After more than a year's delay, NASA on Wednesday unveiled its plan to build a heavy launch vehicle capable of sending astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit by 2025, but it would be only slightly more powerful than the 1960s-era Saturn V that launched Americans to the moon.
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74 comments:
They used slide rules to engineer the Saturn V.
But we've got DIVERSITY!
For the money that NASA spends on office supplies, Bert Rutan could put a man on Mars.
"They used slide rules to engineer the Saturn V."
Well, they may have reached the moon using that primitive equipment but they weren't able to reach out to the Muslim world.
Amazing how far we've come since then!
"Well, they may have reached the moon using that primitive equipment but they weren't able to reach out to the Muslim world."
If we built enough rockets, maybe we could merge these goals...
You can joke all you want but the truth is that we've come a long way since those discriminatroy times when a good percentage of our nation's talent went untapped.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H8TJv0C58Q
Now that our space program is more diverse there's no telling what we're accomplishing. Really, there's almost no telling what we're accomplishing at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H8TJv0C58Q
Guess all those high SAT-scoring Asians are gonna have to pick up the slack.
Because, you know, Asians are always going around in America founding all sorts of institutions for the general good.
Not only did they use slide rules, but they managed to build the Saturn V in how many years? I mean, 2025 is fourteen years away. Between JFK's speech and the actual moon landing was what, half that?
Seriously though, the talent to do these things still exists. It's just gone latent, because nowadays most with the requisite skills recognize they'll be neck deep in bullshit, sociopaths and political correctness if they sign on at a place like NASA.
Aw come on, it's quite an achievment to do it without German rocket engineers. Not that it's actually been done yet.
The next time we hear about this program will be when it has been cancelled.
You only need so much power to achieve escape velocity, the physics haven't changed since the 60's, how powerful should it be now that we have Matlab?....It does seem to be a pointless project, however.
It is interesting. I think it's that fight for dominance that affects so many things for the worse. The SWPLs, the Liberals, the New Elite, what you want to call them (and I think the fact that they lack a name greatly enhances their power) just turned on the space program as soon as Kennedy's mission was accomplished. The arguments for and against space exploration didn't change between 1968 and 1970, but it's respectability among them sure did. THe exploration of space just couldn't be their accomplishment, so it had to be stopped. There can't be sources of status they don't control. Christianity was fine, when they controlled it, but when people stopped going to the elite's churches, and went to their own, it became a bad thing. COllege football was fine, too, when Yale was winning. They don't care how much money is spent on space exploration, as long as nothing is accomplished.
I wonder how many of them know why they hate what they hate.
Well, in the 1960's we had Wernher von Braun, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th (or any other) century, working for NASA. Now, NASA subcontracts its technical research to massive cubicle farms in Lockheed Martin filled with third world PhDs who probably couldn't explain how a slide rule works, which is perhaps how they managed to crash the Mars climate orbiter.
These days scientists don't solve hard problems which require deep physical intuition and extensive experience in applied math. Thanks to disproprtionate technical advances in computer hardware, they can hire armies of Chinese and Indian graduate student programmers who write software to simulate reality, based on equations worked out by scientists of generations past.
Even the more recent Nobel Laureates in science aren't that impressive. For example, Steven Chu probably isn't as insightful as Enrico Fermi's dumbest graduate student, but he does make an awesome energy secretary for the most inept presidential administration in US history. And I'll bet he got really high SAT scores.
But Saturn V used German V2 (nazi!) engineers and technology... that's hate tech!
The same catastrophic diversity inefficiency that has effected NASA, the post office and soon, is now being applied to the military.
Its funny blacks traditionally scorned the space program - it was used to belittle the US government (we can puts a man on the moon but we still gots racism!) and I am sure obama shares the same sentiment. I don't think he or they are serious about this - its just a show piece, it will never actually get made with NASA as a diversity showcase
it would be only slightly more powerful than the 1960s-era Saturn V that launched Americans to the moon.
They used slide rules to engineer the Saturn V.
Its sad that the most optimistic explanation for this is simply that our government is lying to us.
"Hacker Feels US Navy Has
Spaceships, Crews In Space"
http://www.rense.com/general67/hackerfeelsUSnavyhas.htm
Probably because you had to be quite inteligent to pass even intro to physics (with calculus) armed with only a slide rule.
Gee, slide rules + White engineers = moon landings and lots of new technology. Computers and diversity = chaos. You choose.
"'Well, they may have reached the moon using that primitive equipment but they weren't able to reach out to the Muslim world.'
If we built enough rockets, maybe we could merge these goals..."
You mean like "One of these days, Ali, straight to the moon!"?
Lots of comments implying that the lack of progress in the Space Program over the last few decades is due to immigrants. How callous are you? Do you have no shame? The lack of progress in the Space Program has NOTHING to do with the demographic transformation of the U.S. You talk as if the average white American, who spends his Sundays getting drunk watching football and eating pork rinds, could put a man on the moon. The white guys who worked on the Apollo Program were the top percentile of whites, and they were hardly regarded by their fellow racial kindred as what an "ideal" male should be. Funny that those "White nationalists" who love to brag about the white race putting a man on the moon are the same people who would have tortured and abused those same scientists when they were adolescents.
NASA has always discriminated on capacity. You do not get to be an aerospace engineer because you are brown, since this is a profession where, for you to exercise it, you need to pass extremely strict tests of competence. This is a matter of law. A Latino who works for NASA is brighter than over 99% of white people, and he is far more capable of putting a man on the Moon or Mars than the "Al Bundy" types that represent the overwhelming majority of white Americans. Everyone who works for NASA except for PR secretaries are brilliant irrespective of race.
