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is at http://www.space.com/11336-space-race-united-states-soviets-spaceflight-50years.html

Why do we keep getting second hand news links?

Anyone else read this article yesterday?

http://www.space.com/11084-supermoon-earthquake-storm-natural-disasters.html

Not that I believe in astrology, but that's quite a coincidence.

That'd be...

CNN

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/30/100-percent-chance-for-life-on-newly-found-planet/

Space.com

http://www.space.com/9225-odds-life-newfound-earth-size-planet-100-percent-astronomer.html ,and a host of others. This was in mainstream press. Not tabloids.

There are a few scientists around who occasionally say idiotic things. Unfortunately, sometimes they do it in front of reporters. This would be one of those times.

I sure wish people would Google before asking such easily answered questions...

That'd be...

CNN

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/30/100-percent-chance-for-life-on-newly-found-planet/

Space.com

http://www.space.com/9225-odds-life-newfound-earth-size-planet-100-percent-astronomer.html ,and a host of others. This was in mainstream press. Not tabloids.

There are a few scientists around who occasionally say idiotic things. Unfortunately, sometimes they do it in front of reporters. This would be one of those times.

http://www.space.com/11034-x37b-secret-space-plane-launch-scrubbed-weather.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EH22Ak03.html

http://rescommunis.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/complaints-about-iranian-satellite-jamming/

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/06/23/letter-eutelsat-corporation

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/26/us-iran-jamming-itu-idUSTRE62P21G20100326

The Cuban government was home to an Iranian jamming program in the old Soviet facilities for years.

And the Libyans have done this before

http://www.space.com/3666-libya-pinpointed-source-months-long-satellite-jamming-2006.html

itym "barely cheaper, possibly far more expensive". The Dragon will cost an estimated 300-400m per launch; the shuttle was 450m/launch. The shuttle could also hold almost twice the number of astronauts and a ton of cargo. The Dragon can't. The Soyuz is a much more cost-effective design than the Dragon, anyway, and one that's been proven to be quite safe. Aside from political reasons, spending money on the Dragon instead of the Soyuz makes little sense.

Citation needed...

This estimate of $20 per astronaut on a 7-man mission implies a launch cost of less than $140: Q & A with Elon Musk

Just an after thought... The article DID mention that this was reported on space.com, but they didn't provide a link. Here it is:

http://www.space.com/10825-sun-holes-space-photo-hinode.html

I had a look, it's way better. Maybe this should have been the link provided in the submission.

This tells us that 57 were identified in 2009. It could have grown since then.

Then I spent part of the afternoon, along with some others, watching the video replays of it and the unfolding tragedy in a conference room by Hans Moravec's Mobile Robot Lab, all the time hoping it was just a misunderstanding, and the astronauts were all right or something.

One of the hopes of some at the Robotics Institute was that robots could do more of the space exploration more safely, including preparing the way for humans. Was that really a quarter century ago? :-) Well, the robots are finally starting to be here:
http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

Or in some cases, even come and gone, sadly:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_center_detail.html?type=publications&center_id=7&menu_id=262
"Space Robotics Initiative (SRI)
This center is no longer active."

Always wanted to work there and make Hewey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running, and the space habitat biospheres they maintain. :-) But that was not exactly their focus.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

That Challenger tragedy was doubly sad with a school teacher on board, considering all the school kids who had been encouraged to watch it. I can wonder if that was part of the further collapse of the US space program?

Still, as much as such tragedies are awful, I later wrote that a big problem with the US space program is that not enough people are taking risks and dying from the consequences. If you think of how many people have died in ocean voyages in the early day of sailing, an active space program seriously oriented to extending human life into the cosmos should be willing to accept hundreds or thousands of deaths a year by astronauts taking calculated and reasonable risks (as in, a 80% chance of success).

The obsession with perfection and zero risk by NASA ultimately seems to have grounded the US space program. That, and an acceptance of overly complicated designs. If astronauts are willing to accept a 20% chance of disaster so they can fly more often (or at all), I say let them. If current astronauts don't want those odds, find new astronauts.

