The problem with that is recognizing what code is going to be reused by others and what isn't.
I'm an aerospace engineer who writes a lot of code (and does so on the taxpayer's dime), and it is a struggle to find the right balance between getting something functional for the immediate task, and recognizing what will be useful for others later. Since its much more difficult to write the second variety (particularly if it needs to be generalized for as-yet unknown tasks,) its just as important to perform some tasks the quick way as it is to do others the right way. Otherwise I am wasting precious resources.
No. I'm sorry. No. Theres a difference between having fun with software names and this. It is incredibly misogynistic, and it is perfectly reasonable to be offended by it. The name refers to a non-consensual sexual intrusion, something you might consider light rape.
There's a big difference between this and something adolescent and immaturely sexual, but not horribly offensive like, oh, 'booblib'.
I see two clear differences between Facebook and Google+ that I think reduce the privacy issues.
1. Google has made a clear commitment to making sure you can export your data from all of their services, while Facebook is particularly shameless about lock-in. This makes the cost of shifting to a different service much lower if they start acting more evil.
2. The Circles feature makes it much easier to maintain privacy, not from Google, but from each other. By making different classes of friends/acquaintances core features of the system instead of Facebook's tacked-on Groups feature, it forces a user to consider whether they really need to share something with everyone. That's definitely a good thing.
Of course the fundamental issue that you can hide your information from Google or anyone that has a special arrangement with them is quite obviously still there. But I can't help but feel Google+ mitigates the issues much better.
Merely ideas before their time. Both nice in theory but ugly reality made them too ineffective for their roles.
Fortunately, we (as in civilization) have taken our lessons learned quite well. The Concorde was too inefficient relative to high subsonic aircraft (i.e. high fuel costs), and had very limited routes due to restrictions on supersonic land overflights. There is a lot of research going on now to reduce sonic booms to the point of elimination, as well as improving efficiency. The next supersonic commercial aircraft, whenever it is made, will be cost competitive and capable of flying more routes.
The shuttle's failings are well documented, but the next generation of manned vehicles demonstrate the lessons learned quite well. All have the passenger cabin on top, separate crew and cargo functionality, seek simplicity and are truly reusable rather than merely refurbish-able. Additionally, by seeking multiple independent vendors we are avoiding the single string failures we encountered after Columbia, Challenger, and the current retirement plan.
We didn't get things right the first time out on either of these, but thats not necessarily a bad thing -- mistakes are often the best way to learn.
I work on NASA Science Mission Directorate missions, and while if JWST is not built, it will be in many ways a shame, but in other ways it will be a great relief.
JWST is facing potential cancellation not simply because it seems less important than military spending or other items, but because it is incredibly late, incredibly over budget, and taking funding from other missions. With MSL (the other SMD money sink) being launched soon, if JWST costs can be either constrained or repurposed we have a lot of opportunity to do a lot of new and interesting things which could be just as exciting.
While the US budget is certainly worth being questioned for its priorities (as is any county's, its only healthy), I don't think this is necessarily indicative of those issus.
As an engineer, that skycrane contraption sets off my alarms of being an extremely complicated and scary solution. It lacks the simplicity of earlier landers with a sequence of chutes, retro rockets, and airbag expansions. Though still being single point failures, they were not actively controlled and could use simple backup timers to make sure everything deployed if at all possible. (Full disclosure: I'm a JPL engineer, but not in EDL and not working on MSL, and of course my opinions are purely my own).
Of course for a mobile vehicle that large, I can't think of a better solution that could fit on a launch vehicle, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.
Given that, though, if it fails, i doubt it would be resurrected. MSL already has a bad track record of delays and problems, and a reputation as a money sink (though not as bad as JWST). Also, I have a bias towards more smaller and cheaper missions (and as a deep space navigator, rovers are quite dull for me professionally) so I would actually rather have the money spent on more New Frontiers and Discovery class missions.
The shuttle was designed and built in the 1970s. NASA (or more precisely the STS model of one vehicle to rule them all with politicians at the helm) has consistently failed to develop a replacement vehicle in the 40 years since then.
