Layoff Anxiety Is Top Risk To Space Shuttle 178
pickens writes "Florida today reports that as NASA marches toward its final two shuttle flights, the safety of the crew rests with workers who know every bolt they turn, every heat-shield tile they inspect, brings them that much closer to the unemployment line in April 2011 raising concerns that people might jump ship early if other job opportunities open up. 'We've been most concerned about maintaining and sustaining the knowledge necessary to safely conduct mission operations,' says Retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Dyer. But shuttle work force surveys show a fierce loyalty and a dedication to sticking it out as long term employees want to be there when the last shuttle touches down. 'They love being part of NASA and what NASA does, and they love being part of the space shuttle program. And they want to be a part of it as long as we're doing the kinds of things that we're doing,' says LeRoy Cain, NASA's deputy shuttle program manager."
Layoff Anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the reason that restaurants and other companies don't tell employees about plant or store closures until the last moment. It's not entirely fair to the workers, but many would rather find a new job quickly instead of being unemployed. I was out of work for nearly 2 months (and even then I was lucky in finding new work) when the restaurant I worked out told us 5 minutes before we walked out the door for the evening that we wouldn't be open in the morning.
I imagine those these folks working for NASA have skills that the private space agencies will definitely want and I wouldn't be surprised to see most of these guys going to work the next day for one of those companies.
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From Arrested Development:
Narrator: "Before firing his employees, George Sr. would be sure to clear the office of its valuables. [...] The employees never saw it coming, although their first task was to unload their equipment from a truck."
look up warn act (Score:5, Informative)
look up warn act
WARN Act layoff notice laws require employers to give employees notification before mass layoffs or plant closings
Re:look up warn act (Score:5, Insightful)
WARN Act layoff notice laws require employers to give employees notification before mass layoffs or plant closings
Or pay a modest fine that can't be collected from a bankrupt store/restaurant etc and is probably less than the productivity losses from pre-announcing at the plant.
On the other hand theres no point in carrying this too far, once you get to assembly plants (automotive, etc) everyone knows when no supply orders are delivered anymore, etc.
As a hint, if the store is accumulating empty unstocked shelves, its going down....
Re:look up warn act (Score:4, Informative)
Yep.The WARN Act is practically pointless. You can always tell when massive layoffs are starting because the company will do things like institute a freeze on all hiring, stop buying office supplies, refuse requests for purchase orders, cancel projects previously thought to be important, etc.
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Lockheed Martin only gave me and other engineers/programmers 8 hours notice in 2001.
Guess the WARN Act doesn't really work. As for looking for a new job, I've learned from experience that it's better to work until your last day. (And collect the 3-6 months of severance bonus.) If someone wants to hire you, they'll be willing to wait another 1 or 2 months.
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Lockheed Martin only gave me and other engineers/programmers 8 hours notice in 2001.
Is that normal?
My employer could tell me not to come in to work any more, but they'd still have to pay me for four weeks, plus any unused holiday days. (The four week period increases the longer I work here. Four weeks is the minimum.)
Quoting from the staff policy book: Redundancy: This is not entertained lightly at ___. However, where this is unavoidable, management will provide counselling for staff and allow time off with pay for staff to seek alternative work or make arrangements for training before t
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I too got severance pay. Unfortunately, it was based on 2 weeks of work (I was rehired after working elsewhere for a year, had I stayed I would have had 3 years of work for that package to have been based on UGH).
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Peter Gibbons: You're gonna lay off Samir and Michael?
Bob Slydell: Oh yeah, we're gonna bring in some entry-level graduates, farm some work out to Singapore, that's the usual deal.
Bob Porter: Standard operating procedure.
Peter Gibbons: Do they know this yet?
Bob Slydell: No. No, of course not. We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.
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I knew those names were familiar. Hilarious movie. (:
have you seen Waiting...
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more importantly, it saves the accounting the department from having to recalculate half-a-weeks pay for all the people they layoff.... MOST companies DON'T have any severance for layoff other than maybe owed vacation time.
Re:Layoff Anxiety? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can get fired in France? I was under the impression that it was legally impossible to get fired.
