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It is mostly highschool aged students pushed by their respective schools so the school can get some local press.

This guy Cygan is from the Warsaw University, not from a high school. His colleagues from the same departament already won other prizes: ACM IPC and Top Coder 2003.

I should probably submit this as a seperate story but I'm too lazy. Here's a quote from a story at DigitalJournal.com to remind us what NASA originally promised:

"David Aiken, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, worked at the Kennedy Space Center soon after the shuttle program was approved in 1972.

He believes that in hindsight the reusability aspect of the Space Shuttle was grossly overestimated.

'Actually the original mission model had 500 missions in ten years for a fleet of five orbiters. Every orbiter was going to fly every two weeks. The idea was that it would land, you would do 160 hours worth of work on it, that's basically two shifts per day five days a week for two weeks - and then you'd be back on the launch pad ready to launch again,' he says. 'Now it's turned out that it doesn't take 160 hours of time to turn it around again, it probably takes more like 3,000 hours of time.'"

Yeah, yeah, I know all about all of the unknowns that they faced. The pioneers are the ones who get arrows in their chests. But this is ridiculous.

I remember NASA experts and PR flacks saying so glibly how using expendable rockets was like driving across the country and throwing away the car after every trip.

Yeah and maybe shooting a gun is like throwing a really tiny knife and leaving it in the target.

Maybe rocketships aren't like cars. Maybe we would have been way, way better off in terms of cost--and probably human lives--if we had stayed with expendables.

In another example, England apparently has a decent chunk of gun violence, yet strict gun control laws

I hate to get involved in gun-control arguments, but...could anyone post a link supporting this?

Here's a couple of links for you to chew on. :-)