You're absolutely right. NASA killed the clipper because it was a threat to their employment-for-life guarantee, namely the Shuttle

Considering that the new prez owes votes to the Federal bureaucrats (93% of DC voted for him), it would be surprising to see him dismantle the NASA status quo. So any solution he'll consider will keep them employed and will not be cheaper.

evanbd,

Interesting posts, I regret that I don't have mod points right now.

Allow me to ask a question: what do you think of the statement "cheaper...while still providing jobs for much of the existing shuttle workforce"? If DIRECT is cheaper, won't it imply that most of the people employed by the Shuttle program will not be needed anymore? Or do they plan to keep these people and spread the salary costs on a very large number of DIRECT launches?

What's your BS-o-meter telling you there? Mine tells me that if they are really trying to keep the standing army of highly paid engineers currently working on the Shuttle, then DIRECT cannot be cheaper. If cheap is the target, then a lot of NASA people are going to be pink-slipped. Someone is lying here.

Your opinion?

Post by LifesABeach is dead accurate. The Delta Clipper demonstrator was an effective SSTO prototype. It was handled to NASA, which "accidentally" killed it on the first flight. Then they could not find $10 million to rebuild another one, while spending $500M a year on the Shuttle.

The Delta Clipper was a threat to the Shuttle milk cow, so it died. Technical superiority doesn't matter anymore at NASA.

NASA is great at science mission, but they have historically fought and destroyed every attempt to make access to space cheaper.

NASA used to be moon-conqueror heroes. Now it is a bureaucracy. The goal of a bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself. They are now standing firmly between mankind and cheap access to space.

Agreed. My first tech book was done in MS Word 6 (yeah, it was a long time ago). It was a nightmare. We had several production problems when it was time to produce the PostScript to send to the pre-press machine. Ugh.

The next books were done in LaTeX (my editor insisted on it for the 1st one, then I was sold). Sure, it's a bit of a learning curve, but the flexibility and control given by LaTeX are worth learning the tricks. Plus, Lamport's LaTex book is actually a well-written tutorial. Aspiring tech books authors would be well inspired to study its style and organization.

LyX reportedly goes a long way to making LaTeX easier to use. I haven't used it myself, though.

"Everybody knows that there is solar variability."

. Everyone, apparently, but the authors of the various global climate models, none of which currently include it.

Not true. There are models which include variation in the radiated solar input (that's sunshire for us laymen). Some even achieve a measure of success in reproducing the observed climate changes over the last few centuries. But as every other model, they don't explain everything and they cannot reproduce all the observed changes.

Moreover, to account for the most striking recent climate change episodes, these model presuppose a solar variation that is not backed by independent evidence. For example, the Medieval warming could be explained with solar activity increase, but we lack independent proof of it.

On the other hand, the climate change (cooling) that led to the demise of the Mayan empire can entirely be explained by solar forcing (that is, solar activity changes were the main cause), and this has been amply documented.