Why would he want to repeat that? Fully dense metal parts with equivalent-to-wrought properties out of the machine and with a bit of stress-relief heat-treatment: http://www.eos.info/en/products/systems-equipment/metal-laser-sintering-systems.html http://production3dprinters.com/slm/spro125-direct-metal-slm-production-printer

EOS, 3DSystems and Arcam make systems that make Steel, Aluminum, Inconel and Titanium parts with mechanical properties equivalent to (and in some cases surpasing) wrought parts. The "sintering" in the trade names is a misnomer. The process is actually micro welding with lasers or electron beams. Straight out of the machine the parts are fully dense and useful.

Woah there Tex!

I have to admit, the high-throughput stuff is pretty neat though. I think the great part about it is that it frees up the human to think more about test design and hypothesis formulation and worry less about the mechanics of putting drop A into beaker B.

Nope. Averages of chaotic series are chaotic too! Learn some math; start with Lorenz.

The annotated ITAR indicates (121.1 Category XV (c)(2), pp50 in that pdf) that there is a speed and altitude restriction: "Designed for producing navigation results above 60,000 feet altitude and at 1,000 knots velocity or greater".

Hopefully they will get credit because their receivers worked at low-speed and low-altitude (on the way down), and they've already integrated their accelerometer data to get very reasonable velocity and position estimates.

Yes, they know how to launch legally.

They didn't get a lock with any of their receivers at apogee.

One of the significant hurdles for Carmack's prize is the ITAR speed/altitude restrictions on most GPS receivers. It will be interesting to see what sort of receiver they used; hopefully at least one of the four was an unrestricted receiver.

Rather that a full up Navier-Stokes solver (I was going to say openFOAM too), since it's a short section of a course, maybe just have them play with the NACA airfoil potential flow solver; that's pretty neat. You can explain the simplifications to the governing equations between "real" CFD and potential flow, and show them that the simple models can still be useful in certain situations.

Absolutely right, he tried to do a Pentagon-style program without a significant Iron Triangle backing him up, so instead of being too big to fail, it was just too big.

I still don't understand how the orbiter would have ever made sense though, every pound of air-frame is a pound of payload given up. Paying to get it up in the first place is expensive, you should bring back as little as possible (teeny-tiny re-entry capsule, separate cargo / orbital lab / what-have-you). Just because the shuttle was initially part of a larger program doesn't make it smart or modular.

Does long, long time mean 'since the total cluster that was the shuttle design'? Hauling all that tile and structure was a really horrible design decision, Zubrin's criticism of it was spot on.

Griffin is / was such a douche bag. I do not understand why everyone kissed his ass so much, 'oooh, he wrote teh book!!1elventyone!!!'. Yeah, guess what? He spent all that time getting degrees and writing text books and not building or flying hardware!! When the boss draws a rocket on a napkin (Ares I) and ram-jams it down the organization's throat, he is a total and unrepentant jerk-off and should never be trusted with any position of authority ever again. Unfortunately this is exactly the kind of well-credentialed, but worthless asshole that gets promoted in the government, and NASA happens to be particularly flagrant with this sort of buffoonery.

Ah, ranting feels good, especially on the internet where it lasts forever...

I'd argue funding NASA prevents the creation of infrastructure (gun / laser launch, systems of tethers / rotovators) because NASA can afford one-off rocket shots which result in no residual infrastructure, whereas private industry would have to be smarter (to be affordable).

There are still enough residual ETs to do some interesting prototyping things, such as a shuttle derived heavy.

See SpaceX's first Falcon 9 in the hangar at the cape, at least it's got the possibility of farting around in LEO more cheaply. Diverting money from Constellation to COTS is paving the way.

Here's a round-up of the recent news with links describing that stuff.

Dennis Leary did it better: