idea.
Technically, everything is done UTC, and the insertion burn for GRAIL-A is around 22:00 UTC on 31-Dec-2011, and GRAIL-B is after that.
Of course, the people operating it are stationed in Pacific and Mountain time zones (JPL/DSN and Lockheed Martin in Denver), and that places the maneuvers mid-afternoon on those days.
Remember though, Juno is not an imaging mission. Its only camera is there for outreach purposes, will die a quick death once it gets into orbit because of the radiation environment, and thus they didn't spend much money on it.
Juno's mission is to map the gravity field, radiation environment, and magnetic field. It's a (relatively) low-cost mission with a focused science goal, and is thus quite different from a mission like Galileo which produced stunning images of Jupiter and its moons. Similarly, any images we get from the upcoming GRAIL or MAVEN missions will be similarly disappointing. We've got lots of pictures, so new missions are focused on data that is just as useful but less pretty -- at least for the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter.
That's probably because it doesn't have a particularly good camera. We've got lots of good pictures from Galileo -- the purpose of this mission is to map the gravity, magnetic and radiation fields. The mission is power-starved and in a really nightmarish radiation environment, so the only camera is intended solely for outreach purposes, and that one won't last long (7 orbits) within that radiation.
Remember this is not a flagship mission, meant to do anything and everything. It's a relatively cheap mission selected through a competitive process, and thus is highly focused on its particular science goals.
The thing about space (besides that its big) is that it makes almost everything harder. Every spacecraft is power starved, so simply adding power is not usually a possibility -- the key is going to be getting a higher data rate for the same amount of energy, mass and operational complexity compared to radio comm.
Even more importantly: high powered lasers put off a lot of heat. On Earth, we've gotten pretty good at disposing of heat -- convection or conduction work great. Unfortunately, in space, you can only radiate the heat away -- thermal management of a spacecraft is a surprisingly difficult proposition. A high-powered laser makes thermal management all the more difficult, and you'll notice that lasers in space are in fact quite rare for that reason.
This is why an engineering demonstration is important -- it helps us work out these issues without risking a $400M Mars mission. I'm working on the next orbiter (MAVEN) right now, and our job would be much easier if we had laser comms to transmit back a lot of the telemetry we'd like to get.
Bandwidth is an issue. Telemetry is extremely tightly budgeted on a mission like this, and being able to get more back would vastly increase the available science data as well as simplify operations.
And a high-powered laser is not a trivial task. First, all the power comes from solar cells, which are themselves heavy and they try to keep them minimized. Second, when you're pumping a lot of energy through a laser, you end up with a lot of heat that is difficult to discard. You can't bleed it off through convection or conduction, so you have to rely on radiators for everything and those get big and heavy too. This tech development project is incredibly important for trying to work out these kinds of issues.
Now, if you can find a way around the latency issues I'm all ears.
I like SpaceX as much as the next guy, but there's more to the puzzle. Orbital Sciences, Boeing's CST-100, Sierra Nevada's DreamChaser, ESA's and JAXA's resupply vehicles, and even Orion-reborn (to name a few) are all critical to maintaining a foothold on the frontier.
I think what this should teach us (potentially having our only way to get things and people to the ISS grounded) is that no single solution can be depended on. In addition to the sought cost benefits of competition, we need multiple vehicles because none of them will be perfectly reliable and all run a risk of being taken out of service temporarily and leaving a gap if nothing else is available.
As Alan Stern pointed out on NASA Watch earlier today, this is a very dangerous move for the space science community.
The science program has worked hard to put up firewalls to prevent the manned program from raiding them for funding when the going gets tough. By breaking that firewall in the opposite direction it opens the science directorate to future funding losses when things get bad on the manned side, (as they are sure to when the already obvious failures of SLS come calling).
Between these two massive programs whose budgets keep growing I fear for the interesting smaller programs on boh the manned and unmanned sides...
Are you saying that the diffraction effects allow one to determine source altitude? Azimuth I would imagine is easily distinguishable from using the ears as mere point sensors, as I mentioned in a sibling post.
Very interesting. (not saying that sarcastically).
Easily justified by the presence of a priori information. You know what an airplane sounds like and that unless you're at an airport, one would hope that it's in the air.