I hear this a lot, and I think the destination-oriented approach to the problem is the wrong way. As part of the Frontier movement, who whole-heartedly argue that settlement is the only economically justifiable reason for human exploration, we don't just want to go to the Moon, or an asteroid, or anywhere else. We want to go to all of these places, and more.
Destination-oriented approaches aren't going to open the solar system to us. They may ramp up public excitement a bit, but lets be honest, public excitement never got us very far. Don't fall for the myth that Apollo happened because of overwhelming public support, or because Kennedy really believed in it, or anything else -- it served a geopolitical agenda of demonstrating the superiority of the American model during the struggle to win the allegiances of the third world. As advocates of opening the frontier we need to learn to take what we're given and do the most we can with it.
And quite frankly, the ambiguous flexible path approach is the best way to do that. More than anything else, it doesn't require the critical step of "Get more money from congress." If we rebuild a solid infrastructure of multiple launch vehicles to get to LEO (with competitive pressures to improve performance and reduce cost) then in 5 years when a new administration may point in a new direction, they'll have a good starting point from which to redirect the program to accomplish something within 4-5 years (a new administration won't cancel something thats almost done). If in the process we find more new and profitable things to do further away from the Earth's economic sphere, then all the better, because commerce is always going to form a more stable base than the fickleness of feel-good politics. If our systems aren't designed only for the Moon, or for Mars or anywhere else, then we can go wherever it makes the most sense to go at the time.
30-year programs and custom one-off systems for a single mission are far more detrimental to human spaceflight than the passing political pressures or the vagaries of public opinion.
That conventional wisdom (which I have my own issues with, but I digress) only applies to projects that consume a large fraction of NASA's budget and are thus highly visible.
Plenty of small-ish projects get along just find without fear of national politics ending them. A small project just needs to stay on-time, on-budget, and not piss off the more immediate managers.
I can't say for sure what they plan, but Earth-Moon L2 point is also a good hopping off point to to hit a lot of interesting places.
If you can match up the equal-energy contours in the Earth-Moon system with similar contours in the Earth-Sun system you can escape from the Earth system with a very modest maneuvers. The GRAIL mission launching in a few months is a good example of this (going the other way). This could make it pretty easy some new asteroids that have never been imaged before, and you could even potentially take these kinds of paths out to other planets -- this is the so-called Interplanetary Superhighway.
I'd imagine their intention is less to explore the L2 point, and more to explore *from* the L2 point.
Well, this article and discussion are more generally on deep space exploration, which implies probes, thus why I focused on probes.
And we still have plenty of manned operations too. ISS is scheduled to fly till 2020 now, and we have multiple vehicles in development (Orion, Dragon, Dreamchaser), one of which has already flown unmanned. When I say stunts, I mean massively funded spectaculars that do surprisingly little to advance us on a sustainable path to human exploration -- Apollo gave up on that when they decided to take the fast and expensive route of a single giant russian nesting doll stack, and Constellation continued it when they abandoned ISRU and other 'risky' technologies in favor of massive rockets that kept ATK happy instead.
Are we? We're cutting back on Apollo-style manned stunts, but thats about it. We have a moon mission and two deep space missions launching in the next 6 months, with plenty already in flight and plenty more in development. The last round of mission prioritization pushed to do a lot of smaller missions rather than a few big ones -- different, but certainly not cutting back.
While the difference in units was the most immediate culprit, it could have been a great number of other things and the real culprits were:
1. Failure by Lockheed to follow defined software interface specifications. The same thing could have happened if they used meters rather than km or a dozen other things.
2. High turnover on the Lockheed spacecraft team meant that no one who was there to initially define the software specs was still around, nor had they directly trained the new team members.
3. The JPL navigation team was understaffed and did not have enough oversight to properly sort out anomalous data that could have prevented the problem.
So yes, while the units thing was the superficial cause, its really just another example of human errors that will inevitably affect any human endeavor, particularly when they need to be very precise. Snidely focusing on the units thing is sidestepping the real issues of quality control and quality staffing. Fortunately we learn from our mistakes -- I know on the JPL Nav side we have a strong push for staffing plans being laid out with significant continuity for the lifetime of a project from PDR through the primary mission, as well as a renewed emphasis on keeping an external review panel for all nav procedures.
