The Device NASA Is Leaving Behind 163
iminplaya writes "After years of delays, NASA hopes to launch this week a European-built laboratory that will greatly expand the research capability of the international space station. Although some call it a milestone, the launch has focused new attention on the space agency's earlier decision to back out of plans to send up a different, $1.5 billion device — one that many scientists contend would produce far more significant knowledge. "...it would be a true international disgrace if this instrument ends up as a museum piece that never is used.""
Intersting comment (Score:4, Interesting)
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Is it an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator? Where's the kaboom? There was upposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
NASA Declares No Room; Re:Intersting comment (Score:4, Informative)
Science 16 March 2007: 1476
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1476
News of the Week SPACE SCIENCE:
NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Andrew Lawler
NASA has no room on its space shuttle to launch the $1.5 billion Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer, which is designed to search for antimatter from
its perch on the international space station.
Expanded and posted on a science blog where it was being discussed:
NASA: Alpha to Omega
Category: astro
Posted on: March 18, 2007 10:39 PM, by Steinn Sigurðsson
http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2007/03/nasa_alpha_to_omega.php [scienceblogs.com] [scienceblogs.com]
SPACE SCIENCE: NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Lawler
Science 16 March 2007: 1476
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1476
News of the Week
SPACE SCIENCE:
NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Andrew Lawler
NASA has no room on its space shuttle to launch the $1.5 billion Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer, which is designed to search for antimatter from
its perch on the international space station.
Hey, isn't that the Samuel Ting-Michael Salamon project?
Yes, it is:
http://ams.cern.ch/AMS/Secretariat/AmsWhosWho.html [ams.cern.ch] [ams.cern.ch]
NASA HQ is surely going WAY over the edge in punishing Michael Salamon. He was the head of fundamental Physics at NASA HQ, then they sent him to the White House, where he was for half a year or so the
Director of Physics at OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy). They pulled him out of the White House for what looks like political reasons.
This was to be the major actual Science experiment on the space station. And they are killing it -- why? I am leaning towards thinking that it is a purely political decision, as the "room" or money
argument is unconvincing, and as I say, it seems to be the #1 science project in the entire Space Station program.
If one detects even a single anti-carbon nucleus, one almost has to conclude that someplace there is an anti-star performinbg anti-nucleosyntheis, which exploded asn anti-supernova.
What a huge discovery that would be by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. For that tremendous science value per dollar ratio alone, it should fly.
I am going to write to my congressman and senators. Maybe it would be worth writing to, say, Oprah. The tax-paying public deserves to have SOME science done with their NASA tax dollars.
====
Yep, I'd like to see it launched, too. Cancelling an experiment after spending 1.5 billion to build it is just the sort of idiocy that the govenment does all the time, though.
If you follow NASA politics, though, you'd see that there's no reason to invoke any sort of "punishment" to understand this call. Griffin was given the order to cancel space shuttle by 2010. When you add up
all the things that Griffin has been instructed to do with the shuttle before the drop-dead do-not-fly-it-any-more date, and look at the maximum flight rate that's considered to be safe, there are zero flights available.
Of course, adding one more shuttle flight in 2011 would make perfect
sense-- the replacement for the shuttle won't be available for
another four years, so why not? But at the moment, that is being
considered the "camel's nose under the tent" thinking, and "cancel
shuttle by 2010" is a non-negotiable deadline.
- Show quoted text -
From the same blog and thread, a reply about Michael Salamon and the
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer:
==========
He was the head of fundamental Physics at NASA HQ, then they sent him
to the White House, where he was for half a year or so the Director of
Physics at OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy). They pulled
him out of the White House for what looks like political reasons.
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And with a very good reason. AMS (the device) is meant to observe extremely high energy cosmic rays - energies magnitudes higher than we can currently achieve in big (or small) colliders.
These rays cannot be observed with ground instruments as once they enter Earth atmosphere they immediately react to produce showers of lighter particles - this is how we know they exist in the first
That's what's wrong with science nowadays (Score:2)
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Might be still time to grab a towel though, after all it's the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
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Let all the Slashdotters out there know . . . if it turns out the young-earth creationists actually are right, I will run naked through the streets.
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Didn't Archimedes shout "Eureka!" and run naked in the streets when he discovered the principle of displacement?
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Yes that would be what I was referring to. It makes me sad no one does that anymore.
Can you imagine? "Hey everybody. We found a Higgs boson. LET'S GO STREAKING!!!"
