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are we SURE that we need the collision energies this new collider will give us?

Yes, if you read the reports they give some examples:

"However, several experimental facts do require the extension of the Standard Model and explanations are needed for observations such as the abundance of matter over antimatter, the striking evidence for dark matter and the non-zero neutrino masses. Theoretical issues such as the hierarchy problem, and, more in general, the dynamical origin of the Higgs mechanism, do likewise point to the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model."

Maybe the money would be better spent on bio-medical research, genetic manipulation of food crops, Fusion energy commercialization or space exploration?

Huge amounts of money are already going towards bio-medical research, both by governments and commercial interests: "Globally, in excess of US$200bn is invested each year in biomedical research." link
There is already a multi-billion dollar international research project on fusion energy (see ITER). Fusion energy commercialization in an engineering challenge and not fundamental research and is already be addressed by commercial investment: Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, General Fusion, Helion Energy, LPPFusion, Proton Scientific and others.
Space exploration is being funded: "global government investment in space exploration totaled $14.6 billion in 2017" link and space exploration is also going commercial, witness SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and United Launch Alliance.

Not only that, but hydroponically grown vegetables in Antartica have been grown for quite a while as well:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/v...

Date on the article: 2004

Come on Slashdot. I know this isn't a breaking news site but ....

You reference a "staunchly formal notice" and where it was posted but can't include a link?

Permit: http://images.spaceref.com/new...

Reference page: http://nasawatch.com/archives/...

"editor".. sheesh

Meanwhile other rockets such as the Delta are at 100% success rate.

So, almost no one has a 100% success rate. Note by the way, that this is part of why both the Dragon and Starliner(the Boeing capsule) have an ability for the capsule to separate if there's an issue with the rocket. It is interesting that you mention the Delta, since around 9% of Deltas have failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(rocket_family)#Launch_reliability. Last I checked, 91% is not 100%. (Granted, many of the failures were early Deltas and many of those failures were partial failures where people in a capsule above might survive). But, in fact, NASA doesn't think that man-rating any version of the Delta makes sense https://www.wired.com/2008/07/why-nasa-isnt-t/, whereas NASA is in favor of man-rating the Falcon 9, Block 5, so the people who think about this sort of thing have thought very carefully about this. Part of why NASA won't man-rate the Delta is because its regular flight profile subjects payloads to 6 gs, but a major part is also its lack of redundant systems where adding them in would require massive work.

NASA is insisting, quite appropriately on at least a few Falcon 9 Block 5 flights before they put people on it. The Block 5 is going to be the final version of the rocket and has a lot of tweaks which will make reuse easier but also other bits that will improve safety and reliability.

it is send us more money! Regarding asteroid laws, Moon Treaty, etc. first gotta have capability to have Moon travel routinely. Right now it is really hard just to get there, "GAO: NASA Human Space Exploration: Delay Likely for First Exploration Mission" http://spaceref.com/news/views...

You'd think, for instance, somewhere someone should be experimenting with the minimum requirements for rendering Martian regolith into non-toxic, fertile ground.

You would think that, yeah. Indeed, we probably have some sort of simulated martian regolith that can be used for this sort of research.

Toying around with the power requirements to augment Martian sunlight and temperatures to levels required to support Terran plants or trying to engineer plants that will grow and thrive at Martian insolation levels.

That sounds quite handy.

Or playing around with in situ production of building materials, automated mining and refining equipment, etc.

Yes, it would be handy if you could make bricks, or perhaps concrete.

I'd certainly be up for a really inhumane experiment

When can you be ready to go?

Come on China, I could use a free taco!

Or Australialiaia will send them a bill for littering!

> Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black. So how are you supposed to see them?

Given that there may several exaquintrillion tonnes of asteroids, planetesimals, rocky planets gas giants, black, brown and red dwarves and even reasonably large stars, roaming around that we are only just beginning to be able to see, a large amount of dark matter may well turn out to be regular matter, just very hard to see.

Nevermind that JUNO was co-funded by multiple countries at that.

Sort of. The US funded the mission itself-- the launch, the spacecraft, the operations. Several European countries contributed science instruments (to be fair, since it's a science mission, the science instruments are the whole point of the mission.)

Details here:
http://www.europlanet-eu.org/juno-europe/
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=49003

This is an amazing published paper on the feasibility of a space elevator.
http://keithcu.com/wiki/images...

