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The only exception to that rule-- so far-- has been the vehicles NASA developed.

Not so. In the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, NASA had a number of well publicized launch failures that caused much hand wringing. Heck, even today, NASA rockets blow up. Even in the realm of manned spaceflight, NASA had the Apollo 1 disaster, where a brand new human-carrying vehicle failed on the launch pad, resulting in the deaths of three astronauts.

The only reason that NASA has the track record that it does today is because it has the benefit (and institutional memory) of its previous failures.

Well, I guess I can do a trivial Google search. I found a couple of articles on wikipedia where it's been used as a verb without the editors fixing it, space.com seems happy to use the verb in their 2.25pm update, and I have a PDF of a letter from a guy who appears to know what he's talking about.

A google search for "will splashdown" gives a lot more hits. Even "Splashdowned" gives a few.

The effect is proportional to length of wire. We're talking about a hypothetical major solar event, potentially comparable to the one in 1859. As the effect will be proportional to the length of the conductor in question, the effect on your ~1m PC will be ~1000 times less than the effect on a ~1km power cable.

If you want to hear more stories about space missions, particularly cutting edge ones, check out some of the following sites:

Spaceflightnow.com
Space.com
The Space Fellowship
The Planetary Society

and, of course,

JAXA
NASA
JPL

There are other sites, but those are some of my favorite.

Ass.

Perhaps you'll believe Elon Musk himself:

"I heard people in Australia thought UFOs were visiting :)," SpaceX's millionaire founder Elon Musk told SPACE.com in an e-mail. "The venting of propellants, which is done to ensure that an overpressure event doesn't produce orbital debris, created a temporary halo caught the sun at just the right angle for a great view from Australia. I thought the pictures looked really cool."

Or perhaps let me google it for you.

Very impressive, but these are just jump-jets for now - sort of rocket helicopters. Going from what we saw to something that can get to orbit, deposit a payload, and return to earth undamaged is going to take a lot more work. Good luck to both teams.

I don't think either Masten or Armadillo (or Virgin, XCOR, or Blue Origin) are planning on targeting the ground-to-orbit market any time soon. I think the general target markets for them for the next several years goes something like this:

* testbeds for NASA autonomous lander tech, like autonomous hazard avoidance (NASA can just put their AI/vision equipment on existing lander to test them out)
* suborbital science payloads: there's a lot of scientists who currently have to pay $1 million+ a launch to fly payloads on suborbital sounding rockets to the upper atmosphere and near-space that would love to pay the much-lower prices Masten and Armadillo charge to fly at much-higher flight rates
* microgravity science payloads: getting amounts of microgravity time that can only currently be beaten by flying on the ISS
* suborbital passenger payloads: both "tourists," scientists who want to be able to operate their experiments manually, and training for orbital astronauts. Armadillo just announced that they were planning on charging $102K per person, undercutting Virgin's price by half: http://www.space.com/news/space-tourism-new-deal-100430.html
* robotic landers for NEOs/Moon/Mars, boosted to the location by an expendable rocket
* after making tons of money on the above, then maybe they'll start thinking about orbit. Once that happens, it'll probably be with something like pop-up boosters, where a reusable VTVL craft will boost an expendable secondary stage high/fast enough that it can reach orbit.

Let me know if I forgot any. ;)

Oddly enough, a follow up of Jupiter impact was just reported Thursday.

I don't think this is odd at all, it just indicates that we have more people observing Jupiter with instruments capable of perceiving a natural process (i.e. interplanetary objects falling into Jupiter's huge gravity well) than ever before.

Oddly enough, a follow up of Jupiter impact was just reported Thursday.

IT never fails to amaze me that NASA does not send a balloon to 100,000 feet and load it up with all kinds of scientific equipment. That way, they would have advantages of being almost in space, but for a fraction of the cost of sending anything in space.

They do. Sometimes they break.

It would be so funny to discover now that the laws of physics ... be uneven in time. Maybe every 54.12 years the relation between produced matter/antimatter switches from 1:1.01 to 1.01:1.

