111–120 of 337 posts
Even if it was past it's point of utility the structure itself was a modern icon of design.
To be hyperbolic about such things, it feels like another milestone in the path to endarkenment
To clarify, "has collapsed" or "was collapsed"? I had heard they were planning to actively decommission it out of concerns for safety, and I don't trust that level of nuance from the auto-translate.
In any case, what's done, is done.
As Clay would say "Ain't no puttin' the candy back in that piñata."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It went thru the journalist filter a million times until unrecognizable. The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing. The flightpath of most Russia to US ICBMs would never have passed over the observatory, obviously, but it was a major radar technology research site in the early years.
>The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing. Source? This seems unlikely since ground-based visual tracking would be obscured by e.g. clouds. Is ICBM tracking all space-based and visual? (I can see why IR is useful to detect the initial boost, but it would also seem rather useless to track a small, passive object in freefall).
Great! Now they can replace it with something new instead of trying to salvage outdated equipment, software and engineers!
Before and after picture from the same account: https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333747356605571072
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The mo…
I wish we could just simply hand the money over and skip the part where we create the demand for eternal wars and the killing and maiming of millions of people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out. I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it. Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but…
I was asked to do a bit of robotics consulting for Solyndra. I figured that it wasn't going to work out when the guy we talked to took us to a conference room that looked too nice, and admitted that he hadn't been on the production floor in the next building before me and my buddy asked to go check that out. We took the job anyway because it looked interesting, started doing the preliminaries, and when we went to get…
When it closed up shop, people were blaming China, again, for stealing American technology, and putting another good American company out of business.
But from your description, it sounds like Solyndra was a scam to part investors and the American government, with their money.
Great! Now they can replace it with something new instead of trying to salvage outdated equipment, software and engineers!
"Too big to fail" apparently doesn't apply for science projects. To put this in perspective, at the cost of a single F-35A, Arecibo could be running for ~7y with funding at 2011 levels.
The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The mo…
"Too big to fail" apparently doesn't apply for science projects. To put this in perspective, at the cost of a single F-35A, Arecibo could be running for ~7y with funding at 2011 levels.
NASA decided this dish wasn't worth even a few million a year in funding. Perhaps this dish simply wasn't worth maintaining? Which is the conclusion multiple organizations seemed to have settled on.