The reason why there has been no progress in the Space Program over the past decades is as follows. Please try to follow me with your pea-brains. The Cold War is over, and there is no incentive to spend hundreds of billions of Dollars on something that has no economic return. Then, there is the technological cap. Distances in space are HUGE and truly gargantuan leaps in technology will be necessary for space travel to be accomplished in the space of a Human lifetime. This does not apply to traveling to Mars and coming back, which can be accomplished in a few years. In the case of Mars, the reason why we haven't landed a man there is because there are no incentives. A man-tripulated trip to Mars would cost upwards of a quarter trillion Dollars, and you get nothing out of it except boasting to foreigners how great your country is - which is meaningless for us non-nationalists who live our lives through ourselves and not through abstract entities. As for the more distant planets in the Solar System, forget about it. Given our current rockets, it would take 20 years to get there and come back. We would need to increase the speed of our rockets by a HUNDRED fold to make such a trip feasible. It is a technological cap.
In the case of interestellar travel we would have to increase speed by 100,000 times getting close to light-speed. NASA engineers are selected just as rigorously today as they were 40 years ago, but coming up with rockets a hundred fold faster than what we have today is as hard as integrating general relativity with quantum mechanics. The reasonw why it hasn't been done is because it is REALLY hard and not because NASA average competence has dropped. The problems are not the rockets, which can withstand the blasts with the new Carbon alloys we have but the power source. We don't have a power source dense enough to provide energy on the scale required to achive these speeds. We would need something like matter/anti-matter(total annihilation).
Going back to the topic of Latinos, even if it were proven that there was something special about whites, which there isn't, it still doesen't mean that Latinos will never achieve great things. Most white Americans are of Northern European descent. Northern Europe was almost completely devoid of achievements up to the 16th Century. Go read Tacitus and you'll see that the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded your ancestors as morons. Things change.
Yeah, we don't build pyramids either like they used to. This rocket is totally irrelevant, just NASA trying to keep busy. What made the difference is the end of the cold war. The Apollo program was a very costly propaganda campaign, basically.
They used slide rules to engineer the Saturn V.
ZING.
It's for reasons like this that I consider the Flynn effect a spurious artifact and not real.
Slide rules is one difference.
The other difference is that the Saturn V actually got built.
This one won't.
So, two differences.
-osvaldo M.
As a recent Onion article pointed out, the Russians just WON the Space Race! US vs. Russia, they are the last man standing. LOL.
A relative recently talked to an IL man who worked on the original rocket fuel pumps for the Saturn V (White dude - engineering degree via correspondence courses) and he was not happy about BHO's shutting down manned space flight.
But what do you expect, science is SWPL. Blacks simply want tax money to flow to Blacks for "human needs" i.e. subsidised food, housing, scholarships for "Education" and everything and anything he can give away.
Under our first Black Prez, America's Frontier vision is now a dead letter.
As Mark Steyn states: We are Doomed.
Although NASA has outlined its engineering design for the launch system, the agency has not yet set out a road map of where the machine would take humans in the solar system and when exactly it would conduct such missions.
This is a big indication they're not serious. The physics is such that anywhere you want to go outside LEO is going to require a lot of engineering trade-offs. So you start with a mission and then you design the hardware.
This is just a pork barrel jobs program. They're designing it around whose districts will get the construction contracts. The fourteen year time frame is there so that they can start it, spend a whole bunch of taxpayer loot, and then cancel it before anyone could reasonably expect to see a working rocket. We've seen a dozen such projects in the last 20 years or so.
Lots of comments implying that the lack of progress in the Space Program over the last few decades is due to immigrants. How callous are you? Do you have no shame? The lack of progress in the Space Program has NOTHING to do with the demographic transformation of the U.S. You talk as if the average white American, who spends his Sundays getting drunk watching football and eating pork rinds, could put a man on the moon. The white guys who worked on the Apollo Program were the top percentile of whites, and they were hardly regarded by their fellow racial kindred as what an "ideal" male should be. Funny that those "White nationalists" who love to brag about the white race putting a man on the moon are the same people who would have tortured and abused those same scientists when they were adolescents.
Cease your hysteria little girl. As you no doubt know, that was exactly the ideal man. Today's perversions do not hold up.
Going back to the topic of Latinos, even if it were proven that there was something special about whites, which there isn't, it still doesen't mean that Latinos will never achieve great things. Most white Americans are of Northern European descent. Northern Europe was almost completely devoid of achievements up to the 16th Century. Go read Tacitus and you'll see that the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded your ancestors as morons. Things change.
Mm I believe the actual impression was that Germans combined great ferocity with great craft. Also Tacitus admired Germans. And as early as the fall of the Western Roman Empire the Germans were able to learn the Greek sciences, something which cannot be said for our modern vibrant minorities.
Anon -- When the US was 85-80% White, there was a very small welfare burden. America did not have to pay for say, all those Mexican women who have, six, seven little ninos starting at age 16 and who must rely on Food Stamps, TANF, WIC, etc. plus much other social spending.
A mostly middle class White society does not use welfare much, can afford a generous welfare system (because it is not used that much) and a Space Program. A "diverse" nation has a heavy burden of non-productive peoples (Black Household median wealth is $5K, Hispanic only $6K, assets minus liabilities).
America's future is ... Mexico! With Mexico's level of health care, sewage systems, public safety, crime, and pretty much everything else. A White ethno state can put men on the moon with slide rules. A "diverse" state can't put a man on the moon with advanced computers.
Two decades ago I was being an "extremist" about privatizing orbital launch services and guess who I ran afoul of but the darling blogger of the elites: Glenn Reynolds.
Amazing how these sleeze-balls manage to get promoted again and again by the powers that be.
Funny that those "White nationalists" who love to brag about the white race putting a man on the moon are the same people who would have tortured and abused those same scientists when they were adolescents.
This guy may have watched too many movies. The way I remember it (Cal. public junior high 1969), the average jock kids pretty much left the nerdy scholars alone. In fact, I can't remember a single instance of any smart kid being bullied at all.
Steve,
"They used slide rules to engineer the Saturn V."