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but I doubt it will make anyone run naked in the streets as, say, discovery of a reaction that makes dark matter could (it is the 30% of the universe after all !)
My physics TA (a doctoral student) used to say that this "dark matter" talk reminded him a lot of how we posited an extra planet between Mercury and the Sun because that was the only way to account for Mercury's orbit. It turned out that there was no planet, Newtonian mechanics were just too imprecise to predict the orbit of Mercury. Likewise, his bet was that the effects attributed to "dark matter" would be accounted for once we developed more precise physical laws.
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There is that.
On the other hand some o
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Nobel prize winner Steve Weinberg says in the article that it will be the only good science done on the ISS if it goes up!!!
...which is slightly misleading, of course. Back in the late eighties, early nineties, cosmic-ray scientists in the US formed a collaboration to conceive pretty much this system. It was called Astromag. It had a certain cost, NASA said it was too expensive, it got canned. Fast forward a couple years and Sam Ting, who has no clue of cosmic-ray science and only now discovers that there's interesting things to be done there drums up financial support in industry and various European partners for a harebraine
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I think all of those comments could have been said about the Hubble, and probably were 20 years ago, but look at what that instrument has taught us. Its output is a scientific treasure we'll still be analyzing for 30 years after it splashes down in the pacific.
I still get upset everytime some bells and whistles project that won't save mankind from blowing hisself to hell gets the funding and support to make it happen, and tools for basic research that canno
What's that item!? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What's that item!? (Score:5, Funny)
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Do not forget CAM (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Do not forget CAM (Score:4, Interesting)
It is still possible. (Score:2)
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"Biolab" centrifuges are usually for pelletting and separating small samples in tubes, etc. Are you sure the ones in Columbus are slow low-grav centrifuges?
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Wikipedia (whose fallibility is only in our understanding of its great wisdom) says [wikipedia.org]:
Biolab will support biological research on small plants, small invertebrates, microorganisms, animal cells, and tissue cultures. It will include an incubator equipped with centrifuges in which the preceding experimental subjects can be subjected to controlled levels of accelerations.
Wikipedia doesn't quite say "low gravity" there, but one can't imagine that they'd do, for extraordinary cost, the same sort of experiments that could be run on Earth.
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It's generally considered non-controversial and unworthy of scientific test
Pfft. First I've heard of this general sentiment. Course, you could be sarcastic here.
Here's an example why this matters. Suppose we have the following mission profile for a trip to Mars (based on NASA's recently released plans). A crew goes to Mars (6 months in zero G) and stays on the surface for 16 months (0.3 G roughly) and returns (another 6 months in zero G). Suppose late during their stay, they find that their return vehicle has become broken. NASA flies over another return vehicle, but they miss
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Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would someone please explain to me why this device must be attached to the space station? (Other than that it was built to be attached to the space station.) It seems to me that such an instrument could've been placed on its own dedicated satellite.
Or is this a case of "we'll get funding for this if we hitch it to the best funding-horse around"?
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Once in space it will probably use a lot of power / cooling / processing power all of which is found on the ISS, not to mention communication systems and possible installation procedures (getting an astronaut to finish the wiring is cheap in comparison to bracing the wiring for the damage inccured on the launch profile)
By the time they work out what extras are needed, what modifications are required and what mass the new system is then there probably isn't a launcher generally available that will take the resulting bulk into the required orbit. It would be easier to start from scratch and build a dedicated satellite rather than juryrig the current system to free flight.
Note that according to the article they looked at other ways of getting it to the ISS and they all turned out too expensive. It's the shuttle thats the limitation in this case not the ISS.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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The option of turning AMS into a free-flyer has been explored and it is prohibitively expensive. Right now it is a precise, sophisticated instrument designed to merge with the ISS infrastructure. Adding propulsion systems, independent power generation, etc. could be done, but is not at all economical. Beyond that, it is probably best that this complicated device be accessible if some unforeseen problem arises.
It is not economical to put things in space. Period. The question isn't whether it is prohibitively expensive, because every launch is prohibitively expensive, yet we still keep launching things. The question is how much it costs and whether it is worth doing.
Give our soldiers in Iraq the week off and you save enough to put 5 of these in orbit. The money is there.
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Why does it need to be launched with a shuttle? (Score:3, Interesting)
Couldn't it be just launched with a rocket, after adding the necessary bits so that it doesn't need the ISS?
