Any source?
Imagine being told to design Google in 2000, but in order to save money you have to reuse old software: database from Oracle, OS from IBM, and design around the code from AltaVista. That should only take a few hundred man-months, right?
The top level comment did not achieve this art, but I've seen worse.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/08/24/...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-artemis-del...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Developmen...
The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 directed NASA to develop a new rocket called the Space Launch System. It set performance requirements for the rocket (use just two stages to lift 70 tons into low-Earth orbit, use a third stage to lift 130 tons to LEO, carry cargo and astronauts to ISS, carry deep-space crew capsule, support gradual increase in performance by "evolutionary growth" with new stages), and required that, "where practicable", NASA should maintain existing Space-Shuttle and Ares contracts, workforces, infrastructure, and technologies, and that the rocket be scheduled to launch no later than the end of 2016.
The precise requirements were written to force NASA to design a rocket that maintained lucrative Space Shuttle-era contracts.
https://spaceref.com/press-release/hatch-passage-of-nasa-rea...
Also, the requirement to upgrade existing infrastructure ensured that billions of dollars went into Bill Nelson's district in Florida. (He is now the highest-ranking official at NASA.)
The law did not establish long-term funding for the development of the rocket. As with all NASA projects, money is granted one year at a time in Congress's annual budget. In 2011, NASA announced the plan to build this rocket. In accordance with the law's requirements and intention, it re-used almost all core technologies, infrastructure, and major subcontractors of the Space Shuttle. There was actually some fuss about this at the time:
https://spacenews.com/shelby-nasa-hold-competition-sls-boost...
but the strategy of "give Congress what they want" has worked: the Planetary Society shows that Congress has consistently granted NASA more money than asked for to fund SLS.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls
In particular, Richard Shelby (senator from Alabama, which is home to many NASA facilities, and Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 2018–2021) was a powerful political supporter of the SLS, ensuring its continued funding, and attacking anybody who even suggested it might not be necessary.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/so-long-senator-shel...
Is it a senate cultural thing that they all tell themselves despite tenuous links to reality?
Is it kickbacks?
Why doesn't the logic apply to infrastructure projects which seem more marketable?
You never see a senator take credit for a plant opening/expanding on their re-election blurb/townhall? You must be in an incredibly safe state.
> Why doesn't the logic apply to infrastructure projects which seem more marketable?
It applies to them, too. Again, if you're not seeing this, either your senator isn't doing much of it, you're not paying much attention to their campaign, or they are in such an incredibly safe district that their only challenger is Bozo the Clown.
Re: infra, you're right, I guess I'm just letting my personal bias in when wondering why they don't do more of that compared to the weapons. It seems like such an easier sell to voters, but the emphasis seems to go the other way.
(Also, in my limited sample size, all of this has taken a smaller and smaller back seat to culture war stuff in modern day campaigning)
The way it works is, the politicians who got the plant created out there earned some cachet with voters, and politicians today would get crucified by voters and the unions if they tried to move the plant. It's important enough that presidents give speeches there. (to put that fully into context: there is absolutely no other reason for politicians to give speeches there or even to be there, except perhaps some obscure form of self-flagellation) And of course voters in the entire surrounding state are pretty sensitive to the notion of losing industrial jobs, which earns the plant some protection from the state's US senators as well. People on the other side of the state might not be talking about it today, but they'd be talking about the plant if it got closed. Politicians understand this.
It's more about the political economy where funneling through certain well connected companies generate a lot of goodwill among the middlemen who then funds pac's and pay for advertisements then it's about a direct relationship between the senate and the employment status of their workers.
And thats one senator in one district it takes 50% of both senate and congress to pass a bill and not everytone gets contracts that big assigned to their district so the system is not individual senators all trying to secure the biggest employment gain for their district, it's much less rational.
You'd be surprised. See, e.g., steel tariffs costing $900,000 per job saved. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/07/trumps-st...
> And thats one senator in one district it takes 50% of both senate and congress to pass a bill and not everytone gets contracts that big assigned to their district so the system is not individual senators all trying to secure the biggest employment gain for their district, it's much less rational.
The fact that SLS isn’t designed for reusability, making its per-launch cost something like $4billion, means it’s effectively already outclassed, outcompeted, and obsolete.
'Let’s be very honest, We don’t have a commercially available heavy-lift vehicle. The Falcon 9 Heavy may some day come about. It’s on the drawing board right now. SLS is real.' - Charles Bolden
Note the reason given here isn't that the Falcon Heavy didn't have as large a payload capacity - that excuse came after it started flying years before SLS, because apparently we're supposed to pretend things can't be assembled in space over multiple trips rather than sending up a multi-billion-dollar rocket.