Absolutely brilliant line.
Here's some of the best scenes from "Apollo 13" -- a movie that will one day be banned for it's lack of what, OneSTDV pointed out, diversity.
http://www.youtube.com/movieclipsFILMA#p/c/C7474254F205231E/1/Zm5nUEG5Bjo
http://www.youtube.com/movieclipsFILMA#p/c/C7474254F205231E/6/kgHYGw9OL7c
"Anon -- When the US was 85-80% White, there was a very small welfare burden. America did not have to pay for say, all those Mexican women who have, six, seven little ninos starting at age 16 and who must rely on Food Stamps, TANF, WIC, etc. plus much other social spending.
A mostly middle class White society does not use welfare much, can afford a generous welfare system (because it is not used that much) and a Space Program. A "diverse" nation has a heavy burden of non-productive peoples (Black Household median wealth is $5K, Hispanic only $6K, assets minus liabilities).
America's future is ... Mexico! With Mexico's level of health care, sewage systems, public safety, crime, and pretty much everything else. A White ethno state can put men on the moon with slide rules. A "diverse" state can't put a man on the moon with advanced computers."
Your point here is redundant for two reasons:
1. There is no evidence that NASA's budget is lower than what it was in the 1960s when ajusted for inflation.
2. There is no evidence that the average competence at NASA is lower today than what it was in the 1960s. Now, as then, you had to have either a masters degree or a PhD from a top 30 technical university and pass strict exams to exercise the profession.
The lack of achievement by NASA over the past decades in POLITICAL and due to a tech gap. There are extremely intelligent people throughout the World, independent from NASA, trying to figure out cold nuclear fusion or how to produce antimatter in large amounts because this is what would be required for interplanetary travel, and they have failed. Do you really think that brilliant people need to work for NASA to think solutions for these problems? The reason why they haven't come up with a solution is because there is no solution. Even Einstein came up with problems he couldn't solve, so your argument that we would be colonizing the Milky Way if it weren't for immigrants is a HUGE jump in logic. It is so huge in fact that it is ridiculous, and I don't even know why I am entertaining this ridiculous idea.
As for the U.S becoming Mexico, the latter had a huge handicap due to the rapinous nature of the Spaniards who colonized it, and yet it is now one of the ten largest economies in the World and has a higher GDP per capita than about 90% of the World's nations.
Let me ask you this: Do you have any idea what England looked like in the early 19th century? Go read Dickens' novels and you'll see how the majority of the almighty white en lived like less than two hundred years ago. London, Sheffield or Birmingham in 1850 makes Mexico City seem like Oslo in comparison. You make it seem like the immigrants who came from Europe were a bunch of geniuses. They were the garbage of Europe. They were the people who couldn't make it there. The Irish left Ireland because they were starving. The Germans who came to America were ostly from the Rhine region and were poor peasants without land. THE EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS WHO CAME TO THE U.S WERE NO BETTER THAN MEXICANS.
james webb space telescope was saved, and that's all that matters for now.
it has been mismanaged but that thing has to get done. and it will. launch that sucker.
The "average" white American doesn't spend his Sundays getting drunk, watching football and eating pork rinds, as the idiot anonymous poster claims.
Stereotyping whites as Al Bundy types shows he is the one who has no shame.
Typical jerk thinks he can call whites names but please be kind to his little brown pets.
If we had to rely on brown brainpower we'd be using dugout canoes to get around.
I have to agree with the Anonymous. The reason NASA sucks is political rather than some sort of human capital. Whatever you think of immigration, NASA is pulling the smartest ones.
I wonder when rightists will finally figure out though that minorities don't matter. They have no power, no influence, and no clout. Our elections are decided by white people, our policies are constructed and carried out by white people, and our culture is driven by white people. Diversity is a fetish of white people...nonwhites don't care and probably never will.
I just finished watching the "Toy Story 3" DVD today and the saddest piece on there was the extra on space travel where they stated there were two ways to reach the ISS, the Russkie Soyuez and now-defunct US space shuttle.
As for "you get nothing out of it except boasting to foreigners how great your country is" you will no doubt enjoy "Space Chimps" (2008) which features US space shuttles with ALL references and symbols of the US space program carefully removed.
Everyone who works for NASA except for PR secretaries are brilliant irrespective of race.
Absolute BS. I have worked at a couple of different NASA facilities. A large portion of NASA civil servants are typical do-nothing bureaucrats and that includes a lot of affirmative action hires. This is just like every other government agency. Contractors typically do the R&D with NASA people "monitoring" the work.
"Let me ask you this: Do you have any idea what England looked like in the early 19th century? Go read Dickens' novels and you'll see how the majority of the almighty white en lived like less than two hundred years ago. London, Sheffield or Birmingham in 1850 makes Mexico City seem like Oslo in comparison."
Industrialization did create a living hell for people. Children worked long hours in horrific condition in mines and factories. It was the people on the left that stopped it and made it illegal. The companies didn't care if you lived or died. They would just replace like a spare part. What amazes me is that many people were for just letting it continue back then. I guess if you were a person like Darwin who didn't have to work, you really didn't care. I don't know what Darwin's views were. I am just saying people like him.
What else do we want NASA to do? We can go to Mars, but that would be a waste of money. We have pretty much done everything reasonable for humans to do in space. Unmanned probes are the only thing really left. We shouldn't really be doing anything manned,especially with everyone concerned with our debt.
Funny that those "White nationalists" who love to brag about the white race putting a man on the moon are the same people who would have tortured and abused those same scientists when they were adolescents.
That's White (specificially Anglo)
solidarity for you!
I recall from my school experience that there was one really smart kid (with a possible neurological condition) who nobody dared to disrespect. He happened to be from a certain well-known oft-mentioned ethnic group with notoriously high solidarity. Nobody could prove anything, but his father had known connections to a certain secret society of "legitimate" businessmen.