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Maybe because one of the "necessary bits" is a human being to run it? I'm just guessing here, based on the fact it's specifically called a laboratory as opposed to a module, but if it absolutely requires human intervention to operate and can't be automated then it's the ISS or nothing. It might even be possible to get the module into orbit with an alternate launch vehicle, but even if you can get it parked alongside the ISS, overcoming the logistics of physically mounting it without the aid of the Shuttle
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If your customer has a good reason for such a change (like in this case) then I would estimate what it would take (money, time, people, etc.) to do the conversion. I definitely will not dismiss the possibility out of hand.
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Back around 1990, when Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) twisted NASA's arm to get them to disclose the actual costs, it turned out that a single Shuttle flight cost right around one billion dollars. That was some fifteen years ago. You can bet your second-best piggy bank that the costs have NOT gone down, given that the cost is determined PRIMARILY by the size of the standing army that must be paid whether th
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A pity for physicists, perhaps but . . (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand any biological experiments on Columbus might have a far more immediate effect on us e.g. understanding salmonella is important because all of us are at some degree of risk from it.
I am sorry for the people who see their great efforts at risk of being wasted - but not that sorry, because I know that the practitioners of every discipline think that theirs is the most fundamental and important to mankind in some way and all of them are wrong, because everything is important.
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Why do the rest of us care one iota about dark matter? It may answer fundamental questions etc and could eventually have some positive effect for the people who have to pay for it but surely if our discoveries have to wait 10 years for the next opportunity to put a similar instrument up it's no immediate tragedy?
On the other hand any biological experiments on Columbus might have a far more immediate effect on us e.g. understanding salmonella is important because all of us are at some degree of risk from it....
Just consider that people would have posed the same argument about quantum mechanics, particle physics, etc. etc. a hundred years ago. Yet technologies based on the understanding of these theories fundamentally enables most of modern medicine today.
No reason to be short-sighted here. The point is that you simply cannot perform a higher level science like biology or medicine in a vacuum, or you will very quickly stagnate. Just imagine trying to do modern biology or medicine with equipment from a century
Uses for dark matter (Score:2)
You think on a terribly small scale. Moving the universe - just this one? Based on the research of Dr. Grumman, and using a steampunk version of the HAARP array and a child sacrifice, a gateway to a parallel universe has been opened in the Arctic. And I'm hearing good things about Dr.
Switched horses in mid stream (Score:2, Informative)
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Yes this is a troll.
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The ISS is an expensive and elegant solution where it would have been better to have a cheap and cheerful solution like MIR.
I still cheer the fact he killed the shuttle (Score:2)
This damn thing and the shuttles has trapped us into low earth orbit for how many years?
The fact is, the shuttle system is what killed the AMS. We can't replace them and the one recent accident set us back two plus years. Add in the fact that another such accident and its all over till NASA comes up with a new launch vehicle and yes your priorities MUST change.
Idiot President or not, at le
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Private Enterprise? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone know if this includes any of the nascent commercial carriers?
If they could get this into a slightly higher orbit, could it be delivered later with a small amount of reaction mass?
Perhaps they should re-open this for bids.
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Given that there really aren't any 'nascent commercial carriers' - SpaceX is years late (and recently boosted its prices...) and Kistler is as much vaporware as ever. You'll likely have to depend on existing commercial carriers (Boeing and Lockmart).
The problem with cos
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It's a sad thruth it needs a shuttle to deliver it.
BTW, couldn't a shuttle-compatible vehicle be designed? I assume the ARES V would have similar vibration and acceleration characteristics and could accommodate a shuttl
Isn't it obvious that it's all wrong?!? (Score:3, Funny)
We're talking about NASA.
So of course it's wrong, by definition. NASA can do no right, on Slashdot.
International disgrace? (Score:2)
If this is a truly an international disgrace and a great launch to science why don't ESA or the Russians launch it? They have the vehicles. I personally am counting the days when they deorbit ISS and move on to project Constellation.
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Although I am not at all familiar with this particular launch, the usual answer is that it would be too expensive to adapt the payload to another launch vehicle. That doesn't mean the other launch vehicles are inferior; it just means conversion isn't practical.
Note that resupply or crew rotation missions are much less problematic, because they consist of a set of smaller payloads, and the e
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There is a very high limit on practicality when the other option is to scrap the $1B, perfectly good hardware. In management terms, "do what you need to launch it on any vehicle available."