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ah.
Either way, completely lame and removes any incentive to do a good job.
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He's talking about the caricature of France as understood by Americans.
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He just missed out "national" before "socialism", honest mistake.
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the short term problem of not getting the last two launches prepared is the LEAST of NASA's problems. The REAL problem is that once these guys are gone and the teams broken up, that technical ability is gone... poof. NASA doesn't even have the program to build a capsule for basic maintenance of the space station and servicing satellites STARTED YET! This is going to be a 20 year blight on the agency when it happens... these jobs aren't going to be replaced, private industry isn't legally ALLOWED to do the k
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That is an issue that needs to be addressed first and foremost by changing the law so that these private companies can do those things. Otherwise it won't be 20 year blight on the agency, but a 20 year blight for the entire nation (at least in this area).
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The only problem is that companies like SpaceX (purely anecdotal evidence here) are not interested in hiring the NASA folks. They want the "top 2%" of applicants. Most of those top 2% aren't the people that know what the heck is going on.
That's an issue in and of itself. Personally, I want people who know what's going on. A college degree means you know how to learn from books.
Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
When you see the orbiters they look like they just rolled out of the factory. Anything you read about orbiters deteriorating is a lie. They are pristine.
With all the money and attention lavished on them, that is as it should be.
Many people are still in denial that this county would be so stupid as to throw away such magnificent machines and they want to be there to keep them flying when we come to our senses.
The shuttles barely have a niche now, and that niche only exists because people work hard to make it exist - the shuttles are a prime example of what not to do, and I couldn't care less (yes, that is the correct way to use that phrase - its "couldn't" not "could") if the shuttles never fleww again.
What the US needs now is a commuter vehicle, something that runs as regular as a standard family car, with similar maintenance levels, not classic car levels. The US does not need a 'do it all' vehicle which comes with an appropriately sized superbudget, it does not need the ability to haul the entire house with it each time it makes the commute from the house to the office. Leave the heavy lift to specialised vehicles, and leave the commuting to specialised vehicles - they are separate problems, they should have separate solutions.
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What the US needs is to not be in such a desperate rush to put humans in space with such very early supporting tech.
We could develop many of the robotic and remote-manned systems we (require) to function usefully in space without sending humans. Humans in space are sent to performs tasks. We should work to not needing that, then send humans for its own sake after other tech matures.
There is _zero_ reason to rush. Manned vehicles are doomed to glacially slow development cycles at our primitive level of suppo
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Why not go back to expendable men though?
One of the reasons manned flights are so damn expensive is because there's redundancy after redundancy to try to do absolutely everything to ensure 99.99999% crew survival rate. By letting crew survival rate go down to, say, 25%, things could get a lot cheaper.
Now, some people are going to say, it's inhuman of society to gamble with the lives of its citizens, but I ask, isn't it ultimately the choice of every *individual* whether or not they want to gamble with their
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25% survival rate is useless for almost all purposes. It means that only one flight in 4 succeeds, which is far below the sweet spot of most bang for buck, even if the payload were free of cost. It also means that you'll be replacing your crew consta
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It also means that you'll be replacing your crew constantly, making everyone a novice in every flight.
Which is a non-issue if we're sending people up for other reasons than to get astronaut training. If we're sending a geologist up to study a comet, then it doesn't matter that he's a novice at astronauting.
Also, exactly why do you think we do manned flights at all? It's precisely to increase the safety to the point where you can sell tourist tickets to celebrities
That may be your reasoning, but there are other lines of reasoning too, that don't require increased safety. For example, sending people up to do construction work on comets. That doesn't require increasing safety to massively redundant levels.
At a 25% level (or pick any other number, really, that you can
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This is the right approach in my books.
For the effort, expense and materials you can do more with a robot in space
because it does not need food, water, or air.
If a robot breaks in space fair odds you can repair it with another robot
if you got the parts up there.
If a human breaks in space...not so much.
Any mission to mars with humans would require so much food, water,
and other supplies that it would take up most of the room on the spacecraft.
Build a few tougher rovers and send them.