I'm not saying take foolish risks, or 99% risks of death, or risks not worth risking death for. I'm just saying, we probably could be launching 100X as many cheaper rockets and having a lot more success, and having thousands of people going into space every year, if we accepted more causalties (on the order of 20% of launches failing like this shuttle did 25 years ago). Obviously, such a program should be voluntary and people should understand the risks as best as they can. Ideally, over time, the risks would be reduced by better engineering to that of the current risks for air travel in commercial aircraft. But it is just too early to have that expectation.

Besides, and maybe I should not say this, but TV ratings would go up for the space program if NASA did not go out of its way to make everything look so boring with astronauts who have been training for years because there are so few launches and they are so expensive. The most interesting thing I ever saw on NASA TV was when that NASA astronaut lost her bag of tools while fiddling with a grease gun. :-)
http://www.space.com/6131-astronaut-laments

The problem is that there is no known naturally occurring source of antimatter

Apart from thunderstorms of course.

Not clearly. It's actually kind of fuzzy. http://www.space.com/10621-moon-mining-legal-issues.html I suspect that the miner's country of origin would love it as they can tax the profit once the materials are sold on Earth. If the other nations raise a stink... we will have to wait to see.

For others who didn't know about that discovery:

http://www.space.com/6904-uranium-moon.html

From this page:
"The SPDM, or Canada Hand, is a smaller two-armed robot capable of handling the delicate assembly tasks currently handled by astronauts during spacewalks."

No, I'm not making this shit up!

I thought NASA was at one point worried that two different cycles of the sun were going to hit at the same time. I also thought they had been saying that the low cycle was unusually long. Which made them worry about how far it could snap back in the other direction. Kind of like a rubber band or how no tremors for long periods make earthquakes worse because they don't let off that energy and instead store it and suddenly release it.

As long as we don't have a repeat of 1859 then I am ok with whatever happens.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090902-1859-solar-storm.html
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/

Another storm like that in this modern electronic age would be a nightmare.

NASA lost the engineering specs for the Saturn V

No they didn't.

Citation from there: "The real problem is the hundreds of thousands of other
parts, some as apparently insignificant as a bolt or a washer, that are simply
not manufactured any more."

There also was lots of "hands on" know-how by the people doing the actual metal
bending that never was properly documented. That's why rebuilding a working
Saturn V is likely to cost about as much as a new development - and then you'd
have a rocket using state-of-the-art 1960s technology and materials.

Space.com has some fairly-new cool time-lapse movies of a Martian sunset and eclipse:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars-rover-opportunity-sunset-movie-101223.html

There seems to be some camera or processing artifacts that cause faint ovals, however. Some small-delta smoothing algorithms could perhaps fix them up.
   

Hmmmm, "better, faster, cheaper," where have I heard that before? As a rule of thumb, faster, better, and cheaper doesn't always work out with respect to complicated technical endeavors...like pioneering unexplored areas of space. Now... applied to a practice which has been done well, consistently, for four+ decades, like LEO flight (SpaceX's current business), it has its merits. But when it comes to sending a probe out past the edges of the solar system, trying to do something fast and cheap is sure to create a new crater on Neptune.

But then, maybe you can explain to me what kind of profit a company in the private sector could generate from a mission like Voyager or Cassini?

It's okay, I'll wait....

In the meantime, I will sit and ponder the merits that NASA has going for it when it comes to deep space exploration vs. the merits SpaceX has going for it when it comes to LEO access

In case it's helpful, the other day I came across a really cool infographic which shows the relative sizes and capabilities of the SpaceX Dragon, the Soyuz-launched Progress, China's Shenzhou, Orbital's upcoming Cygnus, Europe's ATV, and the in-progress Orion capsule.

Each Dragon capsule can deliver more payload to the ISS than Progress, but not as much as the ATV. Unlike the other two disposable craft, however, Dragon is designed to reenter the atmosphere, which will make it the only way to get significant amounts of equipment/material/samples back from the ISS after the Shuttle's last flight.

This is a "runaway" wearing rouge? A zombie runaway too? So a zombified runaway is going down the orbital highway wearing too much makeup, or is the headline incorrect?

I am so confused!

Kids these days!!

http://www.universetoday.com/81224/gallery-x-37b-space-plane-returns-to-earth/

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/photos-x-37b-robot-space-plane-landing-101203.html

-molo

I hope their final voyage is a safe one, and one day we will have a manned mission back to the Moon and maybe to Mars.

