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At the request of Congress, the nonpartisan US Government Accountability Office reviews the finances and management of federal programs, and this week it released a study critical of NASA’s crew capsule, Orion. Most worryingly, the 56-page report (PDF) regularly draws parallels between the Orion program and another large NASA project, the James Webb Space Telescope. The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is notorious for ballooning from a 10-year, $500 million project to a 20-year, $8.8 billion (£6.7 billion) instrument that may finally launch in 2018.
Although Orion has not yet experienced such dramatic increases in costs, the spacecraft is now into its second decade of development. NASA estimates that it will spend a total of $16 billion (£12 billion) to ready Orion for its first crewed flight in April 2023. However, the GAO review, signed by Director of Acquisition and Sourcing Management Cristina T. Chaplain, did not find these numbers to be reliable.
The federal auditing agency based this conclusion on the fact that only a handful of NASA’s methods for estimating costs and schedule were consistent with “best practices.” Moreover, the GAO found, in making a number of its estimates, NASA appears to be relying too heavily on data analysis from the primary contractor for Orion, Lockheed Martin. In regard to Orion’s cost and schedule estimates, then, the GAO report concludes, “They do not fully reflect the characteristics of quality cost or schedule estimates and neither estimate can be considered reliable.”
[...] Few blame the NASA engineers themselves for these difficulties, but rather changing requirements and bloated government procurement processes for a program that formally began in 2006. The 5-meter capsule has seen significant modifications during that time, first envisioned as a means to transport astronauts to the space station and now more focused on deep space exploration.
[...] It's nevertheless striking that it will probably take NASA about 17 years to design and develop Orion before finally flying its first crewed mission in 2023. During the same amount of time, from 1964 to 1981, the space program flew the Gemini spacecraft; designed, developed, and flew the Apollo capsule; and designed, developed, and flew the much more complex space shuttle.
Source: ArsTechnica
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday July 31 2016, @01:45PM
We're completely off topic…, but I find it endlessly amusing. The lizard people are getting everyone stoked to tear each other apart. I love it. The lizard people feed on it. Or something.
I always wonder what these secret Muslim conspiracies to murder Jesus and turn us all into gay Muslim atheists look like in the viewer's imagination. I know the devil's involved one way or another. It's just the way these things work. Most won't own up to it, but it has to be a fantasy as childish as a Chick Tract [chick.com] (author's name is Jack Chick), perhaps involving guns.
There were maybe 2–3 people depending on where one did trick or treating when I was growing up that would hand those out. I had a small collection of 'em going. That was before the local churches realized that Halloween is a Pagan holiday and banned their flock from participating outright. (Instead, they'd get together at church for an evening of Jesus, family, costumes, games, and candy prizes.)
One of the most interesting conspiracy theories I read was while we had that AC regularly posting about the virtues of national socialism. According to this one website, Christianity and Islam were both created by The Joos!™ for the express purpose of turning half the world against the other half. Whether or not one believes in some vast conspiracy by The Joos!™ for world domination, it seems to be playing out. Were the geopolitical situations reversed, I have absolutely no doubt we'd see Christian suicide bombers. Maybe they'd yell “Jesus is LORD!” instead of “God is great!”
Here's part of the programming that underlies this insanity. It's also the basis by which many Protestants regard Catholics as devil worshipers. I think they did actually fight a couple of wars over this issue before agreeing to disagree. Revelation 22:18–19 MSG [biblegateway.com]:
I give fair warning to all who hear the words of the prophecy of this book: If you add to the words of this prophecy, God will add to your life the disasters written in this book; if you subtract from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will subtract your part from the Tree of Life and the Holy City that are written in this book.
Now, at first this would appear to apply only to Revelation (and probably does, given that the Bible is an anthology of works), but it's popular among Protestants to extend this rule to every other book in the Bible. That sounds like, in our geopolitical bizarro world, a basis for Christian terrorism against the filthy West who worships false profits like Mohammed that weren't authorized by Revelation.
In fact, if you find high enough concentrations of crazy, you get people insisting that anything more recent than the King James Version, despite the fact it was a politically motivated translation meant to check the power of the Church, is the word of the devil, meant to deceive. Some people will allow the New International Version. I'm certain that the Message is heresy. If you want blasphemy, there's also a version at Bible Gateway called the Voice that's written as a screenplay.
The hatred seethes and swells like a Lovecraftian ichor, the crazy grows and grows, and if there is a devil, I'm certain he's licking his chops at the hatred and jealousy in Christians' hearts towards Muslims. I imagine endless columns of shackled souls in hell, screaming and screeching and howling their hatred of the gays and the Muslims and the atheists, roaring with their desire to be set free so they can drag the true sinners to hell, unaware that the shackles themselves are made of their own hatred.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Monday August 01 2016, @03:09PM
That last paragraph was poetic. Very evocative imagery. I rather enjoyed it. Thank you.