NASA Chief Tells the Critics of Exploration Plan: "Get Over It" 216
mknewman (557587) writes "For years, critics have been taking shots at NASA's plans to corral a near-Earth asteroid before moving on to Mars — and now NASA's chief has a message for those critics: 'Get over it, to be blunt.' NASA Administrator Charles Bolden defended the space agency's 20-year timeline for sending astronauts to the Red Planet on Tuesday, during the opening session of this year's Humans 2 Mars Summit at George Washington University in the nation's capital."
Proposal. (Score:2, Flamebait)
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It ?
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It's a shame people don't use the gender neutral it more often. Instead they feel they must come up with their own new unique methods of being gender neutral.
Re:Proposal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it technically is the gender neutral preposition. It is not, apparently, politically correct but it *is* grammatically correct.
Wikipedia Reference [wikipedia.org]
Also, "Man" and "Mankind" still refer to all humans, not just male humans.
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Woman is just a subset of mankind. A subset of better people :)
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The claim that "he" rather than "they" is the correct gender-neutral singular personal pronoun is mainly an innovation of 19th-century grammarians, not traditional English usage. Prior to the 19th century, both constructions were in use, depending on the preference of the author. Nowadays, they are again both in use, after a brief interlude in which "singular they" suffered a decline in usage.
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Yeah, same people generally. There was a period in English prescriptivist grammar when people authors of grammar books would attempt to "rationalize" the language, often using Latin as a model (other times just using rules of their own invention).
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There was a period in English prescriptivist grammar when people authors of grammar books would attempt to "rationalize" the language...
In contrast to those non-people authors... ?
How the west wasn't won (Score:2, Informative)
This is a good analysis [spacefuture.com] of NASA. It's a good oldie, but it should be read more often.
Re:How the west wasn't won (Score:5, Informative)
Not to overly criticrise your analogy, but I prefer nonfiction to fiction in my decision-making process.
This is a good analysis [nasa.gov] of NASA. It's a good oldie, but people should read it more often.
I would note that it was valid then, when it was written, it was valid when Columbia fell apart, and it is valid now.
And it is an EXCELLENT reason why Nasa shouldn't be messing with asteroid capture. Fortunately, it is more likely that our country will be glowing embers, than that NASA will see this accomplished. And I view that glowing embers bit as a negative, brought about by similar egos by similar wackos in OTHER government offices (including Putin's Russia).
But yes, I am very glad that other problems are likely to make this problem a moot point.
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If you wanted a better fictional story about why it was a bad idea, I might pose the story of a day when intelligent dinosaurs were living in Pangea, and a space agency went to 'get' an asteroid. whether through malfunction or deliberation doesn't matter, because the asteroid crashed into the southern part, and punched obliquely into the mantle right where there was a collection of Uranium-calcium georeactors. It pushed one to the center, causing a massive explosion that blew out the Scotia plate (below) an
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Here's an insider's view of flying fighter aircraft and working for NASA.
http://static.freelibr.net/fic... [freelibr.net]
Nook ebook:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/... [barnesandnoble.com]
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All out nuclear war will kill everyone on the planet. The math is pretty simple.
ALso, there would eb a lot of glowing embers for a while; which is what the poster was eluding to.
"Hiroshima took a direct hit by a nuclear weapon."
no. atomic weapon, not nuclear.
"How long did it take before it was perfectly save to live in Hiroshima after the nuke hit?Answer: a couple of months. "
years before it was safe, not months. Of course, you are comparing a tiny air burst atomic weapon to modern nuclear weapons. Amateur
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You can watch the speech on YouTube [youtube.com]. It's 29 minutes with Q&A. The "blunt" remark comes around 25:40.
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That's stupid, ignorant and wildly inaccurate.
Fucking morons.
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I think the example of SpaceX begs to differ. How can SpaceX operate so much cheaper for the same payloads? Even cheaper than the Chinese? Granted some of the technology developed by SpaceX is based on NASA research, but why can't NASA come even close to SpaceX's operating costs?
Re:How the west wasn't won (Score:5, Informative)
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So why does this system not prevent NASA's robotic missions from working so well?
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The GP is talking specifically about price, not "quality" per se. It's hard to gauge NASA's robotic missions against the private sector, since nobody in the private sector is doing much yet in that space.
