My opinion of Reynolds is in between the parent and the grandparent. I agree he has problems with his characters - often they seem to do things which make no sense, except that they propel the plot forward. He also has big editing problems... he will sometimes build up some plot thread, only to resolve it in a completely underwhelming way, as if he decided he had to cut 100 pages somewhere.
And yet... his technology/science is first rate, as already mentioned. But more than that, I find his vision of future history and culture to be quite compelling. And I would disagree that he has pacing problems, I find them to be very tightly plotted and exciting to read. And, as John Clute said about Revelation Space, he is good at evoking "the thrilled melancholy of the abyss" which I would agree is part of the appeal of space opera.
All in all though, having just read Absolution Gap I am disappointed that Reynolds hasn't overcome these sorts of problems after four novels. Perhaps he is just better at the short forms of fiction (Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days was excellent). His next novel is not tied to his previous ones, and he has also taken the plunge into writing full-time, so maybe he will take this opportunity to became the great writer that he easily could be.
Oh, and my other suggestions for where to go after Vinge: Greg Egan, Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Gregory Benford (especially the Galactic Center books), David Brin (Uplift).
OMG! I was so impressed by this suggestion for a new term for space elevator that I didn't even bother to finish reading the sentence. I think we have a winner... hopefully one day we will be riding that space tram to the stars!!
Still, for my money, the C64 game music was from Way of the Exploding Fist (although that midi file doesn't quite sound as cool as I remember; possibly because I'm not 12 now...)
Oh, I missed this one. Common sense? Yes, Slashdot is a police state, I can see why you need anonymity. Cmdr Taco's goon squad will be beating down your door in the morning if you don't toe the party line. Yep; I work at Melbourne Uni. (Ooohh what a burn... guess I should have posted as an AC! I see what you mean now!) I doubt I would die if I did not, though, because there are like, other IT jobs out there, you know? Um... who exactly did I sell out to? You are the one who worships the almighty dollar; I never have. (Why would I be working at a university if I did?) Why exactly is it intellectually dishonest to assert that some things are worth preserving even if they are not economically self-sustaining? It may not accord with your intellectual assumptions, but they are not mine. That was the whole point of my comment, if you couldn't figure that out for yourself. Self-serving? Sure, it's in my interests, as I am studying to be a historian which is definitely not economically self-sustaining. But I wouldn't be studying it if I didn't think it was worthwhile nonetheless, so how is this "intellectually dishonest" or selling out? (Oh, and just to bludgeon you over the head with this again, as I'm not posting as an AC and moreover link to my home page you CAN get an idea of MY biases and form your own opinions of such. But no, you're right, I'm dishonest, and you, the anonymous coward, are not.)
Oh yeah. I love the Economist so much that it's the only magazine I read regularly that I DON'T subscribe to! Why? Because by the time I'd get it in the post here in Australia, it would be Monday. But I can get it at the newsagents on Saturday. I'd rather get it two days earlier than save $180 per year (or however much cheaper it is).
The other magazines I subscribe to are:
The Diplomat (an Australian perspective on world affairs, but much more lightweight than the Economist)
History Today (British history magazine, which is what I'm studying. A bit too middle-brow though *sniff*)
Fortean Times (my favouritest mag ever, a monthly dose of high strangeness)
Skeptical Inquirer (a necessary counterbalance to Fortean Times)
The Skeptic (a necessary counterbalance to Skeptical Inquirer!)
Warship (an Australian naval history/news etc magazine, very much a small press sort of thing. Don't know if I'll keep it up, may look for something a bit more professional)
I probably don't need two skeptical mags. I do feel the lack of straight science in there; tried Scientific American for a while but it's a bit too detailed for me; New Scientist is more like it but as it's a weekly, between that and the Economist I'd never get to read any books! A compromise might be an astronomy (my first love) mag like Sky & Telescope, but then I'd like something with a bit more aerospace type stuff... Oh well, I read too much anyway!
An alternative is the alternative vote system, which we use in Australia. Basicially you rank candidates in order of preference. If no single candidate has an absolute majority of the votes, then the candidate with the lowest number of votes drops out, and their votes are redistributed according to the next preference. This continues until somebody gets an absolute majority. Sounds a bit confusing, perhaps, but it has the advantages of choosing a candidate who is least offensive to the majority of the electorate (ie less divisive) and also does not discourage you from voting independent/third-party or whatever - because your vote is not wasted, you can vote Greens against a Liberal incumbent, but your vote may still help get the Labor candidate elected, depending on how you have ordered your preferences.
