Crap Throwing Monkey

Fraud, generally. And you don't need a criminal charge to file a civil suit, by definition. Probably wouldn't be worth it, though. Once the take from a civil suit - minus lawyers' fees - were split between everyone, they'd get about thirty cents apiece.

Unless someone files a civil suit...

Man-rating it is the expensive part. Unmanned rockets, they can live with 90% reliability. Manned have to be around 99% or more. That extra 9%, as a general rule of thumb, is really expensive. The shuttle's reliability, BTW, runs about a calculated 96% at best, last I figured.

The last time I played Trivial Pursuit was years ago, when, after I beat everyone handily, someone leaned over the table and asked me point-blank "Do you have a life?" I knew two women in college, though, that were so good at Trivial Pursuit that they had their own rule that they had to act out the question in charades, just to make it challenging. That was pretty !@#$ing scary. One of them actually taught herself Gaelic, just for kicks. In retrospect, it's no surprise that she had a psychotic episode mid-junior year and left school...

They're better off. Lay's obviously a quitter.

What stores would these be?

A crushing defeat? Oh, good...yet more reason for them to roll around on the pitch like they've been gut shot...

Read a lot. Had a deep enough interest in the space program as a teen that I actually pursued a degree in astronomy in college. Mostly, though...I read a lot. And remember a lot. And can deduce other stuff (i.e. make educated guesses) a lot from what I read and remember.

Please. Around here, they're called Fit drivers...

That you, Mr. Nugent?

It was a general history jab. Both cross the Rhine on the backs of others, all the way back to Vercingetorix and Ceasar. But hey, thanks for taking it FAR too seriously.

Federal charges, though. I don't know in that case. Plus...other people's money. Who's to say he didn't call in a few favors?

Swap those. Realistically, it shouldn't cost billions of dollars to rebuild after each flight. Ideally, it should have a realistic escape system. Because that's really all that is. Idealism. A "realistic" escape system from a space-bound multi-stage rocket? Realistically, it's either the fervent invocation of deity or what's sometimes known as "raspberry jam delta-v". Sometimes you just have to roll the dice and take your chances...

Oh, okay... Split the shuttle mission into two different missions: putting people in orbit, and putting cargo in orbit. For the first, design an "Apollo capsule with wings" (what the shuttle was supposed to be to begin with), that'll carry 4-8 people to the ISS with a 3-day endurance on its own. Small, simple, easy to maintain (relative terms, obviously ). The hell with launching reusable cargo capacity - the expense of bringing back empty space is not worth the effort. Bring back the truly complex and expensive stuff - the life support - and reuse it, toss the rest. For cargo...use existing shuttle technology to build a heavy-lift LEO disposable rocket. Right now, the shuttle system launches about 120 tons into low earth orbit including the weight of the orbiter. Most of the weight of the orbiter is dedicated to maintaining it in orbit and bringing it back to earth...make a disposable launcher out of the launch components, and you might get as much as 70 tons into LEO at a shot, which is stupid heavy in space flight terms. That's maybe $200M a launch (a rough guess - last I checked, a shuttle flight was about $1.2B, a billion of which went into readying the orbiter for flight) for 140k lbs of payload - about $1300/lb, which is cheap as launches go. Then...design and build a reusable trans-stage to get satellites from LEO to GEO (roughly half the payload of a satellite launch now is the disposable trans-stage to shift a satellite to its proper orbit). Refuel it from the space station. Launch fuel on the heavy lift booster. Launch satellites in bulk on your heavy lift booster (along with the fuel - you've got 70 tons of payload to play with). Launch astronauts on your space taxi. Astronauts stay at the ISS. Satellites and fuel go to the ISS. Astronauts refuel trans-stage, mate it to a satellite, ship satellite to its proper orbit, recover trans-stage...and repeat until you're out of satellites. NOW you've reduced your cost to geosynchronous orbit drastically, in addition to giving the ISS the purpose it sorely, desperately lacks. Hell, do that and you might even make space economical.

A good start is http://www.mda.mil/mdalink/pdf/bmdsbook.pdf. It's chock full of "rah-rah" public relations stuff...but it at least gives a good overview of the depth and complexity of the missile defense system as a whole...and demonstrates that the budgetary facts of missile defense are NOT $10B on ten missiles in holes in Alaska. http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/57.pdf An interesting technical discussion. Not terribly germane (he discusses quite a few older ideas against defeating massed Russian nuclear strikes), but has some interesting insight into what is and is not capable. Defense News has had some good articles over the past few years. I'll see if I can link to some articles...it's a paid site, though, so no promises, as I ain't giving out my login to it. Other than that...I don't really know one public media site that's ever really demonstrated any real knowledge of the ABM system (which, as a system, is a hell of a lot more than interceptors in silos in Alaska - there's a reason, for example, that the Navy recently tested an SM-3 launch jointly with Japan.) Lots of what I posted is "ear to the ground" "common knowledge" type stuff. The test results on the ABMs (sanitized for unclassification) are readily available off the net; to anyone with a scientific or engineering background they're pretty clear, without any of the wesealy "Well, it was a success even though it failed" nonsense public reports usually ascribe to it. I believe I've seen overal schematic diagrams (i.e. diagramming assets responsible for a successful warhead intercept - it's just a little less complex than a moon launch) suitable for the "PowerPoint warrior" on the net, too. A lot of it, though, is just based on common sense and the knowledge I've collected over the past quarter-century. SAMs tend to be ripple-fired - in Kuwait in '03, for example, it was standard practice to launch more than one Patriot at a detected incoming warhead, despite the system not being checked out for such (all previous tests had been single shots; multiple shots were not written into the procedure formally, but doctrine overrode written procedure, basically). A 60% kill rate is a reasonably good guess based on the performance of roughly comparable systems (though the GMD interceptors are so bleeding edge - by design, they can't avoid being so - that the PK could be anywhere from 30% to 90%. Most of the realistic statements on performance fall within a 40% to 70% range. I've heard the number quoted as anywhere from 0% to 100%, both of which are obvious horseshit. Like I said, 60% is pretty reasonable, maybe a touch high, but I'm a technical optimist. ) The observation on the media...well, come on. It's the media.

Nope, it's in Berlin. To which all the Frenchmen and Italians of the world are saying "Berlin? Hmmm...never been there before."

I just leave mine at home with the kids... Wait...what?

Bail. He could afford it. Other people's money and all...

Never, EVER, do I want to even think about checking out JSP's hoohaas...

And Italy-France final? Why not just go to a playground and watch four-year olds fall over repeatedly for 90 minutes...

Mother!@#$ing brilliant coach...

The age of 12 is a somewhat arbitrary benchmark for saying "When a kid is this size/weight/developed, he/she won't be killed by the airbag." A sturdy 105 is roughly the size of a small adult. So if you want to if it's safe or not, find out how airbag deployment affects petite women. My recollection is: poorly.

"We should have won that game! Look how injured our team acted!"

Hey...for some things, reasonable risk is implied. You go on safari in Africa, you willingly accept a reasonable risk of getting eaten by a lion or stomped by a Cape Buffalo. You fly on a plane, there's a reasonable risk of gravity decisively asserting itself. However...when you sign on to work for a company, having the corporate officers use your 401k savings to prop up the price of the stock so they can cash out should not fall under any sane definition of reasonable risk I've ever heard.

And even when they do, they always roll around in the middle of the road like they've just been in an accident...mother!@#$ing genius drivers, I tell ya...