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what about http://www.space.com/28095-3d-... ?

It's time to stop jetting around the solar system on chemical rockets. Designers and funding should be directed towards lofting and running multi-megawatt reactors. They would be used to power multiple ION engines and once at the destination, provide power.

I think you and me have VERY different definitions of what a shower is.

"But on the International Space Station and NASA shuttles, astronauts have a squirt gun that shoots water and a wash cloth. They also have a special rinse-less shampoo to keep their hair clean."
http://www.space.com/7060-slee...

I would think excluding the sun would be a given. Also not one mention of Schulz's star, which (supposedly) 70,000 years ago came within 1 light year

A moon rock is supposed to cost ~$50,800/g*. A quick Google search shows that platinum costs $35.85/g and gold costs $37/g.
The most valuable thing on the moon are the rocks themselves. I guess their price will come down dramatically if mining begins and there becomes a legal moon rock market.

* - http://www.space.com/11804-nas...

The left is cutting NASA's budgets?
http://www.space.com/22023-nas...

Color me unimpressed. While somewhat original the whole approach is completely flawed. There are many more things than just stars in the universe. After all, for all we know, the visible universe only makes up a small portion of all matter.

Surely a rocket trying to come in for a soft landing and going splat! boom! can't be worse than blowing up on the pad during lunch.

Definitely correct. That ruins everyone's dinner plans.

Surely a rocket trying to come in for a soft landing and going splat! boom! can't be worse than blowing up on the pad during lunch.

The astronauts were paid their regular military salaries, plus hazardous duty pay. It was a pittance. In order to compensate these men more fully The United States Congress authorized, through legislation, that astronauts could keep spent NASA equipment as mementos. It was always one of the 'unwritten rules' at NASA during that era. It wasn't until years later that it was questioned by some bureaucrat and the legislation was needed to end and questions

So no theft or questionable loans were involved.

I hope they can land the Falcon 9 this time. SpaceX's Hans Koenigsmann says this time the Falcon 9 will come in twice as fast as the January 10 attempt, and it will land farther offshore.

I'm not sure why this is news, according to this article They have done it before. Was that discovered to be a lie? So little info.

If everything is moving away from us, perhaps we -are- the center of the Universe! Sounds like there are still things we dont understand about the observable universe if we cant get the red/green shift stuff to make consistent sense.

Get a rubber balloon and a marker, or just use your imagination. Put a bunch of dots on the balloon. Now choose one dot as a reference and inflate the balloon--all of the other dots move away as the balloon expands. Try using a different dot as the reference and you get the same result. Note that there are limitations to this analogy, but I found it helpful.

P.S. It's red/blue shift, not red/green.

Because ammonia works. It handles wide temperature swings. It is very efficient weight wise. The tech is well known. The instrumentation is well known. The only downside is that it's impressively corrosive. That said, the Russians don't use it.

Which, in the end, is likely why we do.

What you're suggesting is a variable length second. That's what GMT was before the current UTC came along. The slowdown of Earth's rotation is NOT a known factor, it varies. Things like earthquakes can change the period unpredictably.

Modern UTC ticks at a predictable rate, which is useful for some sciences. Leap seconds keep it in sync with the Earth's rotation, which is useful for others. UTC with leap seconds was deliberately intended to bridge those two needs.

If someone wants a time scale without leap seconds they shouldn't be using UTC, there are others to choose from, such as TAI or GPS.

They did plenty of science on the space shuttles, including these experiments: http://www.space.com/12150-6-c...

... If NASA wants more funding, it needs something that the public wants, beyond just that scientists want to science ...

Hate to rain at your parade, buddy, but nowadays NASA is not run by the scientists

Click on the following link and you know what I mean ...

http://www.space.com/8725-nasa...

We now know, thanks to Kepler, that almost all stars have planets.

http://www.space.com/24894-exo...

So what you're saying is that all galaxies are precisely as far away as the Andromeda galaxy? Yeah no.

Please learn something about what you're talking about before you make a fool of yourself. Again.

Take thine own advice ignorant knave: http://www.space.com/18502-far... :

A new celestial wonder has stolen the title of most distant object ever seen in the universe, astronomers report. The new record holder is the galaxy MACS0647-JD, which is about 13.3 billion light-years away. The universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so this galaxy's light has been traveling toward us for almost the whole history of space and time.

There has to be proof, in safety-critical processes

First: Why? everything in life is a risk. If you put out an add looking for volunteers for a mission that is almost 100% guaranteed to kill the volunteer, you will still get many thousands of times the number of volunteers as you need...