You're not the first to think this (specifically the fundamental constants like the speed of light might be changing over time):

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/constant_changing_010815.html

Now that we sent an apple tree to space, the only thing missing there was Eva^He.

Wow - this has to be in the Top 10 Worst Article Summaries ever on Slashdot. And why is the link pointing to a CSMonitor dupe instead of the original story at Space.com which has the best coverage? Most of the other commenters already pointed out the problems (it's not a GPS satellite, the libration points are not Earth-Moon Lagrange points, etc), so I will just point everyone to the real articles with real facts on this story: http://www.space.com/news/out-of-control-satellite-threatens-others-sn-100503.html http://www.space.com/news/zombiesat-galaxy-15-shutdown-fails-sn-100505.html

Wow - this has to be in the Top 10 Worst Article Summaries ever on Slashdot. And why is the link pointing to a CSMonitor dupe instead of the original story at Space.com which has the best coverage? Most of the other commenters already pointed out the problems (it's not a GPS satellite, the libration points are not Earth-Moon Lagrange points, etc), so I will just point everyone to the real articles with real facts on this story: http://www.space.com/news/out-of-control-satellite-threatens-others-sn-100503.html http://www.space.com/news/zombiesat-galaxy-15-shutdown-fails-sn-100505.html

From the following space.com article: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_dangers_040120.html Scientists are still working to characterize the dangers and develop the technologies necessary for safe suits and ships. This much they know: Any trip beyond Earth orbit will involve radiation threats not faced by residents of the International Space Station, which sits inside the planet's magnetic field. A 2-1/2-year trip to Mars, including six months of travel time each way, would expose an astronaut to nearly the lifetime limit of radiation allowed under NASA guidelines. The Moon, with no atmosphere, is more dangerous than the surface of Mars. Lunar forays will have to be brief unless expensive shielded habitats are built. Mission planners knew the Apollo astronauts would be at grave risk if a strong solar flare occurred during a mission. The short duration of each trip was a key to creating favorable odds. "A big solar event during one of those missions could have been catastrophic," said Cary Zeitlin, a radiation expert at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "The risk was known. They gambled a bit." Once again, the purpose of space travel is not to "do something really cool" It is to gain scientific understanding. Any other reason is pointless. A failed mission reduces the amount of scientific knowledge we gain. Risk is fine. People take risks everyday. Currently and ironically trying to go to Mars is like "shooting the moon." Huge risk with small odds of worthwhile reward.

They did that a while ago; they have an observatory and host astronomy conferences. Obviously it's an attempt to live down what their predecessors did to Galileo, but I welcome it.

"The Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world and the only research group directly supported by the Holy See". It's just the VATT (Vatican Telescope) that's relatively new.

They did that a while ago; they have an observatory and host astronomy conferences. Obviously it's an attempt to live down what their predecessors did to Galileo, but I welcome it.

Try this one instead: http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/rocket-racing-tulsa-demonstration-100426.html

That was just so much NASA PR (about the only thing they do well anymore). NASA has always regarded the ISS as their exclusive territory. Remember how pissy they got when the Russians wanted to bring up a tourist (just because they realized it would give the Russians another "first" in space)?

Here's the thing: We make simpler models of infinitely complicated systems ALL THE TIME.

Who said we didn't? But to say that the physicists who calculated the half-life of uranium was equivalently complex to climatologists modeling Earth's entire ecosystem is just absurd. Provably absurd, since we've known uranium half-life for quite some time, while climate models are still leading edge research.

The standard model is even woefully lacking (Gravity?) and as to provable, you've got to be kidding.

Again, who said that we have perfect knowledge of physics? I said no such thing. I said our level of knowledge of physics is far higher than climatology. And it is. Sorry, but it is laughably ridiculous to compare climatology to almost any field in physics. If you want to compare climatology to, say, economic theory, I'll listen to that argument.