The big take-aways:
* Decreasing the x-sectional surface area by an exponential function as altitude decreases theoretically allows any material to be used, though the volumes required would be prohibitive for any but the strongest materials, and too steep an exponential function makes the geometries also not practically possible
* A yield strength of 46.5 GPa only requires a max-to-min cross-sectional area ratio ("taper ratio") of 10. A lower yield strength would require a larger taper ratio.

The material in this article has a yield strength of 9.6 GPa which is about 7.2% of the maximum strength of graphene and 20% of the way to 46.5 GPa, and I believe stronger than any bulk material previously manufactured. Reaching 46.5 GPa only requires 36% of the 130 GPa maximum strength of graphene, leaving lots of room for falling short on the actual average yield strength of manufactured product, and also including the required engineering safety factor in the design. And if we still fall short, we have some room to raise the taper ratio.

This TEDx video describes spinning carbon nanotubes to give them more than enough strength, which is basically what these people in this article have done! It also addressed the other concerns of the Gizmodo article. Since this manufacturing is firmly in the realm of engineering, now, I would expect to see a regular rate of increasing strengths in produced materials, as the processes improve. http://spaceref.com/space-elev...

TD;DR - Space elevator is entirely possible.

The are doing some of the growing enough food, although you are right it is not in a truly closed system. Note that none of the plans I’ve seen have that all of the food would be grown. http://www.spaceref.com/news/v...

What, like this? http://spaceref.com/news/viewp...

http://www.spaceref.com/news/v...

Attempt to fly at 100,000 feet, which is about I suspect the same density as martian atmosphere.

Days after being excoriated for essentially failing at their primary science mission, NASA announces it arrives at Mt. Sharp despite being several miles from the actual mountain.

What else were we supposed to do with it? We'd pretty much depleted our Saturn 1B launch systems, the last being used for the joint Apollo Soyuz mission and the shuttle wasn't going to fly for a few more years. The American public had already shown its propensity for being uninterested in the space program so congress wasn't willing to put funds towards keeping it in orbit and there were other problems with Skylab that needed to be fixed if it was going to be viable. This also happened during the Ford and Carter administrations, not the Nixon administration.

Grassley has a history of sending drooling stupid letters full of dipshit questions to NASA administrators. Here he's character-assinating the director of the Ames Research Center. Here he's making shit up about NASA and Google doing something nefarious. Here is an account of him badgering them about procurement practices.

Note that all of them contain demands for detailed histories, rationales and future plans, all to be delivered with two weeks.

Maybe this grandstanding fucktard should start writing similar letters to the Secretary of Defense. I hear they get a slightly larger portion of the budget pie than NASA does.

This article says 1 billion years, but we will run out of atmospheric carbon dioxide long before that. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=908

Alright, but asteroids large enough to kill everyone in a major metropolitan area come more frequently. Tunguska-sized events might be as frequent as once every 400 years. If we address this more immediate, more manageable risk with today's technology, maybe in 1000 years we will have slowly progressed far enough to address larger threats.

I'm fairly sure superluminal phenomena have been observed. They aren't going faster than light but they appear to be.

Exactly! What's been missing in the dialog is the fact that the federal budget has ballooned in all departments. You can hear the little piggies being called to the troughs in DC while leadership at all levels, congress, the administration and even down to local municipalities has been missing. It's has been easier to say 'spend and borrow' than 'let's make the hard choices that's right for our country.' This is what happened last year when the debt ceiling was being reached and the republicans said they wouldn't support it without budget cuts. So what happened? they compromised for a joint task force with them all being deadlocked and both parties agreed that Sequestration wouldn't happen until after the 2012 elections. Guess what, nobody did anything. The joint task force couldn't come to a consensus and now we have the 'Fiscal Cliff' everybody is talking about. Do we honestly think that our dysfunctional government can come to an agreement of how to reduce the budget? Well for the past four years they haven't been able to so my suggestion to everybody is save your money now and get ready for another recession because there is a complete lack of adult supervision in Washington and it's time we all recognized that. Being a leader means that sometimes you have to make a decision that isn't popular but one that you know is right. There isn't anybody in Washington DC that can do that. Sure they can make speeches and talk about things like women's rights and "The private sector never built anything" but it gets us nowhere fast. I suggest that if you have the ability to vote in November, do so, don't ignore it and then vote against all incumbents. That means if the person has the office now, vote for somebody else on the ballot in all races, even down to your local elections.

That will send a message and it will also give somebody out there, anybody, a chance to do better than the bunch of clods we have now.

