I think we should secretly replace their employees with Folgers crystals and see if anyone notices.

It's about time someone defunded this utterly ridiculous and transparent scam.

Indeed, it's about time they defund SLS/Orion!

Don't get me wrong, NASA should be in the launch systems business. In the revolutionary launch systems business. Government programs are supposed to exist to do the important thing that private industry is unwilling or unable to do - in the science field this means things like such as science without immediate commercial applications, very expensive basic research, etc. There is no shortage of private companies now competing over the launch market, and indeed even for the heavy launch market. It's no longer some sort of monopolistic scenario.

NASA needs to be working on rocketry techs that are seen as too much cost / too much of a long shot for private industry to try - that is, until someone else (such as NASA) can prove them. Metstable fuels, nuclear-steam rockets, liquid airbreathing rockets, scramjets, solar sails, magnetic sails, fission sails, advanced ion propulsion technologies, fission fragment rockets, ballistic launch, launch loops, antimatter-initiated microfission / microfusion rockets, nuclear saltwater rockets, nuclear pulse propulsion, and on and on, plus advanced non-propulsion techs for landing, transit, sustaining a base/colony, new communications technologies, advanced robotic systems, etc - with all exact schematics, production instructions, consultations with the developers to serious parties, etc made available at no charge. I'm also of the opinion that NASA should produce and make available at low cost to private space companies and researchers the sort of large-scale analysis and test facilities whose capital costs would break a startup.

Basically, they need to be filling in the gaps in advancing space technology, not trying to do everything, even those things that other parties are more than happy to do on their own with their own money.

That might be true if this was some sort of dispassionate commentary on the bill. But it's not, it's a ringing endorsement of a highly partisan bill. Surely you see the difference.

For those who are serious, here's the Planetary Society's commentary, with a link to an indepth but nonpartisan analysis at SpacePolicyOnline. The Planetary Society is very happy with the planetary science numbers, not happy with the earth science numbers, and couldn't seem to care less about the funding for SLS/Orion.

plenty of those wealthy only get their wealth by warping the laws of the land to bring more wealth in their direction. we're not talking about hard working small business owners here, we're talking about parasites

additionally, i am not sure why we should worry about these "patriotic americans" fleeing the country being that doing so would give us more leverage to seize the means of their ill gotten gains, which is the real problem

so good fucking riddance should they flee

there's a certain kind of american who thinks "socialist" means "communist totalitarianism"

it's a kneejerk pavlovian response from cold war era propaganda without any thought education or historical awareness

i'm not a socialist and i can think of problems with socialism. but at least i can talk about the concept on its merits and lack thereof, rather than being a blind moron as to what the word really means and substituting ignorance from an expired era, the cold war, when considering the word emptily, rather than the real ideology the word actually represents

It's the same reason why many of the oppose geothermal power, keeping Hawaii reliant on burning oil for most of its electricity. Also why there's opposition to even trying to redirect lava flows as most countries do when their people are threatened (with a number of successful redirects having been achieved).

Apparently Pele wants people to be ignorant of the cosmos, to destroy the climate, and to lose their dearest possessions without putting up a fight.

I get 1 new recruiter request per month. What typically follows is spamming of job offers because one keyword matched in their database. Such as "programming". I've had some pretty interesting offers once in a while. Perhaps not interesting enough to jump ship after all the advantages I have for working 18 years in the same house, but some came very close. But on the average of 10-15 offers a month, most are totally irrelevant to what my profile lays out in terms of specialties and experience.

The problem boils down to the recruiters not understanding the core technologies they're being tasked as manning. So they shoot all around hoping for a positive hit because they want their fees and will go as far as sharing their fees with a sign-in bonus.

Can you imagine a 500$ sign-in bonus would have an 18 year veteran jump ship?

If you can't be bothered creating an account or resetting your lost password, you can forget about any meaningful offer.