Yes, of course, the only value anything has is the monetary value people are willing to attach to it. And I'm sure you've never benefited from anybody else's tax dollars, oh no. At least Heinlein would have had the guts to not post anonymously.
Would you say that Germany wasn't a serious military power in the period 1914-1945 because it lost two world wars? That's absurd logic. France is clearly a second-class military power now (if that), but to claim the Napoleonic wars as an example of French military weakness is rubbish; for nearly 20 years France dominated Europe by conquest; it was only Napeleon's ambition which undid him. In WWI, the French army held most of the line against the Germans on the Western front, certainly up until 1917, nearly bleeding itself to death in the process - they lost 1.3 million dead. In WWII, yes, they caved in. So did every other army the Germans went up against until the invasion of Russia - and even then it was a close run thing. Sorry, history does not confirm that "France hasn't been a serious military power since 1800". Since 1940, yes. Since 1918, arguably. Since 1800, rubbish.
It's not just the money, it's the tech. No other country on Earth comes close to matching the military technology of the US. And that's not just in obvious stuff like nuclear weapons and aircraft, it's across the board - avionics, radar, communications, etc. It gives the US military unrivalled reach and power. One day others will catch up, presumably, but not in the near future.
Yes, really. About the Thule Society, I can do no better than quote Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who literally wrote the book on it (his The Occult Roots of Nazism was the first scholarly work in this area). In his most recent book, Black Sun (pp. 116-7), he says: "This sensational image of the Thule Society and its members is almost entirely a fictional invention. Hitler never attended a single meeting of the Thule Society... Far from growing in importance as an occult group behind the Nazi Party, the Thule Society was politically insignificant by 1920 and lapsed into complete inactivity after 1925." Even then, a diary of their meetings between 1918 and 1925 shows only two lectures on occult topics. The Nazis didn't revert to the monarchist flag and symbol precisely because they were not a monarchist party, as the fact they did not reinstate the Kaiser (or any Kaiser) should tell you; the old system had failed its sternest test, the Great War, and the Third Reich was not meant to be its rebirth but its replacement. Hitler committed suicide at about 3.30pm on 30 April, which as far as I can tell was before walpurgis night (in Germany, the night of 30 April to 1 May according to Wikipedia (and walpurgis day itself is actually the following day, 1 May). He chose this time because otherwise he risked capture by the Soviets, who in fact reached the bunker on 2 May. (If, as you claim, Hitler did choose the date of his suicide because it was walpurgis night, then it was very kind of the Soviets to time their assault to suit him.) See, eg, the definitive biography by Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Nemesis: 1936-1945.
I'd be interested to know what your sources are, but I suspect they are not scholarly, well-referenced works by professional historians. In which case, you should take their "findings" with a very large grain of salt, and at the very least should check more conventional historiography for a second opinion.
PS I'm Australian, not American. But every country has its nutty conspiracy theories and apparently we are no exception.
Sorry to butt in here, but since the OP's reference was in the context of orbiting the Earth, surely Earth-Moon Lagrange points were the ones intended. Personally, though, whenever I hear Lagrange I think O'Neill colonies anyway...
To anyone who knows anything about the history of this period, yes, sorry, that IS tinfoil hat territory. There's little evidence that Hitler was interested in the occult (but there is a lot for Himmler), and it's been fairly well established that the whole occult-Nazi thing is way overblown (yes, I KNOW about the Thule Society, but it was only important in the early days). And as for the technological acheivments, Germany had a sterling record in science, technology and engineering, so it's not really such a wonder that they did well in this area. (The helmets? Cripes, that design dated from 1917 or 1918; you can see them in WWI photos. And no, Germany's nuclear physicists did NOT intentionally sabotage the a-bomb research, they just got it wrong. The sabotage myth was something Heisenberg self-servingly let others believe after the war.)
I enjoy the occult Nazi myth as much as the next guy, but it's not got a lot to do with the history of the Third Reich. (The post-war neo-nazi movements are another matter entirely, see Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun.)