Here is a cool infographic I found on the Space Shuttle

Trouble is that's not how life works. Life is basicly just chemicles interacting in a perticular way, and if you change the conditions enough you make it imposible for the same set of chamicles to exibit the behavior we call life.

One of the problems is that the concept of "life" isn't really well defined yet.

Solar microwave satellites were fun in SimCity 2000, and I'd still like to see them operational, but I've not seen even any proof of concept devices yet.

We're working on it. These things take time though.

...why will we be building megastructures in space in the first place?

Because some of us think it is boring and downright stupid to keep our entire species piddling away on this silly little blue marble of ours. If you are comfortable in the warm, cushy confines of your home, that's fine and dandy. Other folks, with different values than you, would be happy living out the remainder of their days barely scratching a living from harsh environment that is space, even if that living is only for another couple days, hours, or minutes. Why? I couldn't tell you. Maybe we really are all nuts. But some of us value pushing the envelope, even at the risk of our own lives, far more than we do a comfy home and a warm fireplace.

I remember reading about an interview with one astronaut, who said that the most spectacular sight he saw in outer space was when his urine was ejected from the capsule. It immediately froze, crystallized and exploded, and was brilliantly illuminated by the sunlight.

I tried to google for this reference, but only came up with this: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/090911-space-water-dump.html

It's nice to see that astronauts use their precious bodily fluids to entertain stargazers.

Hypothesis: Mysterious trail is from scheduled flight.

By definition, the hypothesis is a contradiction: Something that is scheduled could not be mysterious and appear in the headlines.

That's because you have misstated the hypothesis.

Hypothesis: Trail that is mysterious to some observers is from scheduled flight.

If it's a scheduled flight then people would have probably seen it before.

Please keep in mind that people have identified the moon as a freaking UFO. (And this is not an isolated case.)

Venus has often been mistaken for an airplane or UFO -- during WWII, there were cases where anti-aircraft batteries tried to shoot it down.

The fact that people have seen a thing before, even hundreds of times, does not mean that they can't look at it later and go, "WTF is that?!" We are an unreliable bunch of observers.

Defaulting to cautionary surprise is evolution in action: if you're not sure if you've seen something before, assume you don't know what it is, that it's strange and dangerous, that it might eat you. This improves your chances of surviving to have offspring. But it's not really good behavior for a technological culture. Resolving this conundrum is left as an exercise for the species.

I am an author of the paper in which this discovery was reported. You can find a copy of the paper here.

While the planet probably is near the habitable zone, this isn't the first time a giant planet has been found in the habitable zone of a star, and while it could have moons, there isn't any reason to speculate more about this planet than any of the others.

However, this planet is important for two other reasons:
1. It was the first planet discovered using a technique called "astrometry", which is measuring the positions of stars in the sky, as the move up/down and left/right in reaction to a planet orbiting it. This technique has the potential to find earthlike planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars.
2. It is found in a binary system and the second star is close enough that its gravity would have impacted planet formation. The leading theory of planet formation, called "core accretion", requires millions of year for planets to form, as dust in a disk around the star collides together and clings electrostatically (similar to the way dustballs collect on a hardwood floor). Eventually the dustballs grow large enough to be considered rocks, those collide and grow bigger, etc. But the second star's gravity would cause the dust to be swept out of the system in just thousands of years, far too little time for core accretion to occur. Thus, we need a different mechanism to explain planet formation in this system. This isn't the only such binary, but it this study does offer more controlled statistics of how frequently such binaries host planets, and these facts combined show that some had to form in the binary itself---the chances of a binary interacting with another star (that originally hosted the planet), leading to an exchange where the binary picks up the star, are much too small to explain the high rate observed.

Also, here is another press story covering the discovery (by the way, stars have multiple names---don't be confused that this article calls it "HR 7162" and the other one refers to "HD 176051"---they really are the same system). The third figure on the right hand panel is particularly useful.

Any questions? I'll try to answer responses to this post.

one way to change an asteroid's trajectory over a long period of time is to take advantage of the Yarkovsky effect.

Even if it does exist, who would want to go there after reading this: average temperature between minus 24 and minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31 to minus 12 degrees Celsius). Gliese 581g completes an orbit every 37 days or so. frozen plus vertigo? no thanks.

Really? Really? You are either joking, or 12 years old.

