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Commercial versus non-commercial is about a company building a standard product which the government utilizes through firm fixed price contracts. SpaceX has a published price for a launch, and that's exactly what they charge. In contrast the traditional NASA approach has been to award cost plus contracts to major contractors and an army of subcontractors and NASA is more of a partner than a customer, building a one-off custom design. In this type of system cost overruns often get billed to the customer (NASA), but with firm fixed price the work is expected to be completed for the agreed upon price and SpaceX has stated that any cost overruns on their NASA programs above the fixed price launch costs will be covered by SpaceX, not NASA.

Contract vehicles notwithstanding, it also appears that even in NASA's opinion SpaceX is simply more efficient at getting things done than the usual NASA & defense contractor method probably due to reduced management and organizational overhead: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf

A big part of SpaceX's efficiency is that they are vertically integrated, doing most of the work themselves. With the non-commercial cost-plus model Congress had the ability to split up subcontracts for the shuttle development and manufacturing across the entire nation, with drastic hits to efficiency.

Although it may not seem like a totally commercial enterprise with NASA as the major source of SpaceX's revenue (for now), but there are important changes taking place in how NASA is acquiring launch capacity which seem like they have the capability to reduce costs over the past model

Building bases on the moon would necessitate engineering improvements that could save billions in earthquake damage over the next century. Quakes on the moon can last twenty times as long as those on the earth due to its rigidity.

Indeed. And the value elsewhere http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Sun&Display=Facts&System=Metric of 6.9551 x 10^5 km implies also an error of the order of 10km. But it differs by 500km (or 50 standard deviations)! This is an incredibly large difference between the measurements, given the error bars. Perhaps they are measuring different things, the radius at the equator won't be the same as the radius at the poles.

NASA seemed to know it's 696,000km long before this experiment.

You can come to your own conclusions on the matter. Here is the official "guideline" for NASA equipment on the Moon (it can't be rules because that would be a claim of sovereignty on the Moon):

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/617743main_NASA-USG_LUNAR_HISTORIC_SITES_RevA-508.pdf

The only way these rules could be enforced is for the U.S. government to claim these hunks of lunar real estate and establish them with National Monument status under the Antiquities Act of 1906 (16 USC 431–433). I've love to see National Park Service rangers go up to the Moon to enforce such laws.

Actually I would love to see the day come where there is a NPS ranger on the Moon in some sort of interpretive center near the Apollo 11 landing site, but I don't think that will happen in my lifetime. I certainly would love to bring some of these conspiracy nut cases up to the Moon and show them the sites myself, but then they would still claim it was some sort of NASA conspiracy that dressed up the landing site in the 21st Century in some sort of movie reenactment by James Cameron to falsify the record. Even bringing these idiots to the Moon won't convince them that people from the 1960's could achieve such a technological feat.

But the moon surface is rock stable.

I guess you've never heard of moon quakes. Rock stable my ass. Consider this the new thing you learned today.

NASA is still doing outstanding science with amazing teams. Just because the shuttles and ISS are a bit of a debacle hardly means NASA is in 'decay'. Please stop spreading this nonsense.

Current missions:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html

Future missions:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/future/index.html

Look at all that political decay.

Is this satire? I can't be sure.

Only 4 missions currently planned for the future ...
(Interestingly, where is JWST?)

The current missions looks impressive, until you discount "Hurricanes" and "Ice Bridge", etc. which aren't space missions in themselves, and Juno, which I believe is gone ...

NASA is still doing outstanding science with amazing teams. Just because the shuttles and ISS are a bit of a debacle hardly means NASA is in 'decay'. Please stop spreading this nonsense.

Current missions:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html

Future missions:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/future/index.html

Look at all that political decay.

Is this satire? I can't be sure.

Only 4 missions currently planned for the future ...
(Interestingly, where is JWST?)

The current missions looks impressive, until you discount "Hurricanes" and "Ice Bridge", etc. which aren't space missions in themselves, and Juno, which I believe is gone ...

There seem to be elongated star-trails and out-of-focus objects in the raw image. I've highlighted a few. What's interesting is that the star-trails aren't all in the same direction, or necessarily a spacecraft rotation artifact. Are these smaller objects in orbit around Methone, or the result of the image being a composite, perhaps?