Simply put, humans are incredible sensor platforms, able to synthesize information from both simple and complex sources. Nonetheless, your ears are essentially two point sensors, so while you can distinguish quite a bit by hearing alone, azimuth by differencing the volume to each ear (of course there's a front-to-back ambiguity), distance by expected volume, and change in distance by Doppler shifts, you're still limited by basic physics. Of course if you're needing to distinguish up and down locations by sound alone, you can always cock your head and get quite a bit more that way.
Of course, I'm no expert in biology -- I'm more interested in sensor systems, thus my tendency to analyze human senses in those terms.
I would venture that the 2d limitations of natural human sonar have more to do with the fact that our ears are in a horizontal plane and thus can't distinguish up/down variations. Except in special circumstances, the air through which the sound is travelling is not going to be stratified enough to make a difference.
Given that, this is likely to sidestep that limitation, since it appears far more directional, and mounted on a hand, which is more natural to tilt than ones head.
The problem is that the only way to be 100% sure (or even 10% sure) of an impact risk is to send something out there to track it with proper radio science measurements.
Generally the approach any mission should take is not to prevent an impact, which implies that you will have something approaching good knowledge of whether or not it would pass through a keyhole, but rather to reduce the probability of impact. Because the center of the distribution from your knowledge (largely gaussian) is going to be offset from the keyhole, you need to nudge the asteroid further in that same direction to move it out past a 5-sigma or 6-sigma or 7-sigma ellipse, whatever your desired goal is.
The annoying truth about dealing with anything in deep space is that its all probabilistic. You never really know where anything is, and you always have to quote your certainty values.
I wonder if they've looked at predicting how this will play out with the new program in place -- they have the basic problem that they're affecting what they're observing, and thus will change what will happen.
If the algorithms predict crimes in certain areas, you'll end up with officers in the area, likely preventing a crime before it even happens. That is, the potential criminal will notice the police presence and decide its not a good time. Thus there would be some feedback from the prediction method back onto itself.
I can think of three ways it could go: 1. Predictable "waves" that roll across the city 2. Predictable but chaotic patterns reminiscent of a complex cellular automata or fractal 3. The software nullifies itself.
Anyone have any other thoughts or know if they've studied this problem?
Airbags scale by a factor of ~2.5 with mass. MSL is much larger than the MERs. Thus it can't be landed with airbags and fit on top of a launch vehicle.
The skycrane, ridiculous as it may seem, is probably really the best way to get something the size of MSL to the ground. Whether or not they wouldn't have been better off selecting a couple of MER sized machines is a different question...
I like how Boeing, ULA and ATK are listed as having no experience. This is neglecting the fact that no-experience applies less and less to SpaceX. You'd think being able to get a completely new good-sized vehicle flying with two successul test flights would speak to their capabilities.
When will these people realize that the old way of building spaceships hasn't produced a new vehicle in 30 years! Claiming NASA has the experience to build something new is disingenuous -- this is not to put the blame on NASA employees, but rather to point out that the current contracting structure, with its tendency to produce a One-Design-To-Rule-Them-All, and then have it be meddled with by congress, has proven to not be up to the task without Apollo-like external influences. I have trouble believing that any new NASA-designed launch vehicle would actually make it all the way to completion.
And their arguments are based largely on a miscomprehension of what is meant by 'commercial space'. It does not mean independence from a government market -- in fact only the wildest flights of fancy claim that an HSF market could exist without government demand. It means changing the contracting methods to something less prone to the abuses of cost-plus contracting, and allowing the companies that build new spaceships to sell their services to others as well. I really wish that we had chosen a less inflammatory name for the concept when it got pushed into the Obama budget -- I fear that the name makes the whole process sounds scarier than it actually is.
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Is anyone arguing with that? I'm a commercial space proponent and I work on NASA-funded planetary science missions.
The commercial space community states explicitly that NASA should be performing the "Lewis and Clark" job -- in fact thats the exact phrase we use. However, rides to orbit are no longer cutting edge technology, and have a proven opportunity for profit, and this is why we call for the government to stop insisting on its own launchers and use commercially available ones wherever possible, and to foster a market where it is possible to form one.