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SpaceX has negotiated some sweet deals to use existing government facilities
Sweet or not, those deals were negotiated in a competitive environment. SpaceX recently inked a 20-year lease on SLC-39A (intended for their upcoming Falcon Heavy), and in addition to the rent, they are paying for all the upgrades and renovations they have in mind. (IIRC, Bezos also wanted pad 39A, and they had a bit of a bidding war over it.)
SpaceX has received a lot of seed money from NASA
Not sure what you mean by "seed money" here. Yes, they got a COTS contract (also in a competitive bid) to develop their hardware, but so did Orbital. How is this diff
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Because Space X doesn't have to dole out government dollars to various entities in the congressional districts of the appropriations committee members.
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Manned ventures into space beyond LEO involve a high degree of personal risk. The US and European governments, sensitive as they are to the feeeee-lings of anti-science Luddites, cannot expose their astronauts to high degrees of risk. If there is to be any future for Americans in space, it will have to be a private one.
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Re:How the west wasn't won (Score:4, Informative)
Because NASA did all the heavy lifting.
SpaceX build on what NASA did.
SpaceX does 1 thing.
SpaceX still doesn't have a viable way to make a profit.
SpaceX is still at least a decade from getting someone to ISS.
It's like asking why Ford doesn't have the same operating costs as a mechanic shop.
Re:How the west wasn't won (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet without governments there would be no space technology.
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Damn... where are my mod points to mod you up when I need them :(
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And yet without governments there would be no space technology.
We don't know that. We can't rewind history, and try again without government involvement. But it is possible that we would be even further along if governments had never gotten involved. Up until about 1970, NASA made rapid progress, and had resources that no private enterprise could hope to match. But, then for the next 40 years, NASA lost its way, and drifted. No private company would or could have done that.
Re:How the west wasn't won (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely we know that.
There was no driving factor for private interest.
NASA never lost it's way. NASA lost it's budget. IN spite of budget reductions, NASA has done amazing things, just without humans sitting in a flight deck.
On, to Mars! (Score:5, Insightful)
I have one thing to say. Hurry the fuck up.
When I was a kid, there was so much "by the year 2000". Space stations. Moon bases. Mars colonies. Mining asteroids. Deep space missions. Fleets of spacecraft. Hypersonic travel around the earth.
The only thing resembling a real space ship has been retired. 1960s tech is back as the best thing anyone can come up with, and it's totally owned by the Russians.
I am impressed by probes. They are cool toys. But they can't replace a person standing there, making decisions. Asking "what if..." We learn from being and doing. The rover we have on Mars now has a mostly busted wheel. A wheel that a human could have riveted a patch over in a few minutes. Or maybe some duct tape. You know, what the Apollo astronauts did, because they were there. Where humans can improvise, and grab a roll of tape.
If we hadn't given up on the space race, maybe we'd have most of those things. So we slacked for 20 years, lets get back on track.
Re:On, to Mars! (Score:5, Funny)
On a similar note, I saw Star Wars and I'm really disappointed that we still don't have hyperdrives or laser guns or even translator droids! It's been all of 35 years!
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Nerd smack down!
BEGIN!
We have laser guns, but more importantly they didn't use LASER guns in Star Wars.
I sit next to a person who LITERALLY has a droid in his pocket that can act as a translator.
I have one, but it's nexus and not a droid. So it would only figuratively be one.
END!
comparison is out of whack (Score:5, Insightful)
Human on mars is only a question of fulfilling a dream, a dream which is completely cut off from the reality of cost. it is nice for you to have a dream, but some of us prefer practical solutions.
Re:comparison is out of whack (Score:5, Insightful)
That's funny that you express that there's no reason to put people on Mars, but you quote Carl Sagan in your tagline.
I ran across this a few days ago.
http://io9.com/5932534/carl-sa... [io9.com]
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150 years ago, the same set of economic constraints applied to California. Yet thousands of people signed up for one-way trips to it.
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You nee to compare that to the cost of research and discovery. You would need to send 100s of robots to even come close to what 1 human could do in a day.
Frankly, it s a silly argument. It's not Human v Robots. It's humans and robots.
TI's funny when someone uses an irrational and flawed argument but has Sagan and randi.org in their sig.
