Now you just spend all the compressor and heat-exchanger machinery weight that you saved by not going with the Skylon engine by having dedicated thrusters elsewhere on the vehicle for the pure rocket mode.

As someone somewhere else said, Skylon strikes me as a characteristically British solution to the problem, just due to it's sheer over-reliance on plumbing.

Let's get one thing out of the way up front: SpaceX launched, orbited, reentered, and retrieved a fully reusable capsule, one with an ablative heat shield that can be used hundreds, if not thousands, of times over. Disregarding the reusable aspects of the design, they're in the company of 3 nations. Include the reusability aspect and they're in the company only of the United States and the former Soviet Union. I have a degree in engineering. I have engineering friends, some of whom work in aerospace companies. Until this recent PR push, I hadn't found one of them who'd even heard of SpaceX, to say nothing of their groundbreaking and historical flight and recovery of a capsule with private funds. If that's "all the press," then I have "all the press," too. Go ahead. Ask me how it feels to be so famous!

The little press that they do get within the ossified aerospace industry has been terrible. AvWeek recently ran a piece which was focused on how SpaceX had "lost some of its luster" (not a direct quote, but close) with the slip from February to April for the Space Station rendezvous launch, as if any government-run space technology was ever delivered on time. A while ago, they found some blow-hard "space policy expert" to opine about how space was hard and how it was absolutely obvious that SpaceX was over-promising and destined to radically under-deliver. They ran another piece about how congress was unhappy with COTS. Only recently did they have to give some ground with a piece about how commercial space was "already having benefits" now that the launch is so near, and I was overjoyed with schadenfreude when they had to provide neutral coverage of the uninteresting and everyday fact that Space Station astronauts were rehearsing for SpaceX's visit to the station. There's a reason, I'm sure, that SpaceX chose Muse's Uprising as the theme song for their animation about their plans for full reusability. It fits.

Further, Orbital's offering is not even close. Orbital's vehicle is not reusable. It burns up on reentry, and therefore has no capacity to bring cargo back from ISS. And their price point is nowhere near Musk's. In case you're keeping track--and I mean the hypothetical "you", I'm not pissed at you, Metapony--that's less for more. Less than SpaceX for more money. Furthermore, the floor on Orbital's costs is the same trifecta that's always been around in aerospace: expendability, costs of disparate components, and integration costs. I'd love to see a viable competitor to SpaceX, but Orbital isn't even close.

Make no mistake, the battle is not between "government" vehicles and private industry. There are no "government" vehicles: Every vehicle gets built by private contractors. The battle is actually between the established aerospace industry, built around expendables and cost-plus contracting, and SpaceX, an innovative and disruptive aerospace company based around competition, reusables, and fixed-price contracts, with Orbital taking up the rear with the worst aspects of both models.

I know. I come across as a strident cheerleader. I hope that has less to do with any inherent fanboyism in my makeup than it does with my absolute perplexity at and frustration with the bare fact that SpaceX has done unprecedented, amazing, historic things, and hardly anyone knows about them at all.

1. A duopoly for big aircrafts by Boeing and Airbus (you have to look at the development and industrialisation nightmares of the B787 and the A380 to see where that got them)

2. National monopolies for military aircraft almost everywhere, meaning not pressure to deliver on-spec on-time in-budget since these contracts are basically subsidies

3. Protected space-flight markets, also to a high degree to military aspects

4. High entry barries, e.g. development costs, costs for market penetration, regulations (both civil and military), etc...

Given the above facts, it's clear that the big guys everywhere do everything to protect their market share against others like SpaceX, the chinese (commercial airliners) and the like. But a situation like that also means death to innovation, we are cooking in own juice (if you can say that in english...). The only thing the hold Boeings Lockheeds BAes and EADS grip on the industry are the above mentioned facts, hopfully that changes with the raise of the likes of Embraer, the chinese and (as I personally hope because I like the indesttuctable designs) the recovering russians, some competition can only help.