If you think relativity, molecular theory or evolution are 'provably accurate' you're in for a hell of a shock -

Relativity is provably accurate because we can actually make a prediction and then test it. It's provably accurate until it is proven inaccurate. Unlike climate science, which is nearly impossible to prove or disprove in the real world.

here
and
here
Quant
These are two men that have shown that they have motivation. In addition, they have shown that they have money from past ventures. Finally, Bigelow has not only hotel (ability to make money from tourism and business ppl), but also has a very large construction company. The man KNOWS how, but more importantly who to make these things work.

The stupid Bruce Willis Movie Armageddon had one thing right (and just about the ONLY thing): if you are going to do something different in space, then you work with those on the ground who are experts. Musk has surrounded himself by ppl that are rocket experts. Bigelow already had the hotel and construction, then he hired nearly all the ones that were experts on the Transhab (as well as the rights to transhab). Finally, BEZO has been hiring ppl and building a lander capable of lunar surface to lunar orbit.

America IS going to the moon by 2020, if NASA helps Bigelow and the commercial launchers NOW. Hopefully, others will join in, such as the entire west(EU, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea), as well as Russia, India, South Korea, and maybe Brazil.

here
and
here
Quant
These are two men that have shown that they have motivation. In addition, they have shown that they have money from past ventures. Finally, Bigelow has not only hotel (ability to make money from tourism and business ppl), but also has a very large construction company. The man KNOWS how, but more importantly who to make these things work.

The stupid Bruce Willis Movie Armageddon had one thing right (and just about the ONLY thing): if you are going to do something different in space, then you work with those on the ground who are experts. Musk has surrounded himself by ppl that are rocket experts. Bigelow already had the hotel and construction, then he hired nearly all the ones that were experts on the Transhab (as well as the rights to transhab). Finally, BEZO has been hiring ppl and building a lander capable of lunar surface to lunar orbit.

America IS going to the moon by 2020, if NASA helps Bigelow and the commercial launchers NOW. Hopefully, others will join in, such as the entire west(EU, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea), as well as Russia, India, South Korea, and maybe Brazil.

Do you really want private companies going to the Moon and commercializing it?

Yes please, as rapidly as possible. Coincidentally, a couple days ago space.com had an interview with construction billionaire Robert Bigelow (who currently has two prototype space stations in orbit, which he launched on his own dime). In the interview he discussed his plans for a private lunar base, which would be assembled from three of his space station modules in lunar orbit or a Lagrangian point, then land assembled on the lunar surface:

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/private-moon-bases-bigelow-aerospace-100414.html

After launching two prototype space stations into orbit, space entrepreneur and pioneer Robert Bigelow is now setting his sights a bit higher. His latest vision: A quick-deploy moon base capable of housing up to 18 astronauts in inflatable modules on the lunar surface.

The base itself would be fabricated in space, with consideration being given to crewmembers piloting the entire base directly onto the moon's surface. ...

"We need to make low-Earth orbit work first before we go beyond . . . but I believe we will," Gold told SPACE.com. "Once we've established a robust infrastructure in Earth orbit, created the economies of scale necessary to produce facilities in low Earth orbit . . . at that point, we've really enabled ourselves to look at a variety of options."

Bigelow's main limiting factor has been the lack of a commercial crew vehicle to transfer customers to his space stations, and NASA's newly-announced commercial crew initiative will solve that problem. Once Bigelow's LEO bases have proven themselves, a private lunar base will be able to take advantage of the propellant depots in LEO and Lagrangian points foreseen under the new NASA plans.

The orbit of this will be found very quickly - probably within 24 hours. That will rule in or out whether it was in Earth orbit.

Note that

- there are orbits for all satellites bigger than a few kilograms, secret or no. It's hard to hide up there and

- there have been number of multi-state meteors in the past. This, if a meteor, would not be very unusual.

Don'd feed the extremely inaccurate troll. The probability of complex organic life coming into being is actually much higher than most people realize.