I agree for the most part, but there are two things I find traditional broadcast TV useful for:
Sports: its not for everyone, but I love college football. ESPN3 (despite its obnoxious attempt to translate their cable revenue model to the internet) helps a lot, but broadcast is indispensable, particularly when it comes to bowl season.
Weather: I grew up in Oklahoma, and though I've moved away now, I still have it instilled in my core that with serious weather, you turn on the TV as the best way to get pertinent information. Professional judgement, along with the moving pictures that show the storm's progress are ideal for informing a large area of potential dangers, and for telling those in immediate danger to take shelter immediately. I would be very nervous to live in a tornado prone area without some sort of TV broadcast reception.
Of course, living in California now and football season not starting for a few months still I certainly understand the sentiment. I haven't used my antenna since February. Still, I'm glad I have it.
1. Libya is a large country with a small population that can be effectively policed through targeted strikes and a no-fly zone to prevent delivery of supplies to the eastern half of the country.
2. Libyan rebels asked for a help, and the Arab league agreed that it was in everyones best interest.
Syria is too dense to enforce things in a similar way. Additionally, I have yet to hear of Syrians requesting western assistance to deal with their oppressors (although I could just not be tuned in enough, I admit). Sadly, this is not an ideal world, and there is not a simple formula that defines YES or NO on humanitarian missions -- we have to balance humanitarian needs, real-politik, practical capabilities, willingness to commit, respect for sovereignty, and probably dozens of other factors I can't think of.
You're making a (common) incorrect assumption: that the change in velocity you impart maps linearly to a change in distance in the future.
When trying to avoid an impact, the best approach is to shift the phase (the location within the largely fixed orbital path) so that the intersection with the orbit of the Earth occurs either a little before we get there, or a little after. Thus most of the time you're either pushing or pulling in the velocity direction (changing the period ever so slightly).
The thing about the orbit phase, though, is that its incredibly sensitive to anything you might to do the orbit, particularly when you start talking about multiple revolutions. Slight period shifts compound and build up, and a small change leads to a much larger changes later (much larger than distance = velocity*time would suggest). As you might imagine, this can prove to be a huge advantage for any mitigation plan that has a good lead time (10-20 years). Thus while the 70 days estimate is probably decent, most serious mitigation plans focus on early detection so that we can take advantage of gravity to help us out.
Have you ever actually looked at what the FAA is wanting to do for commercial space operations? Have you ever talked to the people doing it to figure out their goals? The FAA-AST folks and the NewSpace folks in fact get a long quite well, they're even Facebook friends.
Pre-emptive regulation where the industry has a main seat at the table is the best weapon right now against over-regulation later. With the current path, the legal regime under which the companies will operate will be well-known and designed in a way that benefits everyone. If this weren't happening, and an accident were to happen, the 'do something!' crowd would force congress to impose ill-conceived regulations instead. If you're playing a game, you want to know the rules in advance, not have new ones sprung on you after you've started playing.
Regulation is not necessarily bad. Bad regulation is bad. Unfortunately thats the kind we notice most.
They know this. The FAA is regulating the legs of the trip through US air space where they have jurisdiction. Launch and re-entry are the main areas of concern.
Also, the FAA folks involved in this, AST (Office of Space Transportation I believe), are trying very hard to facilitate new developments, not regulate it to death. Having well-defined regulations in place now helps prevent ill-concieved and onerous regulations coming in later when congress gets involved. The ones I have met are thoughtful people who are very enthusiastic about the emerging markets in commercial spaceflight.
From everything I hear in the NewSpace community, most of them are quite happy to have the FAA working on this. Its better than NASA or the military taking the lead, and far better than having no regulatory framework.
You forgot the classic example used by the commercial space community: airmail.