This guy may have watched too many movies. The way I remember it (Cal. public junior high 1969), the average jock kids pretty much left the nerdy scholars alone. In fact, I can't remember a single instance of any smart kid being bullied at all.
The 1960s were an exception to the general 1945-to-present trend of bullying. Again, thank Sputnik and the Space Race.
Distances in space are HUGE and truly gargantuan leaps in technology will be necessary for space travel to be accomplished in the space of a Human lifetime.
The real issue is not distances but potential and kinetic energy gradients.
Potential energy: all celestial bodies (including Earth) have gravity. The term "gravity well" is very appropriate. Getting from a planet's surface into even low orbit takes enormous energy.
Consider that the Earth is the most massive solid planet in the Solar System, and the fifth most massive planet. In all historical space flights, 80% or more total energy is required simply to escape Earth's gravity!
Kinetic energy: all celestial bodies have velocity. Limiting ourself to the Solar System, this reduces to orbital velocity around the Sun. No two bodies have the same velocity, and the differences are in the thousands of MPH.
What is old becomes new again.
The ORIGINAL inhabitants of the Americas were EUROPEANS.
They beat the Asiatics by 5,000 to 7,000 years -- using the Atlantic ice bridge.
When the Asiatics first arrived the ice bridge was long gone. And in they came.
Society was stratified: Whites on top, the new guys on bottom. There was no place for the Asiatics to reside that hadn't long been settled.
This situation endured until historical times.
However, eventually the Asiatics committed genocide upon the ancient Whites. It has taken decades -- but finally the digs have reached the timeline of the killing -- and there are flint embedded corpses all over the ancient sites.
Even the Incas disclaim any involvement in master building -- which they attribute to the ancient White race -- which they claim to have liquidated in the 16th Century.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCf__ndlIk8&feature=related
As you might imagine, Asiatic descendants have been entirely reluctant to speak of such oral histories.
This also explains why Cortez found that his COLOR has such a drastic impact upon the locals -- he had the skin color of the Top Caste -- which had always been white for 15,000 years !
The same shock undid the Incas mere years later.
The Conquistadors had absolutely no clue -- but did discover that wherever they went the locals figured them to be top dogs -- they didn't even have to use their weapons.
BTW, European DNA is found in Native Americans -- particularly those in Eastern America.
the universe lying beyond low earth orbit is thoroughly hostile for a variety of reasons extending beyond merely being bathed in lethal radiation.
but the government broadcast footage in real time of men bouncing around singing la-la-la driving cars playing golf after landing on an alien planetoid in the 1960's, so it definitely happened.
use of wires and construction of a featureless backdrop is beyond the wit of man.
the state is incapable of organzing large scale deceit.
and with its burning commitment to the truth, it would never dream of resorting to subterfuge to create an illusion of heroic victory when the alternative is confessing to years of floundering helplessly on a task so colossally beyond science's reach that it was scandalous idiocy to have ever been begun.
the tale is reassuring and moving, and has been told to us for so long, and so fluently and with such confidence, that ever unlearning it will be wrenching.
but only when the myth is laid to rest can we really see the vastness of the wonder and danger that surrounds us, and invent ingenious methods of penetrating its empty reaches, or fall back in renewed appreciation of the oasis we briefly share.
either way, the moon story is a bunch of bullshit that we need to get over.
I don't think I've come across Anonymous 5:06's particular brand of crazy before.
If anyone's interested in better informed debate about the so-called Senate Launch System, check out NASAWatch.com or SpacePolitics.com.
One of the things non-Latter day Saints especially despise aboput the proposed missile is the continued use of solid rocket boosters, similar to the ones that killed Space Shuttle Challenger and its crew. Republican Sen. Oral Snatch has insisted on that -- the solid rocket boosters are made in Utah.
Me, I've been banned from NASAwatch for making wiscracks about today's NASA having too many Affirmative Action hires, including current NASA boss Charlie Bolden.
My serious prediction is that the SLS won't get built. It's a job preservation program for for otherwise redundant Space Shuttle workers.
What the USA needs are new technology spacecraft. Having or not having more payload than the Saturn V moon launch missile isn't the most important figure of merit. The USA could return astronauts to the Moon with somewhat smaller missiles that already exist, such as the Boeing Delta IV. Spacecraft can travel to orbit on existing missiles until newer technology launch systems are ready.
The SLS proposal is Apollo redux, 1960's nostalgia -- sort of similar to the new Mustang or Camaro, except a lot more expensive and a lost less likely to actually roll out of the factory.
...
Jody, are you aware that completing the Webb telescope may kill other worthwhile space science projects, because the Webb is a money black hole?
Can you please explain why the Webb has to have a 6.5 meter diameter main mirror?
I am Anonymous 9:17 AM and 1:41 PM.
This is an addition to my reply to "Whiskey".
Whiskey's argument that immigrants are responsible for the lack of progress in the space program is completely fallacious, a classic case of syllogism. Not only does the evidence easily disprove his point - like I did by pointing out that the U.S' NASA budget corrected for inflation is no lower today than it was in the 1960's, as well as the average competence of NASA engineers -, but simple deductive logic shows the fallacy of his argument. Here is how Whiskey's rationale goes.
- Space programs cost money to the State.
- Immigrants cost money to the State.
- The amount of money the State has is limited.
- Ergo, if the State spends more money on immigrants it has less money available for space programs.
The reason why this argument is fallacious is because there are two variables that Whiskey is not taking into account: the budget increases as the population increases, and the ALLOCATION of resources is what matters. Even if the budget were static and more immigrants came, you could still have a higher budget for space programs by allocating more money proportionally to it than to the immigrants. The budget is not proportionally divided.