I think the real reason we haven't found anyone out there is probably things like interstellar hydrogen getting in the way of space travel, and causing scattering and absorption of communications signals. Most people agree that the SETI project is fundamentally flawed in that way. Doesn't make it an unworthy cause, however, just an unlikely one.

Actually, it could be a threat according to this theory: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/nemesis-comets-earth-am-100311.html It basically says that since extinction events on earth occur every 26 Million years, the orbit of an as-yet-unknown brown dwarf may be causing impacts on earth that lead to these extinction events.

Yes.

Most pulsars are around 3000 light-years away. Since the speed of light changes over time those pulsars emitted light when it was traveling at a different speed than it is today. So the timing between the pulses will drift.

(At times like this, Slashdot needs a +1 Crackpot moderation.)

My mistake. I was thinking microwaves, but it was gamma rays.

"Garriott added that his assertion is somewhat tongue in cheek."
-a less dodgy source

Garriott may or may not own a legal title to Lunokhod (it is by no means a given that the auction sale was a legitimate title), but there is no way buying Lunokhod gives him any ownership rights to any piece of the Moon, however small.

From http://www.space.com/news/soviet-moon-rover-space-law-100322.html:

Validity of ownership?
Enter space lawyer, Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz. She is Director of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law and Research Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi.
"The soundness of a property right depends in large part on the integrity of the documents that memorialize the right," Gabrynowicz told SPACE.com via email. "This is why property buyers conduct title searches before buying property. They want to be sure that the title is good."
Gabrynowicz said that without reading the papers or knowing how they were processed and by whom, she can't speak to the validity of the ownership of a space object purchased at auction.
"However, a contention that buying a space object that landed on the lunar surface from a sovereign nation gives rise to a property right to the territory under it is wrong," Gabrynowicz said.
Gabrynowicz said that States-Parties to the Outer Space Treaty of 1966 cannot acquire lunar territory by landing an object on the moon.
"The USSR was and Russia is a party to the Outer Space Treaty," she added. "It did not acquire the territory under the object when it landed. One cannot sell what one does not own. Since USSR/Russia did not have a property right to the territory under the landed object, there was nothing to sell."

This image is based on the COSMOS survey. There's a better article about it here

DNA forming by accident is already a longshot as it is

As far as I am aware, the formation of organic life has been generally considered extremely likely since, like, the fifties. It's even been shown that organic molecules are relatively common in deep space.

This image linked to from the article shows the design of the falcon 9 + payload, and compares it to the Soyuz and the Shuttle.

That 54m is the total height including the payload capsule and the nosecone.

But really, who gives a shit about how tall it is? Look at that picture and the stats, and you see the real comparison, the thing is way smaller than the shuttle stack (pile? Jenga game? what do you call a non-stacked stack?). Mass is much lower, but so is payload capacity -- about 16% the mass, and 43% of the payload to LEO. So it goes with rockets.

The existence, and a picture of what it is claimed to look like, is not a secret, but just about everything else about it appears to be a secret. How come the Wikipedia page is virtually empty? There is some good insight here: discussion . The X-37B seems to be a pretty extensive rework of X-37A, so information about X-37A, which was nothing but a glider without any reentry heat protection, is not of much use.

For some reason this only got posted to the politics.slashdot page (where it's gotten all of 2 comments), but since I figured others would be interested in learning more I'll re-post the details here, with relevant links included:

The White House has announced that on April 15 the President will be visiting Florida to host a conference on the Administration's 'new vision for America's future in space,' which is focused on developing new technologies and capabilities needed for sustainable exploration of 'the Moon, asteroids, and eventually Mars.' The White House's plans for reinvigorating NASA are facing vocal opposition from several congressmen in Florida, Texas, and Alabama, due to its outright cancellation of the Constellation/Ares program, which was found to be 'fundamentally un-executable' but is/was an important source of jobs in many areas.

'Under my watch, NASA will inspire the world once again and is going to help grow the economy right here in Brevard County,' said the presumptive Democratic nominee, speaking to a crowd of 1,400 at Brevard Community College's Titusville campus.