In planetary science we actively support this model, since Juno, MSL and GRAIL (the three recently launched missions) all launched on commercially purchased launch vehicles (though ULA is a bit of a monopoly so its not the healthiest commercial market).
Its not a replacement for all rockets. Its a replacement for giant rockets that are required to get huge payloads with lots of fuel to space.
The Apollo capsule could have launched easily on many of our current launch vehicles (it was tested on the Saturn I). It was the fuel required to inject towards the moon that required the huge Saturn V.
You're not trying to refuel the launch vehicle, you're trying to refuel the payload. It could be an injection stage for an interplanetary probe, the stationkeeping propellant for a satellite, or the fuel required to take an Apollo-style capsule to the moon.
So you'll need re-designed payloads, but not redesigned launch vehicles. The idea is that this reduces the need for a $50B monster like SLS by allowing larger missions with our current stable of launchers.
What do you suggest as an alternative CMS/Blogging system. I've recently taken over the web presence for a non-profit, and we are currently wordpress-based, though I'm in the process of completely revamping the site.
So far I really have come to like it, despite the fact that its PHP-based. Its easy enough to customize, once you buy-in to their design patterns, and it allows me to do a lot of the heavy lifting to get the site ready, while leaving the press and content writers perfectly capable of doing their jobs without needing/bothering me. Its easy to install and has lots of available plugins. And it makes it easy to use primarily as a CMS with the blog-like component active but in the background. Once I got past my own NIH symptom of wanting to build a custom framework, its treated me quite well.
Of course I am only an amateur, so I guess I may be part of the 'ignorant' market its intended for.
Its a technology demonstration for hardware that will eventually make deep space navigation better.
This is being run out of the JPL navigation section and is intended to improve long-term capabilities with a small investment.
On a Mac you can hit Command+Space to open Spotlight and then type the name of the program you want and achieve the same thing.
Just to keep you from going crazy next time.
Thats how its supposed to work. Governments should be doing the things private industry and individuals can't -- in this case development of technologies that have the potential to benefit society as a whole that are expensive enough and uncertain enough to never make a valid business plan or hobby project.
Then, those developments should be fed back to the citizens (and the companies they form), so that when its possible for the private entities to take advantage of it, they can. I work for NASA, and personally I'd much rather SpaceX/Boeing/Lockheed/Orbital build launch vehicles and let us worry about high-risk tech development and exploration.
Well, to be fair, a satellite in an extremely low Earth orbit with significant drag throughout its entire orbit is probably the most difficult place for us to track a live satellite.
The atmosphere is unpredictable, so its constantly rephasing the orbit in ways you can't predict, and when its that low, a ground station has a very brief time to get acquisition, get some data, and send it to the controllers for orbit determination. Compare to a deep space vehicle (say Juno instead of an alien spaceship), where even if you're uncertain by 100s of km you're still within the beam-width of a DSN tracking station, and you only need three stations around the globe to track it at any point in time. Plus the orbital dynamics are known well enough that you should be able to find it again 6 months or a year later pretty easily even if you lose all tracking data from now till then.
That is unless you're worrying about Webb and its partner money sponge SLS soaking up funds from other programs.
Personally, my interests are in seeing CCDEV/COTS, tech development, and planetary science advance. Sadly, unless things (I'll give management the benefit of the doubt and just leave it at luck) improves drastically I can't help but worry as costs keep going up and launch keeps getting delayed.
I think scientific interest would be more along the lines of using it more like GRACE, tracking climatic changes associated with carbon and water ice moving around. Additionally, you couldn't get data from as close to the surface, since you've got to stay out of the atmosphere, just like you do on Earth, making it harder to get 'crust to core' data.
The other problem is that flying these things in formation is *hard*, and around Mars it would be even harder. You depend on tracking data to and from Earth, in addition to the spacecraft-to-spacecraft range, and thats harder to do since its further away. Maintaining data to Earth on a higher-gain antenna while maintaining orbiter point would be difficult, since the pointing constraints are not guaranteed to get along. Plus trying to get them into synchronized orbits is hard enough around the Moon, so Mars sounds potentially nightmarish -- of course, for that you might just have to put them on a common bus and separate them after Mars entry. Additionally, you'd need a bigger motor than GRAIL/GRACE have, in order to achieve Mars orbit.
