Alan Boyle has a story on the loss of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, with an amusingly stupid comment in his comments section:
When did NASA become so political? Oh right, when the neocons filled it with “scientists” who don’t like science that refutes the Bible (that is to say, all science). F-ing crazy people. This is what happens when the cornerstones of our civilization fall before the onslaught of religion: our future falls into the ocean. Adios homo sapiens.
Yes, there was never any politics at NASA before those evil “neocons” came along.
Seriously, WTF is this person talking about? When did NASA get “filled” with “scientists” who “don’t like science that refutes the Bible”? And how did they manage to infiltrate Orbital Sciences? Did I miss that?
Rand…
YOUR NEXT!
I represent the evil anti science agenda ™, conservative branch. While we may have lost some ground to our liberal branch in recent years, we will outperform them long term! The god of global warming can never compete with the god of love, people, get a clue!
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Rand – you will now report for “reeducation” where we will force you to believe. Unfortunately, we have had some budget cuts – would you mind taking the bus?
And since when is religion NOT a “cornerstone of our civilization”? I wonder if the Founding Fathers would agree with that statement. Or the men who drafted the Magna Carta. Or the Puritans. Or any of the other great thinkers, soldiers and statesmen who built our civilization…
Wait, wait, now I’m all confused Rand. I thought the bible believing christian conservatives were paleo-cons and the secular jewish conservative converts were neo-cons.
With tongue firmly planted in cheek,
Greg
I’d say Alan’s second paragraph started the confusion:
The $280 million mission, which apparently went awry due to an equipment malfunction, would have been the perfect showcase for NASA’s changing priorities under the Obama administration.
Except that Alan then writes:
Last year, President Bush proposed a $1.1 billion increase in spending on weather and climate monitoring over five years.
The problem here is that funding and start of the OCO project began under President Bush’s administration. Perhaps Senator Obama voted on funding, but otherwise Obama played no role in making OCO happen. And before our happy liberals suggest the Democratic lead Congress had anything to do with it; here’s an ESA article about OCO from 2005.
As Matt in Syndey Australia suggests, OCO was green lighted in 2001, just after Vice President Al Gore left office. Apparently when the bible thumping President took over, he filled NASA with a bunch of people interested in observing the global carbon cycle. Perhaps he thought it was better to actually, well you know, perform some actual science than just go along with the Kyoto Protocols.
Didn’t ya hear yet. Some snake charming hillbilly rocket scientist tape a giant ‘John 3:16’ poster to the side of the nose cone right before launch. Apparently, the voices in his head that he thinks are some god forgot to tell him about the little fact that all that tape would hold the 2 halves of the nose cone together. Now we’re going to all melt into the ocean and it is all this bible thumbing assholes fault. I say we confiscate all the rolls of tape from anybody at NASA seen within 50ft of a bible.
Josh, I bet it was this guy. I saw him hanging around with the white room guys.
Yeah, baby, we *prayed* that sucker down. Meet our demands or next thing we demolish is your precious ape-man fossils.
Isn’t it funny how they neatly sidestepped the fact that they spent 300,000.00 a pound or whatever it was on this satellite?
I’m not sure what the point was about the expense of the satellite. The Taurus launch, I gather is somewhere around $20 million on total mission costs of around $280 million. That’s a bit light for launch costs, but not radically so. For me the real problem was with the failure rate. The Delta II seems a cheaper vehicle due to this alone.
With one Taurus failure in seven (before the latest launch), add in about $40 million in expected cost due to loss of mission to get the expected cost of a launch and loss of mission. In comparison, apparently (from the link above) the smallest Delta IIs cost around $33 million. I don’t know if I buy that, but suppose it’s true.
The Delta II has a collective failure rate of just under 2%. The expected cost of loss of mission would be around 2% of $300 million including launch costs (a bit less actually) or $6 million. So in total, Taurus cost of launch is effectively $60 million compared to $40 million for the Delta II.
In order for the two launch vehicles to reach the same expected cost of launch (including failure) the Delta II would have to be more expensive than around $50 million. If we use the current failure rate of 2 in 8 for the Taurus, the Delta II would have to be more expensive than around $80 million per launch.
Seems to me that someone was gambling a bit on the Taurus launch vehicle. This would have been more in the Taurus’s favor, if the satellite had been cheaper per pound. An expensive satellite (for its weight) is a case where reliability is more important than base cost of launch.
That post sounds like something that retard Elifritz would spew out of his drug-addled excuse for a mind.
It wasn’t much saner in the threads for this story at space.com, universetoday.com or dailytech.com. Regardless of position on the climate change issue, that one could virtually cheer the failure of a satellite that could give more data (which could end up supporting *either* viewpopint) is beyond me…
Silly me, just wanting more facts…
Welcome to the internet-a-tron under the web-savvy liberals. Those nasty neocons are everywhere!
Only the libs have the mad skillz needed to do rocket science. Just look, our fearless #2 in charge, he even asks for the “number of that website”. Truly geniuses.
Dave,
VP Biden was just taking it old-school with IP address. Of course, if he was web-savvy, he’d know new web servers actually can require the full web name, and not just IP numbers. Why that is would probably blow his mind.
“…who don’t like science that refutes the Bible (that is to say, all science)”
Bummer. Now I can’t let my kid do the old baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano science thing, because it must be against my religion. The commenter in the Alan Boyle story says so.
You can’t do it anyway, Jeff, because the product of the reaction of baking soda and vinegar is carbon dioxide, which the EPA has said is a pollutant and will be regulated.
I think the otherwise incomprehensible remark about neocons might have something to do with an incident in which a political appointee in NASA a few years ago objected to discussions of the Big Bang.
On the other hand, theocons aren’t identical with neocons and it was an isolated incident, as far as I know.