Getting back on target, if we start to get a handle on all those non-essential things, like 16000 new IRS agents, it would close the budget gap for NASA but let's all face facts, the Obama NASA wants the Private Sector to do the heavy lifting, while NASA continues to explore. This would represent more opportunity for Space-X et. al. Even Burt Rutan would like to see that.

...they let them slip on the floor. If only they could be a little more careful...

http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=36679

Oh, you mean do science? But that's such hard work.

One Wikipedia article that you absolutely must read if you want to do any sort of "serious" Science Fiction involving travel in the solar system is to read up on Delta-v for travel in the Solar System. These articles are essential:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_travel

• Make sure you read up on very real "spaceship" (as opposed to spacecraft) that is being proposed by NASA engineers: The NAUTLUS-X

  Travel in space is all about energy, and you need it in heaping piles that are incredibly efficient in how that energy is used, as well as fuel sources that are incredibly dense in terms of potential energy storage for such a journey. All of this is in terms of how you get there, and to be perfectly honest there are still a whole bunch of unknowns. More importantly, there is very little if any sort of biological research that has gone into the long-term effects of partial-gravity environments, considering that the Apollo missions were mostly like weekend camping trips rather than any sort of serious attempt to stay somewhere for a substantial period of time.

  One thing that I find especially sad is that there has been absolutely no research at all to find out the physiological impacts of zero-g environments, much less partial gravity environments, upon the gestational development of a placental mammal. You hear all sort of conjecture flying about from supposedly intelligent scientists on the matter and talk of sterilization of the first participants to long-term stays elsewhere in the Solar System, but I think all of that is a bunch of hogwash as the proper answer is simple "we don't know". There might not be problems, but there might be issues too, or potential ways to mitigate the issues that come from having sex in space and producing children. Note here I'm talking even studies of mice, rats, guinea pigs, or any other kind of creature has never been studied in terms of what happens when they produce kids. Mice have gone on board the ISS, but they are intentionally kept separate and explicitly not permitted to have sex. I think this is something criminal in terms of keeping that sort of knowledge from being developed, and is to me one of the things that should have been studied years ago, particularly in light of potential plans for travel to other planets. Make a wild guess as to what happens, and know comfortably that nothing has been studied so the ideas of a 3rd grader is just as good as a PhD in terms of this particular issue.

  There are terrestrial studies (stuff done entirely on the Earth) of population groups and the minimum number of people you may need for a viable self-sustaining population. Even there, however, don't get hung up on the piddling details of what it takes to make a sustainable colony as no colony is going to be completely isolated from the rest of humanity, unless your story has an apocalyptic flavor and the isolation from the rest of humanity is part of the story itself.

  Some overlooked issues include worrying about base machines that make machines. In spite of some very interesting progress along the way, I don't see 3D printers becoming the ultimate source of tool making on Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, and good standbys of things like a lathe, grinder, and other machine shop tools are going to be critical items to take on any sort of extra-terrestrial trip. I envision that one of the very first tasks for

This from the same corporation that anchored a target for the Mir space station in the South Pacific. The ad campaign made more headlines than the actual deorbit or Mir. Whoever came up with that idea deserved a huge bonus.

Although it's probably too late to get this comment prominent - just this month a US judge ordered IPv4 assets frozen.

And the Dutch police happily sent a police order to the RIPE NCC, the registry in charge of internet numbers in Europe, which immediately followed it.

Considering the fiscal climate we are in I say the government should forget about going to Mars and just pick the project which would create the most high paying jobs. It seems like the new rocket will create the most and will greatly ease launching more satellites for both private and public use. The only thing on Mars is dirt and sending another probe wont change that.

This is exactly what NASA should not be doing. If you want to know why, you should read the 2003 testimony of Zubrin on the future of NASA.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1568 The guts of the reentry capsules is neat. I really wish I could be there but sadly I'm on the opposite coast.

Actually, I remember reading an English language "how to handle a Soyuz capsule landing in your backyard" manual, IIRC it was published somewhere on nasaspaceflight . It was written in such a manner that it could be given out to local administration, should the capsule land in an unplanned area by accident.

Nevertheless, it was quite an interesting read - how to help the cosmonauts open the capsule with a special wrench mounted on the outside of the capsule, to watch out for automatically deployed boom antennas, etc.

Looks like the manual is also included in this article: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=815

The science program has worked hard to put up firewalls to prevent the manned program from raiding them for funding when the going gets tough. By breaking that firewall in the opposite direction it opens the science directorate to future funding losses when things get bad on the manned side...