In the early 20th century, we had seen that aviation was technically possible, but not that it was much good for anything but military and stunts. It was hard to justify the capital costs to develop a reliable airline service. So the US government (in the form of the USPS) steps in and says that they'll guarantee a market for airmail. Those contracts made the uncertainties of the rest of the market seem worth the risk, and we see the modern airline industry start.
The sometimes-poorly named 'commercial' prospects for space technology are like this. They are supported and subsidized by the government right now, but the structures for the contracts are set up so that other customers are possible and indeed expected and supported. Plus that nice gem about purchasing from multiple vendors that will force price control through competition. Investment in a high-risk, high-capital industry is a chicken and egg problem, and initial government-assured contracts can help get things started.
Because making sure copyright laws are in sync is an international issue.
Not that I support either version of the DMCA and am glad to see some resistance to it, but in general, international cooperation on copyright matters is appropriate and necessary.
I actually kind of appreciate having a not-too-hackish OS-X like interface, mostly because I use OSX as well as Ubuntu -- and first thing I do is move the dock to the side in OSX.
Unfortunately, this has one glaring problem for me. I expect applications to behave in a 'application-centric' way like OSX does now, rather than the 'window-centric' way. I keep closing my browser and having to restart it because I keep thinking it should keep running after I close the window. Since the beta was slow for me and my desktop is getting long in the tooth this got really annoying.
VASIMR is still in development (and its being developed by an American company, Ad Astra, which was founded by an American astronaut of Costa Rican origin). I believe there is a demo going to the ISS in 2014 for station-keeping.
The reason to look at doing this with traditional chemical rockets is that its the hardest case (so transferring the techniques to something inert like xenon or argon would be straightforward), and it also doesn't make the entire effort dependent on VASIMR being proven. It's been talked about for many years, so though I wouldn't call it vaporware, its not something you put on your critical path.
Multiple paths that may be combined in interesting ways is the ideal way to do this kind of long-term tech development.
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The problem with that is recognizing what code is going to be reused by others and what isn't.
I'm an aerospace engineer who writes a lot of code (and does so on the taxpayer's dime), and it is a struggle to find the right balance between getting something functional for the immediate task, and recognizing what will be useful for others later. Since its much more difficult to write the second variety (particularly if it needs to be generalized for as-yet unknown tasks,) its just as important to perform some tasks the quick way as it is to do others the right way. Otherwise I am wasting precious resources.
No. I'm sorry. No. Theres a difference between having fun with software names and this. It is incredibly misogynistic, and it is perfectly reasonable to be offended by it. The name refers to a non-consensual sexual intrusion, something you might consider light rape.
There's a big difference between this and something adolescent and immaturely sexual, but not horribly offensive like, oh, 'booblib'.
I see two clear differences between Facebook and Google+ that I think reduce the privacy issues.
1. Google has made a clear commitment to making sure you can export your data from all of their services, while Facebook is particularly shameless about lock-in. This makes the cost of shifting to a different service much lower if they start acting more evil.
2. The Circles feature makes it much easier to maintain privacy, not from Google, but from each other. By making different classes of friends/acquaintances core features of the system instead of Facebook's tacked-on Groups feature, it forces a user to consider whether they really need to share something with everyone. That's definitely a good thing.
Of course the fundamental issue that you can hide your information from Google or anyone that has a special arrangement with them is quite obviously still there. But I can't help but feel Google+ mitigates the issues much better.
Merely ideas before their time. Both nice in theory but ugly reality made them too ineffective for their roles.
Fortunately, we (as in civilization) have taken our lessons learned quite well. The Concorde was too inefficient relative to high subsonic aircraft (i.e. high fuel costs), and had very limited routes due to restrictions on supersonic land overflights. There is a lot of research going on now to reduce sonic booms to the point of elimination, as well as improving efficiency. The next supersonic commercial aircraft, whenever it is made, will be cost competitive and capable of flying more routes.
The shuttle's failings are well documented, but the next generation of manned vehicles demonstrate the lessons learned quite well. All have the passenger cabin on top, separate crew and cargo functionality, seek simplicity and are truly reusable rather than merely refurbish-able. Additionally, by seeking multiple independent vendors we are avoiding the single string failures we encountered after Columbia, Challenger, and the current retirement plan.