Make it so they can repair
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There is no "cost" problem, it is a PRIORITY problem. We spend more than 1 Billion dollars a month (all borrowed outside the usual 25% military budget) on our little "peace" missions. Six months of not paying for any more wars would put people on Mars quite easily. The problem is that after we went to the Moon, we didn't KEEP doing it. We threw away all the technology and experience in the 1970s, and we're about to throw away the ability to put ANY people in orbit. NASA's budget is a fraction of what it wa
Unfortunately, the commuter model doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Although the ideal requirement can be stated concisely, that does not mean it is actually possible. NASA's overall problem is one of mission incompatibility. Normally if I post something like this, somebody replies "with your attitude we wouldn't have discovered fire yet". To which the reply is that fire is ridiculously easy to discover; wait for a thunderstorm after a dry period. We have got where we are because energy became more and more readily available as our tools improved. But energy has ceased to become more readily available; we do not have any feasible technology for space lift that does not require exotic chemical mixtures. NASA is being asked to look at the wrong end of the telescope. Much better fuel or lift means needs to come first. Douglas Adams, who was no fool, satirised the problem with his infinite improbability drive and bistromath drives, but in fact he identified the core problem in space travel.
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Firstly, my point about hauling the house was meant for the unbelievably stupid concept of having the shuttle built to haul several tonnes of cargo on top of its crew of seven people while the basic issues of risk have not been solved. The very fact that you have a heavy cargo on board increases the risk to the crew to, in my humble opinion, unacceptable levels as you increase the complexity of onboard systems, control, abort scenarios etc etc etc.
Secondly
"Heavy cargo...increases risk" (Score:2)
I agree that
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The energy distance from the ground to even low earth orbit
When I did the calculation, I got something like $10 in electricity per kg of payload (at the usual $0.10 per KwH) to put something in orbit. The energy distance isn't trivial, but it's not the real obstacle here. The real obstacle is the delta v. You need to pick up somewhere around 9-10 km/s of velocity (including some that you lose to gravity since you don't instantly end up in orbit and to a burn to circularize your orbit). With our relatively inefficient engines (in terms of ISP/exhaust velocity, therm
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But the most BASIC level of improving the situation for exploring the solar system is to stop launching every rocket from Earth with enough fuel for an entire trip. A much cheaper solution is to use the Moon for the launch point, but the US hasn't put a man there in 40 years, it' s practically a myth now. Sure, that doesn't solve all the fuel problems, but it allows you to focus on efficient ships for "milk runs" from Earth to the Moon, and allow the Moon teams to build ships to go further that don't have t
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Gasoline, huh? I guess that big tank of liquid hydrogen is just used for buoyancy.
From http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/newton/askasci/1995/environ/ENV165.HTM [anl.gov]
"Author: bob w whitbeck
What kind of fuel do space shuttles use?
Response #: 1 of 1
Author: jade hawk
It depends on what you mean by "space shuttle" -- the official name is Space
Transportation System (ever wonder what the "STS" stands for in the mission
names?). For launch the STS uses 2 systems: the main engines in the orbiter
that burn hydrogen a
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Yes, the STS is using liquid hydrogen, but the Saturn V [wikipedia.org] used the kerosene/LOX fuel mixture, as does the Delta IV, Atlas V, and Falcon 9 rockets for their first stages. Kerosene or some other petroleum product is indeed one of the primary fuels being used for spaceflight. If you don't mind the smell of fried foods, you could use bio-diesel for that matter. Liquid Hydrogen is being used on the Shuttle because it has a slightly higher ISP than kerosene when combined with LOX, but it requires fancier handlin
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The only company I've heard of that spent more on rocket fuel than for the engineering department's office supply budget was Armadillo Aerospace. Even for "established" vehicles like the Space Shuttle, that still is the case.
Or put it more this way: More paperwork is generated for each "routine" launch for most government spacecraft in both volume and weight (and all of this paper work arrives in Washington DC as "paper", not just electronic documents) than the mass which sits on the launch pad before the
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Maybe NASA should look at where Armadillo gets their office supplies.