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I have an anecdote related to this.
In my last life, I worked at a lab involved in the MER missions. After the 90 day nominal mission, somebody asked my boss, a highly respected planetary geologist, how long it would take for a human to accomplish the gathering of scientific data that the rover had accomplished thus far. His answer was "it would be about a solid afternoon of work."
So if anyone old there thinks "100s of robots" is an exaggeration, it's not.
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Mildly off topic:
Until we can make vast improvements in launcher reliability, perhaps we should stick to 1960's technology for that aspect of space exploration. Getting off of and back onto Earth's surface is an extraordinarily difficult task and it will remain so for the decades to come.
Rather, in my opinion, we should be focusing upon building infrastructure in and beyond Earth orbit so that we can get people into space for longer durations. The infrastructure that we do develop needs to be fully repair
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When I was a kid, there was so much "by the year 2000". Space stations. Moon bases. Mars colonies. Mining asteroids. Deep space missions. Fleets of spacecraft. Hypersonic travel around the earth.
We were also supposed to have flying cars and hoverboards. Or depending on which movie you're going on: time machines, androids that could pass for human, and FTL travel.
But are you really getting angry at NASA because science fiction isn't a reality?
I am impressed by probes. They are cool toys. But they can't replace a person standing there, making decisions. Asking "what if..." We learn from being and doing. The rover we have on Mars now has a mostly busted wheel. A wheel that a human could have riveted a patch over in a few minutes.
I think you're overestimating the ease with which humans can do things. A human could have fixed the rover if he had all the right tools and replacement parts, assuming that we could get him to Mars, surviving the trip there in good health, surviving the yea
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Throughout the twentieth century (and I lived through half of it) we couldn't see forward past 2000, Now we can no longer see backward past the fall of 2001.
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If I hadn't just posted a comment here, that would've totally earned a +1 insightful from me.
Requisite Quote: (Score:2)
"Get your ass to Mars!"
Re:On, to Mars! (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't take much (Score:5, Insightful)
Provide incentives for private industry, and get the fsck out of the way.
Promise $5 billion to the first company to send the same spaceship to orbit 10 times and return. $10 billion to the first company to send the same spaceship to geo-sync orbit 3 times. $20 billion to the first company to bring an asteroid above size X to a lagrange point. $50 billion to the first company to have people live on the moon for two weeks. Change the goals and figures to suit. Total cost will be a fraction of having the bloated NASA bureaucracy do the same things.
Then get rid of all possible regulations, and eliminate most liability. Space is hazardous - let's assume participants are adults who know what they are getting into.
Then get out of the way.
Re:It doesn't take much (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with "winner takes all" competitions like that is that unless you are fairly certain of winning there isn't much incentive to spend billions trying. The NASA model of creating a spec and then asking for tenders to do it is better, assuming you can resist cancelling or downsizing everything year to year.
Re:It doesn't take much (Score:5, Insightful)
Over here in the real world, "private industry" acts like the United Launch Alliance: an intrenched monopoly with zero incentive to bring down launch costs. The same for the other long time players, like ArianeSpace and the Russians.
The only disruption to this cozy international cartel is SpaceX and the like. Note that these are all privately funded by technocrats who made huge fortunes in software. No one had to go out and raise money for these ventures. The investors are the founders, and they have very deep pockets.
It is impossible to raise money for this kind of business in capital markets because it's easier and more profitable to make money the old fashioned way: steal it.
Just look at the example of the FCC deciding to squash net neutrality. Hire regulators via the revolving door, pay out some bribe/campaign contributions, get legislation that you wrote passed as laws: instant profit!!! Why waste time and money on something as iffy as outer space?
So real innovation and risk taking is not the product of "private industry", it's a hobby of a few individuals who succeeded in the past. They could have as easily bought a major league sports franchise like Mark Cuban.
Is it likely that the next generation of successful entrepreneurs will have the space bug? Because if they don't then the only way we'll get to Mars, or make use of space resources is through governments. Any near term profit in space comes from satellites at synchronous orbit or below. No profit or incentive for long term capital investment any further out.
The only other reason to go is nationalism. That's why the Chinese are going to the moon. The US will opt out because none of the entrenched "private industry" players see sufficient guaranteed profit in their pig trough. It's so much easier to raise prices for Netflicks.
