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News flash: NASA got too optimistic

 
 
 
Trying to go to space on the cheap has had disastrous consequences in the past
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-has-had-disastrous-consequences-in-the-past/

When reporters asked the first U.S. man in space, Alan Shepard, what he thought about as he sat atop a Mercury launch vehicle, he's said to have responded, "The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder."
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The cause of the failure remain unknown. But Orbital has marketed the Antares as a "cost effective" way to launch payloads, due at least in part on its reliance on recycled Soviet-era rocket engines — a move that has drawn criticism from some, including competitor SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk. Here's what he told Wired in a 2012 interview:

One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.​
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True these engines were made 50-60 years ago, but properly stored they can last much longer than that.
 
I thought the program was to develop new rockets. How is it we will still be dependent on outside resources?
 
Space tourism is probably about as safe as flying on a Russian made commercial jet.
 
I confess, I still don't get Loren Pechtel's joke. I understand that there is supposed to be one, I simply don't understand what it is.
 
Emily Lake said:
I confess, I still don't get Loren Pechtel's joke. I understand that there is supposed to be one, I simply don't understand what it is.
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He pretends to misunderstand that the name of the rocket is the goal of the mission. And that it's a surprise that the technology to boost high school science fair projects into near earth orbit is insufficiently mature to deliver a payload to Antares. It's kind of like the setup before Emily Latella turns to the camera and says 'Never mind.'
 
Emily Lake said:
I confess, I still don't get Loren Pechtel's joke. I understand that there is supposed to be one, I simply don't understand what it is.
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Well, "Going for Antares" in "Going for Antares was apparently too much, it crashed into the launch pad" has two different meanings.
In one case "Antares" is a rocket and "going" means physically moving.
In other case "Antares" is a star (actual star in the sky) and "going for" means "trip to"
 
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Emily Lake said:
Any joke where the audience has to play dumb in order for the humor to be found is just a bad joke...
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No, no.
That's the essence of satire. The idea that someone, somewhere, would take your statement at face value. That's the whole idea of a Poe, a statement made in jest that we suppose at least one fundamentalist would accept as a truth. Or even nod in agreement because that was stated in last Sunday's sermon.

It's just usually, you do enough prep work so that the people you're trying to entertain are 'in' on the joke. And the 'people who think this is true' are largely a hypothetical audience. Loren just didn't do enough ground work in the set-up. Or, you know, any.
Gilda Radner always made sure everyone knew where Emily Latella had lost the bubble, or made an unsupportable assumption ormisheard a lyric. And by it being Gilda Radner in costume, you already knew there was a joke coming, too.
 
I suppose I will simply chalk this up to my lack of humor then. Anything more sophisticated than puns is often lost on me.
 
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