Even if it does exist, who would want to go there after reading this:
average temperature between minus 24 and minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31 to minus 12 degrees Celsius). Gliese 581g completes an orbit every 37 days or so.

frozen plus vertigo? no thanks.

X-37B? Oh, wait, they found that already. holy crap, there really is an app for that...

Has Space -X actually put anything in orbit? No.

You mean 'Yes'. The Falcon 9 upper stage orbited for a good 3 weeks.

Statistically, one planet doesn't make a trend.

Ok, two including the one we're standing on. But still, we've searched and found two within 20 light years of each other. That's a teensy tiny bit of space to use to extrapolate out to the other 156 billion light years.

All that finding does is give one hope and a good reason to keep looking. Find a few dozen nearby and maybe you could figure out a local density of goldilocks planets. And by nearby I mean a few hundred light years. And by local I mean our little slice of the milky way. Maybe the spiral arm we're in. Things will be drastically different as you near the galactic center. There may be no such thing as a habitable planet near the core with the change in radiation density and more frequent and closer supernovae and the like.

Space.com gives a better summary:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth-like-exoplanet-possibly-habitable-100929.html

However, I think the 20% to 50% number comes from the size of the star, Gliese 581. The mass of the star is 20% to 50% of the sun's mass.

Thus far, the lowest-massed planet discovered by the radial velocity method was about 150% to 200% the mass of Earth. Discovering one as small as 20% to 50% is currently beyond the capabilities of the RV method, so the 300% to 400% figure makes a lot more sense.

The Ancient Computers Powering the Space Race

From general agreement on the definition of the Space Race:

The Space Race was a mid-to-late twentieth century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in outer space exploration. The term refers to a specific period in human history, 1957-1975, and does not include subsequent efforts by these or other nations to explore space.

Emphasis mine. As to the 'ancient tech', it's stable and still working so what's the problem? People are bitching about rising taxes not the fact that we are stunting ourselves in exploring space. It's not 1975 anymore, people have moved on to other international penis/rocket/missile envy matches.

In related news, the house fails to agree on a meager NASA funding bill while space tourism continues to progress.

If we wanted to build a Saturn V rocket today it could not be done. The original design is gone.

GOD DAMN IT. I really, really wish people would quit perpetuating this wildly incorrect urban legend. The original design details, down to the very last nut and bolt, are on file at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Absolutely nothing at all is "gone". Source.

The experts that had been working with rocket engines since the late 1940s worked on the Saturn V. Today there is nobody that knows anywhere near as much about rocket engines left. While the main engines for the Shuttle are somewhat of a marvel, I doubt they could be reproduced today either. The people resources simply aren't there - it would take 10 years of experimentation and learning about rockets.

Also ridiculously incorrect. You truly don't believe that the Space Shuttle Main Engines could be "reproduced" today? You're completely unaware of the fact that they've been continually "reproduced" since the beginning of the program, right? That they're rebuilt between missions, and that the design has improved and evolved over the life of the program? That as of right now there are in fact nine fully-built spare ones in storage at KSC? The engineers didn't just build a bunch of them in 1980 and then zap themselves with the Men In Black flashy-thing--SSMEs have been constantly built for the past almost thirty years. If my tone is coming across as a little coarse, it's because I'm having a hard time understanding how you could have a highly-moderated post to Slashdot when thirty seconds of research would refute almost everything you just said.

The reason why building a Saturn V today from the old plans is impossible has nothing to do with "cheaper labor" or "people that didn't mind getting their hands dirty" or whatever stupidness you wrote. Rather, you can't build a Saturn V today because a Saturn V isn't just a bunch of tanks with engines strapped to it--it's half of a complex launch system, with the other half being the Apollo CSM that sits on top of it. A Saturn V is an end-to-end system designed around the IBM-produced instrumentation unit, two tons of analog and basic digital computers and instrumentation. It's not that you can't build it--it's that building it wouldn't make any sense. You'd need to completely de-Apollo the rocket for it to work right, and guess what? That's exactly what NASA has been doing, although the political will to make it happen is sorely lacking.

Please educate yourself before you spout off such a mixture of urban legend and outright incorrect craziness.

I've read a lot of that.

The misreadings and misunderstandings are incredible. I find it hard to believe that someone apparently intelligent could unintentionally be that obtuse.