I've seen plenty of work on accelerator-drive heavy isotope reactors but nothing for light isotope reactors like lithium. Accelerator driven heavy isotope reactors still deal with many of the problems of conventional fission reactors - they're greatly improved in many regards, but still problematic (you still have some plutonium, you still have some fuel availability/cost limitations, you still have some long-lived waste, you still have some harder to shield radiation, you still have a wide range of daughter products making corrosion control more challenging, etc - just not to the degree of a regular fission reactor). A light isotope reactor using lithium would virtually eliminate all of these problems. And it has a higher burnup ratio, which is of course critical for space uses.

And while everything I've seen about past improvements in accelerator efficiencies and spallation process improvements, and what's being worked on now, suggests no limit any time soon on neutron production efficiencies - at least that's how it looks from the papers I've read. Plus, even if efficiencies couldn't be improved any further (there's not that much further one needs to go), one could hybridize a heavy isotope and light isotope reactor, using a heavy isotope target as a neutron multiplier to bombard the lithium. You'd require significantly reduced quantities of heavy isotopes relative to a pure heavy isotope reactor, and most of the energy from the lithium side could be as mentioned captured without Carnot losses, which is a big bonus. Any non-thermalized neutrons of sufficient energy would produce tritium as a byproduct, which of course would be a value-added product - in fact, given that the tritium-breeding reaction with 7Li and a high energy neutron yields a lower-energy neutron, the thermalization could potentially be done via tritium breeding in the first place. And tritium is a valuable product whether one has interest in D-T fusion or not.

I just think it's weird that I've not come across any work on a lithium-based accelerator-driven spallation reactor, and was just wondering if there's a reason for that. It certainly looks appealing to my non-expert eyes. I mean, it looks even cleaner and more fuel-available than D-T fusion, and looks closer to being viable on a full-system perspective. Versus accelerator-driven heavy isotope fission you get less power per neutron (about a quarter as much), of course, even accounting for Carnot losses in the former - but that's not what matters. Cost is what matters, and if you're eliminating the use of super-expensive fuel, not producing any costly-to-manage waste, have no incident radiation, no proliferation concerns, etc, you're completely changing the cost picture - without even considering the possible joint production of saleable tritium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

misandry exists and is real

but it is tiny compared to the systemic misogyny in the power structures and social norms in jobs and schools, especially STEM jobs and schools

so to ask for the false balance with the esoteric minor misandry, when examining the very strong and very real misogyny, is yet another example of someone, in this case you, just not fucking getting it, and being out of touch with the reality of pervasive misogyny

you are out of touch with reality

no, wrong

women suffer from sexism far more than men in general society, and especially in STEM careers/ academia

this is actual reality

it's like says racism against whites by blacks balances racism against blacks by whites. completely ignoring history and reality of who actually suffers far, far worse effects

and of course there is misandry in this world, that's real, that exists

but it's the misogyny that is far, far more worse and embedded in social norms and power structures in jobs and schools, especially in STEM jobs and scholarly pursuits

that's reality. if you don't agree with that or understand that, you don't understand reality

the point is the bias is real and serious. if ridiculous drama like that reaction to the guy's t shirt exists, this is minor sideshow crap compared to the very real, very serious, very unfunny sexism

but in certain minds, the blowback over a t shirt is the "real" issue, and the actual sexism is unnoticed and invisible, or a reason to make jokes, on a topic which is not funny

revealing the bias and prejudice to be very real

I own a 2001 Honda Insight hybrid modified to be a PHEV and plugged in nightly to charge on geothermal power.... and a Ford Ranger ;) The "why" is obvious, because I have regular needs to carry big heavy things, now that I own land in the countryside. Back when I had no such need... I didn't own any such vehicle.

I guess it's hard for him to imagine that a woman would have a need to carry large and/or heavy items?

you are modded funny, and make a joke, when men ARE privileged

as proven by the story you are commenting other

yet everyone is laughing

so the problem is real, because everyone thinks the subject is a joke

it's like a story showing racism's bad effects, and people make racist jokes underneath

unexamined prejudice is alive and well in the slashdot comments

And the crazy thing is, they did consult with male colleagues before publishing. The reviewer just assumed that because two women submitted a paper with a conclusion that he disagreed with, that it's specifically because they're women "making ideologically biased assumptions" who refuse to talk to men.