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Check out Moonlite, a (hopefully) upcoming British mission to do just that.

Good for science, good for the comedy value of saying "penetrator" and giggling a lot.

http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/assets/channels/about/UK%20registry%20of%20Space%20Objects%202006.pdf
centaur.sstl.co.uk/SSHP/mini/mini60s.html
http://www.astronautix.com/project/skynet.htm

It's not exactly a neck-and-neck race for the title of "Most Abundend Element."

Nor abundant. Spellcheck would help you. That said, abundance wasn't the issue, and if you were much good at this, you'd realize that; you can fuse the output of hydrogen fusion too. Read what I wrote again, and keep reading it until you understand it.

whatever ridiculous engineering thing we're going to end up doing when it comes time to leave the nest and expand past Sol. Well, before we leave this planet, ...

"This septic tank isn't big enough. It barely handles the staff, and none of the prisoners are in the jail yet." "Well, it's fine *before* the prisoners get here."

Way to miss the point.

And if we're going to be leaving Sol any time soon, we'll have to pass this little thing on the way out called "Jupiter." I hear it has a little bit of raw hydrogen.

Way to continue to miss the exact same point. You really shouldn't take that tone in your voice until you've managed to stop being a dumbass.

"The bulk of stuff that isn't out in the sticks (galactic style) is in gas giants or stars;"

If you're talking interstellar scales, there are nebulae.

[G]alactic nebulae, [] are composed of the interstellar medium (the gas between the stars, with its accompanying small solid particles) within a single galaxy. Today the term nebula generally refers exclusively to the interstellar medium.

Yeah. Except for the stars, the Milky Way is a nebula. In general, wait until you know what you're talking about before you talk back; all you did was to accidentally repeat me. Nebular matter is the result of stellar wind. Now, before you get all huffy and dig up something that says 5% of the galaxy is nebular matter, please try to focus.

(I'm guessing for the sake of the example; don't waste your time getting an almanac.) Ten percent of all oil is bound up in grass. Does that mean grass is a good place to get oil? No: it's spread far too thin over far too big a space (the great plains) to be usable in any realistic fashion. Sure, let's say 80% of the salt on Earth is in the ocean. Why do we mine it? Why don't we just dredge the ocean? Let's say 50% of all topsoil is spread across the dustbowl states. Why don't we collect it? Why do we go to the effort of creating it?

One day, you'll try gathering something on a large scale in the physical world. On that day you will learn about the overhead of doing the actual collection. On that day, remember this post.

"Remember also please that the solar wind isn't really that abundant; it's just that the universe is ginormous."

But Jupiter is.

Wait, let me get this straight. I was talking about a timescale in which stars aren't much of a source of hydrogen, and you're still stuck on mining Jupiter? Has nobody pointed out to you how much bigger Jupiter isn't than our sun?

By the way, have you actually thought through the logistics of mining Jupiter? (No.) The hydrogen starts several hundred miles below the frozen helium. The metallic hydrogen is 6000 MILES down. Are you going to set up a flying mining base, then send big-ass cables down with balloons? Maybe just a really, reallllllly long pipe? (Is it filled with weed?)

Mining Jupiter is ridiculously unrealistic. There are better sources of hydrogen in this solar system. Quit flogging Jupiter.

Heck, there's enough in those to make Bussard ramjets feasable. ... Lay off the Star Trek.

Ahahahhahahahhaha. Lemme get this straight. First you're going to call Ramjets by their star trek name, falling for the wikipedia deception that somehow they're different than the ramjets from 1906 by Ren

Strange how some people have short term memory loss when something happens.

In this example. The European GPS system will actually fly. This is a system that was taken out first as a direct competitor to the GPS in the early 80's. Then as a new goal in the early 90's. And next, as an EU Project in the late 90's. Each time it was put back in the cupboard because it served it's purpose of bringing more interest to the topic of the day.

Now, the cost of keeping the current GPS system flying is becoming noticable. Contracts are finally starting to come to a close. New bidders are lined up at the gate ready to go. Nasa, thinking as an accountant, calls up the EU and asks how the GPS system is going. And lo and behold, it materializes. The plans were drawn out of that very dark area of the research lab and updated for a presentation to NASA. NASA offers some suggestions and markets the idea to other countries. And as with most things that go into space, this will have more than a few NASA bolts.

"The Minister referred to past and present success, stemming from close working within the international community. He also welcomed the recent agreement between the EU and US, which will enable Galileo, the new European civilian satellite navigation system, to complement existing US GPS services." http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/default.aspx?nid=3878

This agreement had as its core the possibility of GPS birds falling out of the sky without a replacement. **GASP**.
It was a pincher movement by NASA contractors. Toss a bit of fear about birds not being replaced due to the age of the equipment.

But the rare and mystical beast called the "NASA ACCOUNTANT" awoke for 5 minutes and killed the contractors.

Except it's not the American media - VNU are a British publishing company, and the artice is by Peter Williams of the British National Space Centre.
"In true British low-budget fashion" is surely a comment that could only have been written by a Brit, anyway?

An actual image of a planet-like body orbiting a star? No way!

But they're heading to Mars in the Beagle2 soon!

The Brits did actually engineer some good rockets like the The Black Arrow etc, and Prospero satellites in the 70's, the problem was with funding not the engineering, one of their rockets handled a massive payload if I remember correctly. They've maintained their military satellites from very early on, a new constellation of their SkyNet satellites have been launched over the last 18 months or so.