You should have stopped at "math major", so you've just admitted that you are not an expert in the models and analysis specific to the climate field. Every person with a STEM major thinks they are qualified to criticize climate science. You don't hear everyone with a STEM major yapping in with their opinion when the subject of a proof of the Riemann hypothesis comes up. By the way I was a math major, too, and I work with climate scientists and in their specialty they know a lot more about the math involved than I do.

Modded up by somebody but contradicted by the facts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... After the loss of Challenger there was a gap of 2 years 8 months until the next Shuttle launch. After the loss of Columbia there was a gap of 2 years 6 months until the next Shuttle launch. Neither of which qualifies as "the best part of a decade". Prudent amounts of time to do the investigation of failure of such a complex and expensive system and implement changes to reasonably reduce risk of another loss going forward. Even during the space race days of Apollo when greater risks were accepted, the gap between the planned launch of Apollo 1 and the actual flight of Apollo 7 was 1 year 8 months. Anyone who tries to go quicker or tries to cheap out on the investigation after a loss is likely to lose another crew shortly thereafter which will really shut a program down.

Constellation basically cancelled itself by going way over budget with almost nothing to show for it except a useless suborbital launch of a glorified Space Shuttle solid rocket booster and no hope of ever maintaining a semblance of a budget going forward. And Obama didn't end the shuttle program -- he just executed the end of the shuttle program as scheduled and planned by the Bush administration and Congress before he took office.

From personal experience, I don't know where this educational reform is you are talking about. I went through a good set of public schools in the 70's in a good middle class school system. The Friday night football game was the highlight of the week at high school. Classes were pretty good, the kids that wanted to, got into good colleges. Now, 40 years later, my kids are going through a good set of public schools in a good middle class school system. The Friday night football game is the highlight of the week at high school. The kids that want to are getting into good colleges. Two main differences from my experiences -- my kids seem to be learning more advanced concepts in math and science sooner than I did and the school district doesn't offer Driver's Ed as an elective. I wish that Driver's Ed was an elective, other than that the K-12 education experience seems as good or better than what I got.

The first action the company will take once it starts making a profit will be to open a subsidiary in some other country through which they can launder their cash flow and avoid corporate taxes.

So what you are saying is that Clinton had little to nothing to do with the prosperity of the 90's, but he was responsible for the problems of the 2000's -- OK...

The neutrino was in the same state for a while -- a hypothesized, unobserved entity needed to make the equations balance. Now we have three different neutrinos plus their antiparticles.

"the US of A hasn't passed the 'free country' test, for the past 2 decades or so" -- the AC who posted this and anyone who believes it is grossly ignorant of history. Take a look at the Espionage Act of 1917. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus. Look up the history of the Japanese-Americans interned during WWII. Prohibition in the 20s. Women couldn't vote until the 20's. Anyone other than Caucasians effectively couldn't vote until the '60s. Look up the destruction of people and careers during the Red Scares of the Cold War (start with Robert Oppenheimer). Hell, go look up the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 passed by the great "Founding Fathers". The USA has never been as "free" as the myths about it say, just usually better than almost anywhere else. It (the USA) has always been a work in progress and by many measures is more free now than it has been in the past, especially compared to the 20th century. J Edgar Hoover was FBI director for life and (unlike today's NSA) didn't make a big secret of the surveillance files he kept on anyone he disliked. Anyone want to go back to the 1920's, 30's, 40's, or 50's? -- you don't get to choose who you go back as and may be of another race than Caucasian or sexual orientation other than male and heterosexual.

You lost me at "Statists"

In this case the State is paying all the bills -- those people's salaries, the inflated salaries of the Northrop Grumman executives, and the inflated profits which Northrop Grumman is getting from the project. Don't want to talk to the State actors? -- fine, then don't accept a paycheck from them either. The State needs to cut off the money spigot until there is more cooperation from the contractor.

Wait a minute -- Since when is "Add another 50 percent to make it flight qualified and for the various surprises that happen at the coal face and aren't quite as evident when you're writing a grant proposal" supposed to be a normal part of project execution? Flight qualification is supposed to be built into the project cost from the beginning. And any honest cost proposal for an aerospace project with new technology needs a large contingency reserve. No, even by your numbers the Webb is incredibly overbudget and I've seen original budget estimates for it closer to $1.6 billion than $4 billion. Either this project was fraudulently underbid in the original proposals (standard procedure in big government aerospace projects -- see F-35) or the original cost proposers were totally incompetent along with the managers and program officials who accepted those estimates (also standard procedure in the aerospace industry). Webb should have been cancelled on principle a long time ago to discourage this sort of proposal/management style in the future. If costing the Webb was as easy as you stated it then why were the original numbers so far off?

I can't say about SpaceX and they already have their Falcon Heavy in the works (which doesn't match the SLS specs), but Boeing is already the prime contractor for most of the SLS vehicle -- "Boeing is the prime contractor for the design, development, test and production of the launch vehicle cryogenic stages, as well as development of the avionics suite." http://www.boeing.com/boeing/d...

Being an old school aerospace contractor, Boeing knows the risks to deliver new, cutting edge space hardware*. I doubt they would take this project on as fixed cost or with a hard delivery date.

*Yeah, I know that SLS doesn't look cutting edge compared to the Saturn V or Space Shuttle, but it's development will be sucha large effort, it might as well be.
Don't take anything I said here as actual approval of how the SLS was conceived and is being done.

The Shuttle never lived up to what it was sold as -- cheap, reliable access to space. The most damning evidence of that is that the only major sponsor/user besides NASA, the US Air Force, abandoned it as soon as its actual operational limitations became clear. The Air Force went to the expense of developing new large expendable launch vehicles rather than try to stick with the Shuttle. For the last few years the Shuttle had only one mission -- support the ISS, every other mission had been taken from it. And, the US had a perfectly viable space station program without the Shuttle -- Skylab, and for that matter, so did the Russians. Speaking of the Russians -- they figured out pretty quickly that the Space Shuttle concept was operationally a loser and abandoned their Buran version after one flight. So, the Shuttle looked good in the marketing slides from the 70's and early '80s, but has to be judged an operational failure by the standards set for its justifications to be built. The Shuttle could do things that no other vehicle can do, but those capabilities, such as its huge cross range landing capability, just turned out to be not very useful and not worth the cost.

You must not have been following the debate in the 80's when the evidence that was coming in that the ozone layer was in trouble and some scientists were saying we needed to phase out chlorofluorocarbons -- there was a great cry that the civilized world was going to end without air conditioning and we would all die sweaty and uncomfortable. Same thing happened in the early 70's when leaded gasoline was phased out -- we were going to have to abandon gasoline powered cars, it would be impossible to design a usable engine to run on low octane unleaded. Those examples are why I am skeptical when told how expensive it will be and that it will practically destroy civilization to phase into non-fossil energy.

Was the Fed flooding the market with cash in 2007-08? I think it was the private banks that were creating liquidity (money) with those weird investment vehicles and loans. What the Fed failed at was not withdrawing money from the economy and running up interest rates to cool things down, but nobody wants an economic party pooper and they would have been savagely criticized for ending the good times.