The writer goes so far as to incorrectly define words to prove his point. There's also the bizarre frame of reference which seems to fluctuate between someone reading 2500 years ago, and someone reading now, depending on which point of view best supports his arguments.

Then there's making claims that the Bible says something it simply doesn't.

Let me give you an example from his page:
"And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament."

The writer uses this to claim that the Bible states that the sky is some sort of solid dam, holding back incalculable amounts of water. This is what he claims a firmament is.

Google for "define:firmament" and you'll find five definitions, only one of which mentions anything about it being solid, and even then, it only "seems" that it what firmament meant.

The firmament is simply an arbitrary space above the earth.

Now, Genesis is widely accepted to have been written approximately 3500 years ago. Do you think an uneducated commoner in those times realized that clouds were made of water? I doubt it.
However, somehow the author wrote about water over the firmament. Clouds. Wow. Such horrible science.

There's also water in space. Quite a bit of it, actually. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/milkyway_water_010412.html

So regardless of what you take the "firmament" to mean - unless you take the "solid sphere" meaning, which is in no way indicated Biblically - then there's water above it.

Similarly, he complains about the phrasing "corners of the earth", and "ends of the earth" as if they show an earth that is some flat shape.
We still use these phrases today, in lots of conversations. Does that mean we all think that the earth is a flat square? No. It's a metaphor.
"Going to the ends of the earth" means you'll do virtually anything to accomplish a task. Since there is no end to the earth, due to it being a sphere and all, then this makes perfect sense.

The problem a lot of people have with this kind of stuff is that they either read the Bible totally literally, completely out of context, or both.

It was written using language and metaphors that common people of 2000 to 3000 years ago would understand, in a culture where community was incredibly important.
Read it from that point of view - instead of thinking "The earth doesn't wear a skirt! This is pink unicorn bullshit!" - and you'll find it makes a lot more sense.

Since when has ocean drilling even a part of space exploration? Or any drilling for that matter?

One of the anticipated problems of future space missions is that humans will need to find resources outside of the Earth environment. The amount of energy required to lift materials out of the gravity well of our planet is huge, so it makes sense to explore other options. NASA has researched laser drilling, deep drilling Mars for water, Moon drilling, low energy mobile drilling etc. NASA's remit is not just shooting satellites into orbit, it is also to conduct early stage R&D for exactly this kind of stuff.

And why the FUCK is NASA the only expert around to be able to help the stranded miners?

NASA employs many experts with the skills to do detailed drilling, modelling and geologic and seismic analysis.

Why does NASA have not only the desire, expertise, or the capability to test a BOP?

Who would you rather have test it? Deep sea drilling is a tight-knit industry. I would be surprised if there were any independent testing labs for this technology.

indeed some already started thinking about it in Nasa and ESA: http://www.space.com/news/international-space-station-room-recycled-asteroid-mission-100811.html
(... but it is a very small part of the ISS)

According to this article from 2007, that might not be the case:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070125_mars_atmosphere.html

Combining two years of observations by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, researchers determined that Mars is currently losing only about 20 grams of air per second into space.

Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe. (A bar is a unit for measuring pressure; Earth's atmospheric pressure is about 1 bar.)

The rumor is a bit misleading. Actually the new device is the iPhone 5, basically a new iPhone 4 equipped with a 2 inch[es] bumper.

That's no bumper. That's the antenna. Steve hates bad publicity. Never again will the iPhone be castigated for poor antenna performance. In fact, Apple engineers are working on accessory antennas for those difficult areas in SF and NYC as we speak (early prototype seen in a bar in Puerto Rico).

That wouldn't be an accurate statement. They've cataloged about 10% of the local sky.

http://www.space.com/news/earth-asteroid-impact-congress-commision-100719.html

A National Research Council report released last Friday revealed that only $4 million annually has been allotted to identify civilization-ending near-Earth objects (NEOs). Of the $3.1 trillion in the 2009 US federal budget, four million dollars represents only 0.000129%. To put it in more concrete terms, if your salary was $40,000 last year, you would have spent 5 cents protecting yourself.

We don't know what's out there, and won't catalogue every object for a very long time. There will always be unknown and unmapped objects, at least in the foreseeable future. Even when they do see these objects in advance, the accuracy for impact zones, although improved, still has a rather large variance until a rather short time before they actually hit.