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Hydrazine is used because it is hypergolic [wikipedia.org].... this is a very nice property for thrusters that need to be used on demand in short pulses for station keeping but it isn't the primary fuel that is used for getting into space. The main fuel being used for the 1st stages of most rockets today is simply kerosene and liquid oxygen..... the original poster was correct.
As for the difference between kerosene and gasoline, I'll leave it to a petroleum engineer to explain the difference if you care... both are hydroc
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
The shuttles are a definitely not the best possible design, we know that now, but at the time they were built they seemed like a good idea. Either way, just because the shuttles aren't the ideal vehicle doesn't mean we should toss the whole program away, which is what we are doing. I live in Floida, and visit the space coast often and know a lot of the "little people" in the space program. They are insanely dedicated, even the people who do jobs others would consider demeaning or unimportant. They knew the people who died in the various NASA accidents way better then the engineers in Houston did, and they work every day to keep the astronauts safe. The majority of them can and will get better paying jobs in the private sector, many of them routinely turned down offers when economic times were better (no one is getting rich at NASA).
There is a ridiculous amount of institutional knowledge in the shuttle program, as well as a culture the defies all the regular government stereotypes. Once the team is disbanded and goes their separate ways we will have lost our best shot as a country at safe sustained manned space flight. We should have had a next generation vehicle ready to transition them too, but politics and the vague promise that somehow commercial space flight will fill in has killed it. Apparently as a country we no longer want to lead in the realms of science and engineering, and are content to have our only government funded innovations come in the form of new banking procedures to steal from the poor and give to the rich.
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I wish I still had some mod points. Fantastic post!
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The Shuttle is history already, only the walking zombies are insisting that it lives on. The time to save the Shuttle was about two years ago.... and about two years after (at the time) the original decision to end the Shuttle program had been made. There was a chance and there were even groups within the space community that were saying "now is the time to save the Shuttle".... but nobody paid attention at the time in terms of politicians or anybody that mattered.
Yes, I realize there may be institutional
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I couldn't care less (yes, that is the correct way to use that phrase - its "couldn't" not "could")
Phrase it any way you want to, I could care less.
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Why haven't we tried an update of the shuttle?
I know it's got like, 60s-70s era computers in it and whatnot and it has its flaws, but they've run hundreds of missions with the damn thing and they've went pretty fine. The ability to land on a runway has got to be a pretty big bonus as well. Why haven't we tried to make a modernized version of that?
I'm sure there's valid engineering and financial reasons for the "rocket and capsule" route that we (and pretty much every private agency) seem to be going, but ae
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Why haven't we tried an update of the shuttle?
NASA has tried. There has been a singular failure within NASA to get any sort of new vehicle for manned spaceflight developed. From the CRV to the DC-X, the Apollo II project and several other interesting but failed experiments leading up to the Ares I/Ares V/Orion spacecraft system (and arguably even the DIRECT concept) keep getting massive amounts of funding but also consistently get shut down eventually... usually due to political expediency or lack of congressional support to get those projects to com
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The sad thing is, I imagine Virgin Galactic or a similar company is going to essentially have this and beat most world governments to the punch.
As it stands we have Spaceship One/Two which uses a mothership to launch the craft into low orbit. I'm sure with some scaling up this could be done on a level where we have ships that are capable of dragging cargo out into space if need be. It's sad to see the decline of one of America's finest government institutions.
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Why? Commuting implies a destination. The Space Age is over. The sooner you fruitcakes come to grips with the fact that space is utterly hostile and empty, the better.
Earth is, of course, a prime example of the utter hostility and emptiness of space. With considerable effort, I'm sure we could make a bunch more hostile and empty places like Earth.
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Please explain how you think we have anything near the energy resources and technology to build planets?
[...]
We can barely build tin cans in the high atmosphere with all the industrial might we can bring to bear.
There you go. Demonstration that people can live in space. Keep in mind that the ISS isn't the only "tin can" that has made it into space/"high atmosphere". We have three others prior to it. It's also worth noting that the "industrial might" continues to grow more capable over the decades. I imagine what is barely possible today (especially when it's government run) will be considerably more routine in a few decades.
If you're that attached to ideas of colonizing hostile places, hey, 75% of the planet is underwater, and there's always Siberia.