Here's a guess: it apparently orbits in the E-ring, which is related to the jets of ice from Enceladus. Maybe these tiny ring particles are somewhat sticky and have been accumulating on the surface for a long time, thus covering craters from larger objects? I seem to recall some of the small moons within Saturn's rings also having anomalously smooth surfaces. Ah, here we go: Atlas and Pan. These two are not completely smoothed all over, but have accreted material along the plane where they sit in the ring. For Methone, the E-ring is quite broad, so perhaps the same effect smooths the whole thing?

I watched a video on Elon Musk which stated that raw materials come in to the factory in Hawthorne, CA and rocket parts come out the other side. I believe most of their 1500+ employees are in CA (awesome vid of them cheering the launch here). Hawthorne is about a mile from LAX and they can probably just take the parts over to LAX and put them on a big transport and fly them. I'd be willing to bet that transport costs are but a tiny tiny fraction of the human resource cost of the project.

Transportation costs would probably be minor by comparison, true.

And SpaceX won't be dealing with anything the size of the shuttle external tank, which had to be shipped by covered barge from around New Orleans. The Falcon components could also be transported by rail, since no one section of the rocket itself is wider than the old shuttle SRBs (Falcon: 3.2m, SRBs: 3.7m). The fairing, or payload capsule, is 5.2m though, too wide for train tunnels, so those parts probably have to shipped or flown.

There's probably some pages out there saying how the components are transported, but a quick Google didn't turn up anything useful.

In India, not very long at all

The transit of venus will be visible from most of North America (assuming no weather issues):

Unfortunately, the NASA eclipse website's taking a hammering today, but this should be the map (try the link tomorrow)

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/tran/TOV2012-Fig01.pdf

And there's an official gathering near you, too:

http://venustransit.gsfc.nasa.gov/events/viewapprovedevent/id/212

For the transit times & path from your area, see:

http://transitofvenus.nl/wp/where-when/local-transit-times/

The transit of venus will be visible from most of North America (assuming no weather issues):

Unfortunately, the NASA eclipse website's taking a hammering today, but this should be the map (try the link tomorrow)

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/tran/TOV2012-Fig01.pdf

And there's an official gathering near you, too:

http://venustransit.gsfc.nasa.gov/events/viewapprovedevent/id/212

For the transit times & path from your area, see:

http://transitofvenus.nl/wp/where-when/local-transit-times/

Oops spaceport here

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/nexgen/Nexgen_Downloads/Spaceport_Visioning_Final_Report.pdf

Annular eclipses occur every 15 months on average.

NASA have a lot of solar eclipse stats for anyone interested.

The issue isn't the physical damage from the expanding nebula but the intense energy (mostly gamma-ray) burst that happens when the star collapses. Basically anything within a few hundred light years gets hammered by a shotgun of energy if it's aligned with the poles of the star.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst

http://f64.nsstc.nasa.gov/gbm/
More reading on our monitoring attempts, though anything that would hit us would be noticed pretty much about the time it hit us.

how is that insightful??
"another asteroid between 4.5 and 10 meters (14-33 feet) wide" just missed the Earth. Go look at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ for real data. Thing is we are in estimated 95 percentile about potentially hazardous asteroids now.

Basically for about 4 months of every year I am working for the government and only for the government. For that period of time I am not benefiting from my own labor at all.

Not benefiting at all? Really? Ever drive on a road? Ever go to a public school? Ever go to the park? Ever use any of these technologies derived from government research? Where do you think the money comes from to pay for these things?

Hell, you obviously use the internet, which was made possible in a large part due to DARPA, along with other technologies you probably benefit from daily in your cushy first world life including RADAR, GPS, helicopters, jet engines, tanks, atomic power, and soon to be autonomous vehicles.

Actually, as Kepler is using a transit methodology to find planets, there is nothing conclusive to say that these stars don't have large orbiting bodies. While I do accept that when looking at a large volume of stars, at least some of these should show transits by planets, but given the chances of a transit of a planet at roughly 1 AU is 0.47%, then these 365 superflares should have statistically shown one single transit event. I wouldn't consider that to be conclusive proof by any stretch. I am going to call Occam's razor on this one.