Second: There is no such thing as proof. the very concept is for mathematicians, politicians and idiots; none of whom deal in the real world. The real world is dangerous, and people are notoriously bad at planning for the unexpected. The amount of danger increases as a function of the energy involved, making spaceflight very dangerous by definition. The people involved accept that risk, but what good is installing 3 redundant hydraulic systems when a single fault in the leading edge of a wing severs all three... A better use of weight and cost would be two systems with armor... (Might have saved Columbia, or at least gotten the crew to a slow enough speed and low enough altitude that they could have survived breakup/bailout). Redundant systems have a demonstrated usefulness, but they fail completely when face with area effects, and yet, redundancy is used to "prove" low odds of failure, that simply do not pan out in reality. Fukushima was supposed to survive a one in a thousand years tsunami...

flight 232 had all three hydraulic system severed in what was supposed to be a 1 in a billion event...

Kegworth was a result of redundant engines being useless because the wrong engine got shut down...

"Proof" in mechanical systems is usually demonstrated through redundancy which only gets you so far: Not nearly as far as the engineers are taught...

Oh, maybe they found it already.

You know what else is stupid? You :)
Old hat NASA engineers have been repeating that same old story about hardening for years. They all said it cant work, will be unreliable, is a waste of time and money. All until Phonesat was tested and worked.
http://www.space.com/21036-spa...

Today there is over 100 NONhardened satellites in orbit
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/p...

They cost thousands instead of millions of dollars, and work just fine. You can listen to an interview with one of the founders/engineers here:
http://www.theamphour.com/220-...

I'm sure the Congressmen from Boeing had something to do with this. After all, if they're sending a rocket to Europa, how's it going to get to get there without the Senate Launch System? "See? We have to spend that money now! We've got a bunch of science missions that we've already spent money on waiting for it!"

>So, what exactly is the point of manned space stations?

For one thing, testing various methods for keeping humans alive, healthy, and sane in space.

We need to expand beyond Earth. To do that, we'll need space stations as jump-off points, and we'll need to know how to survive extended periods in space (months and years). To do that, we need somewhere to test survival, like the ISS.

> Or would the money, time and effort be better invested in some other types of space activity - automated experimental stations, or - let's dream - building a "real" base in space?

The ISS cost $150 billion over 20 years, or about $7.5 billion a year to construct and maintain. The US currently spends about $3 billion a year to keep it going - or about $8 per person. It's not a lot of money. Think about that - watching a movie about space costs more than actually maintaining a real life space station.

We have to start somewhere. All the work put into building and maintaining ISS was necessary experience before would could build a "real" base. We can design all we want but there are a lot of lessons to learn when you try to put theory into practice.

Yes, for each individual experiment, automated experiments are cheaper and easier. They're still done: http://www.space.com/27003-rus...

We don't have to do ISS *or* automated experiments - we do both.

Space is the future and it takes big investments right now. They do pay off now, and they'll pay off even more in the future.

Already been done on an asteroid. already collected comet dust and returned to earth

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sci...

http://www.space.com/26832-sta...

Maybe people who weren't as mentally sharp had fewer employment options and ended up in jobs with shift work.

I seem to remember that the guys keeping track of the Mars rover were on 25 hour cycles (here's a link: http://www.space.com/18381-cur...). This study directly shows that these guys became moronic and thus screwed up their units and hence why the follow up mission crashed into the planet. So, yes: shift work makes you dumb. I've been doing shift work for years and it's turned me into a moron too.

Hey, um... what if dark matter is just heaps of rogue planets and left-over dust and gasses from nebulae? Given that we've only recently gotten a handle on how many rogue planets there are out there, wouldn't they've been left out of our previous calculations?

Right, except that time it did explode, killing 3 engineers. I guess we can't remember all the way back to 2007.

TiggertheMad, it seems to me that you are being TiggertheSensible. Your ideas are better than those in the Washington Post and Mashable.com articles.

The Washington Post is now owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, another man who often enormously over-estimates his own intelligence. Would you go into space in a vehicle owned by Jeff Bezos? The Amazon web site is an abusive mess! For example, a few days ago I selected "lowest price" for an item on Amazon, and several were listed for $1. The real price was $18. Why doesn't Jeff Bezos detect that he is already overloaded and not dealing with his overload well?

It's amazingly weird! Elon Musk can be the coordinator of a company that builds spacecraft successfully, but he can't detect when he has a REALLY crazy idea.

Elon Musk is not completely like Jenny McCarthy, I think. She never has good ideas. Or maybe she is just a model who has found a way of making herself more well-known among the ignorant people who consider her interesting.

1. Satellites and probes are carrying something more akin to a nuclear battery than a nuclear reactor, called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

Again, this.

