[extropy-chat] Diaspora was Bluff and the Darwin award

[KAZ]

----- Original Message ----
From: Rik van Riel <riel at surriel.com>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 7:45:40 AM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Diaspora was Bluff and the Darwin award

 
> Congress critters wanting their district to benefit from NASA's
> budget means the shuttle and other NASA projects are so full of
> pork it almost looks like NASA's main goal is to prove that pigs
> can fly ;)

Yes, but it's not just Congress...NASA and its contractors work hard to waste as much of the money as possible. And I mean literally waste, not just "they don't do a good job of spending". For example, I was on a cost-plus contract for the Hubble Space Telescope, and when I was getting my job done ahead of schedule they literally pushed me off onto fake "emergency" projects in order to extend it...not only to put it "back on schedule", but even causing it to run over indefinitely.
 
You may recall that, in 1999, they "installed a computer upgrade" into the Hubble...but what they didn't explain, when bragging about this, was that the "upgrade" was a 486 motherboard. At a time when even my crappiest backup machine at home had a Pentium in it, they considered a 486 to be an improvement worth spending millions to fly up and install. And yet, ironically, one of the NASA employees I was working with had a dual processor PC with the newest, most CPUs in it sitting in a box in the corner of his office. He had ordered it on a whim (on NASA budget), but didn't know how to set it up, so he just left it there, unused.
 
All this waste is aside from the sheer idiocy of how they DO things...like, say, the shuttle replacement, which Congress should just cancel entirely.
 
They are...I kid you not...planning on another VERTICAL LAUNCH craft. They are, over fifty years after we worked out that it's a stupid, inefficient way to get into space, still going to make our main NEW launch technology one which throws the ship straight up into space, racing for orbital velocity immediately.
 
If you broke up NASA's budget and handed it to the top ten X-Prize contestants with no strings whatsoever, we'd end up with more actual progress on space travel. That cheap, simplistic Space Ship One used more advanced technology to get into space than not only the Shuttle, but than the shuttle replacement that won't be ready for another decade.
 
Or, better still, just yank the NASA budget it entirely and used the money to reduce the budget deficit, deregulating space flight so it is no longer effectively illegal for private manned space travel to occur. 
 
--
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