Human Exploration just recently merged with Space Operations (infrastructure) creating the HEOMD. HEOMD Sort of like merging the Department of Labor with Department of Transportation (infrastructure). Or (sorta) like merging the Athletic department with the Engineering department!

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=4152

And in other news, plans to blow up the recently surveyed miscreant asteroid are moving forward. Since right-hand circularly polarized signals become left hand circularly polarized when reflected, the unauthorized infringing signals sent back to Earth were considered distinct copies. The asteroid has been getting away with this for more than fifty years. Dealing with this has been a long term combined effort of NASA (National Asteriod Surveillance Agency) and MPAA (Mars Punishes Aberrant Asteroids). Some fear that one of the surviving asteroids may someday retaliate and attempt to destroy the Earth.

Although NASA astronauts were very helpful in the installation of additional solar panels on the international space station which would allow more powerful signals to find terrestrial "unauthorized copies in any information retrieval system" (even if organic and encased in a tin-foil hat), the U.S. astronauts mission was ended after it was found they were smuggling copies of recordings in iPods. Those recordings clearly being taken outside the region of license (if there even was a license).
An official was quoted as saying that eventually machine probes alone will be able to do all needed monitoring and enforcement. They also hope to someday nip coping in the bud by traveling back in time.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=22762
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1274
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=22729

And in other news, plans to blow up the recently surveyed miscreant asteroid are moving forward. Since right-hand circularly polarized signals become left hand circularly polarized when reflected, the unauthorized infringing signals sent back to Earth were considered distinct copies. The asteroid has been getting away with this for more than fifty years. Dealing with this has been a long term combined effort of NASA (National Asteriod Surveillance Agency) and MPAA (Mars Punishes Aberrant Asteroids). Some fear that one of the surviving asteroids may someday retaliate and attempt to destroy the Earth.

Although NASA astronauts were very helpful in the installation of additional solar panels on the international space station which would allow more powerful signals to find terrestrial "unauthorized copies in any information retrieval system" (even if organic and encased in a tin-foil hat), the U.S. astronauts mission was ended after it was found they were smuggling copies of recordings in iPods. Those recordings clearly being taken outside the region of license (if there even was a license).
An official was quoted as saying that eventually machine probes alone will be able to do all needed monitoring and enforcement. They also hope to someday nip coping in the bud by traveling back in time.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=22762
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1274
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=22729

And in other news, plans to blow up the recently surveyed miscreant asteroid are moving forward. Since right-hand circularly polarized signals become left hand circularly polarized when reflected, the unauthorized infringing signals sent back to Earth were considered distinct copies. The asteroid has been getting away with this for more than fifty years. Dealing with this has been a long term combined effort of NASA (National Asteriod Surveillance Agency) and MPAA (Mars Punishes Aberrant Asteroids). Some fear that one of the surviving asteroids may someday retaliate and attempt to destroy the Earth.

Although NASA astronauts were very helpful in the installation of additional solar panels on the international space station which would allow more powerful signals to find terrestrial "unauthorized copies in any information retrieval system" (even if organic and encased in a tin-foil hat), the U.S. astronauts mission was ended after it was found they were smuggling copies of recordings in iPods. Those recordings clearly being taken outside the region of license (if there even was a license).
An official was quoted as saying that eventually machine probes alone will be able to do all needed monitoring and enforcement. They also hope to someday nip coping in the bud by traveling back in time.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=22762
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1274
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=22729

Read the report: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=35294

In short, the answer is yes, management is that bad at NASA. I am coming to believe that we need to look at NASA's mission and alter it for the post Cold-War era.

You say the public is against space exploration, I say the public is for it. I think one of us should come up with figures to back up what we say to prove we are not simply making it up.

The accident you refer to happened four years ago. A little over a year later Scaled Composites released their findings into the cause of the accident and shared everything they learned in how to more safely handle the materials they were using with the industry.

Since then I haven't heard of any accidents. So please inform us what other accidents have occured at Scaled Composites relating to the rocket motors.

Furthermore, I've love to hear about your sources that characterize the current state of Scaled Composites' rocket motor development as being "problematic".

I think your information is four years old. Scaled Composites already has a schedule in place that includes, later this year, firing the rocket motor in flight, possibly even putting SpaceShipTwo into space by the end of this year (but that will probably happen in early 2012). And by the end of 2012 we'll probably see the first paid flights.

The engines are fine.