That's already been done and we continue to colonize these places. Space is more intere
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but then all it takes is one little asteroid [wikipedia.org] to ruin your day.
It generally is not a good idea to "keep all your eggs in one basket". The small, admittedly expensive, forays we make into space today provide future generations the knowledge they need to create sustainable habitats away from Earth, necessary to preserve our species when another Extinction Level Event [wikipedia.org] occurs. You are welcome to live in a tin can under the ocean and be crushed by the intense compression waves of a meteorite impact, I'll be safely watching the from one of our orbital habitats. [wikipedia.org]
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We have a much better chance of handling an 'Extinction Level Event' if we a) don't completely trash the planet so there are some habitable areas left by the time the big ball hits b) try to figure out how to run civilizations so that even trivial little things like earthquakes, floods and rush hour don't cause major issues and c) learn how to maybe, perhaps,
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
If an ELE occurs it won't matter how nice to the planet we've been, the entire ecosystem will be thrashed and the survivors are going to wish they had died. The life they will have to live will be so incredibly hard; war for the scant resources remaining will be common, many will die of starvation, and simple diseases easily curable before the impact will claim many.
If you think an earthquake or flood is a trivial event, you're not paying attention to recent events. Five years later they are *still* putting New Orleans [wikipedia.org] back together. Haiti is still a mess [wikipedia.org], I remember reading estimates its going to take years and at least 14 Billion [reuters.com] just to put Haiti back the way it was.
When an event like this happens even the concerted effort of a group of nations, and Billions in donations from a concerned public, can only alleviate some of the suffering and it will take years rebuild their lost infrastructure.
An ELE event, if it doesn't outright kill you first, is going to catastrophically cripple everyone.
We'd lose our global manufacturing base, the one thing that could help clean up the mess, and effectively put us back to the early stone age. In a North American society, and a good chunk of Europe, few of us know anything about basic survival. Do you honestly expect the majority of survivors from a "modern" society to know how to eke out a basic living when we're so used to the conveniences of take out, fast food, gourmet restaurants, and grocery stores?
It won't matter if everyone is all fluffy bunnies and roses when an ELE event occurs.
When it does happen our fluffy bunnies and roses mentality will get pushed aside and our base instincts will take over. The only reason "modern" societies are even able to function is because our manufacturing and infrastructure base allows even the weakest amongst us to survive without too much struggle. Take that away and it quickly will devolve into a "survival of the fittest" situation.
Our best hope for survival as a species is to spread out to as many places as we can, as far away from Earth as we can, so if something bad happens to any one of those colonies the rest of the species has a fighting chance for survival and can use their infrastructure and manufacturing bases to help the others pick up the pieces.
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It won't matter if everyone is all fluffy bunnies and roses when an ELE event occurs. When it does happen our fluffy bunnies and roses mentality will get pushed aside and our base instincts will take over. The only reason "modern" societies are even able to function is because our manufacturing and infrastructure base allows even the weakest amongst us to survive without too much struggle. Take that away and it quickly will devolve into a "survival of the fittest" situation. Our best hope for survival as a species is to spread out to as many places as we can, as far away from Earth as we can, so if something bad happens to any one of those colonies the rest of the species has a fighting chance for survival and can use their infrastructure and manufacturing bases to help the others pick up the pieces.
Wow, you make humanity sound just likes spores off a fungus... I guess if you look at the big picture, thats pretty clear. Our corrupt basic instinct survival spreading to where we can smash and grab an existence... If I were an extra terrestrial.. I'd nuke us fast before we can spread. Humanity, the toxic mold of the universe.
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The hard, harsh reality that no one wants to accept is that there *are no* "sustainable habitats away from Earth." With our bent for science fiction, our "We can do it!" attitude, our infatuation with our technology, and our frontier spirit; we just can't accept that there are some frontiers which simply *can't* be settled. The other bodies in this solar system are more inhospitable than most people can even imagine. For an asteroid hit to render this planet more inhospitable than even the most earth-like a
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Someday you will wake up and realize that you are stuck here with the rest of us until we clean up our own household. As things currently stand politically, culturally, and technologically, the best we would be able to manage for the next several decades would be to basically destroy our own civilization in order to get an unsurvivably small population of humans off this rock.
