Let me add to your excellent post -- having grown up in Huntsville during the 60's and the peak of von Braun's American fame (not infamy, yet), he serves as an almost perfect corner case for techies to consider as to how they would fit into their larger society to advance their technical dreams. von Braun did not ask to be born into what would become Nazi Germany and when he started working for the army there it was before the Nazi atrocities started. He wasn't particularly interested in weapons and by all accounts his goal was always space flight. The German army resources allowed him to pursue the development of the rockets he had been working on for years before, at that time Germany was not yet the horror it would become. By the time the really bad stuff started happening there -- the deadly slave labor, which his project was involved in, he was stuck -- continue the work or head to prison or execution, most likely the latter by that time in the war; he was arrested in 1944 and released only due to the intervention at the highest levels (Albert Speer, Minister of War Production). Those slave laborers (which he claims to not know the extent of) were doomed from the start; there is nothing he could have done for them. So, just what was he supposed to do? -- given that there was nothing he could have done to improve the lot of the populations under Nazi control? The fact that he was working on weapons aimed at the civil population of England could be problematic but by then the English and American bombers were incinerating German cities. He didn't have the option of just quitting and going away to work on something else. Given the same circumstances what would any of us techies had done? I don't know and I'm glad I will never have to find out. There is an excellent recent bio (2007) of von Braun by Michael Neufeld which tries to address the moral ambiguities of von Braun's life -- worth a read.

Not intending to bust on you here, but this idea comes up occasionally -- that NASA screwed up by "abandoning" air-launched space planes for ICBM based capsules. Often it is from someone who "had an uncle working on it in 1958" or similar. Seems promising but the physics just don't work that well for air launches and it turns out that putting the rest of your vehicle on a big first stage to get it out of the atmosphere and on a good start for speed is very efficient. There is a huge difference in getting an X-15 to Mach 6+ and an orbital vehicle to Mach 25. Air launch just doesn't work for anything other than small payloads.

To get the Apollo lander to the moon the Saturn V had to put 260,000 lbs into low earth orbit. The biggest Boeing 747 now (in 2014) has a takeoff weight of 975,000 lbs. Look at the difference in size between the X-15 and the B-52 which carried it. There is no aircraft which is going to launch an Apollo sized payload into earth orbit. Or looking at it another way -- at burnout and jettison of the first stage of the Saturn V, the rest of the vehicle was already moving faster than the X-15 ever got to (a lot faster) and almost as high.

If air launch was really feasible, then customers would be knocking down the door at Orbital Sciences which has had their air-launch to orbit Pegasus booster in operation since 1990 and there would be an effort to build bigger versions -- there isn't. That whole X-30 program (National Aero-Space Plane) in the 90's was similar to air launched spacecraft and it didn't get anywhere.
   

"Where is the greatness of America anymore?" -- you asked, here's one answer -- New Horizons, NASA space probe, launched 19 January 2006. Due to fly by Pluto on 14 July 2015. After that, headed to interstellar space, following the other four American space probes leaving the solar system; there are no others. American made, American operated, American funded. (with nods to the other fine nations who are operating interplanetary exploration programs)

What it (importing all your IT workers) causes is a native brain drain out of IT. You get a smart kid in high school making a career choice and right now he or she has to consider what professions are being depressed by bringing in workers who are not any better than he is but will work for substandard wages. The smart kid then says, "screw that, I'm going to med school, or an MBA or law degree from a prestigious school". And parents steer their kids away from the profession. Then the corps really can't get native born talent any more -- self-fulfilling prophecy. Is that in the national interest?

Don't try to get away with blaming the government for this. I guarantee you that it had at least a majority support for "anything goes" in the general populace at the time, and maybe even now. Remember the hysteria after 9/11 and that most Americans were hell-bent to go into Iraq which had no connection to the 9/11 attacks. You can say the government lied -- they did, but the lies were so transparent even at the time that you had to be willfully ignorant to accept them. Now, if the USA had had a responsible government at the time it might have been able to resist or deflect the worst impulses of the mob, but the government we had just gave the American populace, most of them, what they wanted. I don't know what American community anyone is living in who says the people are any better than the governments they elect but it isn't the one I hear on the radio call in shows and the newspaper letters to the editor. And no one else in the world is any better, so they can keep their remarks to themselves, too. The best we can do is to try to improve the sorry lot which humanity has become (actually, always was).

I'm not trying to start something here, but where exactly did the OP (me) not get it right? The first Saturn V flight (to which I was comparing this Orion flight) was never intended to be manned, so that disposes of the post you responded to. And one of the test points of that Saturn V flight was to test the Apollo capsule (admittedly a Block I but with some Block II modifications) at reentry speeds faster than those of low earth orbit, which seems to be a talking point about the Orion flight. Just saying that the Orion program as demonstrated by this flight is only as far along as Apollo was in 1967, actually considerably less because by late 1967, project Apollo had demonstrated the booster to go out of LEO (Saturn V) while the launch vehicle for this Orion flight was barely more than the equivalent of a Saturn 1B. I'm a huge fan of NASA and have the posting history to prove it, but I also remember back when they were doing great things and didn't overhype every little event like they do now. They are still doing great things, but this Orion flight just isn't that great, just a step forward.

