It didn't help that Sergei Korolev died right before the Apollo moon landings. It was even apparently due to a poorly trained surgeon for what should have been a routine medical procedure that caused his death. Had Korolev been around to provide strong leadership to the Soviet Moon program, I think there might have been an outside chance for a Soviet crewed lunar landing to have happened by about 1970 with the N-1 rocket becoming successful.

The funny thing is that the N-1 engines that should have gone to the Moon ended up being used by Orbital Science for sending supplies to the International Space Station. Then again, when one of those engines exploded shortly after launch, it destroyed one of the cargo modules and a couple of satellites... so the disaster of the N-1 seems to keep repeating itself.

America has lost the capability of being able to reproduce the original Mercury flight of Alan Shepard. There are some efforts to try and build some new spacecraft that might actually be useful in the future and they are currently under development, but none of them are flight worthy. If some alien creature was discovered orbiting the Earth and simply asking for somebody from the Earth to meet with them in orbit in exchange for huge amounts of cultural and scientific data, it would have to be done right now with a Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft or with a Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft. America wouldn't and simply can't do something like that.

Yes, the technological capability of going to the Moon has been lost in the past 40 years and needs to be rebuilt from scratch. All we know is that it was done in the past, where sadly an entire generation of kids are starting to believe the Moon hoax guys because the technology to get to the Moon no longer exists.

NASA funding since the Nixon administration has been pretty flat and generally is something like social security.... a death trap politically speaking if you try to cut it. Just look at how quickly Barack Obama changed his tune about NASA when he was running for President and needed the votes in Florida after he proposed a virtual elimination of NASA (if anybody has that kind of memory). People talk about shutting down programs at NASA, but it really doesn't happen.

There have certainly been some disasters at NASA in terms of program management like Constellation and the James Webb Telescope that have eaten up almost all funding at the agency as it should be seen as a zero-sum game for any new programs that get done within the scope of NASA. But none the less I dare you to show any deep cuts to NASA after the damage following the cancellation of Apollo happened!

I do agree though that when you ask those of older generations (especially those over 60) how much money is being spent on NASA, they think about 5% of the federal budget is still going to that agency. It is even a figure they think is where it should be at too, and are greatly surprised when you tell then that the actual figure is less than 1/10th of that amount.

This was true until a sultan decided arbitrarily that science was no longer useful to his sultanate and order it to be stopped. It is one of the problems with monarchies, and also why it was the Spanish and not the Chinese who conquered the Incas and Aztecs (with some evidence that China had reached South America before the famous voyage of Columbus and definitely sailed past modern-day South Africa).

It is the end of this period of enlightenment that should be of concern, as it shows even some very intelligent people who made some amazing contributions to the knowledge of mankind as a whole could have essentially that whole sub-culture destroyed due to the whims of just a very few people... or even just a single person. In other words, it should be a cautionary tale how Muslim science was destroyed.

Could you elaborate on this? Some governor elections are held in odd numbered years simply to remove the distractions from presidential election politics and the congressional races, but how is that manipulation when it is specified by law to happen on a regular basis?

This certainly is nothing like elections in the UK where the PM can decide an arbitrary date to hold the next round of elections to the House of Commons when the polling numbers are looking really good... or put off elections for awhile if they aren't looking so nice.

Rhode Island and Deleware might beg to disagree with you on that point. It isn't really all that much larger now than it was in 1787 when the concept was being set up in the first place where those two states in particular really didn't want to get lost and absorbed into Massachusetts and Virginia respectively. They wanted to maintain their independent nature and strongly objected to plans treating them as insignificant in the greater republic.

Yes, this is definitely working as intended, where those two states are still independent sovereign entities with their own identities. If anything, the population disparity between the original 13 colonies has lessened to a great extent over the past several decades too. I would call that working as intended.

This is intentional and deliberate. The Senate was never supposed to be even an elected body in the first place as it was supposed to be essentially a counterpoint to the UN General Assembly. In other words, it was supposed to be a body made up of representatives of the various state governments and definitely not supposed to be remotely representative of ordinary citizens.

You might be advocating an elimination of the Senate in the fashion that the House of Lords has sort of faded into obscurity in the British Parliament, but there is definitely no reason for it to become even more of just a horrible copy of the House of Representatives, something that was never the original intention in the first place. The disparity is that for better or for worse, the U.S. Senate seems to have grown even more with regards to political power, where individual senators sort of think of themselves individually as vice-presidents ready to step into the "top job" at any time and definitely command their staff as if they will be the next president. The ego needed to become a senator is definitely something right now that basically is a waypoint for many who have presidential ambitions.

Complaining about the disproportionate nature of the Senate is just downright silly and ignoring its purpose in the first place.

It should be pointed out that SpaceX has a huge presence in Texas, with the Texas state legislature doing some rather recent.... enticements as it were... to get SpaceX to spend a few hundred million dollars more in their state.