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What about the American public makes you think this is a reasonable assumption? We can't even assume that people who order hot coffee are adults who know that coffee is hot.
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not no it's dangerously hot. as in put you in the hospital for a week hot.
Seriously if you order a coffee would it be a reason expectation that it would be so hot that if yo dropped it in your lap you would be in the hospital for a week(may have been 10 days)
Ironically, you posting that is more of an example of what you are trying to show.
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Provide incentives for private industry, and get the fsck out of the way.
That actually makes a lot of sense for things that actually hold some promise of being a profitable business in the near future, like near-earth orbit launch vehicles.
However, it makes no sense whatsoever for things with no possible commercial market at the forseable end of them, like pure space exploration. Since there will (most likely) be no commercial pot of gold at the end of these tasks, any "incentive" offered would have to cover the entire cost of the endeavor, plus some extra for profit. If taxpa
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportation_Services
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development
Understandably these are to meet NASA's requirements (which makes since, since they would be the main customer for the services anyway), so they don't just want to dole it out without a decision process.
There's also stuff like the Lunar X [wikipedia.org] prize, but none of this is in the magnitudes you are talking about (good luck getting that through congress).
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You want private enterprise to own celestial objects? Because that's what would happen.
"Welcome to Mars, brought to you by AT&T"
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The commercial crew program does this in a realistic way. For about $2 billion we ended up with the Dragon, the Dream Chaser and whatever cargo lump that Orbital built, plus Orion. Three out of four are designed to be human rated.
Blue Origin got some first and second round funding but they're way behind the curve compared to everyone else. Even Dream Chaser put down money for an Atlas V for a test launch already. Bigelow already has a "space station" in a near-polar orbit since 2006, but nobody's vi
Re:On, to Mars! (Score:4, Informative)
Well, lets look at the federal budget, so we can judge on "extra tax dollars".
The 2015 spending budget is $6,293.7 billion.
NASA gets $16.6 billion, or 0.26%, or $52.13 per person.
Defense gets $820.2 billion or 13.1%, $2,575.37 per person.
The F-35 has $875 billion allocated to the project.
Our defense budget isn't just high. Our spending is 36% of the world's defense spending. The US spends about as much as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, India, and South Korea *combined*. If we reduced our military spending to the level of the country that spends the most (China), we could trim 452 billion from military spending, NASA could be paid 27 times over.
GE was paid about 10% of the NASA budget for avoiding paying taxes. The taxes they don't pay count for more than the entire NASA budget. GE makes most of it's money from the US government.
You know, I wouldn't mind 1% being dropped from killing people in other countries, or threatening to do it. I wouldn't mind if companies like GE weren't allowed to skip paying taxes, to reduce our tax burden, and double NASA's budget. I wouldn't mind if they skipped trying to build the F-35 fighter, and doubled NASA's budget.
So, which do you want? An airplane that we don't need? Wars that serve no good purposes? Paying corporations for avoiding taxes? Or to advance the knowledge and reach of the human species?
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Orbital launch cost is a red herring; it's expensive, and this isn't going to change. We live in a whopping big gravity well.
The goal has to be building an infrastructure. Get mining and production infrastructure up there. That's going to be a huge investment, but once it's in place you can produce ever more of what you need directly, without having to haul it out of the well.
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You mean like ~$180k? Because that is how much the fuel costs are for a falcon 9. If space-x can make the whole thing reusable and get the launch rate up to a couple times a week, the raw cost to put a human in orbit could be just a few times the cost of a first class intercontinental flight.
If the fuel costs is 30% of the total launch costs (about the same as the airline industry) then the expected 6 people per launch would be ~$100k per person, which matches the roughly $500/lb numbers musk has been quoti
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are you high? try 55+ million per launch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
Re: On, to Mars! (Score:2)
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What you don't understand is how close we came to all the things the parent post was talking about, every time a game changing technology shows up funding gets cut, or an accident occurs, or it doesn't work quite as well as expected in the trials (but still pretty darn well) so it gets shelved as too risky. NASA had plans drawn up for nuclear powered rockets when the space age started winding down (to be clear, this would be a rocket using a nuclear pile to heat exhaust, the exhaust itself would be non-nuc
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You're totally right. People complain about the NASA budget, but they don't realize how insignificant it is compared to other things. We've spent (and continue to spend) far more on killing people (or the
threat of) in other countries.
NASA's budget is less than 0.4% of the federal budget. The bank bailout was more than has ever been spent on NASA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
US and Science (Score:2)
Yet, slashdot, a web site for geeks, has a comment post count of 6.
This by itself is hugely important - there is little to no interest in a fundamental technology of the future.
Couple that with the US's current anti-science sentiment, and NASA being a science department of a funding challenged government, and the US days of space exploration is done for a while. Close N
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Is quitting something you do whenever things get tough? hard project? quit. Takes effort to change? quit! Painting the house is hard? Quit and sell the house!
Maybe it you generation of whiners and quitters that's the problem?
Radiation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Radiation Rules Exploration [astrobio.net]
Re:Radiation... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hollowing out asteroids was/is one proposed way to solve the shielding problem – no need to launch all mass up. Of course, we're far from being able to do that, but the asteroid redirection mission is a first step in that direction.
Re:Radiation... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were planning a trip to Mars, solar and cosmic radiation would be one of my main concerns.
Cosmic radiation is only a problem if you aim for zero tolerance.
The data given by Curiosity [63.131.142.246] show that a Mars mission only increases your risk of cancer by 5%. That means that there are plenty of other hurdles far more dangerous when it comes to takeoff and landing.
To put that in perspective 5.5% of former smokers and 15.9% of active smokers get lung cancer. (24.4% for those who smoke more than 5 cigarettes a day.)
Unless you intend to set up a permanent base or have a mission where the astronauts stay more than two years on the surface the radiation can be handled by informing the astronaut of the danger and have them sign a paper.
If people should be allowed to smoke then I think people should be allowed to risk cancer with a Mars-trip too.
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A high energy electromagnetic field will do just fine. Works on earth... it will work in space.
You just need a fusion reactor. At the moment- we don't have one. Or some other high capacity, small size, energy source not yet envisioned.
NASA, while not saying it, is probably waiting on an energy technology.
Where is element 115 when you need it? Someone call Bob Lazar!!!
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A high energy electromagnetic field will do just fine. Works on earth... it will work in space.
You just need a fusion reactor.
I don't think electromagnetic shielding is that far fetched anymore. http://physicsworld.com/cws/ar... [physicsworld.com]
Seat of the pants calculation says, its probably smaller than an MRI machine and could be powered with with a similarly sized fission reactor.
Not small by any standard, but completely doable with today's technology.
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Someone must find out how to cheaply put lead in orbit.
I propose catapults.
Or Hitachi elevators.
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GIven the infrastructure, lunar regolith would be relatively much cheaper to get to LEO (deltaV required to reach LEO from the lunar surface is considerably less than half that required to reach LEO from the ground.
And lunar regolith is quite usable as radiation shielding. Hell, you can use it as reaction mass for a mass-driver to push off to Mars orbit.
Bravo! (Score:3)
Bold words (Score:2)
There are two NASA's: 1) Pork 2) Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Deal? (Score:2)
I'll "get over it" if you "get on with it", how about that?
NASA pronouncements about manned spaceflight haven't really meant shit since the 1970s. Well, aside from delays and cancellations. They've almost always been in earnest.
But everything else has been political window dressing for one president or another (both parties, thanks very much) to make some bold pronouncement that he either KNEW wasn't going to make it through an enemy congress (and thus he could blame on them) or that he quietly de-priorit
So where is JPL in all this? (Score:3)
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lol coming from a guy posting in monospaced font
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Hey, dumbass!
Browser settings. On your computer. Not his.
Hey, dickhead!
I like to allow people to post code samples in monospace format. Arker abuses this function on this site by choosing the "code" option when he should not. There's no discriminator option in the browser for "Fix only Arker's jackass choice of posting format while leaving responsible users' posts alone".
I would settle for simply having his comment threads excised from the entire forum, but that's not an option in Slashcode.
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Who the hell uses the tt tag?!
On that note, why is my browser even interpreting the tt tag...
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Who the hell uses the tt tag?