Obama has changed an earlier position, in which he planned to delay the Constellation program five years and use up to $5 billion from the NASA budget for education."

Like many politicians of all political parties, Obama tells the voters whatever they want to hear. After he wins election, he quickly changes course.

The principal difference between Obama and the typical dishonest politican is that Obama personally hates Western culture and Western civilization. For 20 years, he attended a church which taught that the West is solely responsible for the failure of non-Western societies.

Of course, Japan is proof that Obama (and his church) is wrong. Not coincidentally, Japan continues to aggressively pursue space exploration. According to a recent news article, "Despite the recession, the [Japanese] government budgeted ¥344.8 billion for space exploration in fiscal 2009, an increase of 10.4 percent from the previous year."

Would stars like this be a better theory for sending Oort Cloud material to the inner Solar system than a hypothetical unseen Nemesis?

About 5000 years ago, the earth had a severe climate change event; glaciers are just now receding back to the same levels they were then, uncovering lots of old flora and fauna, like Ötzi. Another severe climate change happened 4200 years ago, causing drought and the collapse of major civilizations in the Middle East. The Mayans believed things happened in a roughly 5000 year cycle; there may be some truth to that. Climate change happens, records are always being broken, and yet somehow the Earth has managed to regulate it's temperature for billions of years, despite increases in the Sun's temperature Yes, I do believe human activity does have some effect on climate, and it might be possible to stress Earth's temperature regulation system to the point where runaway heating or cooling occurs. But if that hasn't happened in the past millions of years, it is probably not going to happen due to the relatively small changes we are seeing now.

Project Dynasoar was nearly complete when they canceled it. It is probably they way we should have been going into LEO.

Coincidentally, the Air Force is getting ready to launch a vehicle to orbit which could be considered in many ways a spiritual successor to Dyna-Soar. I submitted an article about it yesterday (unfortunately rejected, but that's the way it goes sometimes), and have pasted the text below for the curious:

Air Force Spaceplane Preps For Launch

The US Air Force is currently preparing for the launch of the secretive X-37B OTV-1 (Orbital Test Vehicle 1) spaceplane; NASA had previously dropped the project in 2004 so it could devote more funds to the Constellation project. The reusable spaceplane is set to launch in April on top of a commercial Atlas V rocket, orbit for up to 270 days while testing a number of new technologies, reenter the atmosphere, then land on auto-pilot in California. The X-37 previously conducted drop tests and autonomous landing tests using the Scaled Composites White Knight carrier aircraft.

...is a friggin' sensationalist claim that has no place in science reporting, either on a primary site or on a news aggregation site. Should the first Falcon 9 fail, they will learn from it and launch better designs in the future. Orbital still is working on its Taurus rocket. The EELV program (Atlas and Delta) are still pushing strong in the commercial market. If the first Falcon 9 flight fails, it will not be the end all be all of either Obama's current NASA vision, nor America's role in the space program. So please, keep the hyperbole out of the damned summaries guys.

I totally agree. I'm a huge fan of SpaceX and have a lot of hope for them, but even if they suddenly disappeared into the ubiquitous ether the new NASA plan would still be going strong. As you mentioned, there's quite a few other companies getting fixed-price milestone-based funding from NASA to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft for crew. A quick summary:

Launch vehicles:
* SpaceX Falcon 9 (vehicle mentioned in summary): medium development risk, low-cost
* Lockheed/ULA Atlas V: low-risk (development risk, that is), high cost, but still drastically lower cost than Space Shuttle or Constellation (has been operating for a number of years now, with all 20 launches so far successful)
* Boeing/ULA Delta IV Heavy: low-risk, high cost (could potentially lift Orion spacecraft)
* Orbital Taurus II: medium-risk, medium-cost, although probably better suited for cargo than crew