I'm glad to see this flight finally, but the flight trajectory of this flight was eerily similar to the first launch of the Saturn V. That mission also tested the Apollo spacecraft reentry characteristics at higher than LEO speed. Well, plus testing the largest booster ever built in all-up configuration on its first flight. So NASA has basically taken an off the shelf military booster (Delta IV Heavy) and launched an uncrewed Orion spacecraft and it worked -- great. So their PR release should have said, "We have now almost achieved the same capability with Orion as we had in 1967 with Apollo." Instead, the official commentary from Mission Control is, " 'There's your new spacecraft, America,' " Mission Control commentator Rob Navias said as the Orion capsule neared the water 270 miles off Mexico's Baja peninsula. Navias called the journey "the most perfect flight you could ever imagine." In 1967 the commentary from Mission Control would have been something like, "The vehicle performed nominally" One of the things I miss about the old NASA was their understated PR at the time -- just the engineering description of events, little fluff. Now I get the feeling that a division of PR hacks are crafting every word of commentary ahead of time.

It is much better for the price of the goods to reflect the full cost of the roads the trucks use to haul them than for fuel taxes for all vehicles to provide indirect subsidies for the "road hogs". If the full cost of the road use is included in the cost of an item then there is direct pressure to make the use of roads for any particular item maximally efficient. The items which don't need to be hauled far will properly cost less, encouraging efficient use of the roads and other infrastructure. That is how pricing is supposed to work in an efficient free market.

I have a counterexample from the Texas public schools -- I have a BA in Math and Physics, and a kid in 8th grade. I have been impressed with the breadth of the math they are teaching here in the lower grades so far. The kids in 8th grade are getting a simple concept of (linear) curve fitting to a scatter of X-Y points, for example. They've been getting probability and various graphs and charts for a couple of years now -- all in a typical suburban public school, admittedly not in a blighted area, but not exclusive by any stretch. I'm sure these stories about the decayed public schools are true, but I'm not seeing it firsthand.

You know that the current Secretary of Defense, top guy in the Pentagon, appointed by President Obama, is a Republican, having served as such as senator from Nebraska in the US Senate for two terms. Also being a former Army enlisted squad leader in Vietnam with two Purple Hearts, I doubt he would adjust his views much and sell out the armed forces for Democratic Party politics.

Here is why the State needs to be involved in doing something about these sort of death threats -- this time Wu is offering a cash reward to whoever helps get her attacker put in jail -- OK, then her attacker will get some modicum of legal due process. If people feel threatened and don't feel the State can protect them then the next time this happens a "victim" will offer a cash reward to whoever helps to assault or kill their perceived attacker -- there will be no due process involved under those rules. Is that the way you want it to be? Historically that is a major reason why judicial systems came into place, to keep everyone from having to take justice and protection into their own hands.

Actually, von Braun's team (brought over in Paperclip) was very conservative in their rocket engineering. They preferred incremental improvements over big leaps in technology. Thus the V-2 begat the Redstone, which begat the Jupiter, which together begat the Saturn I which begat the Saturn IB which (and this was a pretty good sized leap) begat the Saturn V. Two explicit examples -- notice that the Saturn IB and Saturn V both had fins on the first stage -- what other space boosters had or have fins? Also, the Huntsville team flew the Saturn I four times with a dummy second stage before they tried it in the two stage orbital configuration. As a result no missions launched with any Saturn booster failed due to launch vehicle problems (though the second [unmanned] launch of the Saturn V was close). Some other engineering teams in the US were pushing the state of the art harder -- such as the Atlas missile which relied on constant pressurization of the fuel tanks to maintain structural rigidity.

Well, let's consider actual space missions in flight right now. Just next year, in 2015, the American Dawn spacecraft will enter orbit around the asteroid Ceres, after leaving orbit around asteroid Vesta in 2012. And in July 2015, the American New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto. And there is the American Juno mission to Jupiter, launched in 2011 due for arrival in orbit around Jupiter in 2016. Plus the ongoing flotilla of orbiters around Mars, including Maven which just entered Martian orbit less than two months ago and the two functioning rovers on Mars. Oh, and the functioning American orbiters at Saturn and Mercury. Closer to home, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is still in orbit around the Moon taking pictures with half meter resolution. I'm sure I left some out -- so which of those interplanetary and lunar missions doesn't count as exploration for exploration's sake? The American space program has a PR problem -- they have so many space missions going on at once that no one pays any attention any more -- come on -- we're flying past PLUTO next year! The Europeans are landing a probe on a COMET this year! I'm happy to see the Chinese successes, but the Americans and Europeans are doing more space exploration than anyone right now and can do things there that no one else can.

Thank-you for posting this. Usually I feel the responsibility to point out details like this about the early missions, but you saved me the trouble. There are many other examples such as the thousands of pictures returned by the Lunar Orbiters and Surveyor missions to the moon in the mid-60s. By the early 70's the US had missions on the way to Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, places no one else has even attempted yet (the Europeans are planning to go to Jupiter and Mercury soon but haven't launched the spacecraft yet, and they did hitch a ride to Saturn on the US Cassini mission with their Huygens lander.)

I would guess that the difference in reporting is that the Palin family has been far more entertaining over the years than the Biden family, and that is what the media is in the business of now -- entertainment to draw in those ratings. The Biden cocaine case raises far more useful questions about the drug laws in this country and how the upper 1% are treated by the justice system -- but that's not going to bring in the ratings. This is the free market at work -- isn't that how the (L)s want it?