... is that great wall supposed to be visible from space?

They may have slightly exaggerated that claim

Yeah, I noticed the same thing. I would have thought that with 1km resolution you might be able to pick out a vague smudge where some some of the larger cities in India and China that were visible from the satellite, but no, just massive amounts of chromatic aberation from the imaging method used. Clearly roads are going to be out, so I tried again with the 1080p video clip - thought that maybe Mumbai or Shanghai would show up as a brighter spot in the darkness - after all you can see city lights on much lower resolution NASA images, right? No such luck. Clearly we are not visible from outerspace in the wavelengths scanned by Elektro-L No.1, or the lights didn't survive the image processing technique. No way we're going to attract the attention of any passing aliens at this rate. Whether that's a good thing or bad, is entirely up to the reader...

The "Blue Marble" image you're pointing at is based on EOS (Terra/Aqua) imagery. The most recent NASA Blue Marble (Blue Marble 2012) is a composite based on the new NPP Suomi spacecraft, with approximately a 1-km pixel resolution.

As to "accurate"... I think the Blue Marble images (based on the visible-light band sensors of their respective spacecraft) are closer to what a naked eye in orbit would perceive than the Russian imagery, which seems to include false-color infrared. But "naked eye in orbit" is scientifically less useful than the multi-spectral IR and visible all of these spacecraft can sense.

NASA's blue marble photo is what I'm used to seeing http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/57000/57723/globe_east_540.jpg

So why does it look different in Russian photos? What version is more accurate?

One reason the NASA global-coverage image sets that were released in 2002 (with updates starting in 2005) have become the de-facto standard source is that: 1) anyone can download them; and 2) they're in the public domain, so anyone can use them for any purpose. You can get a bunch of versions here and from the Visible Earth site linked at the bottom of that page.

This one looks cool, but further use will be limited if the only thing I can do with it is look at it in this online zooming browser.

The problem with your talking points is that they are blatant lies.

No, stuborn fact. You just don't realize it yet.

Then what is the relevance? Do you really not understand the difference between local (2% of the planet or so) and global? But you didn't specify the US did you? You wrote: "The warmest decade for the 1900s was the 1930s" - nothing about this only being the US. You have been caught red-handed again.

What do you mean again? You haven't caught me the first time. Perhaps it was my fault. I presumed that if you had anywhere near knowledge in this area that you pretend you do, you would know precisely what I was talking about. Mr. Hansen is after all, an 800 Lbs gorilla in the room. Hard to know about this subject and not know about him and what happened. More to my point that you don't know what you are talking about.

Actually, the sun has had a cooling trend for nearly 40 years. And how did you miss the part of that page which says "bout 90% of the global warming followed the CO2 increase"? Face it, you were just spewing another denialist talking point because you are clueless, and now you are trying to pretend that the article supports your nonsense.

Ok, now is where I can really hit you with a clue-by-four. OTHER planets have been warming and you can see it (stuborn facts again), the sun isn't cooler. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html http://reinep.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/sun-is-getting-hotter-burning-the-planet-according-to-swiss-and-german-scientists/ Many, Many other articles on this as well. Even Pluto has been warming though to be fair, that's not scientific since it's beyond the capability of our instruments to conclusively say that. Clearly there is reason to believe that, however. Some denier sites or I suppose "green sites" to you try to explain the damning evidence away. No man on Mars to get rid of that CO2 ice. So they try to baffle you with bullshit, something they do really well. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Speaking of Mr. Hansen (above), he had an article in the NY Times today. "Sky is falling" sums it up. Apparently he can't read his own predictions. He says he was right. Even your skeptical site says he was wrong. Not surprising I found some sites that say he was right. Not that I expect you'll have any sort of clue how to read and understand it (you need to be a scientist who works with this stuff or a very bright guy, otherwise you'll probably misunderstand it), it's here - http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1981/1981_Hansen_etal.pdf . Yes, that really is the famous report. Not to say he's all wrong, there is some very good information in that report. If you're really bright you'll see why I disagree with him and you'll likely agree with me from now on. I guess I'll see how bright you are. Not if you agree with me or not of course. Being bright doesn't mean you agree with me. Maybe you'll understand what I was saying about the Gaia scientists in the beginning. You probably need a lot more context for that though.