I would like to make some further comments on U.S vs Latin America. You guys seem to make the point over and over that the U.S is wealthier and more advanced than Latin America because it's population is more intelligent. This is an unfounded claim. First, the measurement of intelligence is sketchy at best. Then, trying to tanslate the result of standardized "intelligence" tests into actual economic and scientific achievement is even sketchier. Then, the evidence does not really survive careful deliberation. Are Americans really that much more intelligent than Latin Americans? Maybe a little, but a lot more? Enough to justify a GDP per capita over four times higher? The average American cannot even locate the U.S on an Atlas! No, the reason why the U.S is so much wealthier and more advanced than Latin America is due to their respective economic systems and the legal institutions to enforce them. If you go back to the year 1800, Latin America had a higher GDP per capita than the U.S. If yu go back 100 years before that, the Caribbean colonies had a GDP per capita over TWICE greater than that of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Spaniards who came to Latin America had an ultra-macho philosophy of dominance. They came to rape the land and the women. They created a social structure where their sons would rule as kings. When your wealth and status is assured by birth, you have no incentive to be productive and ingenious. Conversely, the English colonists created a system where everone is equal before the law, so if you want wealth and status, you need to be productive and use ingenuity to produce products that are better than your competition's. This creates a virtuous cycle of technological and productive development. This is the FUNDAMENTAL difference that explains the huge gap in achievement between Latin and English Americas. When the State makes everyone equal before the law and prohibits violence as a way to gain wealth and status, the only way for you to gain it is by using your brain to produce more and better.
The stuff Whiskey writes sounds brilliant at first glance, but when you carefully analyse it, most of it is idiotic. I am one of those PhD engineers you guys hate so much, and my profession demands that I use logic on a high level on a daily basis. The fundamental problem with Whiskey's posts is that he makes tons of blanket statements, straw man arguments, unfounded speculations and such. His posts are rich in verbiage but very poor in logic. He is one of those guys who's eloquence clearly surpasses his intelligence.
I agree that there is a correlation between mass immigration/multiculturalism and the decline of the space program but it is not one of causation. I think both phenomena are caused by the same factor: loss of national self-confidence. We had just defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan. We were ascendant, while Europe was in ruins. The best brains in the world were working for us or beating a path to our door. We felt we could do anything. Today, we are self-critical to the extreme and our heros are not scientists, engineers or astronauts but reality tv "stars", athletes and politicians.
This is compounded by an incredible increase in risk aversion. NASA is deathly afraid of losing anyone and thus is more concerned with robotic flight rather than manned. This risk-aversion is reflected by the whining about combat losses in Iraq, where we lost fewer solders in the last 9 years than in the 35 day capture of Iwo Jima.
As far as the Rooskies winning the space race in the end, here's the current status:
Report: Russia to Launch Next Space Station Crew on Nov. 12
by Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff WriterDate: 13 September 2011 Time: 02:07 PM ET
( photo )
A Russian Soyuz rocket launches the unmanned Progress 44 cargo ship from Baikonur Cosmodrome on Aug. 24, 2011 to deliver fresh supplies to the International Space Station. The rocket and spacecraft crashed in eastern Russian just over five minutes after liftoff.
CREDIT: RSC Energia
This story was updated at 5:01 p.m. EDT.
Russia's space agency announced today (Sept. 13) that it will launch a robotic cargo ship to the International Space Station in late October, then follow up with a manned space capsule flight in November — the first station-bound missions since a rocket failure last month temporarily grounded the Russian Soyuz rocket fleet.
The Russian Federal Space Agency, or Roscosmos, announced its intention to launch the next unmanned Progress supply freighter to the space station on Oct. 30, followed by a manned Soyuz capsule on Nov. 12, according to the Russian news service RIA Novosti. [Photos: Russia's Lost Cargo Ship Progress 44]
NASA has not yet confirmed the new Soyuz launch dates, but agency spokesman Kelly Humphries said that both parties continue to work together in support of the International Space Station.
"We're working with our Russian partners on the progress of their investigation and the Progress launch failure, and we're working with them to determine when will be a good time to resume human spaceflight on the rocket Soyuz," Humphries told SPACE.com.
The new projected launch schedule is based on the findings of an investigation into the cause of the agency's Soyuz rocket failure in late August, RIA Novosti reported.
A robotic Progress 44 cargo spacecraft crashed in Siberia on Aug. 24 after its Soyuz rocket suffered an engine glitch shortly after liftoff. The Progress freighter and 2.9 tons of onboard supplies bound for the space station were lost. The accident marked a rare anomaly for the famously dependable Soyuz vehicles.
An investigation traced the root of the problem to a blocked pipe in the fuel line to the Soyuz rocket's third stage engine, according to Roscosmos. The inquiry labeled the incident as "accidental," but recommended measures to ensure the same defect does not plague similar engines, according to RIA Novosti.
Following the loss of the Russian Progress spacecraft, NASA stated that no manned Soyuz rockets will launch new crewmembers into orbit until the problem has been resolved, opening up the possibility that the space station could be left without a crew for a period of time.
With the retirement of NASA's space shuttle program, the agency is relying on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to launch its astronauts to the International Space Station until commercial vehicles are ready and have been adequately tested for safety.
...
You can follow SPACE.com staff writer Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
The Russians used the same missile, which is another nostalgia item from the 1960's, probably designed using Cyrillic slide rules, to launch both their unmanned Progress supply capsule and the manned Soyuz.
lolling at the comment trolls suggesting that Mexicans will build on European achievement
you can babble all you want about FAT WHITE GUYS WHO WATCH FOOTBALL, try living anywhere near Mexicans...your illusions will burst in a heartbeat
>most [people] with the requisite skills recognize they'll be neck deep in bullshit, sociopaths and political correctness if they sign on at a place like NASA.<
Increasingly, all of America is resembling NASA in that respect.
The nation is utterly corrupt. I can remember a time when workplaces occasionally demonstrated common sense and sanity, but it's a vague memory.
It can't go on much longer. There is a price to be paid: decline, bankruptcy. And we're all starting to pay it.