Another reason why aerospace is slow on innovation and radical design is also safety, something you cannot discard. When lifes are at stake, you don't take any unnecessary risk. First because you are most certainly not allowed too by regulations and also due to a culture of not taking unnecessary risks rooted in security issues. This was different in the past, but raisning costs a and a more risk aware (i'm not giong as far to say risk afraid) public changed that a lot. Again a quasi monoploy didn't help neither.

And as far as SpaceX is concerned: NASA open up a huge window of opportunity to disrupt space flight by retiering the shuttle which left almost overnight only the russians. And Elon Musk took that window, among others.

And if you ask me, this was about time!

Sure, both are likely to succeed within the year at their target goals, but it's apples and oranges.

I suspect that Virgin Galactic will eventually orbit, but I think their real money could be made in suborbital point-to-point, acting like an ultra-elite airliner, which they had (have?) as phase-2.

While Virgin will be testing that, the Dragon Heavy will likely be moving people into low earth orbit. Sometime after that, StratoLaunch might roll something onto a tarmac somewhere.

Although they don't directly need consumer support, getting your name out there helps with recruiting the best engineers. I know several people who were tops in their field and heard about SpaceX, dropped what they were doing and applied.

It also helps them with public support. It's very possible that the majors will come in and try to use lobbying to crush SpaceX. Having the public on your side will help SpaceX beat that back later.

In essence, let's assume you've made your own fully-shielded space capsule for one, and that you need, for example, a pound of material for every square inch of its surface, and that you've made it into a sphere to economize on material. Wise choices, all of them. A 2m diameter capsule would come in at 19,500 lbs, or so, for that many square inches.

Congratulations. You've just found out why we don't shield small spacecraft. Now, however, let's get an estimate of what it would cost to shield 200 people, providing them each with a volume-equivalent of your capsule, or 4.2ish cubic meters per person. Really packing them in. This is a 11.6-meter diameter sphere, with roughly 3,300 pounds of shielding per person. At 2000 people, packed in like sardines, we're at 25.2 meters in diameter and 1550 lbs of shielding per person. A 54-meter sphere packs 20,000 sardines, and requires a mere 717 lbs of shielding per person.

A factor of 10-20 better. Obviously, we want to relax the space constraints a bit. However, the form factor of shielding in the larger craft is going to be much better suited to the reutilization of supplies as shielding. In the limiting case, of course, there is effectively no required shielding per occupant. Long before that, magnetic shielding schemes become a viable option, too.

A more practical limit would be to consider a transport module made up of re-entry craft seating 1-10 persons, with the ablative heat-shields and supplies facing outward. In this case, assume we can get down to 5 times your cross-sectional area in shielding, and guess that that's about 2.5 square meters. That's 4000/lbs per person. So, still a factor of 5 better than the solo case.

Additionally, this is a lot of arithmetic to ask of google and http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/geometry-solids/sp..., so the numbers may be off. Also, the Dragon capsule checks in at 5.8 m^2 of heat shield per astronaut, which may be a practical limit. And I just made up the 1lb/in^2 shielding requirement.

First, there is the rocket equation. That little gem tells us the amount of fuel it takes to achieve a given change in velocity for a given energy density of fuel. Then there are some results from orbital mechanics and aerodynamics that tell us what that change in velocity is. For the curious, escape velocity is just sqrt(2) times the circular speed at any given altitude.

I've laid this out before, but here it goes again. To put a pound of anything into orbit has a fuel cost of a little over $20. "Incredible!," you say, "It costs $10k/lb on the Space Shuttle! How can that be?!" Like so. Typical mass fractions are on the order of 2%. That is, 2% of the stuff on the pad, fuel, structure, payload, everything, actually ends up in orbit. About 12% of that mass is structure, things like tanks and engines and the like. That leaves 86% of the thing as fuel. 86:2 is 43:1. 43 lbs of fuel for every pound of payload. Assuming that propellant is roughly as dense as water and roughly the price of milk, both easily verified, that's under 6 gallons of propellant for every pound of payload, which will run you $21 at $3.50/gallon.

