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Right now, Iraqi policemen are getting chewed up because they are poorly trained (part of the speed up process) and poorly equipped (compared to their adversaries).

They're getting chewed up becasue they're poorly trained and unmotivated. They know they're being utilized to take a beating in place of US troops. Fighting alongside them would go a long way to improving perceptions.

...over mission modes. We figured out the best way to get to the moon in the 70's.

ARE WE WINNING? I haven't tackled the fundamental question in Iraq for a while. No, Mickey hasn't scared me into silence. Since the elections, it's simply been hard to figure out exactly what's going on. You can read the good news here. The demise of a complete Sunni boycott of the next political phase also has to be encouraging. Buit it would surely be dumb not to notice how resilient the insurgency still is, how it has capitalized on the political drift of the past few months, and how it is as lethal as ever. My old friend, Niall Ferguson, provides a longer view. Like me, he has long believed that the war was absurdly under-manned from the beginning. Like me, he wants it to work. But some things cannot change. This is the key point:

>> How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons stand out. The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had enough men. In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements. Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000). The trouble is that the population of Iraq was just over three million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24 million. Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at most, 23 to 1. Today it is around 174 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, about one million American troops would be needed. <<

We are fighting a global war with the manpower for a minor spat. Technology can only do so much. And when you further consider that, in order to win, we need to deal with Syria and Iran at the very least, you can see the scale of our problem. Solution? At this point, I can't see any except a major dose of luck.

Not sure which thread to continue the Tspace commenting but here goes, it would seem that tspace is asking Nasa to contract funds for give milestones of achievement in which they are to provide the CXV or crew transfer vehicle for LEO developement.

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67614,00.html] Conflict at Space Confab 

Although Transformational Space, or t/Space, has chosen not to bid for the contract to replace the shuttle, the company nevertheless hopes to beat big aerospace companies to orbit with a four-person crew transfer vehicle, or CXV, that NASA can use to send astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond.

Instead of bidding for the full amount ($500 million) it needs to develop the ship, as the primes will do, t/Space is asking NASA for small increments of development money in exchange for achieving significant milestones.

NASA is sitting up and taking notice; the space agency has already awarded t/Space $6 million for developing the CXV concept and building flight-test hardware that Scaled Composites will fly this week.

Sounds like this was very interesting seeing that lockheed would say nothing about what had been published in the popular mechanics magazine.

BRIAN BRADY
WESTMINSTER EDITOR

DEFENCE chiefs are planning to rush thousands of British troops to Afghanistan in a bid to stop the country sliding towards civil war, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

Ministers have been warned they face a "complete strategic failure" of the effort to rebuild Afghanistan and that 5,500 extra troops will be needed within months if the situation continues to deteriorate.

An explosive cocktail of feuding tribal warlords, insurgents, the remnants of the Taliban, and under-performing Afghan institutions has left the fledgling democracy on the verge of disintegration, according to analysts and senior officers.

The looming crisis in Afghanistan is a serious setback for the US-led 'War on Terror' and its bid to promote western democratic values around the world.

Defence analysts say UK forces are already so over-stretched that any operation to restore order in Afghanistan can only succeed if substantial numbers of troops are redeployed from Iraq, itself in the grip of insurgency.

Question is what you are trying to achieve in Iraq at all. Keeping the country stable so it won't turn into a civil war between rival factions?

As I've mentioned before, civil war could actually be beneficial to us, depending on what we're trying to achieve. Therein lies the problem, lack of clarity. The invasion wasn't the blunder, those came later.

The flimsy composit contruction that his company deals in primarily is not going to be good enough either, its too fragile and can't take much heat.

The X-38 full size mock-up was built by Scaled Composites, Burt's company. X-38 used the same graphite/epoxy body construction as SS1. In fact, the skin of OMS pods on the Shuttle is also graphite/epoxy with foamed aluminum ribs. The composite materials Burt's company works with are exactly what you need for an orbital entry vehicle, it just needs a heat shield. SS1 didn't have a heat shield because it was only designed for Mach 3.

We have lots of options today including RCC, FRCI tiles, and DurAFRSI blankets; the advanced materials designed for the generation shuttle. DurAFRSI can handle 2000°F, not quite the 2600°F of black HRSI or 2700°F of FRCI tiles, but more than the 1200°F of AFRSI white blankets. There are many places where DurAFRSI could be used instead of black tiles. You could place large blankets of DurAFRSI over much of the orbiter, not the piddly little tiles. Tiles were kept small due to thermal expansion. That's not an issue with soft blankets. AFRSI blankets were made small like the white tiles they replaced, but there's no need for that. Just ask a seamstress how to sew a quilt to cover a curved surface, it's just sewing. A small number of large thermal blankets would greatly reduce labour, both installation and maintenance.

An orbital space taxi would be handy to ferry crew to ISS, to ferry science experiments and supplies to/from ISS, to service space telescopes, to service satellites in LEO, and most importantly to carry crew to a lunar vehicle or an orbit-assembled Mars vehicle.

What Burt Rutan needs to look at is a flying wing with the "tiles" on the top rather than the bottom. That way it can fly to and from an "airport" like a normal aircraft but needs to make the atmospheric entry upside down. This can be upscaled later to airliner for mass passenger transfer.

psst- t/space dosen't need NASA.

400 million they asked for. bah!

If they can do ti for 400 million, they can do it on their own.

I know a few buyers, and Bigelow can make a great offer... 

t/Space envisions a two-level architecture: diverse vehicles that carry people and cargo between the Earth's surface and low Earth orbit (LEO), and LEO-based vehicles that make the transit to the lunar surface and back to LEO. This split fosters early competition in the Earth to LEO segment, where many companies and nations already have the capacity to put payloads into orbit. Any space-faring entity thus can participate in the Exploration Vision right away. NASA should not build a CEV system that perpetuates the problem of government-owned vehicles dominating a segment where there is no technical or economic reason for them.

Two types of lunar trajectories

Prof. Ed Belbruno of Princeton University and Innovative Orbital Dynamics has developed the trajectories to be used in the t/Space approach. The CEVs will travel in a standard Hohmann transfer from LEO to a highly elliptical lunar orbit, a journey that takes about four days. The tankers will depart on a Weak Stability Boundary transfer that takes about three months. The longer transit time is balanced by lower fuel requirements; in a WSB transfer, the vehicle slips into lunar orbit without burning any significant fuel to decelerate, as the CEVs must. The greater efficiency allows the tankers to deliver more of their fuel to the CEVs, before the tankers take a return WSB transfer back to LEO.