Spacecraft (potentially launched on a variety of different launch vehicles):
* SpaceX Dragon: capsule is pretty much ready, with a number of test articles, but the development "long pole" is a to-be-developed launch escape system
* Boeing/Bigelow capsule: sometimes termed the "Orion Lite", Bigelow's also interested in this as a way to get to his private space station modules
* Blue Origin: composite capsule, also designing a novel push-based (instead of the traditional tractor-based) escape system adaptable to other capsules
* Sierra Nevada/SpaceDev Dream Chaser: more novel design, using a lifting-body based on the well-tested HL-20; this sort of design provides a gentler reentry from LEO (and potentially upgrades well to lunar/Lagrangian return); the company has already spent at least $10M of its own funds developing the design and building test articles
* Orbital Cygnus: optimized for cargo deliveries to ISS, but can potentially be extended to crew

It's also worth noting that Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada are all being funded on CCDev contracts (in addition to a certain amount of private funding, which they're all required to have). With these contracts, they only get the full payment if they meet all of their pre-determined milestones (building test articles, performing tests, etc.) by September of 2010. IMHO, this September is when we'll get a better idea of which companies will be competing for crew/cargo delivery in the future, and

With all due respect, your anti-Obama rhetoric is making your political stance quite obvious and I wonder if part of your hatred of the move to private industry is clouded.

The fact of the matter is we do have backups in place right now. Commercial businesses are already launching satellites, let alone other nations. So if we need a satellite launched, we have options.

On the idea of "And let's not worry about the big frickin' rocks that occasionally could pummel us, and the space tech needed to even consider an option to stop that.", I'm quite certain that all we would need to do is get the top competitors into a room (read: people that have skill launching things) and tell them that whoever saves the earth gets 3 Billion dollars, we'll see some results.

Personally, what I find most odd about your posts is that you seem to hold NASA up on a pedestal. Really, they've killed a bunch of astronauts and they do so at a huge, HUGE, cost to the public. Yes, they have been moderately successful over the years, but beyond building a station that they seem content to decommission asap and landing men on the moon decades ago, they really haven't done anything private enterprise isn't doing already. Well, besides sending humans up to turn screws on ailing satellites.

• NASA doesn't want to be dependent on a single vendor, and would like two systems, from two vendors (a smart move, which will reduce the chances of long outages in the event of a design problem, as happened with the Shuttle, twice, but which cuts in half the number of flights you can expect to sell to NASA),
• NASA doesn't seem to have a budget sufficient to fund full development of those systems,
• NASA will only be buying a few flights per year to the ISS, for some time to come,
• the budget for purchasing those flights has already been announced ($6 billion over 5 years), and
• that budget is far lower than NASA's own estimate for building a single man-rated system (Orion + Ares I).

You can't just go to the marketplace and say, "I want to buy rides in nuclear powered DeLoreon, and I'm willing to pay standard cab fare rates in the D.C. Metro Area, oh, and by the way, half of them should be rides in nuclear powered Porche, which I'll buy from your competition, instead of from you, oh, and I only want three rides per year," and expect that to actually happen.

However, everybody involved might be banking on the notion that NASA has now backed themselves into a corner. They won't have an option other than to buy from the commercial market, once Ares I and Orion are shut down. NASA will be forced to pay "market rates" for these launch services. If NASA doesn't fund the launcher development, and only buys 1 or 2 flights per year from each vendor, the per-flight market rate is going to be about a billion bucks. Don't like the price? We'll give you a discount, if you buy 30 flights per year so we can achieve economies of scale.

The other potential up-side is that private launch firms probably have some market opportunity to sell to other countries which would like to have improved access to the ISS, or other crewed access to space, but which have a reluctance to fund their own system development. Japan (HOPE-X, and ESA (Hermes) are obvious candidates, having previously tried to build a crewed spacecraft, but potentially other nations such as India, which might elect to direct their R&D budgets toward in-space activities, rather than reproducing the ability to get there).

It also appears that NASA may be transferring the technology from Orion to a private company. This idea was apparently floated under the name Orion Lite, with the idea being a quicker access to the ISS by reducing the capsule's life support requirements to a few days (down from a few weeks).