In other words, Ted Cruz would be crucified in his home state and would even hurt his future presidential ambitions if he were to be in public opposition to SpaceX as a company. I certainly expect to see him show up at the ground breaking when SpaceX starts to pour concrete at the Brownsville spaceport that is being built.... in Texas. For that matter, I wouldn't put it past him to show up at McGregor for an engine test or a test flight of the Falcon 9-R. A great photo op and with his dual hat as the chairman of this committee it is going to be an extra reason to appear for stuff like that.

As chair, he will also get a good insight into space policy issues, which I think will be a good thing too. Somebody with presidential ambitions would be good to become educated on those issues too.

I agree that the AC was simply showing a lack of knowledge about the topic. Russia is the world leader in propulsion technology (the next generation engine called the Raptor that SpaceX is building is based upon Russian technology), so I wouldn't dismiss Russia at all in terms of spaceflight technology on any level. None the less, there have been some other attempts by people other than SpaceX to get a reusable flight vehicle to do a controlled landing.

There are also some scholarly papers that have attempted to prove that what SpaceX is doing here is technologically impossible as well, trying to demonstrate that reusable systems for stage recovery will eat up all of the payload mass making such a rocket useless on a practical level. I believe some Russian propulsion scientists were involved in one of those papers that included some hardware tests. Seeing a rocket stage successfully deliver a payload to the ISS of several metric tons of cargo and land in a near-miss but for the want of a couple gallons of hydraulic fluid sort of shows that those papers might not be entirely accurate or at least there might be ways to reduce the mass of such recovery systems and still deliver a practical payload into orbit.

There was the DC-X program that tried to do mostly the same thing that SpaceX is doing here with this barge landing, but the DC-X never made the trip into orbit and only did pretty much what the Grasshopper did earlier. The DC-X was supposed to lead to a rocket that went into orbit and could be similarly reusable, but funding for that program was cut during the Reagan administration. Surprisingly, it is Blue Origin that purchased all of the IP rights to that technology and not SpaceX... but that is another story.

[citation needed]

Really, this is just utter troll talk here that shows you don't know what you are talking about. That SpaceX keeps pushing the envelope is true, but they've definitely delivered payloads to the desired location in orbit on multiple occasions, including 100% of the primary payloads on the Falcon 9. That they might have set some additional goals on each mission to go beyond the bare minimum expected and then fail on some minor point only goes to show that they aren't trying to stay safe either.

It should be pointed out that as the Falcon 1 1st stage empties out, even one engine burning at minimum throttle is still strong enough to provide positive lift to the whole stage. In other words, it simply must land with at least some fuel remaining in the tank as it would be ascending and not landing otherwise (unless the tank was dry, but that wouldn't be a landing). It definitely wasn't the fuel reserve that caused this problem.

The one clearly identified problem was that the grid fins stopped working due to a loss of hydraulic fluid to keep them operational at the end of the flight. I'm sure more will come up as the issues are found.

On the contrary. It is a requirement as per NASA contracts, but also standard practice in the rocket industry. It is called reserve fuel. Look it up. Every successful launcher that has put things into orbit has such a reserve fuel load that never gets used except in emergency conditions.

SpaceX is merely taking advantage of that reserve fuel after the 2nd stage has been lit up to be able to do something useful with the 1st stage. The engine-out capability is something that has been used by other rocket designers as well, including something Werner Von Braun used in his design of the Saturn V.... something that even made a couple Apollo flights successful that would have failed had that capability not been there.

You don't plan on using the reserve fuel in a nominal flight to boost performance. SpaceX did launch a geosynchronous orbit satellite that pushed the reserve fuel load to the point that testing of the 1st stage landing procedures didn't happen, but it still had the reserve fuel left in the 1st stage after stage separation. It was later said that SpaceX did test the landing process anyway on that flight, but it was rather low-key and didn't involve a hover test.

Was there a Shuttle landing strip at VAFB? An air strip that could bring the Shuttle on the 747 carrier certainly existed and was even used on a couple occasions (when the Enterprise showed up there for some fitting tests), but I don't think it was ever intended to land there.

On the other hand, Vandenberg was to be a launch site for polar launches with an emphasis on military payloads that never ended up being used with the Shuttle. I'm pretty sure any such landings were to happen at Edwards AFB, but I might be wrong on that issue.

The big change to the Shuttle was the cross-range requirement where it could potentially evade Soviet (at the time) tracking and be able to do a single orbit mission to put a military payload into orbit and land immediately after deployment. Such a flight would require significant turning since over the course of the mission a straight wing would have put the Shuttle over the middle of the Pacific Ocean (when launched from Vandenberg). Again, no such mission ever actually happened, but it was one of the things that adversely impacted the shuttle design since it was designed to fly such a mission.

The extra fuel was in the tank anyway as reserve fuel. The only reason why it was jettisoned before full orbit had to do with trying to keep it from cluttering up LEO with more space debris, so hanging onto the tank would have been trivial by comparison. It would have required a slight design change in the tank construction to make it useful though, and likely some in-orbit construction in order to make the tanks useful on a practical level, but neither the fuel nor applications were a problem. It was mainly an issue of getting a very conservative thinking congress (on space issues) to agree to funding any mission that would use the tank.

At this point, it is a moot idea since the Shuttle program is no more, but it was an interesting idea that could have been utilizing a resource that otherwise was discarded.