Given the new development required -- new antennae, figuring out the pointing, a common bus with its own attitude control system and thrusters, and a larger launch vehicle, my WAG for the cost is probably around $800M (compared to ~$495M for GRAIL). Definitely doable under a New Frontiers program. Plus, my experience is with GRAIL and Mars orbiters, so I'd be employed for quite a while and thus like the idea.
Technically, everything is done UTC, and the insertion burn for GRAIL-A is around 22:00 UTC on 31-Dec-2011, and GRAIL-B is after that.
Of course, the people operating it are stationed in Pacific and Mountain time zones (JPL/DSN and Lockheed Martin in Denver), and that places the maneuvers mid-afternoon on those days.
Remember though, Juno is not an imaging mission. Its only camera is there for outreach purposes, will die a quick death once it gets into orbit because of the radiation environment, and thus they didn't spend much money on it.
Juno's mission is to map the gravity field, radiation environment, and magnetic field. It's a (relatively) low-cost mission with a focused science goal, and is thus quite different from a mission like Galileo which produced stunning images of Jupiter and its moons. Similarly, any images we get from the upcoming GRAIL or MAVEN missions will be similarly disappointing. We've got lots of pictures, so new missions are focused on data that is just as useful but less pretty -- at least for the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter.
That's probably because it doesn't have a particularly good camera. We've got lots of good pictures from Galileo -- the purpose of this mission is to map the gravity, magnetic and radiation fields. The mission is power-starved and in a really nightmarish radiation environment, so the only camera is intended solely for outreach purposes, and that one won't last long (7 orbits) within that radiation.
Remember this is not a flagship mission, meant to do anything and everything. It's a relatively cheap mission selected through a competitive process, and thus is highly focused on its particular science goals.
The thing about space (besides that its big) is that it makes almost everything harder. Every spacecraft is power starved, so simply adding power is not usually a possibility -- the key is going to be getting a higher data rate for the same amount of energy, mass and operational complexity compared to radio comm.
Even more importantly: high powered lasers put off a lot of heat. On Earth, we've gotten pretty good at disposing of heat -- convection or conduction work great. Unfortunately, in space, you can only radiate the heat away -- thermal management of a spacecraft is a surprisingly difficult proposition. A high-powered laser makes thermal management all the more difficult, and you'll notice that lasers in space are in fact quite rare for that reason.
This is why an engineering demonstration is important -- it helps us work out these issues without risking a $400M Mars mission. I'm working on the next orbiter (MAVEN) right now, and our job would be much easier if we had laser comms to transmit back a lot of the telemetry we'd like to get.
Bandwidth is an issue. Telemetry is extremely tightly budgeted on a mission like this, and being able to get more back would vastly increase the available science data as well as simplify operations.
And a high-powered laser is not a trivial task. First, all the power comes from solar cells, which are themselves heavy and they try to keep them minimized. Second, when you're pumping a lot of energy through a laser, you end up with a lot of heat that is difficult to discard. You can't bleed it off through convection or conduction, so you have to rely on radiators for everything and those get big and heavy too. This tech development project is incredibly important for trying to work out these kinds of issues.
Now, if you can find a way around the latency issues I'm all ears.
I like SpaceX as much as the next guy, but there's more to the puzzle. Orbital Sciences, Boeing's CST-100, Sierra Nevada's DreamChaser, ESA's and JAXA's resupply vehicles, and even Orion-reborn (to name a few) are all critical to maintaining a foothold on the frontier.
I think what this should teach us (potentially having our only way to get things and people to the ISS grounded) is that no single solution can be depended on. In addition to the sought cost benefits of competition, we need multiple vehicles because none of them will be perfectly reliable and all run a risk of being taken out of service temporarily and leaving a gap if nothing else is available.
ISS, CCDEV, COTS, SLS. There's more to human spaceflight than the space shuttle.
As Alan Stern pointed out on NASA Watch earlier today, this is a very dangerous move for the space science community.
The science program has worked hard to put up firewalls to prevent the manned program from raiding them for funding when the going gets tough. By breaking that firewall in the opposite direction it opens the science directorate to future funding losses when things get bad on the manned side, (as they are sure to when the already obvious failures of SLS come calling).
Between these two massive programs whose budgets keep growing I fear for the interesting smaller programs on boh the manned and unmanned sides...
Are you saying that the diffraction effects allow one to determine source altitude? Azimuth I would imagine is easily distinguishable from using the ears as mere point sensors, as I mentioned in a sibling post.
Very interesting. (not saying that sarcastically).
Easily justified by the presence of a priori information. You know what an airplane sounds like and that unless you're at an airport, one would hope that it's in the air.
Simply put, humans are incredible sensor platforms, able to synthesize information from both simple and complex sources. Nonetheless, your ears are essentially two point sensors, so while you can distinguish quite a bit by hearing alone, azimuth by differencing the volume to each ear (of course there's a front-to-back ambiguity), distance by expected volume, and change in distance by Doppler shifts, you're still limited by basic physics. Of course if you're needing to distinguish up and down locations by sound alone, you can always cock your head and get quite a bit more that way.
Of course, I'm no expert in biology -- I'm more interested in sensor systems, thus my tendency to analyze human senses in those terms.
I would venture that the 2d limitations of natural human sonar have more to do with the fact that our ears are in a horizontal plane and thus can't distinguish up/down variations. Except in special circumstances, the air through which the sound is travelling is not going to be stratified enough to make a difference.
Given that, this is likely to sidestep that limitation, since it appears far more directional, and mounted on a hand, which is more natural to tilt than ones head.
The problem is that the only way to be 100% sure (or even 10% sure) of an impact risk is to send something out there to track it with proper radio science measurements.
Generally the approach any mission should take is not to prevent an impact, which implies that you will have something approaching good knowledge of whether or not it would pass through a keyhole, but rather to reduce the probability of impact. Because the center of the distribution from your knowledge (largely gaussian) is going to be offset from the keyhole, you need to nudge the asteroid further in that same direction to move it out past a 5-sigma or 6-sigma or 7-sigma ellipse, whatever your desired goal is.
The annoying truth about dealing with anything in deep space is that its all probabilistic. You never really know where anything is, and you always have to quote your certainty values.
I wonder if they've looked at predicting how this will play out with the new program in place -- they have the basic problem that they're affecting what they're observing, and thus will change what will happen.
If the algorithms predict crimes in certain areas, you'll end up with officers in the area, likely preventing a crime before it even happens. That is, the potential criminal will notice the police presence and decide its not a good time. Thus there would be some feedback from the prediction method back onto itself.
I can think of three ways it could go:
1. Predictable "waves" that roll across the city
2. Predictable but chaotic patterns reminiscent of a complex cellular automata or fractal
3. The software nullifies itself.
Anyone have any other thoughts or know if they've studied this problem?
Airbags scale by a factor of ~2.5 with mass. MSL is much larger than the MERs. Thus it can't be landed with airbags and fit on top of a launch vehicle.
The skycrane, ridiculous as it may seem, is probably really the best way to get something the size of MSL to the ground. Whether or not they wouldn't have been better off selecting a couple of MER sized machines is a different question...
I like how Boeing, ULA and ATK are listed as having no experience. This is neglecting the fact that no-experience applies less and less to SpaceX. You'd think being able to get a completely new good-sized vehicle flying with two successul test flights would speak to their capabilities.
When will these people realize that the old way of building spaceships hasn't produced a new vehicle in 30 years! Claiming NASA has the experience to build something new is disingenuous -- this is not to put the blame on NASA employees, but rather to point out that the current contracting structure, with its tendency to produce a One-Design-To-Rule-Them-All, and then have it be meddled with by congress, has proven to not be up to the task without Apollo-like external influences. I have trouble believing that any new NASA-designed launch vehicle would actually make it all the way to completion.
And their arguments are based largely on a miscomprehension of what is meant by 'commercial space'. It does not mean independence from a government market -- in fact only the wildest flights of fancy claim that an HSF market could exist without government demand. It means changing the contracting methods to something less prone to the abuses of cost-plus contracting, and allowing the companies that build new spaceships to sell their services to others as well. I really wish that we had chosen a less inflammatory name for the concept when it got pushed into the Obama budget -- I fear that the name makes the whole process sounds scarier than it actually is.