Besides, a Shuttle launch costs about $400M, but a Proton launch costs from $100M to $200M, and Ariane 5 launch costs about $200M. That's a lot of cash that is suddenly freed up to spend on refitting the payload.
Share-ware (Score:3, Interesting)
A museum piece? (Score:2)
An international disgrace? (Score:3, Insightful)
It all starts with Mars... (Score:2)
Foolish (Score:2)
"Earth-shattering" (Score:2)
Then please, leave it on the ground!
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Only 1 shuttle has blown up since then. (Score:4, Insightful)
Um... no. The Challenger blew up in the 80s. The project was conceived in 1994.
So since that commitment was made, not two but ONE shuttle has been blown up.
You're also ignoring the fact that NASA is flying shuttle missions for far less important reasons. The ISS is a huge, ridiculous waste of resources. This piece is the silver lining on that cloud, the one major scientific venture. They're skipping it in favor of kiddie science projects and more stuff related to human activity, i.e. putting more lives in danger.
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If we want to make sure that human kind is not just limited to this one rock we currently inhabit, we are going to have to put lives in danger. Same thing happened when we wanted to be able to fly more than a few miles in an aeroplane. And this doesn't mean just making special test flights. It means making trips to space into a routine activity. Do it more often for wh
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Chemical rockets will not be able to take humans anywhere. Current spaceships are delicate because they have to be light. That's because our engines are underpowered. A shuttle needs an overly complicated (and fragile) heat-shield in ord
Re:Calling Mr Tang (Score:4, Interesting)
The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
The Challenger blew up in 1986, whereas the commitment was made in 1994. I don't think that anyone has ever questioned the fact that strapping yourself to the top of hundreds of tons of high explosives is inherently dangerous.
If you want to make a more valid point, you could indicate that neither the space shuttle or the ISS are particularly well-suited for the purpose that they were designed to fulfill (and I'd imagine that many of the ISS's woes are stemming from the issues with the fact that the space shuttle is expensive, dangerous, and can't carry very big payloads -- literally the worst of all worlds).
For what it's cost to send the shuttle into orbit umpteen times delivering parts to the ISS, I imagine that we could have designed and built a large rocket that could have delivered most of the payload in one or two trips. We'd already done it twice -- the US had the Saturn vehicles, and Russia more recently had the the Energia platform.
If we had a better platform than the shuttle for sending large parts to the ISS, we might have actually been able to get some legitimate science done on it. The shuttle was *never* an optimal launch vehicle, even before the safety issues came to light.
Re:Calling Mr Tang (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think that anyone has ever questioned the fact that strapping yourself to the top of hundreds of tons of high explosives is inherently dangerous.
To drag this further off-topic... Plenty of people have questioned that assertion. Or perhaps more accurately, plenty of people have questioned the idea of strapping yourself to a motor that can't be turned off (the SRBs and most solid motors) -- no current manned rocket actually uses high explosives for propellant. Many of these people are very smart and experienced, and many of them are trying to do something about it. Unfortunately, NASA and the current commercial providers don't seem terribly interested in attempts to reduce the risk of spaceflight by more than modest amounts.
I've worked on rocket engines. There's nothing more inherently dangerous about them than there is about a jet engine or even your car engine. All contain high energy chemicals and at least moderately high pressures. The fact that historically rocket engines are more dangerous than modern airplane engines is a result of two things: higher maturity levels in aircraft engine design, and a very curious lack of attention to safety and reliability in historical rocket engine design.
It does not have to be this way. We know how to build rocket engines that fail less often, and fail less catastrophically when they do fail. We know how to build rockets that don't kill their passengers when they fail. We need to stop assuming that space travel will always be as dangerous as it has been, and ask what we can do differently to make it safer from early in the design process. (It won't ever be completely safe, just as air travel will never be completely safe. It can, however, be continually improving in safety, and we can continue searching for ways to make it safer.)
let's not duplicate 1970s arrogance today, hmm? (Score:2)
Ah? What makes you say this? A direct connection to the mind of God? A little bird told you? It's just intuitively obvious?
The only facts we have are that the Shuttle has been able to deliver umpty tons of stuff and men to LEO -- way more than can possibly be lofted by any other launch system in the world -- but at a cost which is staggeringly higher than the original projected cost in the 1970s. From those fa
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The shuttle as originally designed wasn't a half-bad launch vehicle in either respect, even if it was a bit more expensive than launching separate missions for personnel and cargo.
However, politics got in the way, and we wound up with a worst-of-all-worlds vehicle that's insanely expensive to operate and maintain.