"Jody, are you aware that completing the Webb telescope may kill other worthwhile space science projects"
of course, a budget like the NASA budget is finite. not building the webb is not an option though. we already went through this with the superconducting supercollider. this thing is gonna have to get built. if it doesn't get built now, in 10 years we'll have to start building a new version again, at even greater cost. because the science it is going to do is required. i mean, we could stop doing science on the topics it will address. but that's not how europeans usually operate.
so NASA might as well just finish building it now. got the sunk cost and all. just finish it.
"because the Webb is a money black hole?"
remember when the SSC was "too expensive?" it was cancelled in the middle of construction because the massive, unbelievable price had grown to...12 billion dollars. that's about how much the united states wastes every month on a shithole called afghanistan. for ZERO net gain.
"Can you please explain why the Webb has to have a 6.5 meter diameter main mirror?"
i'm not an astronomer, only took a few university level astronomy classes, so i don't know for sure. i refuse to do a google-wikipedia on this to pretend i know for sure. i only know the basics, like it's spectrum and range and resolution, which are all different than the hubble, probably require some new kind of design that hasn't been fielded before. i know much of the delay and hold up has been because NASA needed new materials and binding substances which did not exist and they've had to develop those plus some new machine tools and machine processes. i'm sure there's been waste as well.
but i'm guessing you're trying to suggest that the webb design is "ludicrous overkill" or "ridiculously stupid" or some such thing. well check the specs on the SSC. it was supposed to be more than twice as powerful as the existing large hadron collider. and it would have cost less. so i don't mind the US government really overbuilding a critical science project for the price of a single month in shithole afghanistan.
one of my friends actually works at NASA as an exoplanet researcher, i'll email him for the technical details and design philosophy on JWST so we don't have to pretend by reading a few web pages. yes, i understand that's not its mission.
i'm sure this could just be some expert versus expert clash of heads. for instance, plenty of guys into fusion disagree with the tokamak design for ITER. in fact under GW bush, the united states' financial contribution to ITER was zeroed. guess their future plans for US energy supply leaned more towards invading other nations for oil, instead of moving away from oil and taking that last step up the energy ladder.
LOL @ these guys spending 300 billion dollars a year on muslim shitholes. maybe if they put 10% of that money into serious energy projects instead, in 10 years they could get to the breakthrough that lets us escape from oil. a manhattan project for commercial fusion reactors.
>completely fallacious, a classic case of syllogism<
Did you leave out an adjective?
>but simple deductive logic shows the fallacy of his argument<
Apparently you didn't leave out an adjective.
("Syllogism Is A Fallacy!" - great slogan to put on a sandwich board and march up and down the street with, eyebrows getting all twitchy)
>the budget increases as the population increases<
An increase in the population of welfare-eaters relative to wealth-creators has bankrupted more nations than the USA.
>First, the measurement of intelligence is sketchy at best. Then, trying to tanslate the result of standardized "intelligence" tests into actual economic and scientific achievement is even sketchier. Then, the evidence does not really survive careful deliberation.<
You know nothing about these topics.
>my profession demands that I use logic on a high level on a daily basis<
Why am I not feeling reassured?
Non-white countries have rarely been on the cutting edge of exploration.
Mexicans On The Moon is a good title for a comedy, not a documentary. Ironically Mexicans themselves are happy to admit as much. It's only snarling white liberals who become apoplectic at such un-PC utterances.
lots of unintentional hilarity on this thread.
Hey pal: the early colonists of Mass blew away the Spanish in IQ. The Puritans were notorious for their high intelligence and their culture reflected their acumen. Contrary to idiot assertions that the trash of Europe washed up in america: it was instead a classic case of Darwinian selection for key traits like ingenuity.
The dumbest assertion yet is that the euro immigrant waves were all poor dumb slobs who couldn't hack it in Europe. Many came from successful families who saw the even greater opportunities in the new world
"Did you leave out an adjective?Apparently you didn't leave out an adjective.
A syllogism is a logically fallacious argument that contains two premises that lead to a possible conclusion that is wrong. I fail to see what's wrong with the way I phrased it here. Maybe I expressed myself incorrectly. English is not my first language. I do the best I can.
"("Syllogism Is A Fallacy!" - great slogan to put on a sandwich board and march up and down the street with, eyebrows getting all twitchy)"
I can see that sarcasm is not your strong suit...
"An increase in the population of welfare-eaters relative to wealth-creators has bankrupted more nations than the USA."
Most immigrants are legal, and legal immigrants pay taxes. But assume none did. Even then, the argument that NASA hasn't been progressing over the past few decades due to budgetary cuts is easily proven wrong since NASA's current budget, crrected for inflation, is roughly the same as it was in 1969 when NASA put men on the Moon.
"You know nothing about these topics."
I know that no one, not even the American Psychological Association, agrees on what intelligence is, and the tests designed to measure intelligence reflect only a small number of numerical and verbal skills involved in academia. Even if this is intelligence, assuming that given population "X" is over 4 times wealthier than population "Y" because it scores 10% higher on these tests is a huge jump in logic. How can you prove that higher scores translate into higher GDP growth? You would need to do a double-blind, placebo-controlled study that controls for all variables and then demonstrate that an "X" amount of advantage in test scores for a certain population translates into "Y" amount of economic growth. No such study has ever been done. Using tests that measure a certain amount of valuable traits in academia and then assuming this translates into higher GDP growth in a perfectly linear and scalar correlation is simply absurd.
"Why am I not feeling reassured?"
I feel reassured reading this reply that Sailer's readers, many of them, are a bunch of infantile, biased and spiteful rednecks who are incapable of debating in a civilized manner with people they disagree with, instead prefering to make ad hominem invective at their opponents.
Mexicans On The Moon is a good title for a comedy, not a documentary.
Ah, they just don't teach history any more. Surely you've heard of the Old Negro Space Program?