I don't think space exploration is a waste of time mind you -- we put about the right level of resources into it. If we're smart we
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Someday you will wake up and realize that you are stuck here with the rest of us until we clean up our own household.
I realized that long ago, and have done more than a little toward that end. I won't bore you with a biography, but I helped design and implement a waste management program in a mid-sized city that tripled its waste diversion rate. I've also been active politically, and in habitat-protection programs for species at risk.
You don't seem to understand what a tiny percentage of the GDP, peoples' tax dollars...however you want to measure it...goes to space. A workable colony on the Moon or Mars isn't beyond our current or near-future capabilities, and needn't "destroy our own civilization". If that were true, the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would already have done the job. Here's just one suggestion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct [wikipedia.org] . There are others as good or better.
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Genetically modified and loaded with implants.)
Wonderful..."We are the Borg..."
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you do realize that NASA's entire budget at this point is just a few months of what the military is spending in the Middle East. NASA has been gutted to the point that money put in is wasted. They've put more money into secret bombers than the next space ship in the last 20 years.
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I do realize that. As I said, I think that's about the right level of spending for this program.
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There's a difference between criticism and insult. If you don't understand this simple fact, then you don't understand much of anything. And yes, I'm being insulting in return. You richly deserve it.
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I just watched a movie. It wasn't very educational. I probably could have been more productive doing something else. But I did it anyways. Why can't society do this together?
Think of it on a m
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the usual phrasing ("could care less") is an Nth-generation requote so removed from its original context that all intention of the original utterance has been lost and all that remains is an awkward phrase which few realize is stupid and backward, moron.
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the usual phrasing ("could care less") is an Nth-generation requote so removed from its original context that all intention of the original utterance has been lost and all that remains is an awkward phrase which few realize is stupid and backward, moron.
Yeah, but I remember when it was the bee's knees.
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For all intensive purposes, I'm reclined to agree with you.
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proud of our country?
do you realize (I'm sure you do) that all chips, transistors, resistors and caps (especially caps; see the china syndrome 'bad caps' that made the news the last, oh, 10 or so years) are made overseas.
we can't trust or rely on their parts quality anymore (the entire world got screwed over by trusting the chinese build caps and not have the electrolyte explode in years to come).
I'm actually surprised more things aren't failing and falling out of the sky due to bad caps (they are even in
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Well thank god we didn't outsource those O-rings for the fuel tanks to some country of assholes! Who knows what could have happened.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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The quality of the o-rings wasn't the issue - choosing to launch when they knew the weather was unsuitable is what caused the explosion. On the other hand, China has had some FAR worse disasters while developing their own space program, and those failures were entirely due to poor design/manufacture.
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Well, I'm very sorry to say that aluminium electrolytic capacitors are not used in space vehicles. Their inherent poor reliability (even the best japanese ones) and tendency to outgas nasty things makes them a no-no. You can find some steel-cased, hermetically sealed ones in jet planes, but not in space applications.
And by the way, lots of american semiconductor manufacturers have their rad-hard/space-grad fab located in the US.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest expense for the US is military.
We have 700+ bases in 130+ countries, we are the new Rome.
Just the cost of maintaining multiple carrier groups is staggering.
Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex on
the way out of office.
JFK tried to do something in that regard and he got his head blown off.
The NASA budget is a tiny joke compared to the military one.
The next biggest budget is Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid and
the way to deal with that would be a Co-op similar to the way
the insurance company USAA is run.
The current system is bloated and ppl have to sue the government
just to get their benefits some of the time.
Having the nations of the world police themselves and reforming
SSI and Medicare would take care of our money problems.
Using Algae oil grown in the desert and ending all imports of
oil would totally eliminate the trade deficit in just a few years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hioZ7C6HLs [youtube.com]
100,000 gal/acre/yr in the desert using non-arable land.
It would pay better than any legal crop at this time.