Multiply sqrt(2) by $21/lb and you have something like $30/lb. If you and your capsule weigh 2,000 lbs, That's $60,000 for a one way ticket. A little over 8 times that price may be a reasonable number. So, what makes up the difference in cost for current launch systems, or even for antiquated and clunky systems like the Shuttle? Low safety margins and their concomitant need for enormous administrative costs for each part, disposable launch systems where that administration cost burns up in the atmosphere or splashes down in the Pacific, and enormous system complexity driven by a lowest-flight-weight-results-in-the-cheapest-vehicle mentality.

We can begin to address, based on SpaceX's design philosophy and planned vehicle, how they may be able to make these claims without deserving to be "laughed out of the room."

First, SpaceX has reduced engineering and integration costs by reusing common components and simplifying designs at every step. they were (and I think, still are) using a pintle injector which is much less susceptible to catastrophic combustion oscillations than the more typical injector-face solution, at a cost of some performance. The tanks for all of their stages are the same diameter, allowing them to engineer and build one capital-intensive jig rather than two or three, and they get more experience with that hardware since all their work is done on it. They're using a pneumatic stage sep mechanism rather than a pyrotechnic one to eliminate material-handling, static, and other safery concerns related to pyrotechnics. Rather than relying on one or a few very large engines to power the first stage, they've chosen to use 9 smaller engines on the first stage and isolate each one in its own cato-proof container, again allowing them to gain more experience with a single system, prove its reliability, and leverage that experience and track record to perform a larger job.

Second, they have plans for full reusability of the launch system based on incremental changes to their existing systems. Yes, there is a fuel and performance penalty for going this route, but the savvy armchair aerospace critic will note that those penalties are expressed in tens of dollars per pound, whereas 100% disposal is measured in thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per pound. That is to say, even if reusability results in a 10-fold increase in fuel cost but allows vehicle cost to be amortized to negligibility, we're still approaching Musk's $500k/flight number. As to his actual plan, the fuel cost to land a booster segment is tiny compared to the cost of launching a vehicle. The first stage will simply reenter without having to retro-burn, and the second stage will need to retro-burn just enough to enter the atmosphere to achieve the rest of the braking. After that, the delta-v required is on the order of 100m/s, hardkly the 10km/s needed for orbit. You seem to know what you're doing, so I leave the derivation of that penalty, using the rocket equation, to you.

tl;dr: You're absolutely wrong in the most irrelevant way, and had you addressed SpaceX's achievements and plans in anything like a rigorous way, you could easily have answered your own question.

EDIT: The fuel cost for escape will not be sqrt(2) times the cost for circular speed. The real factor will be something more like 2 or 3, not 1.414... Still, we're in the range of $60/lb, not $6,000/lb.

So I was going to call bullshit on your price for rocket fuel given that regular gasoline is more expensive than this, but I looked up the price [http://www.desc.dla.mil/DCM/DCMPage.asp?PageID=722] and it turns out that's pretty close to the current price for JP-5. The most expensive fuel the DOD uses, JTS, is only $6/gallon.

Reasonable people can disagree, but I wouldn't bet on Musk being alive to see the first successful round trip to Mars. But I also wouldn't bet against something truly amazing coming out of his activities.

A little background. I'm old enough to have been "inspired" by the Space Shuttle Program near the point of its inception. Imagine a young mkn sitting down with a pencil and paper to work out how much it would cost to buy himself a ticket on the Space Shuttle at the promised $50/lb. I weighed 70 lbs. I knew it would be more than $3500 because I'd have to eat and breathe while I was up there. I wondered if I could go naked to save some cash. But still, it was a nice number. And then, the number changed. The promise went up to $100/lb. Fine. The math was easier. Oh, and the number of launches went from 26/year down to 12/year. Not quite the airline-style operations they had promised, but not bad. And then the price went to $500/lb. 3 or 4 launches per year. And then, the media just stopped talking about the costs and launch frequency, probably because it quit showing up in the press kits.

