LM's been in a staring contest with the USAF for years, each trying to get the other to pay for the development of a domestic version of the RD-180. The USAF just blinked.
No. If you are using the phrase, "Don't bury the lede", specifically to invoke that journalistic cliché, then only the jargon (retro-neologism) spelling is acceptable. Never respell quotes. If you are just generally discussing the lead paragraph in an article, then it's fine to use whatever spelling is familiar to you, as I just did.
Beta ruins everything.
How does Bruno's crime change my point? I don't care if his crime was calling the Pope a paedophile, they burned him alive. You, OTOH, can call climate science a giant hoax (and many deniers do), you can liken individual climate scientists to mass murderers or terrorists (and some deniers have), you can even liken it to religion... and... we still won't burn you alive.
The most and worst thing scientists can do to you is deny you publicity in the journals which they control, and reject your application for grant money from funds they control.
Science can't prevent you from publishing your work online. Or creating your own journals (with blackjack and hookers). Science can't prevent corporations and wealthy opponents of a specific science (climate change, evolution, tobacco-cancer, etc) from offering you money to make up faux science to support their industry. Science can't stop those industries and individuals from throwing money at politicians to change laws in their favour, against the recommendations of scientists. Science can't even stop those bought-politicians from fucking around with science funding and government reports to harm science their masters don't like.
But OMG science is totally like the Inquisition!
Bruno must have chafed at not being allowed to publish his theories in Church journals, much worse than that whole being burnt alive thing.
Deep ocean water is cold.
Because the Pacific ocean is thousands of kilometres wide, but only a couple of kilometres deep, changes in wind patterns can cover or uncover different layers of ocean waters.
If the pattern uncovers a deep layer (as happens during La Nina), then the atmosphere cools.
If the pattern covers the deep layers (as happens during El Nino), then the atmosphere warms.
This is above and in addition to any underlying warming from rising CO2 levels.
Since 2000 there's been an unusual number of La Nina years. Under normal circumstances, this should have produced a noticeably cool period, similar to the 1940s and 1890s. Instead the decade was still the warmest on record. Weird huh.
Yes, religions have been using that trick for hundreds of years to escape questions.
No, what religions do is torture and murder heretics. Science just doesn't pay attention to them until they meet higher standards of evidence, proportionate to the level of heresy. Tiny bit different.
The results provide the clearest insight yet into the interaction between our ancestors and Neanderthals, when they first encountered each other and why the Neanderthals went extinct, according to the lead researcher, Prof Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford. "I think we can set aside the idea of a rapid extinction of Neanderthals caused solely by the arrival of modern humans. Instead we can see a more complex process in which there is a much longer overlap between the two populations where there could have been exchanges of ideas and culture."
Couldn't they just put a label on the sort of people who not only believe satirical news, but, outraged, spread that "news" to everyone they know.
[Idiot] MagicBob97 shared [link].
[Idiot] catpiss wrote "typical fukink obamu!!!!!! [link]".
[non-idiot] sumdude wrote "uh, guys, teh onion is a satire site".
[Idiot] imtoorealforu shared [link].
And further, work done by NASA is public domain, but work done by hired contractors is generally proprietary
Although an outsider, I definitely support your "if the government funds it, the public owns it" open-source efforts.
Re: Games.
Here it's not just proprietary vs open source. Compare KSP and Moonbase Alpha. KSP is an amazingly rich open world simulator that inspires actual "play" and exploration and trial and error. And as you master it, you accidentally learn more about orbital mechanics than by actually studying orbital mechanics. (As former NASA engineer, XKCD cartoonist noted.)
OTOH, Moonbase Alpha is the worst aspects of "grinding" type games, but with no reward. About the most uninspiring game you could possibly create. "Astronaut/Starlite" looks to be cut from the same cloth.
KSP: I built my own rocket and blew it up! Woo! Then I built another one which got to orbit! Now I'm designing a ship for a deep space mission which I'll construct in orbit!
Alpha: I am "soldering" fixed points in someone else's "circuits" against an arbitrary clock. I will see how many circuits I can solder in an hour. And then see if I can beat it.
Moonbase Alpha is mindless drudgery (and I say that as a bookkeeper) that missed not only the entire concept of "a game", but also entirely missed what geeks (and geek kids) like about space.
Flying the same expensive equipment for 30 years and more is not unusual if it lasts that long.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. B52s are still flying, for example. 60 years next year.
But if you were a mad-obsessed young aircraft engineer looking for a challenge, would you go work at an airline flying five old 707s and mostly doing paperwork for maintenance contractors, or for a manufacturer building brand new aircraft every day, rapidly upgraded model lines, and with a supersonic passenger plane on the books(*)?
(* Trying to think of an aircraft analogy for FalconXX-BFR/MCT.)
While your general theme is correct, you missed [...] Endeavour
I was going to add a comment about that, but it seemed unnecessarily pedantic. My point was there was no ongoing manufacturing capacity. The same is true of ISS modules, and nearly every other program. Build one unit, stop, disband the team, destroy the manufacturing base, operate the unit for five to ten years and then ask "What next?", start a new system entirely from scratch. Pretend all the while that doing it this way saves money.
For example:
In general, however, I believe we should have started the design and production of a second-generation shuttle during the Bush41 administration
Waiting a decade to begin developing Shuttle Mk II is exactly why NASA sucks so hard. For starters, the first version should have been severely reduced from the ambitions of the actual STS, minimising the number of new technologies for the first generation. Building a 100 tonne space-plane in a single generation was completely nuts. The aim would be whatever you can build in five years, not one day more. Each subsequent generation starts the moment the last first flies. (With early design work starting even sooner.) So the second generation would have started somewhere around 1975, flying by 1980. Third generation flying in '85, fourth generation around '90... But I'm proposing increments that are probably a fraction of the ones you were picturing.
And just to be pedantic, NASA did start work on successors to the Shuttle in that period. So did the USAF. Giant SSTO spaceplanes, like NASP then VentureStar, which repeated every mistake from the STS program. Pushing the state of the art beyond reasonable limits, while insisting that there are "no show stoppers", under-bidding and over-promising, then blowing budgets and under-delivering. Then when you get cancelled, scream for years about funding and a "lack of leadership".
From the other AC:
What about MSL?
MSL went significantly overbudget and overschedule. (Only the gob-smacking failures of JWST makes MSL's budget look reasonable.) But nonetheless, when it landed, people were excited... because NASA had "actually done something". Which suggests that not only are people excited about space, but they are starved for something to be excited about. It's worth noting that, unlike MER, Viking, etc, they built a single version of MSL with no possibility of a backup. Mars 2020 will be based on the same design, but again, will be a single unit. This is a trend at NASA. Like the 8 years between MSL and Mars 2020. Just long enough to lose most of the team, forget most of the lessons learned.
Similarly, not only did MER and MSL not carry any follow-ups to the Viking life experiments, neither will Mars 2020 even though "search for signs of (fossil) life on Mars!" is the centre of the NASA PR for Mars 2020.
THEGODDESSOFTHENETHASTWISTINGFINGERSANDHERVOICEISLIKEAJAVELININTHENIGHTDUDE