There's also a pretty good article from space.com that talks about a couple of the different points

They go into some more detail about the commercial space transportation part paving the way for more "space tourist" like stuff. Obviously this will still be extremely expensive, but I hope that it could increase the total number of launches, and help bring some economies of scale.

This is also the reason I'm excited about the orbital propellant storage and automated rendezvous technology. These items will allow us to launch big (weight wise) missions by using a bunch of smaller launch vehicles, instead of one really huge (and really expensive) one.

No, they should publish everything freely on the internet, since they're not going to make use of any of it.

This would likely result in jailtime under ITAR arms regulations.

Other Americans aren't going to use it either; what is some private company going to do with plans for an inflatable lunar habitat?

Um, that's actually one of Bigelow Aerospace's business markets.

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/private-space-stations-bigelow-100120.html

"If we can deploy and gang together modules in low-Earth orbit, you can do it in L1...and you are 85 percent of the way to the moon," Bigelow said. In fact, one scenario Bigelow Aerospace has already blueprinted is the soft landing of a trio of attached BA-330 modules -- including astronauts -- on the moon.

The result: instant moon base, something the size of the International Space Station, Bigelow advised. The self-propelled base could even blast itself into lunar orbit, or move from spot to spot on the moon, he said.

"We would lease those lunar facilities to our clients. That keeps the price down. If we sell something instead of lease something, the price really jumps," Bigelow said.

The best option to me seems to be to take a mass spectrograph of their atmosphere as the planet passed between their sun and us. We can do that now

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080319-extrasolar-methane.html

E.g. if aliens had technology comparable to ours today they'd be able to see that the Earth's atmosphere had lots of oxygen. Free oxygen in the atmosphere seems to me to be a good sign of life.

So they could scan all planets in range for non equilibrium atmosphere and then direct a high energy laser beam that would be bright but harmless from our point of view. They could use that to send a signal - it would start off pulsing out prime numbers (or something else obviously non natural) and gradually build up to maths and physics.

Now since we've only been able to do this recently it seems like another civilisation doing it would likely be more advanced than ours. So the physics would be interesting, to say the least.

Obviously, you would process the rock on the moon, and just send back He3.

And you don't need a human there to do it. Yes, having a human on the moon would make the process much easier, but the cost of getting the human there is so outrageous that it doesn't make sense if you can do it unmanned. It makes a lot more sense to spend billions of dollars in robot research and automation, and send that to the moon. What do you think one of the reasons for doing the Regolith Excavation Challenge is?

How much did Spirit and Opportunity cost? See: $820 million. Earlier in this thread someone claimed that a human on Mars could have done all the work that they have done in a couple of hours? While that might be true, that's irrelevant because the cost of getting humans to Mars is mind-numbing. It would be at least $500 billion, and with cost overruns, etc, probably a trillion or two. The ISS (in LEO, of course) cost something between $35 to $100 billion depending on how you count it.

I really, really want to go to space myself, and I want us to have a manned space program. I think that, all things considered, it makes sense to spend the money to do it. But, going to the Moon or Mars is a job for robots.

http://www.space.com/news/ft-080805-obama-space-policy.html

And... Even better:
Obama has changed an earlier position, in which he planned to delay the Constellation program five years and use up to $5 billion from the NASA budget for education.

"Here's what I'm committing to: Continue Constellation. We're going to close the gap (between the end of shuttle flight and the next program, Constellation). We may have additional shuttle flights," he said.

"My commitment is to seamless transition, where we're utilizing the space station in an intelligent way, and we're preparing for the next generation of space travel."

You've been watching too much CSI. I believe what they mean is that they can see if a large heat source exists behind a cement wall. Walls are very good insulators and *stop* heat. With an infrared camera, you can barely even see through a sheet of glass! It's a passive sensor, detecting the heat that the object gives off, and giving that temperature a color in the image. To get an idea of heat blocking capabilities, turn on your reflector space heater, which is a incredibly powerful IR source, shine it at a window, and go outside. Chances are, you wont be able to feel *anything*.