Tyson complains that we don't dream about the future anymore. He's right. We don't. But he complains without the slightest hint of irony. The promise of NASA was that the costs would come down. The promise was that spaceflight would become routine and affordable. The promise tapped into the then-current emphasis on mobility in the American Dream. Tyson is right that we don't dream about the future anymore. But we don't dream about it because NASA has proven to us what the future is. The future is NASA, and the future is stagnation. We have all been "inspired" by NASA. We don't dream because we don't need to. We know.

Tyson breathlessly opines about all the amazing things NASA could do with twice the budget. Missions to Mars! To those, I have this to say: Big fucking deal. The promise of NASA was never its "missions". The missions were a vehicle for the promise. The promise was ubiquitous space access. I'm going to see my cousin on the Moon. We're taking a year and seeing Mars. Sending some highly-selected and highly-trained spam in a can for some fahrt around a crater is not the promise. Sending you and me there for a fahrt around a crater is. Somehow or other, that part of the promise has slipped out of NASA enthusiasts memory. Long live NASA! All we have to do is pay twice as much!

The imagery of the Shuttle and of the new capsule is especially offensive. It's the easiest thing in the world to verify that the Shuttle was the most expensive launch system ever conceived in the history of manned space flight. It is, as I've hinted above, the primary reason for the complete demoralization of the populace with regards to space flight. And it was promised to be so much better than that. The Orion capsule is all that is left of that disgraced launcher program, the one that retained the disgraced SRBs to placate Morton-Thiokol.

NASA can't. That's my new slogan. Unlike other slogans, which are mainly inspirational, mine is intended to remind me of reality. Take any dream you have about space and phrase it as a question, and the answer is "NASA can't". Will we build orbiting habitats in space on a massive scale? NASA can't. Will we ever colonize the Moon or Mars? NASA can't. Will we ever be able to realistically dream of democratic access to space? NASA can't. Every time you hear Tyson speak, just remember: NASA can't. And it ain't for lack of funds.

I wish Tyson would other shut the hell up or direct his energies and oratorical gifts at making NASA an agency worth supporting. But, he won't. He's a cheap shill, and he's just going to keep doing his shabby job.

Why do you insist on slandering him by calling him a shill? There isn’t even so much as a hint that what he says are not really his views and convictions. If you want to challenge those, fine, but don’t slander him along the way.

Also: Have you considered that what you want might just be impossible with the money and resources Nasa has at its disposal? Not just for Nasa, for any organization, real or imagined. You seem to want an awful lot of them.

If you don't like the comment, it's a lot more productive to respond to its substance (why do you disagree?) than to share how it makes you feel.

Please show us your evidence that Neil deGrasse Tyson says what he does about NASA not because it's what he thinks but because he's paid to do so. You do have that evidence, right? Because you say repeatedly that he's a shill. Apparently you even know how much he's paid to do it ("He's a cheap shill"). So, evidence please.

Armstrong and Cernan are just the Spam in the can. They're glorified pilots. As such, they are extensions of the PR arm of NASA and the entrenched aerospace industries. I've phrased that a little harshly, but not by much. Certainly, as trained monkeys go, they are marvelously trained. And not just any monkey could be trained to perform as they did in their, and I emphasize, highly specialized and limited roles within the space program. But, when we see a well-trained dog, the credit goes to the master.

If Armstrong and Cernan were rocket designers, if they had captained a startup that created a new launch vehicle, then I could take their statements seriously. If they were systems integrators, if they were manufacturing engineers, if they were anything other than good pilots, then they might have something useful to add to the discussion on a national level. Until then, all I want to hear from them is how beautiful the Earth looks from space, how fun it is to play golf on the Moon, and various other fun facts about events that took place 40+ years ago.

I feel awful trying to cut these men down, trying to knock them back into place. However, the truly shameful thing is that they've used their legacy to usurp beyond their areas of expertise. I console myself that the bounds over which they've stepped are generous bounds, the bounds of heroes, and it takes a truly cataclysmic level of folly to behave as they have done. It would take nothing less than the legendary ego of a pilot.