Al Gore is irrelevant. He is not a scientist. I realize that you hate science and can't be bothered to refer to actual scientists, though.

Al is irrelevent? Thanks for the laugh! Of course you're right about Al and science. At best he was just a washed up newspaper reporter who wanted to be super man and save the world. Remember Al as you pay more for electric, gas and just about everything else coming up. See how irrelevent you think it is as you pay Al a bunch of money. By then I'm hopeful that you'll realize it's a bunch of money for nothing. Income ensured by laws.

Given that a Shuttle launch only costs around $150m* USD, I suspect you're way off base.

Have any sources? I do.

Here's a nice movie from the NASA CO2 satellite:

http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/news_archive/2010-03-30-CO2-Movie/

You can see that global CO2 levels rise fairly evenly, with Antarctica only lagging the Northern Hemisphere by a few years. Over the time scales involved in the ice cores this lag would be invisible. Also note the scale: it's 360 to 390 ppm, so although the colours look dramatic, the differences being shown are mostly less than 10% of the total and roughly equal to the annual variation.

Because an astronaut on Mars with a shovel can do more in 10 minutes than two robotic rovers can do in a year.

So you're from the John Henry school of space exploration? Distance from Earth to Mars:

"What you want to do is launch the spacecraft so it goes around the Sun to meet Mars," says Moriba Jah at NASA(slashcode fuckup)s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a navigator on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. "We give it the least amount of energy possible and let the Sun's gravity do as much as it can for us."

Cab fare to the corner store not included. From Flight to Mars: the Return Trip:

If astronauts from Earth ever land on Mars, they must choose between waiting over one year for the right conditions to occur, or else taking a more direct but less economical ride home.

The economical trip home is another 200 plus days in space, necessitated if some future administration comes up a bale of metric astrobucks short of heroic funding levels. 200 days out, ten minutes of geological work, then a year tending the Moisture Evaporators while munching through a Walmart barge of NASA MRE rations, followed by another 200 days home.

The mechanical tortoise is looking good. If only it could fly planes.

Imagine, you live in a civilization that can build R2D2 or assemble a Death Star in space, but Greedo's blaster can't lock onto the biggest ego this side of Andromeda from three feet out. Space logic. The worst logic ever.

Point 1: That one is pretty near zero doubt: NASA data. There are other sources as well, and even anti-AGW folks usually acknowledge a rise.

Yup, that's a given, but you have to start somewhere, and temperatures have been roughly flat since 1998.

Point 2: Too vague to answer usefully, because "significant" is not defined. That means that a pro-AGW and an anti-AGW will see the same data and come to opposite conclusions about whether it's significant.

Exactly - it's a valid point of debate, that also feeds into discussion of 6, 7, 8 (as opposed to dogma of pro-AGW folks). There is a point, (e.g. 10C/yr) where it's simply fact, but we're not there.

Point 3: Probably yes - ... this is a reasonably accurate hypothesis. This is about as close as we'll be able to come to a definitive yes without a couple more planet Earths and a few centuries to test things out more thoroughly.

My point exactly. It's reasonable, but there's a lot of reasonable doubt here without more Earths and more centuries, and certainly not a validated scientific truth.

Point 4: Probably yes (see point 3), but even if not this isn't entirely relevant. If it's caused by something else (cow farts, volcanos, etc), we still need to clean up the mess if we're going to survive.

It goes to #5 - if it's orbital fluctuations, we probably can't fix it.

Point 5: Almost definitely no. The reason is that those with the power to do something about it have a vested interest in not doing anything. In other words, the problem is politics, not science.

There are many politicians who would love to do something about it, because it gives them more tax dollars, greater authority, and reinforces that feeling that they know better than the peons.

Point 6: Most studies on the theorized effects of global climate change on economies give this one a definite yes. Although the sea level thing is the one that's entered popular culture, the problems include desertification of farm land, water shortages, increased number and strength of tropical storms / hurricanes / monsoons, and the political fallout from all of those (starving homeless people tend to do desperate things like start wars).