We didn't get things right the first time out on either of these, but thats not necessarily a bad thing -- mistakes are often the best way to learn.
I work on NASA Science Mission Directorate missions, and while if JWST is not built, it will be in many ways a shame, but in other ways it will be a great relief.
JWST is facing potential cancellation not simply because it seems less important than military spending or other items, but because it is incredibly late, incredibly over budget, and taking funding from other missions. With MSL (the other SMD money sink) being launched soon, if JWST costs can be either constrained or repurposed we have a lot of opportunity to do a lot of new and interesting things which could be just as exciting.
While the US budget is certainly worth being questioned for its priorities (as is any county's, its only healthy), I don't think this is necessarily indicative of those issus.
As an engineer, that skycrane contraption sets off my alarms of being an extremely complicated and scary solution. It lacks the simplicity of earlier landers with a sequence of chutes, retro rockets, and airbag expansions. Though still being single point failures, they were not actively controlled and could use simple backup timers to make sure everything deployed if at all possible. (Full disclosure: I'm a JPL engineer, but not in EDL and not working on MSL, and of course my opinions are purely my own).
Of course for a mobile vehicle that large, I can't think of a better solution that could fit on a launch vehicle, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.
Given that, though, if it fails, i doubt it would be resurrected. MSL already has a bad track record of delays and problems, and a reputation as a money sink (though not as bad as JWST). Also, I have a bias towards more smaller and cheaper missions (and as a deep space navigator, rovers are quite dull for me professionally) so I would actually rather have the money spent on more New Frontiers and Discovery class missions.
The shuttle was designed and built in the 1970s. NASA (or more precisely the STS model of one vehicle to rule them all with politicians at the helm) has consistently failed to develop a replacement vehicle in the 40 years since then.
Time to try something new.
I hear this a lot, and I think the destination-oriented approach to the problem is the wrong way. As part of the Frontier movement, who whole-heartedly argue that settlement is the only economically justifiable reason for human exploration, we don't just want to go to the Moon, or an asteroid, or anywhere else. We want to go to all of these places, and more.
Destination-oriented approaches aren't going to open the solar system to us. They may ramp up public excitement a bit, but lets be honest, public excitement never got us very far. Don't fall for the myth that Apollo happened because of overwhelming public support, or because Kennedy really believed in it, or anything else -- it served a geopolitical agenda of demonstrating the superiority of the American model during the struggle to win the allegiances of the third world. As advocates of opening the frontier we need to learn to take what we're given and do the most we can with it.
And quite frankly, the ambiguous flexible path approach is the best way to do that. More than anything else, it doesn't require the critical step of "Get more money from congress." If we rebuild a solid infrastructure of multiple launch vehicles to get to LEO (with competitive pressures to improve performance and reduce cost) then in 5 years when a new administration may point in a new direction, they'll have a good starting point from which to redirect the program to accomplish something within 4-5 years (a new administration won't cancel something thats almost done). If in the process we find more new and profitable things to do further away from the Earth's economic sphere, then all the better, because commerce is always going to form a more stable base than the fickleness of feel-good politics. If our systems aren't designed only for the Moon, or for Mars or anywhere else, then we can go wherever it makes the most sense to go at the time.
30-year programs and custom one-off systems for a single mission are far more detrimental to human spaceflight than the passing political pressures or the vagaries of public opinion.
That conventional wisdom (which I have my own issues with, but I digress) only applies to projects that consume a large fraction of NASA's budget and are thus highly visible.
Plenty of small-ish projects get along just find without fear of national politics ending them. A small project just needs to stay on-time, on-budget, and not piss off the more immediate managers.
I can't say for sure what they plan, but Earth-Moon L2 point is also a good hopping off point to to hit a lot of interesting places.
If you can match up the equal-energy contours in the Earth-Moon system with similar contours in the Earth-Sun system you can escape from the Earth system with a very modest maneuvers. The GRAIL mission launching in a few months is a good example of this (going the other way). This could make it pretty easy some new asteroids that have never been imaged before, and you could even potentially take these kinds of paths out to other planets -- this is the so-called Interplanetary Superhighway.