Currently, the only way to see through walls, which *is* possible, is to use THz (link 1, 2), Xray, and UWB. These are active devices that transmit and receive reflected signals, then construct and image.

And, before someone brings up that infrared is in the THz band, "Low frequency versions of terahertz waves are known as millimeter waves, and they behave much like radio waves. At higher frequencies, the terahertz waves straddle the border between radio and optical emissions." from space.com. From the IEEE paper, "(0.6 to 3 THz) offer a greater degree of penetration through architectural and textile materials", so they're using the looow range.

If you're worried about people seeing through your walls, maybe you should turn off your wifi! :-o

Something I don't get, and is unanswered in general. When the ISS was first assembled back in 1998, it was asserted at the time that this was going to be the first permanent outpost of humanity in space.

Perhaps I'm getting senile in my old age and not remembering things very clearly.

YOU are doing just fine, my friend. Those were my first thoughts reading the TFS. Your post really sparked the old gray cells and I thank you for that. That said, google is my friend, and the fossil record indeed supports the idea that we were promised and sold as taxpayers the idea that this would be a permanent station - I simply googled "iss permanent outpost" and got some interesting stuff right off the bat:

http://www.space.com/common/media/show/player.php?show_id=26&ep=4

http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-station.htm

However, note that in 2000, there came the obscure quote from a NASA mgr - "This is the beginning of what we hope is at least 15 years of continuous human presence in space, and personally, I hope its much, much longer than that that once we get this crew on orbit, well have spacecraft flying with people on board for centuries to come." Source -

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/exp_one_iss_001030.html

Nonetheless, the "permanent outpost" meme was alive and well in 2007 -

http://eu.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=24180

And what's NASA's real plan? Get a load of the roadmap on slide 2 - and the clever glyph at the right end of the ISS bar, showing neither certainty nor commitment -

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/203075main_ECLSS%20Technology%20Exchange%20Conference%20briefing.pdf

Something I don't get, and is unanswered in general. When the ISS was first assembled back in 1998, it was asserted at the time that this was going to be the first permanent outpost of humanity in space.

Perhaps I'm getting senile in my old age and not remembering things very clearly.

YOU are doing just fine, my friend. Those were my first thoughts reading the TFS. Your post really sparked the old gray cells and I thank you for that. That said, google is my friend, and the fossil record indeed supports the idea that we were promised and sold as taxpayers the idea that this would be a permanent station - I simply googled "iss permanent outpost" and got some interesting stuff right off the bat:

http://www.space.com/common/media/show/player.php?show_id=26&ep=4

http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-station.htm

However, note that in 2000, there came the obscure quote from a NASA mgr - "This is the beginning of what we hope is at least 15 years of continuous human presence in space, and personally, I hope its much, much longer than that that once we get this crew on orbit, well have spacecraft flying with people on board for centuries to come." Source -

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/exp_one_iss_001030.html

Nonetheless, the "permanent outpost" meme was alive and well in 2007 -

http://eu.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=24180

And what's NASA's real plan? Get a load of the roadmap on slide 2 - and the clever glyph at the right end of the ISS bar, showing neither certainty nor commitment -

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/203075main_ECLSS%20Technology%20Exchange%20Conference%20briefing.pdf

If there is current life, it may be meters under-ground such that the Viking landers wouldn't be able to detect it because they only dug a few inches. Mars' thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field means that the surface is baked by radiation from space and the sun, which is hazardous to carbon-based life. Thus, if there is life, it may be fairly deep.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070129_underground_mars.html

Quote:

"After mapping cosmic radiation levels at various depths on Mars, researchers have concluded that any life within the first several yards of the planet's surface would be killed by lethal doses of cosmic radiation...The finding will be detailed in the Jan. 30 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters." [emph. added]

The new fossils resemble life found deeper underground on Earth, which is consistent with this research.