It seems to be popular culture these days to theorize on the disasters that could befall mankind. The point is there could be upsides, like perhaps farming in Siberia and Canada that could feed millions. I for one am not arrogant enough to assume that the optimal temperature of Earth is what it was in 19XX.

Point 7: All of your listed actions are pretty much fantasy. What most governments are actually talking about is regulating the emission of CO2 in much the same way that they've regulated the emission of SO2.

Cap and Trade would cost trillions... why do you say I am dreaming?

Point 8: Fairly high, for the reasons laid out in point 5.

Yup - another reason not to monkey with things we don't fully understand.

Basically, the way I see it, there's a problem, and we're absolutely screwed because those who might be able to do something effective about it don't want to. There's just too much short-term gain in doing nothing for anyone to really do something.

Well you've acknowledged (admirably) that there is doubt in some of these things, so I say if there's doubt in the existence of the problem, doubt in the extent of the problem, doubt if it's even a bad thing, doubt in how to "fix" it, and doubt in whether or not or fix would make things worse, I doubt we should be doing anything drastic about it.

Point 1: That one is pretty near zero doubt: NASA data. There are other sources as well, and even anti-AGW folks usually acknowledge a rise.

Point 2: Too vague to answer usefully, because "significant" is not defined. That means that a pro-AGW and an anti-AGW will see the same data and come to opposite conclusions about whether it's significant.

Point 3: Probably yes - Correlations between change in temperature and human emission of CO2. That's obviously not complete proof of causation, but it's indicative of either a causal link one way or the other or an unknown third factor that just happens to match other factors. An experimentally tested mechanism for CO2 emissions causing change in temperature says that this is a reasonably accurate hypothesis. This is about as close as we'll be able to come to a definitive yes without a couple more planet Earths and a few centuries to test things out more thoroughly.

Point 4: Probably yes (see point 3), but even if not this isn't entirely relevant. If it's caused by something else (cow farts, volcanos, etc), we still need to clean up the mess if we're going to survive.

Point 5: Almost definitely no. The reason is that those with the power to do something about it have a vested interest in not doing anything. In other words, the problem is politics, not science.

Point 6: Most studies on the theorized effects of global climate change on economies give this one a definite yes. Although the sea level thing is the one that's entered popular culture, the problems include desertification of farm land, water shortages, increased number and strength of tropical storms / hurricanes / monsoons, and the political fallout from all of those (starving homeless people tend to do desperate things like start wars).

Point 7: All of your listed actions are pretty much fantasy. What most governments are actually talking about is regulating the emission of CO2 in much the same way that they've regulated the emission of SO2.

Point 8: Fairly high, for the reasons laid out in point 5.

Basically, the way I see it, there's a problem, and we're absolutely screwed because those who might be able to do something effective about it don't want to. There's just too much short-term gain in doing nothing for anyone to really do something.

It was also once consensus that the Earth was the center of the universe.

But it wasn't published in peer reviewed journals. I dare say at the time there was no "scientific community" and that nationality determined which intellectual circles you could run in. Although I do agree that, to compare the state of where we are today, you would need to go back to pre-Renaissance times.

A consensus of people in some places think it's okay to stone adulterers.

Yeah, a consensus of people who were not scientists. Who were not using statistics or science at all ... who were basically calling themselves judge, jury and executioner. Again, what these strange archaic Puritanical concepts have to do with modern scientific consensus is well beyond me. I link you 18 scientific associations' assertions on global warming and you refute it with some ancient lynching. Apples to oranges.

Just because a majority of people believe something is true doesn't mean that it is.

It's really weird that when the top minds of physics postulate that black holes exist, we're not adverse to it. But when the top minds of climate science agree on something, suddenly we are the armchair scientists who are better than those who have studied this most of their lives and have compiled samples from decades past from around the world. And the key difference seems to be that you don't want to face the consequences. You're okay with no longer using CFCs, you're okay with trying to wrap our minds around the existence of black holes and could you tell me why now you choose to shove your fingers in your ears and scream "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."

You can point out factual errors in another's post without going down the road of "cheap rhetoric" and "buillshit" in your own.

