Russian Satellite Launch Ends in Embarrassing Flames

JohnleMVP said:
Great example except the F35 is a government program.
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All the work was done by private enterprise though. The govt. just shoveled money at them. There are lots of people here who pretty much worship private enterprise to the point where it aaaaalmost comes off as if they believe it can do no wrong. Or at least is always better than govt. when doing anything. The F35 project is a pretty good example of that concept being complete nonsense.
 
Yea but I already mentioned that on the 2nd page and military mis+over spending is a big problem too.
 
mesyn191 said:
All the work was done by private enterprise though. The govt. just shoveled money at them. There are lots of people here who pretty much worship private enterprise to the point where it aaaaalmost comes off as if they believe it can do no wrong. Or at least is always better than govt. when doing anything. The F35 project is a pretty good example of that concept being complete nonsense.
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Private industry is cheaper and more efficient not because it always succeeds. It fails all the time. The difference is you have multiple companies competing to create the best product.If they don't deliver they fail and you buy someone else's product. With the government if they fail you are stuck with a shitty product or a money pit.

The F35 project is a great example of government bureaucracy creating a design by committee product. To get everyone to sign off on the billions of dollars they had to make compromises for each branch of the military. That and someone probably got a state park or library out of the deal.
 
JohnleMVP said:
Private industry is cheaper and more efficient not because it always succeeds. It fails all the time. The difference is you have multiple companies competing to create the best product.If they don't deliver they fail and you buy someone else's product. With the government if they fail you are stuck with a shitty product or a money pit.

The F35 project is a great example of government bureaucracy creating a design by committee product. To get everyone to sign off on the billions of dollars they had to make compromises for each branch of the military. That and someone probably got a state park or library out of the deal.
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So what?

After the design requirements were drawn up and cemented...it could be built, and if not the contractor companies should have told them it wasn't possible. Thing is it isn't, and Lockheed et al agreed to build them as asked. And the delays haven't been really due to changing requirements. Since before Y2K everyone knew what the customer nations wanted. The only thing in the contracts that has really changed in the last decade are the # of planes being ordered are plummeting as the fly-away-cost per plane has exceeded the budgets of the nations wanting it.

Blaming government bureaucracy when Lockheed can't even get their own goddamn plane to fly is funny. Lockheed's own work being cited for shoddy quality and having a 16% scrap rate.. Then there are the few times Lockheed and other contractors failed to secure their own servers and networks and Chinese spies made off with gigabytes of data...


The whole thing is a gigantic trillion dollar fuck up (yup, with a "T")...and the blame is as much if not more on Lockheed and their fellow incompetent contractors as it is on the Department of Defense.
 
Skripka said:
The only thing you're forgetting or leaving out is that the Treaty of Versailles was...well...signed at Versailles. If you've never been to Versailles, then the gigantic middle finger of that treaty gets lost on you. Because the simple location of that treaty signing was a massive diplomatic middle finger even if the Treaty itself was not (which it was).

For starters. Signing a peace treaty at the most ridiculous symbol of the opulence in the entire world, decadence, apathy to the plight of the commoner (who didn't even have running water in Paris while the king had 200km of piping for fountains), and downright cluelessness of the nobility that culminated in the bloodbath of the Revolution....And the Allies signed a document bankrupting Germany there.
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Additionally, it was payback for the whole episode back in 1871 [end of the Franco-Prussian War], when a victorious Otto von Bismarck crowned Kaiser Wilhelm I in the Hall of Mirrors, one of the most opulent bits of the palace. What better place to humiliate the Germans than the place where they humiliated you? Additionally, the treaty in 1871 took Alsace-Lorraine away from France, which happened in reverse with the Treaty of Versailles, along with a 5 BILLION franc indemnity against France with a 5 year term of repayment. While Germany [nee Prussia] had certainly been dicks about the whole thing, the fact that the Allied powers allowed France [via Clemenceau] to wreak its vengeance through the treaty was a bad sign that war would break out again. Thanks a lot, Woodrow Wilson, way not to fuck it up. :(

RELATED WIKI LINKS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Frankfurt_(1871)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Points#Fourteen_Points

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At least they have a launch program...

And its not as if we haven't had plenty of high profile, expensive and deadly space fails of our own...
 
MajorDomo said:
Okay Russia, if you’re going to threaten the US with locking our astronauts out of the International Space Station, at least have the rockets to back it up. Latest Russian satellite launch go boom: Paging Elon Musk! :D
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I think it quite telling when private companies are more conservative in the missions they launch into space. Small communication satellites and the like are all that are economically viable at the moment.
 
Hornet said:
The problem is they aren't there yet. I'm all for NASA focusing on pushing the frontiers while the private industry handles low Earth orbit travels, but ending the Shuttle program before any replacement is ready seems to be asking for trouble.
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That's the crux of the matter. Private industry can do it better and cheaper, but retiring the shuttle before that happens because of an accident was foolish. Space travel is dangerous. People will die. It's not for the faint of heart... which is probably why the shuttle was retired. "To boldly go" doesn't seem to be in the vocabulary of politicians.
 