I'm just wondering what the excuse for keeping SLS around will be after a cheaper vehicle that can beat its payload is here. Jobs, for sure. What else?
(though yes you could fix that with a small kick stage)
https://spacenews.com/spacex-seeks-to-accelerate-falcon-9-pr...
The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is.
This has real world consequences … when people see the US spends 10 times more than any other nation on its military and its space program it becomes apparent this doesn’t equate to necessarily a 10x factor in results. So yes we may have the best tech/gear in the world but may be spending way too much to only get a slight edge and find this edge is not even sustainable.
As for their kit, Myanmar bought some of their planes but none of them are operational. The planes were a joint project by China and Pakistan, but 8 years after the deal was signed apparently have persistent unsolved technical and structural issues.
Meanwhile Thailand bought three of the new Yuan class subs from China, but they aren’t operational either. Problems with the engines so bad that they need replacing.
Meanwhile China now has two aircraft carriers, but still hasn’t committed either of them to long range operations. They have only conducted experimental night takeoffs and landings, their carrier assigned planes are still largely land based, and they have yet to operate the boats beyond range of land based airstrips. Modern carrier operations are as complex as it gets, and they seem to be struggling with it.
Peacetime armies are generally bad, but turnover tends to be high when the fighting starts, and the second or third set of generals is often much better.
The most important advantages China has are pretty overwhelming- a giant population, and they own the global supply chain for microchips and batteries, meaning they can replace smart munitions and systems while their opponents can't.
They also have the best setup for doing go it alone, vertical industrial production, much better than the US or Russia. They're fine in any scenario where they don't get totally blitzed in a week.
For an invasion of Taiwan numbers are important, sure, but it's a wide channel and amphibious assaults are absolutely the hardest kind of operation an army can attempt. Technical competence, and I would also argue operational flexibility at every level, are absolutely crucial.
In terms of supply chains, that matters for an extended conflict, as we can see in Ukraine. However an invasion of Taiwan would either work in the first week or so, or it's over. I suppose they could try a long terms blockade, but that doesn't seem to be their strategy.
China is extremely vulnerable to a blockade themselves though. They have no control of their essential seaborn supply routes, and are highly dependent on external sources for energy, raw materials, high tech parts, and maybe most importantly food and fertilisers. The US can turn all of that off like a tap at a moment's notice.
The sorts of sanctions levelled at Russia since last year would have China on it's knees in months. The only way to mitigate that would be for the PLAN to go toe to toe gobally with the US, UK, French and Australian and Japanese Navys all at the same time. Also maybe India. The Indian Navy is small but it's no joke, and they have two fully operational carriers.
He's too absolutist for my tastes, he talks about China 'going away' due to demographics. That's just silly, they'll suffer for sure but 1.4 billion people don't just disappear. Also his line about Russia needing to control geographic access points or 'they're finished' is equally silly. They have nukes.
Pretty much all negative coverage of JF17 (joint PRC+PK manufacturing but so far SOLD by PK) are sourced from Indian tabloid rags with no credibility. Myanmar airforce has 100+ PRC airframes, variety of models in the last 30 years with little issue. Pretty much the only useful piece of info so far is Myanmar doesn't have adequate experience operating tech in 4th gen fighters, most of their fleet is 3rd gen. IIRC Myanmar got the jets before they even got simluators, and then bought 4th gen trainers (JL9) from PRC.
>Thailand
Yuan subs aren't operational because PRC couldn't acquire original specified German engines after EU sanctions. There's a period where Thai Navy was deciding whether to accept PRC engines, which they did. Some analysts implied if Thai did not accept PRC engines it would imply they were unsuitable, even more retarded media then spung that as technical issues with PRC engines. Both complete misinformation narratives since there's no basis for evaluating those unintegrated PRC engines at all.
>aircraft carriers
Training carriers based off RU design that analysis suggest PLAN has more or less maximized sortie potential vs when USSR was running carrier ops on similar flight deck. Late 2022 USNI analysis on PLAN carrier ops is they're basically reached "true" blue water deployment, i.e. a few hundred nms near Guam, 1000nm+ from mainland, with no divert airfrields or aerial refueling as backup. Which is about as far as PRC none nuke carriers need to deploy given strategic considerations. Caveate being conservative sorties and pretty clean (light) load outs to compensate for lack of divertion and ski jump. The struggle with PLAN carriers is they won't have catapults and capabilites that brings until 003 and training was hectic because they only had 1-2 carriers training 3-4 crew rotations, somewhat alleviated by converted cruise/barrack ships. TLDR is I would not characterize as overall carrier ops capabilities as struggling as limited by hardware, which TBH is expected since carriers does not seem particularly high priority outside of prestige - given PRC ship building capacity, they could have rushed 10 carriers like US did Forrestal class. Basically most US analysis of various PRC military modernization is they're lacking and focusing on XYZ, but should get there in a few years. Occasionally throw in the word struggle because they watch CCTV7 where miltiary propaganda talks about how hard they work. A few years later, new analysis that they got there (i.e. asw, jointness), something something evolving, modernizing at astonishing rate, but here's the new struggle. Rinse and repeat. Combined with customary but no real combat experience (which no one has in modern peer warfare). But the underlying pattern if you look at meat of improvements year by year is PLA modernizing fast.