This befuddles me the most. The original post I replied to said:

Last I knew, it was still heavily debated exactly how much of an effect humans have had on global warming compared to natural causes (IE: volcanic eruptions).

So I provide a citation and hard numbers on man-made CO2 versus volcanoes. And you label that "cheap rhetoric" and "buillshit"?

The Cherry Blossom festival happened sooner than ever in its history this year in DC and NASA says it's not just cherry blossoms but all plants (published in Nature's May 2nd issue, a peer-reviewed journal). Of course, this natural basic indicator of the state of the climate doesn't have an immediate perceived threat to mankind's existence so you're free to keep your fingers in your ears. At some point though, it's going to become annoying, then problematic for third world countries, then it will slowly climb the chain up to the protected Americans. And then, and only then, will we be willing to do something about it. When it's too late.

Yes, it couldn't possibly be adversaries, and people want to do harm to the United States, in an environment where people like you firmly believe that everything must be a "false flag" operation designed to somehow take away your rights.

...

Or, it could be this:

Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation
http://www.uscc.gov/researchpapers/2009/NorthropGrumman_PRC_Cyber_Paper_FINAL_Approved%20Report_16Oct2009.pdf

Occupying the Information High Ground: Chinese Capabilities for Computer Network Operations and Cyber Espionage
http://www.uscc.gov/RFP/2012/USCC%20Report_Chinese_CapabilitiesforComputer_NetworkOperationsandCyberEspionage.pdf

How China Steals Our Secrets
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-our-secrets.html

China's Cyber Thievery Is National Policy—And Must Be Challenged
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203718504577178832338032176-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwOTEwNDkyWj.html

FBI Traces Trail of Spy Ring to China
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203961204577266892884130620-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNzEwNDcyWj.html

NSA: China is Destroying U.S. Economy Via Security Hacks
http://www.dailytech.com/NSA+China+is+Destroying+US+Economy+Via+Security+Hacks/article24328.htm

Chinese Espionage Campaign Targets U.S. Space Technology
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-04-18/chinese-espionage-campaign-targets-u-dot-s-dot-space-technology

Report: Hackers Seized Control of Computers in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/jet-propulsion-lab-hacked/
http://oig.nasa.gov/congressional/FINAL_written_statement_for_%20IT_%20hearing_February_26_edit_v2.pdf

Chinese hackers took control of NASA satellite for 11 minutes
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/chinese-hackers-took-control-of-nasa-satellite-for-11-minutes-20111119/

Chinese hackers suspected of interfering with US satellites
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/27/chinese-hacking-us-satellites-suspected

Former cybersecurity czar: Every major U.S. company has been hacked by China
http://www.itworld.com/security/262616/former-cybersecurity-czar-every-major-us-company-has-been-hacked-china

China Attacked Internet Security Company RSA, Cyber Commander Tells SASC
http://defense.aol.com/2012/03/27/china-attacked-internet-security-company-rsa-cyber-commander-te/

Chinese Counterfeit Parts Keep Flowing

Really? Are you serious? When Bush was president and Republicans held both houses, the Shuttles were flying, a replacement was planned and funded (Constellation program), and the James Webb Telescope and Mars exploration programs were secure.

Sure, but all this was accomplished with unrealistic budgeting. Here's what the independent review board studying Constellation had to say:

Since Constellation’s inception, the program has faced a mismatch between funding and program content.

[HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT Plans Committee]

The report goes on to say:

Simply extending existing ambitious programs “to fit the money” is seldom a solution to the
resource dilemma. The impact of fixed costs and technological obsolescence soon overwhelms any such strategy. In the Committee’s travels, it encountered widespread support for this policy of realism—although it is likely that most proponents were thinking of having more money, not less program. Should the latter turn out to be the case, much of that conviction is likely to vanish.

Constellation was architecturally sound, but the program management and planning were a disaster. Constellation was never funded enough to get done on time, and the plans didn't account for having to pick up fixed costs borne by the Shuttle program after that program wound down. In a nutshell, Constellation Program delays were going to be much more costly than the plans suggested, and its funding pretty much guaranteed delays. The story is much the same with the Webb telescope: good idea, lousy financial planning control.