Cernan and Armstrong, rest on your laurels, and get out of the way of people who are doing.

We could take a clip without context, or we could read what Armstrong and Cernan actually said:

http://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov...

http://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov...

Their main thesis seems to be that it's unwise to take a program that's currently functioning, took an enormous amount of time to get to where it is, and shutter it before its replacement is viable. To say nothing of the fact that NASA is laying off perhaps the world's best bucket of space-related institutional knowledge. Sure, many are finding employment at private space firms, but many aren't.

Yes, Cernan has been outspokenly pessimistic on the chances of private industry to get there in time, sure, but he's a guy who knows first hand what it takes to get a man into space when starting from scratch. And it's not an unreasonable perspective to say that we are gambling a known-quantity for an unknown, which, given the time it takes to get there, is unwise. Yes, let them develop, and let's help them all we can. But until they have the demonstrated capabilities that we're giving up, why don't we keep what we've got until we know what the transition will look like?

He's been quoted as saying:

"It has been the commercial space industry, under NASA’s leadership and guidance, that has allowed us to get to the moon and build a shuttle and everything that has happened in the last 50 years. To entirely turn it over without any oversight to the commercial sector, which is a word I question anyway, is going to take a long time. Some of these guys are highly qualified, but some are young entrepreneurs with a lot of money, and for them it’s kind of like a hobby. Not all of them. But some of them are making claims to get into space in five years for $10 billion, and even the Russians say it’s going to take twice as long if we put our eggs into that basket. I don’t have a lot of confidence in that end of the commercial space spectrum getting us back into orbit any time soon. I’d like to hear all these folks who call themselves commercial space tell me who their investors are. Tell me where their marketplace is. A commercial venture is supposed to use private money. And who are their users? Suppose we, NASA, have no need for their services. There’s no other marketplace for them. So is it really a commercial venture, or is it not? Is it a group of guys who have stars in their eyes and want to be a big space developer? I don’t know."

Those are not unfair questions.

"I don’t think they’ll come anywhere near accomplishing what they’ve said they can do. I said before Congress, and it’s still true today, they don’t yet know what they don’t know. We, if you’ll allow me to include myself with NASA, have been doing this for half a century. We have made mistakes. We’ve lost colleagues. Don’t you think we’ve learned from some of those mistakes? You bet your life we have. They have yet to learn from those mistakes."

Armstrong, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any problem with it. In fact, he actually supported the idea of giving serious consideration to the commercial proposals NASA received to keep the Shuttle running.

If we considered any other system of infrastructure--roads, water, the grid--and said, "let's shut it down before the private industry creates its replacement," we'd be laughed off the stage.

I'm all for doing things the most efficient way possible, but given the relatively low cost (remember that the Shuttle program costs the same as the UK bank bailout) of maintaining the Shuttle program for another 5-10 years while other options came online, I don't see how this rush to privatize is viewed with anything but complete skepticism of the current administration's strategy. They know full well they'll be out of office before any of these issues come up, and, like the one before it, seem content to kick the can far enough down the road to defer current issues to future administrations.

We've got a space station orbiting that we can continue to use for at least another 8 years, if we can get there. Our ability to do so is entirely dependent on a re-emerging power with interests contrary to ours. Or, some very brilliant, ambitious guys who are still a ways off from launching people.

The fact that their most recent launch mishap allegedly almost ended the program should be a massive wake-up call to anyone who thinks Cernan's completely wrong. What will happen when a mistake kills a few of our (dwindling) astronaut cadre?

Again -- I hope Musk knocks this one out of the park and goes down in history for it. But that's no reason to end a well-functioning program to score some political points and free up money to pour into voting blocs and bailouts.

Let's set aside questioning the notion of whether or not there even can be one universal set of skills that guarantee success merely through some conformance to a Platonic Ideal of Humanity for a second, and begin to construct a somewhat harsher, but more realistic, list.