I doubt it, there is no Babylon 5, as such, for them to work on. Attempts to start a Trek-like B5 franchise have so far faltered (there have been a few telemovies and a spinoff series which didn't make it past the first season). Although JMS always seems to have a few B5 ideas on the boil, this could explain why he is now pitching for Trek...
I never specified how much energy it would take to match orbits - I just said it would take more. There is nothing magic about space travel that says you can't travel to Mars in a nearly straight line if you want to (and yes Virginia yourself, I am - or was - an astrophysicist, so I'm pretty au fait with the laws of physics). Travel at 99% of the speed of light if you want to (and can, more to the point); it will only take you an hour or two to get there, by which time Mars will have moved only 100,000 km or so. Of course, that is ludicrously unfeasible with current technology. But the point is the faster you can go, the less time it will take - that IS physics. The big problem is stopping, and again you can do that if you don't care about energy or propellant. I will say again, there is nothing magic about the 260 day transfer time (except, of course, that it is the Hohmann minimum energy and that by its nature it matches orbits with Mars at the end); if you expend more energy you can get there faster - eg see here,
which posits "sensible increases in propulsive energy" and concludes you can cut travel times by up to 100 days each way. Anyway, this is somewhat irrelevant; the standard Mars Direct plan does NOT depend on nuclear rockets or indeed any new technology or fancy orbits. We can do it right now, and cheaply too. It was just the NASA Reference Mission which talked about that; as I said it's only a version of Mars Direct, one which is more conservative and more expensive. I only linked to it to show that Mars Direct is not some loopy idea that some weirdo sci-fi nuts have come up with; it's valid enough to influence NASA thinking on manned Mars missions, even if they don't (yet) go all the way with Zubrin.
Doubling the fuel means doubling the weight that has to hoisted to orbit, means doubling the price. I hate to be the one waving dollar signs here, but yes Virginia these things do cost money.
Well, you were the one who said that the nuclear rocket plan "merely" saved fuel... But anyway, the whole point of Mars Direct is that it harvests the fuel for the return trip on Mars so you don't have to bring it all the way from Earth. As you point out yourself, there's a huge cost saving right there. (Oh, and I should also point out that Mars Direct tries to minimise the number of launches from Earth; you only need one Saturn V class booster per spacecraft - that is to say three in the limited scenario I originally suggested. True, we don't have any Saturn V class boosters any more (unless you count the Russian Energiya which I don't think has been used in many years) so to be fair development costs for that should probably be included in Mars Direct's costs. It could also be done with smaller boosters and in-orbit assembly, which also brings costs and risks.)
I don't know what you do at night; all I know about you is what you write, and while your objections are not all irrelevant, they are not the end of the story either. They can be solved, and clever people have suggested clever solutions for them. We need a can-do attitude to get there, not a can't-do one.
Also, I never said anything about whether going to Mars was more worthwhile than curing world hunger; I was merely responding to your assertion that it would be too difficult to build a factory on Mars to produce propellent. I just wanted to point out that the best plans we have don't require astronauts to do this, and I got flamed for my troubles. But I will point out that we can do both (that is, both go to Mars and cure world hunger or whathaveyou); people always bring this false dichotomy up in relation to space travel but at the same time seem to ignore the massively wasteful spending on military hardware (even if you accept the need for a powerful military, annual cost overruns alone on large projects would fund NASA ten times over - yes, I just plucked that figure from nowhere, but its something like that). Mars Direct m
Does it say it can't be used as a rocket fuel? No, it's not ideal, but it's much easier to produce on Mars, and it has been used as a rocket propellant before. Have you ever heard the saying, the best is the enemy of the good? Sometimes you can use a merely good enough solution rather than wait for a technically superior one. Or do you think we should wait to develop anti-gravity first?
Well no. The NTP engine was NOT developed to near-flight status. It was never physically constructed, let alone tested. The operation of this device violates most nuclear test ban treaties, and operating one withing the Van Allen belt would eventually contaminate the Earth's surface with nuclear material.
