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from the SpaceX-did-the-FH-for-about-half-that dept.
NASA's nearly billion-dollar mobile launcher tower for the Space Launch System (SLS) is leaning, and may be discarded after a single use:
[The "mobile launcher" component] supports the testing and servicing of the massive SLS rocket, as well as moving it to the launch pad and providing a platform from which it will launch.
According to a new report in NASASpaceflight.com, the expensive tower is "leaning" and "bending." For now, NASA says, the lean is not sufficient enough to require corrective action, but it is developing contingency plans in case the lean angle becomes steeper.
These defects raise concerns about the longevity of the launch tower and increase the likelihood that NASA will seek additional funding to build a second one. In fact, it is entirely possible that the launch tower may serve only for the maiden flight of the SLS rocket in 2020 and then be cast aside. This would represent a significant waste of resources by the space agency.
[...] [From] the tower's inception in 2009, NASA will have spent $912 million on the mobile launcher it may use for just a single launch of the SLS rocket. Moreover, the agency will have required eight years to modify a launch tower it built in two years.
The second mobile launcher, intended for larger versions of the SLS, will cost about $300 million (if not more).
Related: Maiden Flight of the Space Launch System Delayed to 2019
Trump Space Adviser: Mars "Too Ambitious" and SLS is a Strategic National Asset
NASA Opens Door to Possibly Lowering SLS Cost Using Blue Origin's Engines
After the Falcon Heavy Launch, Time to Defund the Space Launch System?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @07:06PM (7 children)
You're basically assuming that which we want to prove: This particular organization ("Uncle Sam") is going to follow well defined rules of interaction.
Not only is that circular logic, but it's patently false; history is replete with uncontested examples of Uncle Sam breaking the law, or twisting it so far beyond what anybody thought the law meant that it might as well be fraud. What else can you expect from a monopoly, especially one that grew out of violent imposition rather than voluntary interaction?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @07:45PM (6 children)
All true, but history also shows that every other form of government has resulted in far worse. Anarchy doesn't work out in practice, and the "series of contracts" is what government already is, we call them "laws". To address what I feel is an inevitable reply, competing contract enforcers is basically a re-imagined city state scenario which even if done perfectly would eventually devolve as some megalomaniac gains control and vies for power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:19PM (5 children)
Legislation is imposition of rules; that's why legislators in the US were able to "outlaw" beer bars that had been operating continuously for 100 years—it's like letting one team come up with rules during a basketball game.
Contracts are agreement to rules in advance of interaction; a dispute means there is a lack of a well defined contract. The whole point of law by contracts is to approach willing adoption (a very profitable state of society), not "win" by imposing your ideas on other people (a very dangerous state of society in which we find ourselves constantly today).
Your "city state" scenario isn't solved by your "government" idea, so I actually have no idea what your point is.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:40PM (4 children)
Do contracts never get re-negotiated?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @09:09PM (3 children)
Contract negotiation and enforcement is necessarily an iterative process; within a free market, they constitute an evolutionary process towards a system of interaction that best fits the environment at hand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:33PM (2 children)
Free market troll strikes again!
Learn about how humanity functions. Even AI is unlikely to be the perfect arbiter required for your fantasy, humans are too good at corrupting systems.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @11:31PM (1 child)
Men aren't angels. So, why put them in control of a culturally blessed, violently imposed monopoly? Fool.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:21AM
I'll bite this bait.
Back at you sucka, but yer too stoopid to understaaaaand