I already posted, but I would bet that they just couldn't get any Pu-238 if they had wanted it. The stuff is in really short supply now. The New Horizons mission to Pluto launched with a less than the desired amount because it wasn't available. The Juno spacecraft enroute to Jupiter doesn't have any and was designed for solar power.
http://www.universetoday.com/1...
Apollo 13's radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) with a load of Plutonium 238 entered the atmosphere at earth escape speed (greater than orbital speeds) and didn't cause any atmospheric problems. These things are designed to survive launch vehicle explosions. I suspect the main reason that Philae didn't have nuclear power is that the preferred fuel, Pu 238, is in very short supply. No one who has any is willing to share. Spacecraft designers are doing all they can to avoid it just because it is too hard to get right now.
I can't believe that no one has yet pointed out the obvious self-contradiction in your post. You start out by complaining about international trade agreements which the government has and is likely to make and end by ranting about more Government. But the purpose of these trade agreements is to remove government imposed barriers to trade across international boundaries. So every trade agreement reduces government interference in how corporations and people to do business internationally, overriding those pesky labor, product safety, and environmental laws. The secret deals everyone claims to be outraged about are all about how badly the multinational corporations can screw the people of each country without them having any recourse in local law. Sounds like the libertarian Utopia to me; smaller government advocates should be all for these deals.
OK, I'll give you an answer to your implied question -- it's "the boy who cried wolf syndrome". Considering that he was "a kenyan, muslim, socialist" who famously "palled around with terrorists" and was bent on destroying America from the day he was inaugurated (actually the day it started looking like he would win the election), I have to examine the criticisms of the man with a skeptical eye and deeply consider the source as to whether there is a trace of truth in any accusations as most of the time there wasn't. The actual failures of this administration have been so overshadowed by the crazed lies and bullshit slung around starting in about 2007 that they have desensitized us to the real problems. Even in this case, which does look really bad, it's no worse than the previous administration (notice I didn't say "any better" either). So anyone bitching now had better have a history of it going back to the original passing of the Patriot Act in 2001. So you can blame the nuts who went berserk at Obama's election for the teflon he wears now.
The Skylab malfunction was with the Skylab module itself, not the Saturn V vehicle underneath it. "The station was damaged during launch when the micrometeoroid shield separated from the workshop and tore away, taking one of two main solar panel arrays with it and jamming the other one so that it could not deploy." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.... Your point holds though, just not the right example.
Interesting link there, thanks. I've read of other rockets which are almost SSTO (Titan II seems to comes to mind, but I can't back that up, and that sounds even more unlikely given the fuels it uses). So the question remains -- why hasn't somebody done it, at least as a demonstration? There no longer seems to even be any serious attempts as there were in the 90s. I would much rather have seen NASA spend money on a one shot SSTO demo than that lame single stick SRB launch for Constellation. I am left with an apparent contradiction here.
Scaled already built a close air support prototype -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.... The world hasn't beaten a path to their door to buy them. I agree that the legacy aerospace contractors are crooks, but competitive modern fighters are extremely complex in every domain -- structural, propulsion, avionics. Ask the Russians and Chinese how well their 5th gen fighters are coming. I respect Scaled but Spaceship Two is a LOT simpler than a 5th gen fighter and it is not coming along so well.
I never got the point of the DC-X. Chemical fuels never got and can't get significantly better than LOX/LH2 so the whole single stage to orbit thing is pretty much ruled out by mathematics, especially on some conventional looking vehicle like the DC-X or a related follow on. The contemporaneous (to the DC-X) NASP X-30 program looked like it had about the best possible chance of becoming a SSTO vehicle and it didn't go anywhere (literally). SSTO with chemical fuels is a pipe dream, the late-20th century version of perpetual motion. Even if someone could cobble something which limped into low earth orbit, it would have no payload.
Mod this AC up, please. This story is an example. Should be good news all around -- fracking, which is widespread and has led to cheap natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel -- is probably, generally benign, so we can concentrate on the outlier cases where it is not. The fact that cheap natural gas is driving coal out of the market has to be a net win for the environment. Maybe I'm an outlier myself, but card carrying member of the Sierra Club here and I'm glad to hear this.
"It did long term damage and did much to keep man in low orbit for following 50 years or longer." -- I have not yet seen a convincing argument which backs this fairly common assertion up. I have seen arguments that the missile based spacecraft crowded out the "space planes" which were under development in the 50's, but those aren't even technically achievable now. Maybe, just maybe, the argument can be made that a stretched out program of going to the moon would have kept the public interested for longer than ten years but that just means we would have been on the moon in 1980 with no immediate goals after that. By 1975 Apollo had put in place two human-rated launchers, a heavy lift launcher, a deep space capability, an orbital space station, international interfaces, and the ground infrastructure to support it all. Then it was mostly abandoned because the Space Shuttle promised (but didn't deliver) cheap access to space. As the Shuttle and ISS have proven, the dreams of space planes and orbital way stations to deep space which Apollo supposedly killed, were not practically realizable in the first place, certainly not in 1969. Now our plans to deep space (either SLS/Orion or Space X's systems) are practically rebuilds of Apollo. It was the Space Shuttle which kept us in low earth orbit for 50 years.
From the same Wikipedia link you posted: "The Obama administration instituted the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, also known as the Augustine Commission, to review the human spaceflight plans of the United States after the time NASA had planned to retire the Space Shuttle.
Constellation had already failed by the time Obama took office. Constellation was porked out from the start, spent all its money and had nothing to show for it. It wasn't going to work. Read the Augustine Commission's report.
Per Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P..., ten Proton-M launches have failed, the most recent before this being July 2013 and May 2014.The recent Western sanctions were not announced until March 2014. Doesn't seem possible that the sanctions and the Proton failures can be related.
They extended the law which gives commercial companies $2.2 billion of free liability insurance, courtesy of the taxpayers.
"The same voting pattern followed on commercial launch indemnification, which expires at the end of 2016. The bill proposed a seven-year extension from the end of 2016 to 2023. The committee approved Knight’s amendment to extend the cost-sharing arrangement to the end of 2025. The Democrats wanted an extension to 2020.
Under law, companies are responsibility for damages from a launch up to $500 million. The federal government covers any damages from $500 million to $2.7 billion. Companies are responsible for any damages above that level."
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.
Happiness is twin floppies.