IMO US pretty much understands this as well, for as much reporting there is on dysfunction of navy and urgent need to fix, there hasn't been much actions instead we see doubling down on distributed land based fires and increasing aviation standoff range, and ultimately long range bombers strait from CONUS to reduce basing dependencies abroad.
As for allied ports and rear support, US basing that enables operations against PRC in theatre, which basically US force structure requires at this point (hence all the wargames trying to convince JP to distributed basing), is IMO even more forgone. Various US partners signalled they wouldn't directly contribute to TW war but will provide rear support, but that's enabling US war regardless, so very likely they're going to get glassed. PRC systems confrontation and system destruction warfare is structured around destroying the softer/easier targets like support ships, tankers, ISR infra etc. Hitting them is doctrine. And ultimately, it's in PRC's long term interest to destroy as much US forward presence as possible, because that's historically how outside hegemons get kicked out, through sufficient force to demonstrate their strategic posture is no longer viable. And US having decades of build up abroad has more dependencies and more to lose if their security architecture becomes unsustainable.
As for unsupported carrier operations, IMO if you consider the sorties numbers their effects are close to negligible. Boat might be nuke powered, but there's only enough supplies (fuel/ordnance) for low hundreds of sorties, 50%+ of which will be buddy tanking / support due to how far PRC A2D2 has pushed standoff range, which leaves a even lower 100s of actual hitters. Assuming no interceptions. Barely enough to dent the 100,000s of targets from mainland. It's not that US CVGs are weak, just PRC operates on another scale, more targets, more concrete, more counter measures etc. Without constant replenishment carriers become single deployment assets with limited use and cost:vunerablity ratio not in their favour. And even then nuke propulsion need to return to dock, where they can be promptly hit with global strike.
I am a bit worried about naval officer training though, there have been damaging cutbacks and compromises made on that front. Nothing that's likely to have long term consequences yet, but they need to fix that before it gets worse.
I see that as a good sign. Why fight wars if there is no need to. I hope they stay that way and don’t get themselves involved in Taiwan
Achievement: You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor.
Get the poster at https://despair.com/products/achievement?variant=2457295683
I’m wondering how you determined this?
I'd read a long time ago about how the Taliban basically formed a shadow government in parts of Afghanistan that provided justice, schools, roads, and other services because the current government couldn't do it. Just found a good article about it:
https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shado...
Here's the PDF it references:
https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/12269.pdf
People flocked to the Taliban's shadow government precisely because it was (at least seen as) less corrupt and more efficient than the services propped up by U.S. and its allies. In the PDF above if you search for corrupt you find the word 7 times in the body of the article, and 6 of those are in regards to how the Taliban fought it.
The article is old (2018) but I think that's the point. They were very organized in how they built their network and we saw the results of it as they ran circles around the U.S. in negotiations both with Trump and Biden administrations.[1]
To me it's a crystal clear example of a less corrupt, less wasteful force completely schooling one with exponentially more resources.
[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal...
That already happened with 2008 GFC. Whats happening with NASA is a small rounding error compared to the amount of pure junk that has accumulated on the FED balance sheet since then, to keep delusions afloat. So the stock market/health care/edu/real estate/iphone/sls prices keep rising. Even though its all pure junk.
I donno about this. Adversaries might just as well conclude the opposite, that the US can blow that kind of cash on SLS and other dumb stuff all over the world without major problems. IIRC, UBL's thesis was A-stan is/was the graveyard of empires and would also be the US', but it turned out to be an otherwise forgotten Pentagon rounding error.
Perhaps the US economy (and politics) is resilient enough to handle it and not crash outright, but poorer folks in the US feel the squeeze of inflation and lowered wages due to cantillion effects.
US debt in 2000: $5.6T, in 2022: $30.9T [1]
The larger wars of this century drove about a quarter of debt growth. Major but not the majority. That more people will risk life and limb to immigrate than emigrate indicates to me that as bad as inflation is, living elsewhere is still worse.
