One of the websites I frequent is called "nextbigfuture."
You have a bunch of mouthbreathers who love to put NASA down at every turn.
Thankfully, you have this great poster who calls himself "
Goat Guy."
He knocks the stuffing out of a lot of handwavium hype by doing a Phil Plait and debunking a lot of crap.
Here is some of his brilliant retorts to retarts
http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/12/spacex-attempting-reusable-rocket.html
"Indeed: while there is an endless stream of NASA badmouthers, which cite everything from "government waste" to "entrenched bureaucracy" to "stuck in the '70s" engineering … the truth is that they're just being prudent, shrewdly concerned about getting the missions to happen without flaw, to the greatest degree allowed by the power, cost and weight budget of the mission. This is why I tend to scoff at
Musk's Vision."
More:
"Oh, I understand the negative critique of NASA and its programs. But they don't even have a tiny fraction of the funding that was invested in them in the post-Kennedy years, when trying to get to the Moon. They have 10× more mission objectives to service per year, ⅛ the funding, and cannot abandon the running experiments and missions that were invested in a decade back, just now coming to fruition. Well, they
would abandon servicing these things, if egotists like Musk were in charge. "Mine first. No. MINE first."
"I make no bones in saying it: NASA "got to the moon"
because an assassinated and hugely popular president had set in motion a huge enterprise with his words, and the public's commitment to avenge our dead leader. That's why it worked. Because the people decided to fund it to the tune of over 7% of the national budget. Today, NASA exists on 0.3% of the national budget, and maintains a lot of mothballed hangers. Whaddya think is needed here?
A new NASA, or a funded one?"
A poster named James claimed that Orion--which went higher than any shuttle "barely got up there:"
Dude… whaddya mean
“barely got up there”? It performed
as designed, and
as expected.
Its triple-thruster burn was exactly (to the second) as planned.
The thrust profile was exactly as planned.
The emergency abort tower and rocket worked as planned.
The ejection of the liquid-fueled boosters happened without flaw.
The "common core" 1st staged resumed high-thrust profile delivering
exactly the ΔV needed.
The Orion MPV was not an empty shell filled with brickwork (like the Russian mock up last year), but a real CM and SM combination, less the blokes to drive it.
Indeed, one could make a pretty convincing media-spin argument that it was
robotically flown or some such hay.
The SM and CM combo performed
exactly as planned, getting the orbiter 8,000 miles up to MEO in a highly elliptical orbit that was planned to deorbit in 2 rotations.
Which it did.
The CM didn't flip upside down or do anything bad on its
robotically controlled return flight (which is a pretty impressive feat, unappreciated by the press.)
And it splashed down with all systems running, with no loss of equipment functionality.
OH, be negative if you must. Say something like, "for twenty eight bazillion dollars, we should HOPE that it would do all those things right. Nyah, Nyah, Nyah." But really the opinion is hollow.
Tell me if you would, what
really was the underachievement of this mission? If you decide that the underachievement is just economic, that it
costs too much for what it did, then come up with something that NASA could do to fund such remarkable missions while keeping the price down to where
you would say,
“well… dâmn. That's pretty good right there.” Because see … I just believe you're prejudiced against ANYTHING that NASA does. Its a position, like being Democrat, Republican, Conservative or Progressive.
His take on STS
"Think about it: NASA had the only landing-strip returnable, reuseable, high capacity space vehicle
ever. You're dissing it like it was a white elephant. It got 150 missions accomplished, that white elephant, and only 2 in-flight failures. That, friend, is dâmned impressive."
"But I understand that your
political position is to diss NASA as a wasteful, hated, symbol of government wrongness institution. You lust for the bicycle-pedaling (e-motor enhanced!) generation of hipsters to get out there and show what
“real leadership” and
“real economy” is like. I get it. But you don't:
just like all of us in the 1970s who were just as much
“hipsters” of the day, riding
our bikes to work, and eating the then-new bean sprout salads at lunch, WE were enthralled with NASA's space-plane vision. We vetted the numbers, we publicly debated them. It seemed
so right at the time. Aren't you just a WEE BIT afraid that your utter belief that NASA needs replacing with something entirely new, is going to come to basically the same end, due to the same reasons?"
Preach it, Brother!
Orion's return
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=27387
http://www.universetoday.com/117207/orion-off-loaded-for-cross-country-trek-to-florida-home-base/
http://www.universetoday.com/117100/why-nasas-orion-spacecraft-flew-old-slow-computers-into-orbit/
http://www.universetoday.com/117197...e-sound-of-delta-iv-heavy-orion-eft-1-launch/
http://www.universetoday.com/117184...-a-big-rocket-and-pretty-on-paper-spacecraft/
On newspacers
http://www.americaspace.com/?p=32540
http://www.americaspace.com/?p=32552
http://www.americaspace.com/?p=32560
http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/editorial/opinion-newspace-needs-nasa-know/
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?154717-Orion-capsule-10-billion-for-nothing
Interstellar travel
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?154707-Interstellar-Travel-Possible