I'd imagine their intention is less to explore the L2 point, and more to explore *from* the L2 point.
As far as NASA is concerned, deep space means anything outside of the Earth-Moon system.
You're thinking interstellar space, where the Voyagers are approaching now.
Well, this article and discussion are more generally on deep space exploration, which implies probes, thus why I focused on probes.
And we still have plenty of manned operations too. ISS is scheduled to fly till 2020 now, and we have multiple vehicles in development (Orion, Dragon, Dreamchaser), one of which has already flown unmanned. When I say stunts, I mean massively funded spectaculars that do surprisingly little to advance us on a sustainable path to human exploration -- Apollo gave up on that when they decided to take the fast and expensive route of a single giant russian nesting doll stack, and Constellation continued it when they abandoned ISRU and other 'risky' technologies in favor of massive rockets that kept ATK happy instead.
Are we? We're cutting back on Apollo-style manned stunts, but thats about it. We have a moon mission and two deep space missions launching in the next 6 months, with plenty already in flight and plenty more in development. The last round of mission prioritization pushed to do a lot of smaller missions rather than a few big ones -- different, but certainly not cutting back.
While the difference in units was the most immediate culprit, it could have been a great number of other things and the real culprits were:
1. Failure by Lockheed to follow defined software interface specifications. The same thing could have happened if they used meters rather than km or a dozen other things.
2. High turnover on the Lockheed spacecraft team meant that no one who was there to initially define the software specs was still around, nor had they directly trained the new team members.
3. The JPL navigation team was understaffed and did not have enough oversight to properly sort out anomalous data that could have prevented the problem.
So yes, while the units thing was the superficial cause, its really just another example of human errors that will inevitably affect any human endeavor, particularly when they need to be very precise. Snidely focusing on the units thing is sidestepping the real issues of quality control and quality staffing. Fortunately we learn from our mistakes -- I know on the JPL Nav side we have a strong push for staffing plans being laid out with significant continuity for the lifetime of a project from PDR through the primary mission, as well as a renewed emphasis on keeping an external review panel for all nav procedures.
I agree for the most part, but there are two things I find traditional broadcast TV useful for:
Sports: its not for everyone, but I love college football. ESPN3 (despite its obnoxious attempt to translate their cable revenue model to the internet) helps a lot, but broadcast is indispensable, particularly when it comes to bowl season.
Weather: I grew up in Oklahoma, and though I've moved away now, I still have it instilled in my core that with serious weather, you turn on the TV as the best way to get pertinent information. Professional judgement, along with the moving pictures that show the storm's progress are ideal for informing a large area of potential dangers, and for telling those in immediate danger to take shelter immediately. I would be very nervous to live in a tornado prone area without some sort of TV broadcast reception.
Of course, living in California now and football season not starting for a few months still I certainly understand the sentiment. I haven't used my antenna since February. Still, I'm glad I have it.
Not soon, and no. Because:
1. Libya is a large country with a small population that can be effectively policed through targeted strikes and a no-fly zone to prevent delivery of supplies to the eastern half of the country.
2. Libyan rebels asked for a help, and the Arab league agreed that it was in everyones best interest.
Syria is too dense to enforce things in a similar way. Additionally, I have yet to hear of Syrians requesting western assistance to deal with their oppressors (although I could just not be tuned in enough, I admit). Sadly, this is not an ideal world, and there is not a simple formula that defines YES or NO on humanitarian missions -- we have to balance humanitarian needs, real-politik, practical capabilities, willingness to commit, respect for sovereignty, and probably dozens of other factors I can't think of.
You're making a (common) incorrect assumption: that the change in velocity you impart maps linearly to a change in distance in the future.
When trying to avoid an impact, the best approach is to shift the phase (the location within the largely fixed orbital path) so that the intersection with the orbit of the Earth occurs either a little before we get there, or a little after. Thus most of the time you're either pushing or pulling in the velocity direction (changing the period ever so slightly).