Phoenix333 said:
That's the crux of the matter. Private industry can do it better and cheaper, but retiring the shuttle before that happens because of an accident was foolish. Space travel is dangerous. People will die. It's not for the faint of heart... which is probably why the shuttle was retired. "To boldly go" doesn't seem to be in the vocabulary of politicians.
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The space shuttle program was ended because of expense, not because of any single accident. The shuttle program was only supposed to be a 15 year program, but was extended a few times. It was even supposed to be expired in 2010, but got a mysterious 1 year extension. Cost and age was the major motivation for retiring the program. Each shuttle mission had a ridiculously high price tag compared to just using rockets. Also the shuttles were getting older and replacing them was also prohibitive. You could do many of the activities on the space station which you could take much cheaper transportation to get to. And launching satellites is much cheaper using smaller delivery mechanisms as well. So really, what was the space shuttle necessary for?
 
Hornet said:
The problem is they aren't there yet. I'm all for NASA focusing on pushing the frontiers while the private industry handles low Earth orbit travels, but ending the Shuttle program before any replacement is ready seems to be asking for trouble.
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That was part of the problem. As long as NASA held on to the shuttles, there WAS no money for a replacement. It can be dangerous because corners would be cut, and R&D shortened because so much of their budget is still pouring into the shuttle. Dumping the shuttles was the right thing to do. The Russian issue is a temporary setback. Things will settle down and we'll be friends again soon and we'll have our own rocket soon too. Russia needs us as much as we need them. Putin is just figuring this out. He's stubborn, but at the end of the day he'll back off.
 
Phoenix333 said:
That's the crux of the matter. Private industry can do it better and cheaper, but retiring the shuttle before that happens because of an accident was foolish. Space travel is dangerous. People will die. It's not for the faint of heart... which is probably why the shuttle was retired. "To boldly go" doesn't seem to be in the vocabulary of politicians.
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NASA doesn't have the budget to develop a new launcher and maintain an old one. There was a similar gap between the end of the Apollo program and the first Shuttle launch. Now NASA has a heavy lift rocket in development in addition to funding private companies.

The Space Shuttle should have been retired earlier. Even before the Challenger disaster there were issues, the cost-per-flight was far higher than planned. After Challenger it couldn't be used as a standard launcher for all NASA and military payloads since the risk was too high. That pushed up costs even more.

If the US had stuck with the Saturn V we could have launched more than twice as much payload as the Shuttle program with the same budget. For the cost of the Hubble servicing missions we could have launched 4 new telescopes. For the cost of the ISS we could have launched 50 Skylab-sized space stations. We'd probably have visited Mars already.
 
NoOther said:
So really, what was the space shuttle necessary for?
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Not being dependent on the Russians and Soyuz as the only taxi to the space station comes to mind, in addition to fixing broken satellites.

DeathFromBelow said:
There was a similar gap between the end of the Apollo program and the first Shuttle launch.
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There wasn't an international space station with US astronauts on board and a whole host of satellites in orbit during that period either.

Now NASA has a heavy lift rocket in development in addition to funding private companies.
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Which is fine, but see above.

If the US had stuck with the Saturn V we could have launched more than twice as much payload as the Shuttle program with the same budget. For the cost of the Hubble servicing missions we could have launched 4 new telescopes. For the cost of the ISS we could have launched 50 Skylab-sized space stations.
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No disagreement here. The shuttle was originally supposed to be used in conjunction with the next run of Saturn V rockets. The budget for the rockets was killed by Nixon, but the shuttle program still went forward. Someone wasn't thinking.

We'd probably have visited Mars already.
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That's pure speculation, but now there's not even a shuttle to handle the more immediate problem of Putin playing politics with the ISS. The shuttle fleet did need retiring, but too much was dependent upon gullible US politicians expecting the Russians to play nice. Putin is not a "nice" man. As the former head of the KGB and a fan of the old Soviet empire, he's going to behave in whatever way he thinks will make his country powerful on the world stage, and he's never let go of the old USA-USSR rivalry. A viable replacement should have been put into action before decommissioning the shuttles entirely, or else at least one shuttle should have been kept working for emergencies. Trusting a former enemy while dealing from a position of weakness is asking for it - especially if that former enemy knows you're weak.
 
Phoenix333 said:
Not being dependent on the Russians and Soyuz as the only taxi to the space station comes to mind, in addition to fixing broken satellites.
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So we should continue to bankrupt ourselves so we don't have to be dependent on Russia....right. Good plan there. How about we just don't send people to the space station until we have our own delivery vehicle? It isn't that NASA can't develop their own program to send people up, it's that it was cheaper for us to use Russia's service and there was no reason not to really. The space station is a joint venture anyway, so we are already dependent on Russia for a number of things there. In addition the only thing we really need Russia for is taxing astronauts, astronauts that Russia is also benefitting from having there. So none of the " Not being dependent on Russia" makes any sense.
 
NoOther said:
So we should continue to bankrupt ourselves so we don't have to be dependent on Russia....right.
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Did you even bother to read anything else I said in my last post? And if you don't understand why being dependent on Russia is a bad thing then you've not been keeping up on current events.
 
Phoenix333 said:
Did you even bother to read anything else I said in my last post? And if you don't understand why being dependent on Russia is a bad thing then you've not been keeping up on current events.
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I did read, I just think you fail to understand the situation fully. Again the space station you are sending astronauts up to is a joint shared environment. Russia and the United States collaborate on it. We will always be dependent on them for things involving the space station. You can't get out of it no matter what. Even if we had our own delivery system, Russia could still refuse to support or aid the station, also incurring costs to us. Russia not helping deliver astronauts and goods we are providing to the space station hurts them as well.
 
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