Nuclear reactors aren't a whole lot larger, they managed to make them small enough to fit on a space rocket, a submarine and back in the 1960's, nine of them on an Aircraft Carrier. It's the support systems (like cooling) and maintenance buildings that end up taking up several acres. Dissipating the waste heat of a 20MW reactor safely, indefinitely, is no small feat.

1. Satellites and probes are carrying something more akin to a nuclear battery than a nuclear reactor, called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
2. Submarines have one reactor each and the only aircraft carrier class to have more than two was the original nuclear USS Enterprise that had eight, not nine.

Worth reading http://www.space.com/21554-mar... on toxic soil on Mars.

first artificial satellite, USSR: http://www.space.com/17852-spu...

Sputnik wasn't a satellite, it was a beeping metal ball. Putting a rock into space isn't impressive, putting an actual probe in space is and NASA did that first.

first human in space, USSR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...

I'll give you that, however I will say it was much easier for the Russians to do this since they don't care about safety like NASA does. Gagarin almost didn't make it back and who knows how many other cosmonauts they killed before him in their attempts.

first woman in space, USSR: http://www.history.com/this-da...

Irrelevant which sex the person was. I could just as easily say NASA put the first black person in space.

first unmanned landing on the moon, USSR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

The Russians crashed an impactor on the moon, not a real probe. NASA put _men_ on the moon.

first mission to Venus, USSR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

NASA was first to flyby Venus. The Russian missions failed.

first mission to Mars, USSR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

NASA was first to flyby, orbit and land on Mars. All of the Russian missions failed.

Now how about all of the other stuff like sending probes to Mercury and the outer planets? NASA did all of that first. NASA was also the first to send a probe out of the solar system.

After a 10-month journey through deep space, NASA's MAVEN probe arrived in Mars orbit late Sunday (Sept. 21), on a mission to help scientists figure out why the Red Planet changed from a relatively warm and wet place in the ancient past to the cold, arid world it is today.

MAVEN, whose name is short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, fired its engines in a crucial 30-minute braking burn Sunday night, slowing down enough to be captured by the planet's gravity around 10:24 p.m. EDT (0224 GMT Monday, Sept. 22).

http://www.space.com/27217-nas...

http://www.space.com/27211-made-in-space-3d-printer.html/

It's ABS, and quite small. It's more for testing than anything else, but they say they intend to print functional items rather than just toys.

I never mentioned large black holes and I was using the quote to demonstrate that we still do not know what is going on really yet.

Anyway, this seems recent enough ( April 30, 2014):
"Black hole atoms now join a long list of candidates for dark matter particles, from supersymmetric neutralinos, WIMPs and axions to warm sterile neutrinos and many more, Dokuchaev told Space.com. Verifying whether any of them is the real deal will require catching one first, he added."

http://www.space.com/25691-dar...

If it’s all a "liberal" conspiracy, what are they trying to gain?

All people already in government would gain increased governmental control over the citizenry's lives — the vast majority of them believe, they "know better" than their subjects — bless our little hearts — how to live. Which is why you haven't yet seen a "green" measure proposed, that reduced that control, have you?

In addition, the "green" measures cause the Capitalism to slow down — a cause dear to the Illiberals and the foreign handlers of some of them. Seriously, scratch a "green" activist, and you'll find a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath...

I can see what you get to gain by denying the problem exists

Could you be more specific? What do I get to gain? Do you suppose, I — or the KKKoch brothers — have a wonderful new planet for ourselves (or our children) to emigrate to, when Earth becomes too polluted? Some kind of Elysium being built for the 1%?

They were purposely not invited. Then they were sort of not invited (Read the TFA, it's weird). Now they've invited everyone else to join their party.

If it's your party, you get to decide on the decorations and the cuisine.

Space.com says it's a 60-footer. http://www.space.com/27026-ast...

This must be the Flat Tyre Service (http://cria.co.in/crweb/flat-tyre-service/) honouring the rumoured subscription of cash-strapped NASA.
Considering the damage (http://www.space.com/26472-mars-rover-curiosity-wheel-damage.html) there was no way Cross Roads (http://cria.co.in/crweb/) could wiggle out of it's responsibility.

space.com also has the video. Although you have to put up with the ads, they seem to have more bandwidth than the original site does, which I'm still waiting on for the download.

The SLS could have a mission: an Apollo 8 style Mars flyby in 2021: http://www.space.com/19985-pri...

That would actually fit within the current flight plan if it became EM-2. 580 days with a larger, livable service module could do it. That would be a mission worth a heavy lift vehicle and an actual date as opposed to "maybe we'll go to Mars in the 2030s" ...

could we solve current computational problems 200 years ago?

Yes, for small problem sets.

We could say, OK, we could use pen and paper and discover these algorithms out of blue.