The shuttle was supposed to have extremely low variable costs by virtue of the fact that it's supposed to be completely reusable. It's pretty easy to see ho
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Worse yet, this is clearly a case of putting politics over science. This 'lab' will accomplish nothing more, it seems, than the same insipid crap that's been done since the beginning of the Shuttle era: materials science in 0-g. Zero gravity can be simulated on earth, fairly well. Doing good astronomy needs to be done in space away from sources of interference.
The remaining shuttle missions need to be used for real science, not some political crap that attempts to smooth over differences between US and E
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So how do you propose to simulate, say, just one hour of continuous zero gravity?
Frankly, I don't know how useful or useless material science in zero-g is. However I'd strongly question your assertion that zero-g can be adequately simulated on earth.
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'Zero-gee': no, never. 'Free-fall': yes, quite well.
Witness:
http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/msad/dtf/tube.htm [nasa.gov]
(cool image: http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/msad/dtf/images/stand1.gif [nasa.gov])
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallturm_Bremen [wikipedia.org]
(additional: http://www.spaceflight.esa.int/users/index.cfm?act=default.page&level=11&page=fac-dt [esa.int])
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_tube [wikipedia.org]
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So how do you propose to simulate, say, just one hour of continuous zero gravity?
Won't go for an hour, but there are some fairly high drop-towers. There's also the "vomit comet" that does parabolic flight paths for longer than that.
But we're talking about enormously expensive resources on the shuttle. They need to be doing science that's a little better than 'Gee, I wonder what this material does in 0-g?'. And I say this as someone who has a materials science background.
Re:Calling Mr Tang (Score:4, Interesting)
The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
Just think, how many days or is it hours of Iraq does it take to fund a solution to this? Not many.
Think, for what has been spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have a US space station around Mars or Jupiter, maybe both.
What would a space station around Jupiter cost? (Score:2)
In your estimation?
Just curious.
Your point? (Score:2)
I myself go back and forth on this. There is NO doubt that we do not belong in Iraq (and would have been out of afghanstan had idiot boy not put us in Iraq). But the simple fact is that we are there. We do not want to leave them in a worse mess (and yes, it can get MUCH worse). So, lets get back to reality.
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I myself go back and forth on this. There is NO doubt that we do not belong in Iraq (and would have been out of afghanstan had idiot boy not put us in Iraq). But the simple fact is that we are there. We do not want to leave them in a worse mess (and yes, it can get MUCH worse). So, lets get back to reality.
I too went back and forth for a long time until I realized the middle east, the whole 9/11 thing isn't really a conventional war at all. It is about a cultural war between radical-Islamic extremest wit
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And only minutes if you took it from the welfare system. You could pay for dozens of the things every year just by eliminating the fraud in that system.
That ship has sailed..... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The credibility of the United States is at stake here..."
I thought that in the last 7 years (the Bush reign), we had already pretty much lost whatever credibility we once had...
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Re:It is a disgrace on the US myopic vision of spa (Score:2)
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It looks like a lot of it went to making that page as indecipherable as possible. I think someone inadvertently created a new crypto algorithm. Let's use something with a little more impact [nationalpriorities.org].
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Hate to break the news to you, but the Federal Government is specifically tasked with running a military. Everything else listed on that web page is the responsibility of the various states. I'm not saying that the 'government' shouldn't spend money to build schools, just that the current fad of treating t
Not really (Score:4, Interesting)
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The 'device' was designed for the shuttle cargo bay. Fitting it to a rocket would mean redesign and modifications. Making a new one would be cheaper.
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While I can believe it never happened, it amazes me that they didn't think about agreeing on a standard cargo mount. It sounds so much simpler than docking ports...
How much would a shuttle-whatever cargo mount weight?
And this extends to everyone that sends things to space - a standard cargo mount could work wonders.
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Re: The government at its' finest! (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people's faith in businesses is as naive as others' faith in governments.
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Sure, private industry does have it issues, but simply because neither private nor public solutions are perfect doesn't mean that they are equally bad for all things. They both have their pros and cons and in many cases replacing one with the other is likely to yield a significant improveme
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Instead, they'd prioritize the payload that generates the most revenue; either the one the could charge the most for, or if they weren't selling payload space, the payloads that have the most near term applied results with a high probability of being licensable.
Even then, they'd only do the launch once the technology was cheap eno
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The could, but perhaps it would be they [space-travel.com] who would be embarrassed.