Arker does, every time he posts. He likes his posts to look different from everyone else, then he tries to convince people it's their browser settings that make his posts look strange and not his deliberate intent. He gets a lot of attention for it. He's getting it right now, again. It's tiresome. It's trolling.
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Curious.
I use monospaced fonts to render essentially all web content, which is why I see no difference in the font of my posts and yours.
Okay, so among the changes you've made to your terminal is the automatic insertion of a tag to make your slashdot posts monospace to others. But it's 'their browser settings'. Got it.
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He's another attention starved twit. I suspect an improper amount of praise from his mother.
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Most highly read sites are using layouts like this now because they adapt well to both Mobile and Tablets, which is how more and more people are viewing the web nowadays. Browsing the web with a keyboard and mouse with a monitor is going the way of the dinosaur very rapidly.
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The layout is adaptive. Load it in your phone and see what it looks like. It will look at lot like browsing articles on Flipboard.
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Ur already there.
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You can mod the AC down if you like, but it's true. NASA basically does just enough to justify its budget each year. But it's really more of an employment program and funnel for government leech contractors than anything resembling what it was during the Space Race. So they play along with whatever fictional promises the latest President makes, send up some probes, and piddle around on ISS. But they know damn well that they aren't ever going to put a man on Mars (probably not ever even the moon again). Shit
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Except it isn't true at all. Looking at the budgets. government programs are more effcient and produce better results the the private sector by a large margin.Just look at the budget reports, and EOY financials.
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NO, it's not true at all. I'm sorry, but I know too any poeple working at NASA.
You got problems with NASA, talk to congress about getting them proper funding to accomplish what ever big goal you have in mind.
NASA generates a ton of revenue for the country. If they got all the tax dollar from industries the created, we would have outpost all through out the solar system ad probably be 2 decades ahead in technology.
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It appears this way, but it's not by design. It's a necessary by-product of the way NASA is funded and run. Anything that NASA does has to be doable within just a few years, which is why it's done such great work with various rovers and probes; it's not that hard to build a small probe in a few years. Any project which is much larger in scope, budget, and time requirements is basically impossible, because things are going to change in 4 or 8 years when a new President is elected and a new Administration
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>>NASA, these days, is nothing but an organization designed to enrich top managers and engineers. It's a jobs program designed to pay out huge >>paychecks and accrue great retirement benefits.
So what? It's not like funding rocket science for the benefit of exploration ever got us anywhere.
When people first started dreaming of traveling to space using rockets all the action was in little private rocket clubs. They did some groundbreaking work and deserve to be remembered for that but they had no
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Do you know how scientists with an interest in spaceflight finally got the resources to build something that might actually make it to space? By piggybacking on the ambitions of the Nazis. A team of some of the brightest German scientists had the Nazis pay the bill for building some of the first rockets that could just about make it to space. The catch of course being that they carried explosives and for the most part 'landed' on England.
Which from my point of view is absolutely awesome, because these scientists killed two birds with one stone: 1) they developed significant expertise in designing, manufacturing, and operating advanced (for the time) liquid-fueled guided rockets, which came in handy later for peace-time projects, and in doing so, 2) they diverted an equivalent of 150% of the whole Manhattan project budget from the German war-time economy to something absolutely useless for advancing the German war objectives.
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>>NASA, these days, is nothing but an organization designed to enrich top managers and engineers. It's a jobs program designed to pay out huge paychecks
>>and accrue great retirement benefits.
I don't think this should be modded down. Not because it isn't flamebait (it is) but because it is flamebait that is likely to spark a decent discussion. It kind of sucks when you read a +5 but it's all out of context because the parent post is below your threshold!
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if you're comparing manned missions, NASA's asteroid-first plan actually makes more sense than Mars-first. Our most urgent need in manned space missions beyond LEO is to develop ways of deflecting asteroids. Landing on a nearby one is an obvious first step.
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The only "realistic" (and I use the term loosely) options other than rockets are:
Space Elevator: We just don't have the materials technology to do this yet, and even if we did the costs would be astronomical.
Launch Loop (or other kinetic energy structure): Might be possible with today's technology, but it would be fragile, error prone, delicate, etc. And if something goes wrong, you're not out a rocket, you're out your entire launch system.
Space Gun: Acceleration forces are too high for manned flight.
Space