NASA Denies New Space Station Partnership With Russia 83
schwit1 writes NASA officials today denied they were negotiating a partnership with Russia to build a space station replacement for ISS, as suggested yesterday by the head of Russia's space program. Maybe the misunderstanding comes from NASA head Charles Bolden, who is currently in Russia. Bolden probably said some nice feel-good things to the Russians, things like "We want to keep working together," and "We will support your plans for your future space station." None of this was meant as a commitment, but the Russians might have taken them more seriously than Bolden realized.
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Can you explain how going 0.1 planetary radius "up" is exploration? And what progress? It's the same damn thing for half a century.
NASA falls into the Russian trap, again ! (Score:1)
TFA seems to think that the Russians are beyond pale, that they are so clueless that they took a common 'nice feeling comment' as a commitment from NASA - which can't be further from the truth
The Russians ~ and the rest of the world ~ already know that NASA - under the Democrat administration - is often underfunded, especially under the Obama administration, and the Russians also know that NASA simply can't locate any funding for a new space station. What the Russians were doing is to set up a trap and let
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The Russians ~ and the rest of the world ~ already know that NASA - under the Democrat administration - is often underfunded, especially under the Obama administration, and the Russians also know that NASA simply can't locate any funding for a new space station. What the Russians were doing is to set up a trap and let NASA falls in
NASA has been underfunded by every administration since the late 1970s... Democrat, Republican, doesn't really matter.
Re: NASA falls into the Russian trap, again ! (Score:2)
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"beureacrats "
Can you please turn on your spell checker?
" We tried to tell you you're to stupid"
To stupid what?
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PEBCAK
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Sure does.
"beureacrats" is underlined in squiggly red bullshit, as it should be.
http://imgur.com/rHQYgmt [imgur.com]
You've either added it to your dictionary or fucked something else up.
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My FireFox on Ubuntu 14.04 routinely forgets the selected spellcheck language, and does not work until I select again the English (US).
So no, not PEBCAK. Just Mozilla doing their fine job as usual.
Putin's getting desperate... (Score:1)
He would have confirmed this with Obama if he was still on his game. He clearly needs something to show his people that Russia is a leading nation among the entire world, and not just a regional power in Eastern Europe, and what better way then say "we're collaborating with the US on a space station no other two countries could build?"
Putin desperation is either good or bad. If he decides he can declare victory in Donbass and calm things down (and he has the political muscle to keep the Ukrainian separatist
Re:Putin's getting desperate... (Score:4, Insightful)
like it or not Russia IS A LEADING nation. I know that we in the US and other parts of the western world like to look down on Russia but in many fields they are the leader, space exploration is probably one of their strongest points both historically and currently. Countries all over the world use Russian rocket technology to get shit into space, even the US. People still seem to look at Russia as it was prior to 2000, they have had a massive economic and political changes in since then yet so many can't seem to get past the old mindset or look beyond the douche that is putin.
Re:Putin's getting desperate... (Score:5, Insightful)
Space exploration? Hardly. They haven't done any exploration since the Berlin Wall fell. NASA's putting probes on every planet they can, the ESA and JAXA are launching their own probes, even China and India are doing more exploration than Russia. The only real active area of research for Russia is on the ISS.
Russia's just a cheap source of rockets - and that has more to do with their low cost of labor and massive subsidies than the actual cost-effectiveness of their rockets. The fact that they're currently the only way to the ISS has more to do with the political failings of NASA than any redeeming quality they have.
PS: Russia's economy is still failing. It's not in the near-freefall it was in the 90s, but it still looks more like a big second-world country than a developed nation.
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True enough. There were, in fact, two probes (Mars and Phobos), but both weren't able to leave the LEO.
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The rocket market isn't just a "failing" of NASA, they were confident that those rockets would be on the market, so they accepted having to use them for a few years in order to be able to afford other things on their limited budget.
Especially now that there are multiple new rockets coming to market to compete in that space, it doesn't look like a failing at all. It looks like they have quality analysts, actually.
They didn't trip over their shoelaces and accidentally end up having to buy Russian rockets.
Re:Putin's getting desperate... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Leading" is a relative term in a world dominated by the US. We're a fifth of the economy. We're most of the military spending. We have the most advanced weapons. Our culture is known world-wide. The Chinese could compete with us, if they get a few more years of 8% growth and they can figure out their aging population problem. The Europeans could also compete with us, if they'd ever get off their damn asses and give their precious sovereign right to veto every-damn-thing to the EU.
Russia clearly belongs in the next tier, right along with the Japanese and other regional powers. But it's not like Russia can bail out small Latin American countries without noticing the hit to it's budget. But the top tier clearly could. So could the Japanese.
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Leading is a relative term when you're discussing countries capable of human spaceflight. Last time I checked, the United States was paying a princely* sum to space-taxi their Astronauts to the ISS.
*When I say Princely, I mean, "the United States pays more to go to the ISS than the King of Malaysia", because that's totally a thing that happened as part of an arms deal, and we still pay more than he did for the privilege, despite our station being connected to theirs.
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"spaceflight" is a relative term when you're discussing what amounts to a tree fort in the upper atmosphere for adults with connections.
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Don't tell me that isn't the coolest tree fort you've ever in your life seen.
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http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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The U.S. also has also accumulated a $18 trillion national debt to pay for all that prosperity, all that "we've got the biggest dick" military spending, all that corporate welfare, all those entitlements, etc.
And it's growing at about $500 billion a year now.
When the credit card bill finally comes due some day, the party ends.