This doesn't mean that Bush was anti-NASA or anti-space exploration. It just means it was more important to them to state an ambitious goal than to actually achieve it. That is manifest by its budgeting. They spent an enormous amount of money to be able to claim they were were making progress, but not enough to actually accomplish something.

I think it is the Left that is big on NASA cuts, as NASA is under mostly military spending.

Odd... If NASA were military, someone would just say it's to fight the TERRORISTS! and it would receive unlimited funding.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/hqlibrary/ic/faqs.html

Is NASA a part of the Department of Defense?
 
NASA is not a part of the Department of Defense, nor of any other Cabinet-level department. NASA's administrator reports directly to the White House.

atmosphere consisting of over 95% carbon dioxide

It might be made up of interesting stuff for plants, but it is exceptionally sparse. At surface level (even at the lowest point) it is a mere 0.1675 psi where earth has a sea level pressure of around 14.69 psi. This leads plants to do some funny things. NASA has been experimenting with plants and low pressures for a while now but it isn't going all that well - the plants think there is a drought when the low pressure basically sucks all the moisture from them - even if they are hydrated very well.

it's nowhere close to the water level found on Earth

The evidence for larger quantities of water may lie well below the surface. Far out of reach of the current rovers. Hence the reason for Curiosity. Stay tuned...

Here's the link to the experiment

I hope you are being serious, because those are actually important questions and strike at the core of the science (not the politics) of Global Warming.

3/4 of the world is water how many consistent accurate readings do we have from the oceans before say 1950.

Sea surface temperature is a good global thermometer and was first systematically recorded during the Challenger Expedition from 1872-1876. Read "135 years of global ocean warming between the Challenger expedition and the Argo Programme" for more detail.

So we have sixty years of accurate readings world wide could there possibly be a 70 year trend that we are missing ?

The simple answer is: Yes, there could be a 70 year trend we are missing. The El Nino cycle was arguably only first described in detail in 1969, so it is possible there are other trends we do not know about.

The planet is 4 billion years old, the last ice age was 10,000 years ago I don't think the sample is large enough for us to make a good decision.

There are temperature paleo-proxies that can be used as thermometers for the deep past. Some examples include sediment cores, ice cores, corals, tree rings, and leaf remains which provide a variety of information about the climate based on stable isotopes and other indicators. Ice cores give us a continuous record going back hundreds of thousands of years, while other proxies give incomplete records from millions of years in the past. I encourage you to challenge the validity of these proxies and learn about stable isotope fractionation.

How much of the atmosphere is CO2... not 90 percent but less than one percent correct and what is the the human contribution to that only a small fraction.

The atmosphere contains about 820 Pg of carbon, approximately 0.04% by volume. Each year, the net flux of carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuels and land use changes is estimated at approximately 4.1(±0.04) Pg -- only 0.5% increase per year.

We are not the cause.

While the Earth's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide has a disproportionately large effect on controlling temperature. To prove it to yourself, you can do a physical experiment with two soda bottles and some alka-seltzer. We are measurably the cause of a small net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (see above); however, if you want to be sceptical you should ask whether that short term increase will lead to a long term temperature change.

Couldn't the dissenters just respond, "You've asserted that atmospheric carbon is causative with global temperature increases. The last ten years contradict that assertion. The increase of atmospheric carbon has continued unabated even while temperatures have remained more-or-less flat."?

10 years is too short a time. Look at these plots. In any 10 year period you could easily fit a constant to the data, but you could also fit quite a steep slope; the shorter term fluctuations are too large to distinguish the two. However I think even the most jaded sceptic would have difficulty denying the worrying ~0.5 degrees C increase in the mean temperature anomaly since the 1960s, which is far outside of any of the error bars, and increasing almost linearly over that time.

Prior to the last decade or so, even those who disagreed with the AGW premise didn't make the claim that warming wasn't happening. Or, at least, they were forced to abandon it if they did. Recently, though, they've taken to claiming that warming has stalled. You're saying it hasn't. On what basis do they maintain that it has?

How about the right graph in Figure 3 here. It certainly seems to show a relatively flat period from approx. 2002-2012.