TGGP: I don't think I've come across Anonymous 5:06's particular brand of crazy before.
A page from Ivan van Sertima's book. This kind of concession to enemy terms is always unseemly ... did his forebears know territorial right in terms of "indigeneity" or "holocausts"?
Could it be that the 1960s engineers hit on the optimal design per kilo of stuff launched into space? There is, after all, a diminishing of returns, even in technology. Look at commercial airliners -- pretty marginal improvement since the 747, with the one leap, the SST, ultimately being a failure commercially. The two hours saved across the Atlantic just wasn't worth it for enough people, given the extra costs of the journey.
Anon., much of what you say about IQ was exploded some time ago or else is convincingly disputed. For cites, look around this website or Google someone like Rushton.
>How can you prove that higher [IQ] scores translate into higher GDP growth?<
IQ is so far the best measurable proxy of g; and dummies don't create, accumulate, or (on average) long keep capital. That you claim to need a double-blind study et al. to see this speaks poorly for your erudition, and yes, for your intelligence as well.
As to manners, you started braying ad homs with your first comment. You weren't exactly looking for respectful debate in the first place.
To sum up: you are ignorant, not very bright, hostile, and insecure. All the things that make most NAMs so endearing. You're not really on any team there at NASA that does the hard science you speak of, are you? Considering your revealed mentality, it's difficult to avoid concluding that you're an AA hire, Ph.d notwithstanding. And some sort of Hispanic nationalist as well (i.e., a La Raza-ite), since this post made no mention of immigration or Mexicans (I rather thought it implied blacks, myself) and you immediately went there, rather incomprehensibly. These things are not admirable. They deserve scorn, and scorn is what you're getting.
The Soviet space race designers, like Korolev, deserve a lot more fame than they have. To accomplish so much in such a frustrating environment...
"The 1960s were an exception to the general 1945-to-present trend of bullying."
I was a skinny, smart girl in glasses in the 70s who was too weak to hit the volleyball over the net. So I was always, humiliatingly, picked last in gym because I made the team lose.
But on current events day or spelling bee day, the jockettes fought over me. Because I made their team win.
The solution to nerds being bullied by jocks is more academic competitions. When the jocks are at the disadvantage and the nerds are the stars of the team, some surprising friendships get formed.
But for there to be more academic competitions would require schools to actually throw a few resources at their "mission" -- to educate --rather than at their true priority, keeping young thugs from burglarizing empty houses in the daytime.
"The Soviet space race designers, like Korolev, deserve a lot more fame than they have. To accomplish so much in such a frustrating environment..."
Yes. And for those of us (me) with no scientific background or inclination, listening to the music of Shostakovich will trigger a similar level of appreciation. To think that someone could compose this in the bleakness of the Soviet Union in the 1950's is simply amazing:
Romance from The Gadfly
Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago is another marvel from that same era.
The dirty secret is that Werner von Braun and his team of Nazi rocket scientists were the brain behind the Saturn launch vehicle, which had a flawless performance, almost unheard of in rocketry. Of course this fact never did fit the US narrative, which is why these guys were kept in backrooms.
Steve Sailer said...
The Soviet space race designers, like Korolev, deserve a lot more fame than they have.
the thinking heads behind the soviet space program were...surprise German Nazi rocket engineers! xcept they were not volunteers
Anonymous (11:24pm) said...
A syllogism is a logically fallacious argument that contains two premises that lead to a possible conclusion that is wrong. I fail to see what's wrong with the way I phrased it here. Maybe I expressed myself incorrectly. English is not my first language. I do the best I can.
I admire that you are trying to engage in high-level discussions in a foreign language. However, you are not doing well.
A syllogism (a Greek word, by the way) is a valid form of deductive argument, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Claiming that it is a fallacy even after you have been corrected makes you look stupid. The canonical example of a syllogism is:
P1 - All men are mortal
P2 - Socrates is a man
C - Therefore, Socrates is mortal
This form of reasoning was bequeathed to the West by Aristotle, and it would be big news if it were to be found faulty.
Also, you should definitely avoid saying things like:
my profession demands that I use logic on a high level on a daily basis.
I understand why this seems like a good way to bolster your argument, but to American ears, it makes you look like a pretentious buffoon.
You might want to look into the internet meme called "I am aware of all internet traditions" and reflect on the fact that Americans find it to be very funny.
Let me ask you this: Do you have any idea what England looked like in the early 19th century? Go read Dickens' novels and you'll see how the majority of the almighty white en lived like less than two hundred years ago. London, Sheffield or Birmingham in 1850 makes Mexico City seem like Oslo in comparison. You make it seem like the immigrants who came from Europe were a bunch of geniuses. They were the garbage of Europe. They were the people who couldn't make it there. The Irish left Ireland because they were starving. The Germans who came to America were ostly from the Rhine region and were poor peasants without land. THE EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS WHO CAME TO THE U.S WERE NO BETTER THAN MEXICANS.
And the founders saw themselves among the best. "God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness."
If we presume that the average IQ of your newcomer Europeans is higher than present day Mexicans such does not preclude inequality, as there will be the more capable and the less capable around this average among them. IQ tests were around 100 years ago and do show that even in those dark times newcomer whites scored higher than Mexicans do today.
As well, in the intervening centuries our living standard has risen dramatically such that our poorest class has material gadgetry far exceeding that available to kings of old. Any picture of the lower class of those days will be quite sensationalistic.
Indeed, all the "German" achievements may be said to have developed natively, whereas the Mexicans have nothing to show for themselves. Accounting for outside influences, the Mexicans have been given even more today with all our modern technology and done even less.
" whereas the Mexicans have nothing to show for themselves. "
Granted it was long long ago, but maize, chile, chocolate, etc were all cultivated by the Aztecs or Olmecs or whoever. Mezoamerica really was a great center of agriculture.