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You wanna know what an MD in her first year of residency has? A 350% debt-to-personal-GDP ratio. Post-residency she's still in the 150-200% range. You wanna know what a 19-year-old home depot cashier at $9.25 an hour has? No debt at all. You wanna guess which one of those women will have a more financially stable future?
Compare that to the US. Yes we have a lot of debt. but we have it mostly because some idiot insisted on cutting taxes without cutting spending, financed two major wars 100% via debt, and the
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space exploration is probably one of their strongest points both historically and currently
Russia has heavy lift capability, and that's basically it. I tried to find the last time they actually did exploration (as in probes, rovers, etc) and didn't see much of anything since the Soviet Union. Right now NASA, ESA, Japan, China and even India are all ahead of Russia as far as exploration goes, as all those organizations have active probes in space doing science. Russia is basically just hauling stuff into orbit.
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I did live there for about 6 months in 2012 in St Petersburg for work. much of Russia has modernised and is really quite a pleasant place to visit or even live, especially the larger cities, people just can't seem to get past old mindsets and ignorance. Much the same is happening with China, the risk to a lot of the western world is these countries are going to leave much of the western world behind, in a few years people will be saying "how the fuck did they get so far ahead of us" as they have remained bl
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Soar past? This is a finite planet, and we are all identical human creatures. And no one is going anywhere, despite all the feverish delusions from the space crowd.
Don't forget, China *was* once the kind of hidebound bureaucratic nightmare that we are heading towards. They are just swinging the pendulum around the other way, but the solution space is quite constrained, there just doesn't seem to be a rational outcome for human societies.
All I know is if an individual exhibited the behaviors of a modern west
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Almost in Europe? what weird ass map are you looking at? it is close to some European countries, most of which are not really indicative of Europe. Russia has plenty of pretty good cities, include Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Pskov, Vladimir and quite a few others, though I have not spent enough time in others to truly judge them. You are heavily focused on the western mentality and propaganda and forgetting that most of the wests wealth is centred around a very select minority (happy to admit I am in that minori
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The soviet union collapsed and now russia is run by a thug dictator for life as his personal toy with immature cult of personality on the same level as north korea
they invaded and vivisected georgia, and now invade ukraine because their feelings were hurt when slavic brothers ukraine announced it preferred to go with europe. its economy is tanking because its economy is just digging up oil
it is 140 million people. china is 1.3 billion. eu is 500 million. both diversified and growing economies with stable go
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Re:Putin's getting desperate... (Score:5, Interesting)
What in my post implied Putin cares what ordinary Americans think? I mentioned him trying to appease a Russian domestic audience with a space station, and potential difficulties he'd have reining in the Donbass rebels, but I said nothing about Western public opinion.
BTW, your premise is wrong to an extent at least. All my comments got a -1 troll, the AC posting that Russia was a superpower got to +4 insightful, and everyone criticizing that blessed comment also got -1 troll. Which means the Kremlin apparently loosed it's merry band of paid internet trolls on Slashdot.
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Yup.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Do not believe anything (Score:3)
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You could actually. $10 Billion a year for 10 years is peanuts in the context of a $Trillion budget.
The issue is that poisonous combination of a) deficit hawks, and b) partisan gridlock which makes it impossible to do anything that costs money. c), the ideological elites absolute commitment to low taxes on itself means that even during flush times (ie: the late '90s- early 2000s) it won't happen.
If you want the government to buy nice things that are not tax cuts you have to vote in the Democratic primaries
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Who do you think makes rockets? The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers.
Who do you think processes rocket fuel? The Steelworkers.
Who do you think designs the damn things in government labs? Government employees, most of whom are unionized.
The current Republican party will never fund any of these groups, partly because some of them are Evil Unions, and partly because the lesson the GOP base learned from the Bush years was that government spending is an evil in it's own right.
We forgave the Russians once... (Score:2, Troll)
... We will need substantive evidence of their change of character before we commit to further projects.
If the Russians are determined to be enemies of the West, then it is in our interests to see that they are as technologically regressed as possible. That means not sharing computer or rocketry technology that they can use to make weapons etc.
It is very sad. We tried so hard to be their friends. The Chinese broke with the Russians in large part because they understood the stupidity of this pointless hostil
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I'm not suggesting they'll surrender anything. I'm saying they'll be too weak to hold it.
Their population is declining, their economy is declining, their neighbors are becoming wealthier and more technologically sophisticated...
Russia is the sick man of Asia. It is headed for the same crack up that the Ottoman empire went through.
We offered them a way out of that. A way to keep everything they have and become wealthier and more powerful than they've ever been. And they spat in our faces...
They're idiots.
Rus
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Which Americans would you say have committed war crimes?
And in what court would you try them?
The underlying fallacy of your position is these two concepts:
1. World court.
2. International law.
Neither one exists. There is no such thing.
For there to be a world court, you'd need a supreme international authority was above every nation.
No such entity exists.
For there to be international law, you'd need an international senate or law making body that every nation on earth was responsible to and then you'd need to
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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When you say you want to work together, it doesn't mean you agreed to specific plans together.
Just like, if somebody says, "we should go to coffee sometime," it doesn't mean that you have plans to go to coffee together. It means you have a shared desire to schedule that activity at a future time.
The person claiming a specific agreement when only a general spirit of cooperation was offered, that is the person lying.
Skip the station; Focus on the moon and mars (Score:2)
Instead, the ISS group should focus on getting a base on the Moon and then on Mars. Private Space will be going to the moon around 2020-2022. Europe, Japan, Canada, Russia, etc should join the private space and push to create the side infrastructure that can be used on the moon. In particular, robotics, nuclear power, etc.