No, we're talking about reality. In reality, unlike in theory, it takes a lot more to get a rocket to Mars than engineering and sufficient power and fuel. It takes massive funding, political will, and the sustained support of both for several years. There's no engineering equation you can use to calculate if you'll make it to Mars -- the equation will only tell you whether you can do the easy part...

Actually, SpaceX's first demo launch of the Falcon Heavy in 2013 doesn't have a customer and they're self-funding it, so if they want to they can send it to pretty much anywhere in the inner solar system that they want. Heck, Elon Musk could even get part of his team to assemble his old Mars Oasis greenhouse project and try to land it on Mars if he wanted. Since it's self-funded, it's purely an engineering problem (perhaps with some PR thrown in for good measure).

The shuttle is a fundamentally compromised design stuffed with 40-year-old technology.

Any sane private company would use something completely different..

Look at what United Launch Aliance and SpaceX propose to do.

Looks like it's the former instead of latter: "In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic... That makes it very peculiar, though it falls short of being some form of truly 'alien' life belonging to a different tree of life with a separate origin."

No, they reverted to Imperial measurements:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=33782

> Yes, it would be nice if it had more money attached to it, but we kinda spent our cash on tax cuts for the rich and two wars under Bush.

IMHO, NASA needs to start spending its money better before it can expect to get more money from the taxpayers. Hopefully the transition to using proven commercial entities instead of attempting to build rockets in-house (which NASA hasn't successfully done in around 30 years) will help with this:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=30992

The NASA COTS program has demonstrated the power of what can be accomplished when you combine private sector responsiveness and ingenuity with the guidance, support and insight of the US government. For less than the cost of the Ares I mobile service tower, SpaceX has developed all the flight hardware for the Falcon 9 orbital rocket, Dragon spacecraft, as well as three launch sites. SpaceX has been profitable for three consecutive years (2007 through 2009) and expects to remain modestly profitable for the foreseeable future.

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.

Launching rockets into space makes a pretty huge mess of the environment too. Liquid fuels like liquid hydrogen+liquid oxygen require vast amounts of energy to produce, liquefy and store.

Then there's the price of getting to space. That's about $10,000/lb to get to geostationary orbit. A 40' standard intermodal shipping container weighs about 9,000lb. You might say once could build it out of a lighter material, but you also need to get it from GTO to the asteroids and back, make a controlled descent back to earth etc. So let's just keep things simple and assume it's a magical shipping container that will fly out to the asteroid belt and back and return to earth safely. You've spent $90M launching this into space.

Now, let's assume that there are asteroids with pure titanium (density 4.5g/cm^3) sitting on the asteroid around just waiting to be loaded into the magical shipping container and you fill it completely to it's 75.3m^3 capacity, and bring it back to earth. Titanium is currently about $11/lb, but let's call it $20/lb. You've brought back about $15M worth of titanium back to earth.

Even in this amazingly slanted scenario the cost of a space launch would have to fall by 83% just to break even.

If the space elevator became reality that might change the economics drastically, but that's not really relevant here because that's not likely to happen in the "near-term".

But once it floats "above" the denser atmosphere, even a slight solar wind is enough to blow it away. It then winds up outside the heliosphere, where it reaches *real* equilibrium between the force of the suns gravity and the upward thrust of the solar wind, about twice as far out as Jupiter.

Time to revive Elon Musk's Life to Mars project? http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=3698

According to http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1419, Sean O'Keefe (and his son) both survived the crash, though they are "...banged up". This, per a family source.

Not in this case. By all accounts, Elon Musk didn't originally want to get into the rocket business. He wanted to be in the Mars colonization business, but quickly discovered that rockets were too damned expensive, so he decided to make his own.

For Musk, the marketing is a tool for achieving is vision, not the other way around.

It's actually quite interesting to read about Elon Musk's efforts to try to launch Mars Oasis and the "Life to Mars" foundation back in 2001, a year before he realized how screwed up the launch market was and decided to start SpaceX:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=3698

Someone is putting his money where my mouth has been. Describing permanent settlement of Mars as "a positive, constructive, inspirational goal" capable of uniting humanity at a critical time," dot-com entrepreneur Elon Musk has pledged a substantial portion of his personal fortune to realizing that goal, beginning with a proposed $20 million technology-demonstration Mars lander to be launched perhaps in 2005. Calling his "victory condition" seeing NASA's top priority change to establishing a permanent human presence on Mars, he said in an interview last week that "the path by which I hope to get there is to get the public enthusiastic about the possibility, then translate that into legislative pressure so that Congress hands us a Mars mandate." Musk's plans are invigorating, finally matching for Mars the initiative and boldness recently displayed in Low Earth Orbit by Dennis Tito's flight and the recent MirCorp announcement of a private "MiniMir" orbiting facility. I hope his entrepreneurial directness will bring a new effectiveness to the Mars effort. I hope also that he can avoid being brought down by the Byzantine politics of space: on the Hill, in the scientific community and in the space movement. ...