Although you might have a warm fuzzy about such ambiguity, I don't, and I don't imagine many other do either.

You know, I was thinking the same thing. The area commonly called "trunk" is usually under the rear deck of a passenger car, separated from the passenger compartment.

Then I thought about my car (2000 TransAm). It has what's called a trunk area, but it's under the rear hatch, and doesn't necessarily have a separation to it. There is a removable interior cover, but I'd hardly call it a separator.

I went looking for a more accurate definition of the "trunk". It's the main cargo, luggage, or storage area in a vehicle. It would not generally be the passenger area, as humans prefer to not be considered "cargo". :) A "trunk" area could be anything from the little space in my TransAm to the rear of a 26' cargo truck. You'd be hard pressed to call a 26' cargo truck a "SUV" though, but you could include something as big as a International XT series. A SUV trunk could be defined in several ways. We'll use a large fully enclosed SUV for an example, the Chevrolet Suburban. I was helping a friend of mine with his, and in the process, we removed everything from the interior, so I became very familiar with it. I'm using rather inaccurate numbers, as the true dimensions are a bit tricky. Somehow they made that truck without a straight edge anywhere in it. We found that out when building panels to replace the interior. They required many measurements to create properly sized templates.

With all the seats installed, it had two front captains chairs, two mid captains chairs, and a bench in the rear. The cross section dimensions were roughly 4' wide by 5' tall. The "trunk" area (between the rear of the rearmost seat and the cargo doors) would be roughly 2'x4'x5', or 40 cubic feet.

The rear bench seat was easily removable, which would change the "trunk" area to roughly 4'x4'x5' or 80 cubic feet.

Removal of the interior trim in creased the cross section to approximately 5.5' wide by 5' tall. This would increase the "trunk" area of the rear to 4'x5.5'x5', or 110 cubic feet.

Removal of the mid captains chairs and associated interior trim increased the distance from the back of the front seats to the rear of the truck to 8', so the "trunk" area would be 4'x5.5'x8', or 176 cubic feet. This would be about standard if the truck was configured from the manufacturer as a work truck, rather than a passenger truck.

So the article's precision explanation for stupid people of "about the size of an SUV's trunk" is just plain wrong. They did also say each side is nearly 1 square meter, or nearly 9 square feet. As 1 square meter is 10.76 square feet, which is over the given sizes, we can deduct it to be not larger than 9 square feet, or 0.83 square meters. So 6 equal sides of 9 sq/ft would make it 81 cubic feet.

Easy, huh? Well, they threw us with "each wall is 9 square feet", because that lets us assume the walls are square. Looking at the picture provided, it appears to be a cube. But, if you look at this NASA photo, you'll see there are 6 square sides, and two hexagonal sides. So, if it were a cube, it would be the size of the cargo area of a suburban with the third row. But, it's not a cube, and there are no less than two different sizes for the sides.

You can't blame the article's author for it though. They got the details from NASA's own article. Great. Dimensions from the same organization that said "oh, we made a mistake in our unit conversion, and lost a $125 million dollar satellite."

Sure, if you're going to go around saying a square meter is 9 square feet, there's obviously something wrong with your conversions. :)

One more way - mining. We already know when and where the rocks are coming to, just launch equipment with enough delta-v and you're set. It'd even be in-line with Obama's idea of hitting smaller targets with unmanned missions, but he probably wasn't thinking of that. Get a mass driver to shoot smaller asteroids out until it's just rubble. If you can mine and refine a rock, it could be worth several $Tn and pay off the US national debt. Just be sure to aim those smaller rocks at empty space, like Nebraska.

It's still a stretch to call it "showing off" when you haven't even got a mock up.

A mock-up of an earlier version with model crew inside was shown off last year, back before Bigelow had announced Boeing as its partner (I believe they actually were partnered back then, just hadn't officially announced):

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090814-orion-lite.html

Earl Wahlquist, associate director of the Department of Energys Space and Defense Power Systems Office, said July 23 [2002] that 7 kilograms of Plutonium 238 slightly more than half of the U.S. inventory is being reassigned for use by an undisclosed national security agency.

The agency in question is probably the NRO. So basically, it has gone from NASA into the NRO black space project.

