Crust

NASA has 2 global hawks which they can only afford to fly 10 days per year. That's 1/5 as many hours as they could afford to fly the space shuttle.




They sometimes drop something out of their rear end.



A blond hottie loads more in. It seems to be reprocessed airline food.




Despite their immense cost, unusual shape, program cancellations & budget scandals, they're really crusty inside.







There's nothing but empty space, old rack mounts for experiments, a crusty old British engine, crusty old analog video cameras for navigation, no backup communication. Screw those swanky Burt Rutan creations made of carbon fiber & fiberglass. Just whack together some aluminum & bang out some fluffy panels to make it look expensive.


It's little more inside than the standard twin boom pusher the world has standardized on, or a foamy.




Being 1 of the thousands of people who designed the bare bones Globalhawk required years of formal engineering education, of course. Basically, the large company hires an army of exclusively MS's & PhD's from MIT & Stanford to design little more than a foamy. None of this self taught foamy designer nonsense.




The blog post was inspired by NASA's budget for 2014, which is what it was in 1986 after inflation. The voters wanted granite countertops instead of space travel, so you can't blame them for not getting what they wanted.



http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey...ince-1986.html



Anything from a bearded guy which says "Creating a better future by exploring other worlds and understanding our own" doesn't get a lot of attention, because bloggers can't really afford a spaceship to explore other worlds & they rarely understand money. They can just afford philosophy & Macbooks.




But he was the only one with the desire to create the graph & obviously sees some connection between money & space exploration, which takes some doing.