0. https://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...
Sure the US may still have a higher quality of life than many others, it doesn't mean that Americans lives couldn't have been better. Also I believe the US recently actually had decreases in both life expectancy and younger generations prospering fincially. So we didn't collapse, but we're not healthy either.
Could things be better in the US if it did not spend the way it does? That is a difficult counterfactual. The well adapted US political system never voluntarily decreases taxes, so a safe assumption is that spending/deficit/debt would be the same.
A significant amount of war funding was spent on the MIC, which employs upper middle income US persons in engineering, logistics, HR. The rest is spent on consumables (also from the US) and bribery, which eventually finds safe harbor by holding large bricks of US $100 bills on the low end or US luxury dwellings on the high end.
In the counterfactual, what would have happened to all those white collar suburbs and Miami penthouses?
We'll give them three quarters of a trillion dollars every year no matter what they spend it on so in reality it doesn't matter if they're war fighting or not, they own us, well 50% of our discretionary tax dollars anyway.
UBL may not have achieved his primary goal but he got many concessions: Americans lost many freedoms, trust in government is significantly lower compared to pre 9/11 and given what happened on Jan 6 and everything that led up to it, we may look back at 9/11 as the point which set the stage for the eventual breakup of the union.
Me and GPT had a good discussion about it: https://chat.openai.com/share/828cb390-dac0-4f3b-a556-f02972...
In the US system (oligarchic democracy) the wealthy needs to earn their hefty share, otherwise the thing in question likely won't happen at all.
I've heard just the opposite about the similar SDI/"Star Wars" - that the US pouring billions into this blatantly impossible and pointless programme, and suffering no real consequences for doing so, was what finally convinced the USSR they couldn't win.
i dont think they were convinced they couldn't win - they just realized their economic laggardness.
The remnants of the USSR is still trying to win!
For a real example of "they couldn't win", you'd have to look towards Japan. And is it such a bad thing to "not win"?
More like, the US broke a promise to the USSR of not expanding NATO, and Russia defended its interests and security.
Disclaimer, I have Putin as much as the other guy, but I also hate US imperialism and propaganda.
There is literally zero evidence of that, except claims by the Russian propaganda itself.
People who live in totalitarian countries (like Russia), seems to not understand that democracies don't do promises, because leaders changes frequently, and any promise without written agreement is just plain impossible except very short term.
So you are using an instance of internal russian lie and propaganda to "hate US imperialism and propaganda", and don't see it yourself.
Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
You're welcome.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...
All of your comments are suspiciously related to US foreign policy issues btw ;)
This expansion argument also ignores that Eastern European countries are joining NATO of their own accord.
Btw Russia and the US also signed the Budapest memorandum to respect Ukraine's sovereignty.
So if a verbal agreement is worthless & a treaty is worthless, how does one negotiate with the US?
I'm unsure how France's presidential system works and what authority he may have.
Russia already got multiple assurances that Ukraines NATO membership would be vetoed.
They clearly don't care about NATO or about defending Russian interests, this is plain and simple imperialism.
This is not a subtle difference. Japanese imperial interests led to a massively destructive war that wasn't really in the interest of the Japanese population. Same with Russia. Plenty of Buryats, Tuvans, Dagestanis and other peripheral nations of the Russian Federation died as cannon fodder for an imperial idea that doesn't even consider them equal to white Slavic Russians.
I would argue that it is in the best interests of Russia as such that their imperial dreams collapse and never arise again. Other nations managed to shake off that backward worldview. Russians can perhaps, too, one day.
There's no contradiction. The argument is that Gorbachev felt the need to set those policies because he saw how much more successful the US was being economically.
They're going to say "we can build our outpost on the moon for way less" and then they'll do it.
Isn't this already known though?
The US has such vast resources it can afford to squander them freely due to corruption and incompetence without the people involved ever really being held accountable. This is true of civilian infrastructure projects as well. Yet at the end of the day the country is still so massively wealthy, it makes no practical difference.
Accurately
A phrase I learned at NASA: "With enough thrust anything can fly".
We like to pretend that political influence on government institutions is a new "bug" and not something build into the system from day one.
SLS isn’t the rocket NASA designed or asked for in order to achieve its mission goals… it’s the rocket they were forced into using due to lobbying and senate shenanigans, there’s a reason it has the nickname “senate launch system”.
The fact the pork barrel project is so bloated it’s “unaffordable” is irrelevant as far as the senators who are voting for it are concerned.
My bet is that the senate will just raise the budget because and continue to make SLS happen as they have always done since the SLS program began.