The only nuclear propulsion system which of necessity would contaminate its surroundings is Orion. But NTP (eg Nerva) uses a nuclear reactor to expel any propellant you like (best with hydrogen though). The propellant in the basic design does get somewhat contaminated, but this can be eliminated using modfied designs. (BTW, that "almost humerous" site you mention is NASA's. Of course, you're smarter than they are...) And FYI they did build and fire test rigs on the ground which showed that engineering-wise the principle is sound, but did not get a chance to test it in space before the program was cancelled.
Even with this wonderous (but never actually built) form of propulsion, you merely cut down the amount of fuel. It still takes 6 months to get there because any faster or slower and you are increasing the distance to be traversed. Indeed the one study still has the same travel times I was talking about EVEN WITH THE NUCLEAR ENGINE.
Um, and so? Is there some law of physics which says a trip has to be made within a certain number of days? Why are you so hung up on the length of the trip? (Yes, I've read your original post about putting the astronauts to sleep and whatnot. I'm not sure why you think these issues are showstoppers when nobody in the field seems to.) And why do you think cutting down on the amount of fuel is a trivial concern? The more fuel you carry, the more fuel you have to carry to push THAT around. The point is to make the spacecraft smaller, lighter and CHEAPER. That's why we haven't gone to Mars, because every proposed mission from von Braun onwards has come with a $500 billion price tag attached to build some massive spacecraft, not because its "damn near impossible". Zubrin's plan can get it done much cheaper.
BTW, your "because any faster or slower and you are increasing the distance to be traversed" is silly. The standard 260 day travel time is the Hohmann minimum energy transfer orbit. If you burn more energy and go faster, you can indeed get there a lot quicker (you'll just have to burn even more to match orbits when you get there).
I don't get people like you. We can't do something right now, therefore it's impossible or not worth the attempt. With an ounce of imagination and historical awareness, you'd see how ridiculous this is.
I was curious myself so I looked and found this. Seems her thesis argued that "community-based government anti-poverty programs don't work", and her college refused to release a copy of it to a journalist. And yet three decades later her husband proposed community-based government anti-povery programs. My god, how do these liberals sleep at night?
Actually, looking a bit further, other accounts by people who claim to have read it say its about a 60s radical, Saul Alinsky, who apparently advocated lying as a path to power (never heard of him before, myself, so don't quote me on that)... see here and here. To be fair, that's a more disturbing thesis for a former First Lady and current Senator to have written. But it was 1969 and she was young; revolution was in the air. Give her a break!
You don't scratch build the factory on Mars. You build it on Earth, send it to Mars 18 months before the astronauts, let it churn away for that time, lots of consumables for them by the time they get there. In case of problems, you send an identical automated factory in a separate ship at the same time the manned ship leaves, which will arrive at roughly the same time. Seriously, the GP is correct; it's not that hard to get there using Mars Direct; see here, here and even here (NASA adopted a more conservative version of Mars Direct some time ago). Or read The Case for Mars.
Those are quite amusing. But, speaking as an historian, it doesn't prove anything about the justness of current wars one way or the other - nor does the opposite of tactic of reworking WWII propaganda posters into satirical comments on contemporary US policy. Saddam was the merest shadow of Hitler, and Iraq was certainly no Germany, so the fact that a straw-man liberal critique of WWII comes across as ludicrous does not mean invading Iraq was justified or smart. (And although my area is modern British history, I think it is fair to say that the most notable contemporary American critics of participation in WW2 were on the right - Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, etc.) However, I do agree with the grandparent post; the Slate article is making a contemporary mountain out of a historical molehill.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet ... his technology/science is first rate, as already mentioned. But more than that, I find his vision of future history and culture to be quite compelling. And I would disagree that he has pacing problems, I find them to be very tightly plotted and exciting to read. And, as John Clute said about Revelation Space, he is good at evoking "the thrilled melancholy of the abyss" which I would agree is part of the appeal of space opera.
All in all though, having just read Absolution Gap I am disappointed that Reynolds hasn't overcome these sorts of problems after four novels. Perhaps he is just better at the short forms of fiction (Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days was excellent). His next novel is not tied to his previous ones, and he has also taken the plunge into writing full-time, so maybe he will take this opportunity to became the great writer that he easily could be.
Oh, and my other suggestions for where to go after Vinge: Greg Egan, Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Gregory Benford (especially the Galactic Center books), David Brin (Uplift).
