When Congress approved and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, it became the law of the land that the public business of the United States is the business of the American public.

Just because the FOIA had become the law, however, little immediately changed in the dominant culture of secrecy, self-serving, and cover-up that always and everywhere pervades bureaucracies, but especially the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal executive branch.

That suffocating and constantly expansive culture would only change when millions of individual citizens and activists (plus journalists devoted to “the public’s right to know”) made continuing use of the FOIA and insisted that the law be respected and followed, even if doing so required persistence and insistence to the point of hiring lawyers and heading into court.

When the authoritative history of the succeeding 56 years is written, one individual and the non-profit group he founded will stand out — Adam Andrzejewski and Open the Books. The reason why is captured in the OTB purpose, “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time,” and its standing invitation to “Join the Transparency Revolution.”

There are legions of advocacy and activism groups in America that raise hundreds of billions of dollars each year based on claims of working to make government better. But not one of them can match the monumental accomplishment of Andrzejewski and OTB.

Here’s why: transparency is the absolute prerequisite to accountability in government. That’s the ideal underlying the FOIA and the essential condition for the survival of a republican democracy. And knowing how the government is spending the tax dollars of its citizens is the necessary first step to achieving genuine and enduring accountability. That is where Andrzejewski and OTB excel as no other individual or group in America.

abie Ars Scholae Palatinae
5y
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malor said:
The SLS is just so dumb. It uses the most complex and expensive engines ever built, which justified their cost by being re-usable, straps four of them to a stick, and then throws them in the ocean.

What a pile of crap that design is.

Another contender for 'dumbest design' is ISRO's PSLV. This is a 4 stage rocket that has:
1) The first stage is a a large solid rocket booster
2) Up to six additional strap on (giggity) SRBs, albeit optional - ISRO considers these part of the first stage
2) The second stage is powered by a single 'Vikas' engine that uses hypergolic propellants (UDMH/N2O2)
3) The third stage is another SRB
4) The fourth stage is powered by two engines that use different hypergolic propellants from the second stage(MOH/MMN)

https://arstechnica.com/civis/attachments/pslv_c51_b-jpg.58966/

All very Kerbal. This Rube-Goldberg machine manages to send up to 3800 Kg to LEO, or about 17% the payload of a Falcon 9 without reuse. I get that the rocket is an evolution of previous designs, but why didn't someone at some point not take a step back and ask if maybe a clean sheet approach would be better? 5 separation events, 3 different SRB designs and two completely different liquid stages, sheesh.

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

The flight followed several months of inspections and refurbishment of SpaceX’s most-flown rocket, a process that included a “recertification” of the booster to prove, at least on paper, that it could fly as many as five more times after completing its 15th launch and landing last December. //

It was SpaceX’s 216th successful mission in a row for the Falcon rocket family, a record unmatched in the history of space launch vehicles.

The booster flown Sunday night, numbered B1058 in SpaceX’s inventory, debuted with the company’s first launch of astronauts in May 2020, sending NASA crew members Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken toward space on the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission. That mission ended a nearly nine-year gap in US launches carrying astronauts into orbit.

SpaceX’s fleet-leading booster has now launched 801 spacecraft and payloads, plus two astronauts, in more than three years of service. //

SpaceX’s latest iteration of the Falcon 9 rocket design—called the Block 5—flew for the first time in 2018. At that time, SpaceX had the goal of launching each Falcon 9 Block 5 booster 10 times. With boosters still coming back in good shape after each flight, SpaceX extended the life to 15 launches and landings, according to a report last year by the trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology.

The magazine reported that SpaceX put booster components through vibration testing to four times the fatigue life of what they would experience over 15 flights, giving engineers confidence that the rockets will continue to fly successfully. //

SpaceX started the year with the goal of flying 100 missions in 2023, the most flights in a year by any launch provider. SpaceX flew 61 times in 2022. The Falcon 9 continues to be the workhorse for the launch industry as SpaceX tests its much larger Starship vehicle, which engineers designed to eventually be fully reusable with an even faster launch cadence.

But the main limitation of SpaceX’s blistering launch rate is not the availability of flight-ready rockets—it’s the turnaround of the company’s three Falcon 9 launch pads. SpaceX has flown out of Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as often as once every five days. The Falcon 9 launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California can be set up for another mission in fewer than 10 days.