Pluto Closest Approach In:
1168 Days
20 Hours
07 Min
41 Sec

Then you'll have your answer.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

The "current IPCC report" 2007 (Fourth) explicitly did not consider sea level rise and gave _lower_ numbers than the Third
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ar5/ar5-leaflet.pdf
"due in 2014, will provide an update"
What do we know better now?
Example: See the illustrations at: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/rosenzweig_03/

Delta V isn't the only metric. Trip times and frequency of launch windows are also a consideration. The moon has 3 days trip times and from a given low earth orbit, launch windows are every two weeks.

The Planetary Resources people are correctly calling *water* the most valuable space resource. Propellant high on the slopes of earth's gravity well would revolutionize space transportation. And less expensive space transportation is a prerequisite for mining asteroidal metals.

And there is thought to be large deposits of water ice at the lunar poles.

Another advantage the moon has is 3 second light lag. Most of the time a typical NEA will have a light lag of tens of minutes. Luna's closeness makes high bandwidth doable, LRO achieved 100 megabytes per second. These are important advantages if the mining is done by telerobots.

I am hoping the volatiles in the lunar cold traps will eventually ping on Planetary Resources' radar.

And it doesn't matter if the number could be arbitrarily large, as you contend, because the probability could still be small enough that there is only one planet with life, since you don't know what it is.

If the universe is actually infinite, which is what current cosmology suggests, and the probability of life arising is a purely random event, then by probability life has arisen an infinite number of times, and there's even somebody typing this very same comment out an infinite number of times.

Planetary Resources' first goal is water. And the moon has water. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/multimedia/feature_ice_like_deposits.html

Delta V isn't the only metric. Trip times and frequency of launch windows are also a consideration. The moon has 3 days trip times and from a given low earth orbit, launch windows are every two weeks. The Planetary Resources people are correctly calling *water* the most valuable space resource. Propellant high on the slopes of earth's gravity well would revolutionize space transportation. And less expensive space transportation is a prerequisite for mining asteroidal metals. And there is thought to be large deposits of water ice at the lunar poles. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/multimedia/feature_ice_like_deposits.html Another advantage the moon has is 3 second light lag. It's closeness makes high bandwidth doable, LRO achieved 100 megabytes per second. These are important advantages if the mining is done by telerobots. I am hoping the volatiles in the lunar cold traps will eventually ping on Planetary Resources' radar.

Conveniently, NASA's latest budget request quadruples the asteroid detection budget.

However, this asteroid is too small to have been in scope for NASA's asteroid detection. NASA's asteroid detection is focused on objects 1 kilometer or larger. As others pointed out, the much smaller obejcts that NASA does track are in Earth orbit. Tracking small objects in Earth orbit is both more achievable (they're always relatively close to Earth!) and more important (they pose a ongoing hazard to spacecraft, both manned and robotics.) Small asteroids pose relatively little threat -- they burn up in the atmosphere in a single pass. And they're really hard to detect. So NASA doesn't even try.

[Posting in part to undo a bad moderation.]

That was one, single cold winter.

The melting continues.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/thick-melt.html

Retrieval of Asteroidal Materials [1979]
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19790024063_1979024063.pdf
BRIAN O'LEARY, MICHAEL 1. GAFFEY, DAVID 1. ROSS, and ROBERT SALKELD
Earlier scenarios for mass-driver retrieval of asteroidal materials have been tested and refined after new data were considered on mass-driver performance, favorable delta-V opportunities to Earth-approaching asteroids with gravity assists, designs for mining equipment, opportunities for processing volatiles and free metals at the asteroid, mission scenarios, and parametric studies of the most significant variables. We conclude that the asteroid-retrieval option is competitive with the retrieval of lunar materials for space manufacturing, while a carbonaceous object would provide a distinctive advantage over the Earth as a source of consumables and raw materials for biomass in space settlements during the 1990's. We recommend immediate studies on asteroid-retrieval mission opportunities, an increased search and followup program, precursor missions, trade-offs with the Moon and Earth as sources of materials, and supporting technology.

insignia for this program? http://www.flickr.com/photos/45676693@N03/6959137824/in/set-72157629163524738/