It would make jobs and solve our energy issues til we
can migrate the infrastructure over to hydrogen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hydrogen_production [wikipedia.org]
Then with time we can get one of the several ideas for Fusion
off the ground and move to an primary electric system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus#DPF_for_nuclear_fusion_power [wikipedia.org]
Dense plasma focus has the lead at this point for cost
effective use.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest expense for the US is military.
This used to be true. Now the largest expense in the federal government is interest on federal debt, with the #2 largest expense being Social Security payments, and #3 is health care benefits to federal workers (and this was before Obamacare went into effect).
Military spending is now #6 or #7 on the list of top fiscal outlays, and falling. Appropriations for NASA hardly even show up on the pie graphs at all, and this year are down to 0.1% of the federal budget.
You point is well taken, but military spending shouldn't be made out to be the bad guy here even though they still do get a huge hunk of change every year.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
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Even that chart doesn't show the "off budget" funds when Congress does pure borrowing in 100 Billion a pop. All that money is "off the books" as far as the budget keepers are concerned, which is why even though every other program is seeing cuts, the deficit is ballooning at record rates. Adding in off-budget military funding they are definitely in first place now. The stating of the military "minimum" is deceptive because Congress is constitutionally not allowed to guarantee military funds year-over-year,
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we don't actually spend that much on NASA any more, it's budget has been cut to a fraction of even 20 years ago. The real problem is that we have to do BOTH, we have plenty of food in this country, sure there are hungry people but that is a social problem not a money problem and there are still fewer than any other time in US history. Our transit systems need work, but again, that money and employees can come from the Military budget if it was really important. As far as digital infrastructure, again to co
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's never any moderator points around when you really want them. That's one of the best summaries of the shuttle program's failures I've seen. We're still screwing around in Low Earth Orbit when we should be well on the way to putting a Mars colony together, and that's thanks in large part to the shuttle.
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Please tell us all, with your clearly vast experience putting spacecraft into space, how you would have met the same requirements. Let's make it simple for you, 65000 lbs to a polar orbit with a 1200 mile crossrange capability. Dazzle us!
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
I have had vast experience working STS ascent GN&C in the 80's and early 90's. I worked about 22 missions and I can tell you the Shuttle has never been able to put 65,000 lbs in polar orbit. The best it could do for a 90 degree launch would be about 35,000 lbs. It would also have had to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base since you can't launch polar from KSC due to abort restrictions. Vandenberg was never used due to the Challenger disaster and the launch pad there was converted to launch Delta IVs so you couldn't even do a Shuttle polar mission.
BTW, even though the original design specs called for 65,000lbs, the Shuttle has never been able to put 65,000 lbs in orbit heading due east from KSC. It gets a maximum of 55,250 lbs.
Even though I loved working on the Shuttle program, I think we would have been better off building a separate crew transport and improving the heavy lift capability we already had.
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The Saturn V could put more into orbit and do it cheaper than the Shuttle. So why was the Saturn V abandoned again? This time the Shuttle is being abandoned for the Ares I, which puts even fewer astronauts into orbit for more money still, and this time without any cargo capacity at all except for a couple hundred pounds in the "trunk". Yes, an Ares I launch is at least the same cost if not more than a Shuttle lanuch.
I'd like to be dazzled too. And as pointed out by the AC poster, the Shuttle never had a
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I wouldn't say it was that short sighted though. All the agencies kept adding their own hobby projects to the list and that was probably a good thing. Considering the USA has not developed or tested any other manned vessel since before the shuttle was launched in 1981 and the last new shuttle was launched in 1992 (and Apollo ended several years before that) the shuttle program is a raging success for a 1970's design. Five vehicles (Enterprise was never launch worthy. Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis, Discove
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sorry bub. I have no desire to dis NASA, but you fucks haven't done anything since we landed on the moon. Politician's fault, not yours.
When I see NASA monies being used to "uplift" Moslems and Women, I shake my head in wonder.
Then I notice that Advanced Propulsion research has been canceled.
Then I noticed that while we once flew to the Moon, we no longer can.
Pournelle's Iron Law has prevailed at NASA. Fire them all and give Space to the Navy.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no doubt that the finest work ever done in relation to the Shuttle program is perhaps being done now by the workers at KSC, and that these vehicles are in the best shape that they have ever been in.