1) Shutting up and getting to work--Yes, your mommy thinks you are special, and you think your kids are special, but nobody else does. Whether you're in service of a crappy manager inside some sucky megacorporation or trying to pry cash out of fickle customers, the only thing your gatekeepers care about is what you can do. So, do it. Turn off Facebook. Turn your phone off. Write your damned code or design your damned bridge and deliver it. Or push your resume around. Just turn off the distractions and make yourself go.

2) Conform--Again, Snowflake, you're one among a million lower-case-s snowflakes. Get over it. Go along to get along. If your so stuck on yourself that you can't dress down like a slobby developer when working with slobby devs, or put on banking attire if you code at a bank, then you're going to make people uncomfortable and make things worse for yourself. Go ahead, feel smugly superior about it as you do it, but do it. I'm sure they are all mindless automatons, but you can do it out of a conscious choice. Just remember, they can kill you, but they can't eat you. Snowflake.

3) Perform while depressed or discouraged--You're not a hothouse flower. You are an employee. Or an entrepreneur. You're a name to you and your friends, but your a number to somebody who's between you and a promotion. Or your next paycheck. You're not always going to be happy, and you're still going to have to meet your obligations, still going to have to provide value to someone or make progress to a goal that provides value to someone. Take a pill or drink a beer or cry on a shoulder, but don't stop performing until you can afford it.

4) Recognize bullshit--And recognize that it's everywhere. That's not a moral judgment. It's just the way it is. It's easy to spot in the obvious places, like advertisements, but not so easy in others, like when someone is blogging about the wonderful things they're going to instill in their children that the Bad Old Education System just won't for some reason. Everyone wants to blow smoke up your ass. Especially your parents. Especially parents who want to view themselves as enlightened friend-peer-guides to their crotch spawn. You're special, but not more special than Daddy's ego. Not really.

5) Watch out--Look out for number one. I don't mean to not play on a team. Just recognize that it's play, that it's a thing you do for certain reasons. Everyone else on the team is in the same situation, whether they realize it or not. Are your skills a threat to someone else on the team? Watch them. Be careful around them. Be a little paranoid while maintaining some perspective. It is not at all uncommon for someone of either gender to trump up a harassment claim to neutralize a rival. (Among many other stupid and counterproductive things.) Don't be paranoid, but be aware and smart.

That's a start. You get those things down, and "Problem solving", "Compassion", and "Tackling projects" will seem like the stress-free child's play that they are.

Good luck out there. You're gonna need it.

Let me welcome you to clinical depression. You can't concentrate for five minutes, and I mean it. Your productivity will be 0.01x the normal. Your error rate will be 100x. Half of your day is a struggle for not jumping out of the fucking window, right there, right now. The other half, you will spend crying in the bathroom, pushing through the pain. (And then some smug bastard tells you "what pain? suck it up", and you fall into suicidal ideation again.)

If I were your boss and discovered you were clinically depressed, I would pay you to go home and not work until you got well. Damn, I would pay your therapy, even. Simply put, depressed workers are bad for business.

Of course I am pissed off. Don't tell me that I should have worked my ass off when I was on SSRIs, and anything less is being a loser. Don't trivialize it. Shit, I can't fucking believe I made it through. And I wasn't even that majorly depressed.

Learning how to focus and building a high quality work ethic is important, but your advice is horrid. Following it is likely to lead a person to becoming a burnt out husk of a human being by the time they are 40, if not sooner.

Even a bit of humility about whether your personal vantage point and opinions are accurate pictures of the entire "real world" would help...

I can't stand either side in this debate over what attitudes students should be taught. One camp says "students need to learn how to be creative, independent, caring, and improve their self-esteem". The other camp says "harden the fuck up, and get ready for the real world". Neither side can justify 12 years of school. In either case, kids can be conditioned in about 3 months (the time it takes to go through army boot camp). 3 months afterwards, they'll have adjusted to whatever environment they found themselves in after graduating.