And yes, in practice we did use pen and paper (or blackboards, etc) to do just that. Most of the algorithms are easily within the grasp of mathematicians of the past 3000 years (once you get them to accept basic math concepts like real numbers and set theory.

Note that computers didn't make these algorithms possible, they merely created the need for them.

believing that being isolated in the jungle with pen and paper, and no internet, one could formulate dark energy...

Where am I going to find pens and paper in a jungle? The existence of both, particularly of pens with extruded plastics, chemically sophisticated inks, or machined parts, implies already a considerable amount of civilization.

And it's worth remembering here that dark energy was formulated with whatever Einstein was using at the time, which was near equivalent to pen and paper. He didn't have the internet either.

Anything that is a sphere and orbits a star is a planet. Asteroids don't have sphere shape. Same goes for comets. The reason for the name "dwarf planets" is that of naming issue. There are more than 100 planet object out there, most of them smaller than planet Mercury.

Haumea is a planet, but is minor elongated due it's rapid orbital period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

List of other dwarf planets.

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/pl...

Then there is a chance of Earth size planets (both above and below in size and mass) in the outer region of our solar system that have not yet been discovered. At least there are clues about them today, even if they have so far not yet been found. It is my guess they are going to be found, given time and advances in technology that allows for better detection of outer orbital planets in our solar system.

http://www.space.com/7728-eart...
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

There is a lot out there that we don't have no clue about and there are discoveries to be made (if the funding holds).

1) can't launch to polar orbit.

They have the pad at SLC-4 at Vandenberg to launch to polar orbits.
http://www.space.com/23023-spa...
And there's not much in the way of large commercial satellites in polar orbit anyway-- it's the GEO comsat market they're after with this launch site, I think.

Not as long as you have someone with three muslim names as commander in chief.

Get this: Hussein installs a black guy in as NASA chief, and telling him that the "foremost" goal of NASA is NOT science, is NOT space flight, but is, literally, to make Muslims feel better. This guy says in an interview:

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering

http://www.space.com/8725-nasa...

Thanks alot, assholes, for electing this guy.

Odd that anyone hasn't heard since it's far from news, but "moon volcanoes" is easily googled for thousands of reference to extinct volcanoes known to be active until at least a billion years ago. Discussions of a couple of specific types of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... and http://www.space.com/12419-moo...

While fast radio bursts last just a few thousandths of a second and have rarely been detected, the new result confirms previous estimates that these strange cosmic bursts occur roughly 10,000 times a day over the whole sky.

That's a lot of aliens.

Well, since there are 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, not so many. One burst per galaxy every 50,000 years or so.

Or maybe we are inside of a slow thinking alien's head.

Ok, we need some links with more concrete figures:

1. Huge Mars Colony Eyed by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk

Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable. The United States' GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.

I'm not saying that's a reasonable way to draw a budget, just to provide an estimate on what Musk is targeting. Since this article came out (Nov 2012), I think his cost estimations went up, and his funding plans shifted more to preparing a realistic IPO (not covering the whole thing, but some of the early stages). Cannot readily find a quote for that.

There are many more (somewhat obfuscated) details in that article, like this one:

Musk also ruled out SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, as the spacecraft that would land colonists on the Red Planet. When asked by SPACE.com what vehicle would be used, he said, "I think you just land the entire thing."

Asked if the "entire thing" is the huge new reusable rocket — which is rumored to bear the acronymic name MCT, short for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport — Musk said, "Maybe."

2. Elon Musk Says Ticket to Mars Will Cost $500,000

“Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket — half a million dollars. It can be done,” he told the BBC.

Musk did hint that one of the keys to low-cost trips to the red planet would be the ability to not only refuel there, but also to reuse the entire spacecraft on the return trip. In the BBC interview Musk said by reusing the spacecraft, you end up with the same sorts of costs airlines face. Musk compared it to flying today where a 747 isn’t simply thrown away after a flight to London. Like the airplane, the cost of the spacecraft could be spread out over numerous flights rather than just a single trip making fuel one of the main expenses rather than the entire ship.

3. Tesla’s (TSLA) Musk On Colonizing the Red Planet

Asked about the possibility of a SpaceX IPO, Musk said the company’s plans are too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, making an IPO unlikely any time soon.

“Maybe [when] we’re close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we’ve flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense,” he said.

So, I can't comment on how realistic is each of his cost and time estimations, but he is trying hard to make them internally consistent, and most and first of all, to bring down the launch costs and to improve the reusability. We can already see several successful steps in that direction, and we will see the gradual progress, or lack thereof, very soon. It's not some Kickstarter scheme for Gates & Buffet.

Yeah, I suppose they should have just gone ahead with the launch. There was probably only a small chance of doing this or this.