The issue is that the time to save the Shuttle program has passed by and that the production lines needed to replace parts currently being used for the maintenance have now shut down, and that there is a need to at least replace the Columbia and perhaps create a few more new orbiters in order to really use this capability to its fullest. Getting that supply chain going again including restoring the staff at the Michoud Assembly Facility is not just difficult, I would dare say that in the current federal budget environment would be impossible to accomplish. And that is but the most obvious facility that has already had lay-offs with the employees already gone and moved on to other things. Many other factories involved with the construction and maintenance of the Space Shuttle have had similar kinds of lay-offs.
If anything, what is happening at KSC is just a delayed action to stuff that has been happening for years now.
Would it stink if it were me in the position you are in? Absolutely! I would be hating life in that kind of circumstance. I am very much aware that this is going to force many people to change their lifestyles in Brevard County. Then again, the problem is that everybody is depending on the government here where there are another thousand counties or so in America that are asking why are they sending money to this county when they would be just as deserving.
Over time, I think this is going to be something better for that part of Florida anyway, and in terms of places to perform launches into orbit, KSC is quite difficult to beat. It still is one of the premier locations on the Earth for orbital spaceflight and that is a fact of geography that other places like Virginia, Texas, and New Mexico can't beat.
I agree that what needs to happen is to reduce the cost of launches and spaceflight in general. I personally don't think that the Ares/Orion (or this new "heavy lift vehicle" for that matter) is going to be any cheaper, but that is a personal opinion and the sentiment is well in hand. To me, the best chance that KSC has is to encourage The Florida Space Authority [spaceflorida.gov] to get its act together and turn KSC into the spaceflight equivalent of the O'Hare International Airport. I believe that day is coming where even NASA is going to be told to wait for an opening for launch with a launch window measured on the order of minutes instead of days because of the sheer traffic happening there. Perhaps other locations could open up that might work out better, but I think it would take an idiot to pass up on the potential of that launch location for all but specialized flights.
It is time to let the Space Shuttle go gracefully into history. That program has served our country well, and so have the thousands of dedicated people who have help to get that hunk of equipment into orbit. The jobs are eventually going to return, but it won't be the same kind of jobs and the companies involved won't be the same either. In fact, many of the companies who will eventually be there may not even exist yet. That would be my suggestion: find those companies or form one of them if you have the skills necessary.
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Exactly. I am glad guys at the KSC are thinking about the long term future of space transport rather than wanting to keep maintaining such an expensive vehicle, even though the cost of maintaining it is primarily spent hiring people in the KSC. Efficiency is key to progress, a cheaper way of launching must involve s
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the John F. Kennedy Space Center (in Florida).
http://www.ksc.nasa,gov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Space_Center
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KSC == Klondike Spicy Cheese
Korn Sugar Calories
Kennebunkport Salad Condiments
Yeah, I thought of all of that, including the Colonel's spicy chicken recipe too.
Now about that "S". There is a word there that I'm missing too.
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Layoff Anxiety Is Top Risk To Space Shuttle? (Score:5, Funny)
Here it was I thought dying in a gigantic fireball upon liftoff or reentry was the top risk.
Those were the days.
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You'd better move your tent, then.
not to worry (Score:2)
Don't have to worry much about a job opportunity for NASA workers.
NASA tanked a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just the maintenance crew. NASA's real collapse came at the end of Apollo, when they laid off most of the people who designed and engineered spacecraft. NASA, like Google now, had been the place where the really smart and competent people went. That all ended around 1973.
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Haven't studies shown that an American president who gets involved in a war is most likely to get reelected? That might be one cause for the US getting constantly involved in wars; the others being that it lets the current president pay off the military industrial complex and it lets you test new weapon systems. This would explain a lot about US foreign policy if true, sadly :P
Caveat: I am Canadian, so my viewpoint isn't the same as a US citizen's might be.
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Or you could do both: choose to pay to prepare America for stupid future wars!
The new Phased Plasma Clown Gun will make our forces unstoppable.
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