Hm. So a primary-secondary education can be recapitulated in 1 year when you're 18 years old. Then why the heck do we make such a big deal out of it? Why torment the kids with all that artificial stress?

I suggest - take control of your child's education. Make your family projects More important that busy-work homework. Take the heat for them from the teachers, and spend your emotional capitol teaching your kids some self-reliance, common sense and kindness.

Got three Eagle Scouts this way: Sgt Al, CMU grad-school graduate Joseph (1st job: working at a Mt View startup), and young Andrew auditioning at Julliard. A shed full of home-made trebuchets, chain and plate mail; a yard full of vines and trees; a watch tower 2 stories tall with gun slits and camo netting. They did all that. The schools had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Anyway a little off-topic but sure I agree, 'boot camp' at 18 will do more to prepare your well-rounded kid than 18 years of stressing over grades.

Does anyone remember when Monster.com had that super-bowl commercial? -- When I grow up, I want to climb my way into middle management!

I would rather instil a sense of wonder and kindness into my child than a sense of "look at this shit world, don't even think of trying to improve things within your bubble of influence... instead conform, and play the game like everyone else, then you'll grow up and be a real happy ranter like mkn here."

Yes I have to admit that if I had grown up with these values myself I would be perhaps be not getting myself into trouble so much .But hey...at least my life is fun :)

But I agree with you on the other things...always recognize bullshit and always watch out for the assholes!

Sometimes it's neccessary to reach a bigger goal.

And sometimes it's just easier to conform in some small areas you don't care about. Some people can't deal with the level of 'weirdness' they see in others - conform in some areas and get better relationships to them (and don't say you don't want relationships to those, sometimes one can't choose).

On the other hand you should never dress down and always dress a little better than the people you work with.

That said never interview for a dev position in a suit. I like wearing one, but there is a near perfect corellation between people expecting to wear a suit and stupidity.

Or university.

1. Sit down and shut up!

2. Be a conformist.

3. Keep your head down.

4. Listen to strangers, not parents.

5. Every one is out to get you.

Wow, how original!!!

Yeah, that's a silly one. I disagree with it, too. It's a good thing it appears nowhere in the fine article. Are you actually confused about the difference between frequency and amplitude? Or did you misread the article?

"24 bit doesn't offer any advantages to sound quality? Sheesh."

As brazzy rightly points out, "Sheesh" isn't a reasoned statement. It's an ejaculation. And, it turns out, the author talked about why sound engineers record with 24 bits; It has to do with pragmatic reasons about leaving room for the highest and lowest frequencies in the audio being recorded without clipping, as well as with the author's discussion of Nyquist considerations in the distributed product.

Your post is wrong in so many ways that would have been easily fixed by reading the linked article with even 8th-grade reading skills that the reasonable reader has to wonder if you're being deliberately obtuse. Are you?

Given that, we can probably look to progress in the "science" of management to get a feel for what progress in the "science" of language design is going to look like. That is to say, we probably can't expect anything at all in the way of progress. It's funny that there's a parallel between the conclusions in William Whytes' "The Organization Man" and "progress" in language design. Whyte concludes, one, that management in the abstract doesn't actually exist and, two, "management" taken as organizational oppressiveness and intrusion is actually a parasitic load on people trying to get work done, and ought be minimized. Look at the success of weakly-typed scripting languages like perl, js, ruby, python, and so on: the fewer strictures they impose on the data, the more work you can get done!

Researchers are just going to have to get over math and physics envy. The "truths" they discover are very unlikely to be anything like nearly as universal as physical truths. Structured programming, OOP, AOP, functional programming, or whatever else aren't ever going to fit into a proposition like "If we adopt ____, we find that blah," where blah is any kind of contingent claim relating to bugs or productivity. All we'll ever get are notions that whatever paradigm worked well in one context and poorly in another. Again, this is parallel to management. You can't manage programmers like auto workers like farm workers like service workers. Outside of algorithmic analysis, computer "science" has as little to say about programmer efficiency as management science has to say about how many weeks of parental leave you should give your employees.