Our anonymous SWPL troll thinks that whats holding Mexico back was the horrors of Spanish colonisation.
Well, what would Mexico be like now, if it were only discovered today?
We cant really answer but there is a chance that it would be no different than before the Spanish arrived. And no, it wouldnt have its own space program.
The dirty secret is that Werner von Braun and his team of Nazi rocket scientists ... Of course this fact never did fit the US narrative, which is why these guys were kept in backrooms.
9/16/11 9:45 A
Herr Headache,
Why are our continually so anti-American? Does your Amerika bile arise from a Red or a Brown point of view, might I ask? I'm not referring to Baron von Braun in this context.
As for those guys being kept in the dark: von Braun was and is a household name in the USA. I remember seeing him on the Walt Disney Sunday night TV show several times when I was a kid, talking up space exploration with Ole Walt.
Kind of like Arnold Schwarzenegger, except that I don't think there was any gossip about Werner cheating on his wife.
But there were seventy one (71) other Deutschlanders who came to the USA with von Braun -- Project Paperclip is what the US Army called this group. Most of them stayed here to work on the space program in the 1950's and 1960's.
There was no plot to keep the names or existence of these other men secret.
Perhaps von Braun could be accused being like Steve Jobs -- one the celebrity face of NASA rocketry, the other Mr. Apple Computer, both seeming to get credit for every good thing that happened at their respective organizations.
How many of their names can you name, Headache?
From List_of_German_rocket_scientists_in_the_US
Operation Paperclip scientists
( photo )
Wernher von Braun and his team in the fall of 1959. At the time, von Braun and his associates worked for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. Those in the photograph have been identified as Ernst Stuhlinger, Frederick von Saurma, Fritz Mueller, Hermarn Weidner, Erich W. Neubert (partially hidden), W.A. Mrazek, Karl Heimburg, Arthur Rudolph, Otto Hoberg, von Braun, Oswald Lange, General Bruce Medaris, Helmut Hoelzer, Hans Maus, E.D. Geissler, Hans Hueter, and George Constan.
( another photo )
Wernher von Braun in 1961 with members of his management team. Pictured from left to right are, Werner Kuers, Director of the Manufacturing Engineering Division; Dr. Walter Häussermann, Director of the Astrionics Division; Dr. William Mrazek, Propulsion and Vehicle Engineering Division; Dr. von Braun; Dieter Grau, Director of the Quality Assurance Division; Dr. Oswald Lange, Director of the Saturn Systems Office; and Erich W. Neubert, Associate Deputy Director for Research and Development.
Operation Paperclip scientists
Rudolph 'Rolf' Ammann
Rudi Beichel [4]
Werner Dahm [5]
Konrad Dannenberg
Kurt H. Debus
Ernst R. G. Eckert
Krafft Arnold Ehricke
Ernst Geissler
Dieter Grau
Walter Häussermann
Karl Heimburg
Otto Hirschler[6]
Helmut Hoelzer
Hans Hueter
Wilhelm Jungert
Georg ("George") Emil Knausenberger [7]
Heinz-Hermann Koelle
Hermann H. Kurzweg [8]
Hans Maus
Fritz Mueller [9]
Willy Mrazek
Erich W. Neubert
Theodor A. Poppel
Eberhard Rees
Gerhard Reisig [10]
Georg Rickhey[11]
Werner Rosinski [12]
Ludwig Roth
Arthur Rudolph
Harry Ruppe
Friedrich von Saurma
August Schulze
Walter Schwidetzky
Ernst Stuhlinger
Bernhard Tessmann
Adolf Thiel
Wernher von Braun
Albert Zeiler
Theodor Karl Otto Vowe
Georg von Tiesenhausen
[edit]after Operation Paperclip
Walter Dornberger
Hermann Oberth
Jesco von Puttkamer
Guenter Wendt
More pee ceeness at Keith Cowling's NASAwatch today:
Interesting NASA Exploration Ideas - With Some Added China Bashing
( Actually, the PDF file to which Keith refers ain't very interesting, aside from the artwork in question --DD )
...
There is one problem I [ Keith Cowling, Mr. NASAwatch.com ] have with this document - and it has to do with one specific graphic (page 28 - larger view). Had the author noted that China's plans for the Moon should not spur us to do things out of fear or paranoia or something like that, I'd agree. But using an image that shows a Taikonaut on the lunar surface, planting the flag of the PRC while trampling an American flag is troubling. Are there really people inside NASA who think like this - enough that they go out of their way to create and use a provocative image like this? Alas, China-hater Rep. Frank Wolf will just love this chart.
Alas the horror, Keith! Artwork on one slide showing Chinese astronauts on the Moon stomping on our beloved flag. How shamefully insensitive.
It is pathetic the replies in this thread. Especially the guy trying to correct that dude on syllogism.
we can puts a man on the moon but we still gots racism!
You beat me to it; I was going to say how pithy I found SBDL's aphorism, "we gave up going to Mars so that we could pay for BRA."
There are extremely intelligent people throughout the World, independent from NASA, trying to figure out cold nuclear fusion or how to produce antimatter in large amounts because this is what would be required for interplanetary travel, and they have failed.
Where's it written that we need cold fusion or industrial-scale antimatter to make interplanetary travel feasible?
"The next time we hear about this program will be when it has been cancelled."
[Newsflash, Feb. 2013, Washington.] President Obama today issued executive order 1098, mandating the full integration NASA "to reflect the diversity of our country".
Newsflash, 2016: New rocket program cancelled for lack of progress. Institutional Racism blamed. Experts call for more diversity to solve problem.
We could reach the moon, but why would we want to? It's rather desolate. It only happened in the 60s to show up the russian.
The real benefit to mankind has always come from low earth orbit, with a few in medium and high.
Nazi engineers? They were not nazis. These are assumptions without evidence. Do your homework and quit making an ass of yourself.
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