The thing about the orbit phase, though, is that its incredibly sensitive to anything you might to do the orbit, particularly when you start talking about multiple revolutions. Slight period shifts compound and build up, and a small change leads to a much larger changes later (much larger than distance = velocity*time would suggest). As you might imagine, this can prove to be a huge advantage for any mitigation plan that has a good lead time (10-20 years). Thus while the 70 days estimate is probably decent, most serious mitigation plans focus on early detection so that we can take advantage of gravity to help us out.
Its currently orbiting the sun, and will be entering orbit around Vesta during its science phase, so it is technically a satellite.
Still, generally at JPL we use spacecraft (or just s/c) since a satellite could also refer to a natural body.
Have you ever actually looked at what the FAA is wanting to do for commercial space operations? Have you ever talked to the people doing it to figure out their goals? The FAA-AST folks and the NewSpace folks in fact get a long quite well, they're even Facebook friends.
Pre-emptive regulation where the industry has a main seat at the table is the best weapon right now against over-regulation later. With the current path, the legal regime under which the companies will operate will be well-known and designed in a way that benefits everyone. If this weren't happening, and an accident were to happen, the 'do something!' crowd would force congress to impose ill-conceived regulations instead. If you're playing a game, you want to know the rules in advance, not have new ones sprung on you after you've started playing.
Regulation is not necessarily bad. Bad regulation is bad. Unfortunately thats the kind we notice most.
They know this. The FAA is regulating the legs of the trip through US air space where they have jurisdiction. Launch and re-entry are the main areas of concern.
Also, the FAA folks involved in this, AST (Office of Space Transportation I believe), are trying very hard to facilitate new developments, not regulate it to death. Having well-defined regulations in place now helps prevent ill-concieved and onerous regulations coming in later when congress gets involved. The ones I have met are thoughtful people who are very enthusiastic about the emerging markets in commercial spaceflight.
From everything I hear in the NewSpace community, most of them are quite happy to have the FAA working on this. Its better than NASA or the military taking the lead, and far better than having no regulatory framework.
You forgot the classic example used by the commercial space community: airmail.
In the early 20th century, we had seen that aviation was technically possible, but not that it was much good for anything but military and stunts. It was hard to justify the capital costs to develop a reliable airline service. So the US government (in the form of the USPS) steps in and says that they'll guarantee a market for airmail. Those contracts made the uncertainties of the rest of the market seem worth the risk, and we see the modern airline industry start.
The sometimes-poorly named 'commercial' prospects for space technology are like this. They are supported and subsidized by the government right now, but the structures for the contracts are set up so that other customers are possible and indeed expected and supported. Plus that nice gem about purchasing from multiple vendors that will force price control through competition. Investment in a high-risk, high-capital industry is a chicken and egg problem, and initial government-assured contracts can help get things started.
Because making sure copyright laws are in sync is an international issue.
Not that I support either version of the DMCA and am glad to see some resistance to it, but in general, international cooperation on copyright matters is appropriate and necessary.
If you're referring to the SPICE toolkit, we're even still using it.
I actually kind of appreciate having a not-too-hackish OS-X like interface, mostly because I use OSX as well as Ubuntu -- and first thing I do is move the dock to the side in OSX.
Unfortunately, this has one glaring problem for me. I expect applications to behave in a 'application-centric' way like OSX does now, rather than the 'window-centric' way. I keep closing my browser and having to restart it because I keep thinking it should keep running after I close the window. Since the beta was slow for me and my desktop is getting long in the tooth this got really annoying.
VASIMR is still in development (and its being developed by an American company, Ad Astra, which was founded by an American astronaut of Costa Rican origin). I believe there is a demo going to the ISS in 2014 for station-keeping.
The reason to look at doing this with traditional chemical rockets is that its the hardest case (so transferring the techniques to something inert like xenon or argon would be straightforward), and it also doesn't make the entire effort dependent on VASIMR being proven. It's been talked about for many years, so though I wouldn't call it vaporware, its not something you put on your critical path.
Multiple paths that may be combined in interesting ways is the ideal way to do this kind of long-term tech development.