Musk's "Mars Oasis" project is a small robotic lander intended primarily as a mini-greenhouse, growing samples of food crops in an enclosed chamber filled with treated Martian regolith (soil), to test the feasibility of humans living off the land. Other experiments may include test units for the production of oxygen and rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere, and radiation sensors. In a radical departure from the missions scheduled by NASA, each experiment would focus on developing data critical to human habitation, rather than on pure planetary science. ...

He refused to engage in political posturing or NASA-bashing, saying that "I don't have a palpable ideology for private or governmental missions." He described his relations with NASA as "good, I would say. I have not had any bad relations whatsoever. I don't see them as the bad guy. NASA's in the position it's in not through any desire of its own. The public is asking NASA often to have a perfect track record and a perfect safety record," yielding excessive caution and institutional gridlock. "By driving this private space mission forward," he continued, "I hope for changes for NASA, for it to receive a clear and pressing mandate for a human base [on Mars]. I want to reinvigorate NASA."

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=301
have a look at "GEOSYNCHRONOUS TRANSFER ORBIT"

Now of course that will drop but I think you're being more than a little optimistic assuming it will reach 1% of that price any time soon.
Perhaps if someone builds a space elevator(or similar).

The reason I mention Asimov is that he had a bit of a thing for humanoid robots. Old romantic really. And it is true that if you want people to interact with machines naturally then humanoid would be good but really if you want the machines to be able to use off the shelf tools then a pair of humanlike hands is all you really need- a humanoid torso, legs and head don't do very much for you unless you also want your robot to take part in a sci-fi movie.

Actually, the Falcon 9, unlike most reusable boosters, was designed in advance to carry humans. It meets all of NASA's requirements for a human-rated vehicle except for an escape system. SpaceX has stated their intention to dot that final i within a couple of years. The Dragon spacecraft they're designing for the Falcon 9 will support a crew of 7.

A few additional points:

* As you allude to, Falcon 9 is designed and built to NASA's human-rating standards. With Ares I on the other hand, NASA had to lower the human-rating standards when it turned out Ares was unable to adequately meet them.

* Falcon 9 is an all-liquid rocket, meaning it isn't prone to catastrophic solid propellant explosions like the Ares I is. The Ares I design uses a gigantic solid rocket as its first stage, and a USAF analysis showed that an explosion of that stage would create a giant cloud of solid propellant debris which would melt parachutes on the escaping capsule, with 100% chance of killing the crew.

* The sort of PRA analysis used to show that Ares I was the "safest rocket ever" with a supposedly "1 in 3145" chance of losing crew tend to have a fairly loose correlation with how safe a rocket actually ends up being, as the types of failures accounted for in a PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) end up being only a fairly small fraction of all launch failures. Most launch failures are caused by unexpected failure modes in a design, which are completely unaccounted for in a PRA.

* The best way to determine rocket reliability is through its track record. By the time humans are first launched on the Falcon 9, it will have had at least a dozen or so unmanned flights to prove itself. The Ares I, on the other hand, plans on carrying crew on its -second- flight ever.

Yep. There's a reason why some folks referred to Ares as Porklauncher I.

I cringed when I heard Alalbama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, say the launch of Falcon 9 as a display merely replicating what "NASA accomplished in 1964." I guess he forgot that Ares IX didn't even accomplish that -- nor even equalling the accomplishment of the 1960 flight of Mercury-Redstone 1A. Ares IX took an extra shuttle SRB (not the actual 5-segment solid booster planned for Ares I), avionics from an Atlas V, and a leftover roll-control system from a Peacekeeper missile. This Frankenrocket was topped with a fake 2nd stage and capsule and was a suborbital plink.

Falcon 9 had a fully new 2-stage rocket with all the pieces -- engines, avionics, control -- in place except a payload, and it achieved orbit to within a high degree of accuracy on its first flight. And the whole Falcon 9 development program came for less than the cost of JUST the Ares I Mobile Service Tower.

The sooner the Constellation work ends the sooner NASA can start spending that money on something that will get us somewhere.