Not only that, ScentCone posts the same trollish article twice(at least) and gets modded up for it twice. Mods are either asleep thinking he was linking to the actual new direction he wants NASA to go in or are convinced this is Obama's secret Muslim tendencies revealing themselves.

And why are we not building one instead of wasting all the money on welfare, manned space exploration of a our mostly dead solar system, and more missiles so we can blow this place earth up even more times than we already can

These days, welfare is for corporations, not people. Even LINK is a subsidy to McDonald's and WalMart, who because of it don't have to pay their people a living wage. IINM good science is being done on the ISS. As to missles, they're actually reducing the number of nukes, but increasing the non-planet killing conventional bombs.

I think I read somewhere last month that we're spending as much on Iraq and Afghanistan in a single day as we spend on NASA in a year. There's where your savings should come from, not starving the WalMart guy.

The main problem with our space program is that for 100 years we've been stuck with the rocket equation and 2% at best payloads.

We haven't been doing it for 100 years; the airplane was first flown 107 years ago. Rocketry came about in 1936, 74 years ago. Sputnik was launched in 1957, and that could be seen as the birth of space rocketry, only 53 years. And we're working on ion drives.

I don't have an argument against the wavelength limitations, but this photo shows what adaptive optics can do over a somewhat wide field. Ground-based telescopes also enjoy the benefit of being much, much easier to repair and/or upgrade.

Besides, isn't it going to be ultimately more beneficial to be able to image "small" fields, such as individual solar systems or planets? Not that we have to choose, we've got both ground-based and orbiting telescopes, and that's a good thing.

Of course it's a hack!

Of course, and you're a hack to make the "there aren't AIs randomly posting to slashdot" theory work. It's not like I can actually infer your existence or anything without the direct use of my senses.

The problem is when there's no observation to either agree or disagree with, or when the observations they're developing models for are actually wrong. That is why many of these people do what is called "theoretical physics". Of course sometimes observations are made that contradict current theoretical physical theories.

There are actually many observations that support the existence of dark matter. Which is why the statement "there is more error in WMAP than thought" is a far jump from "dark matter doesn't exist". The first evidence for dark matter was not in the CMB at all, but in the behavior of galaxies. First that the observed matter was not enough to give them the behavior observed, then in galaxy collisions where large amounts of apparent matter appeared outside the galaxies, having passed right through unslowed by the collision, and then ultimately by creating maps (and more maps) of dark matter via gravitational lensing.

Like I said, many very talented physicists have tried to make sense of the observations without resorting to dark matter, and it worked when the evidence was only in the spinning of galaxies, but at this point they have mostly admitted defeat. The idea that dark matter is only accepted because nobody wants to rethink the prevailing theory is utter nonsense.

What has happened is a theory that cannot explain observation has been given a crutch to aid it limping along for a while longer until a new hypothesis is introduced to explain the discrepancy.

But the theory works perfectly if you simply infer the existence of mass as all evidence suggests. Then there is no discrepancy. Why this is such a sin, such a hack, is beyond me. Do you think that this is just a little fudge, like the numbers are off so we push 'em this way or change this constant or the mass value of this galaxy and it works? And we're happy because that's better than admitting the theory is wrong?

That's not even close. There is no way to modify gravitational theory in any sane (as in consistent with other experiments) way and get the observed results, without there being matter out there. You'd have to explain how gravitational lensing occurs in the absence of any mass/energy and how visible masses experience accelerations towards apparently empty space. To actually get that to happen, you would basically have to have gravity working completely differently than it appears to in every other observation and experiment.

So as regards evidence, I think you need some evidence for your "gravity pulls things in random directions and causes lensing around empty space without an mass/energy there" theory. But first I think you should figure out whether this theory is even consistent with the all the non-dark-matter evidence.

I think the difference is that we know from the experience of our own senses that 9 (or 8, depending on whether or not you agree) planets do actually exist, are visible and have some demonstrable gravitational effect on our own Sun. It's not such a great leap to infer that perhaps other such bodies exist around other stars and perhaps by measuring the wobble of those stars we may be able to learn something new.

Exactly. The difference is that planets are "normal", and dark matter sounds strange and weird and therefore your gut reaction is to think they are just making things up to keep their theory working. The idea of a kind of matter that has mass, but doesn't interact with photons and is thus invisible to any sort of direct electromagnetic detection, just can't be true. Even though this very article is a