OMG! I was so impressed by this suggestion for a new term for space elevator that I didn't even bother to finish reading the sentence. I think we have a winner ... hopefully one day we will be riding that space tram to the stars!!
You're both right! According to the Heinlein Concordance he used both beanstalk and skyhook in Friday, and beanstalk also in Job.
Well, at least it's not "I Missed The Bus" ...
Still, for my money, the C64 game music was from Way of the Exploding Fist (although that midi file doesn't quite sound as cool as I remember; possibly because I'm not 12 now ...)
Man, I totally didn't get that myself. And the first computer I ever owned was a VIC-20! How stupid am I ...
Oh, I missed this one. Common sense? Yes, Slashdot is a police state, I can see why you need anonymity. Cmdr Taco's goon squad will be beating down your door in the morning if you don't toe the party line. Yep; I work at Melbourne Uni. (Ooohh what a burn ... guess I should have posted as an AC! I see what you mean now!) I doubt I would die if I did not, though, because there are like, other IT jobs out there, you know? Um ... who exactly did I sell out to? You are the one who worships the almighty dollar; I never have. (Why would I be working at a university if I did?) Why exactly is it intellectually dishonest to assert that some things are worth preserving even if they are not economically self-sustaining? It may not accord with your intellectual assumptions, but they are not mine. That was the whole point of my comment, if you couldn't figure that out for yourself. Self-serving? Sure, it's in my interests, as I am studying to be a historian which is definitely not economically self-sustaining. But I wouldn't be studying it if I didn't think it was worthwhile nonetheless, so how is this "intellectually dishonest" or selling out? (Oh, and just to bludgeon you over the head with this again, as I'm not posting as an AC and moreover link to my home page you CAN get an idea of MY biases and form your own opinions of such. But no, you're right, I'm dishonest, and you, the anonymous coward, are not.)
The other magazines I subscribe to are:
The Diplomat (an Australian perspective on world affairs, but much more lightweight than the Economist)
History Today (British history magazine, which is what I'm studying. A bit too middle-brow though *sniff*)
Fortean Times (my favouritest mag ever, a monthly dose of high strangeness)
Skeptical Inquirer (a necessary counterbalance to Fortean Times)
The Skeptic (a necessary counterbalance to Skeptical Inquirer!)
Warship (an Australian naval history/news etc magazine, very much a small press sort of thing. Don't know if I'll keep it up, may look for something a bit more professional)
I probably don't need two skeptical mags. I do feel the lack of straight science in there; tried Scientific American for a while but it's a bit too detailed for me; New Scientist is more like it but as it's a weekly, between that and the Economist I'd never get to read any books! A compromise might be an astronomy (my first love) mag like Sky & Telescope, but then I'd like something with a bit more aerospace type stuff ... Oh well, I read too much anyway!
An alternative is the alternative vote system, which we use in Australia. Basicially you rank candidates in order of preference. If no single candidate has an absolute majority of the votes, then the candidate with the lowest number of votes drops out, and their votes are redistributed according to the next preference. This continues until somebody gets an absolute majority. Sounds a bit confusing, perhaps, but it has the advantages of choosing a candidate who is least offensive to the majority of the electorate (ie less divisive) and also does not discourage you from voting independent/third-party or whatever - because your vote is not wasted, you can vote Greens against a Liberal incumbent, but your vote may still help get the Labor candidate elected, depending on how you have ordered your preferences.
Yes, of course, the only value anything has is the monetary value people are willing to attach to it. And I'm sure you've never benefited from anybody else's tax dollars, oh no. At least Heinlein would have had the guts to not post anonymously.
Would you say that Germany wasn't a serious military power in the period 1914-1945 because it lost two world wars? That's absurd logic. France is clearly a second-class military power now (if that), but to claim the Napoleonic wars as an example of French military weakness is rubbish; for nearly 20 years France dominated Europe by conquest; it was only Napeleon's ambition which undid him. In WWI, the French army held most of the line against the Germans on the Western front, certainly up until 1917, nearly bleeding itself to death in the process - they lost 1.3 million dead. In WWII, yes, they caved in. So did every other army the Germans went up against until the invasion of Russia - and even then it was a close run thing. Sorry, history does not confirm that "France hasn't been a serious military power since 1800". Since 1940, yes. Since 1918, arguably. Since 1800, rubbish.
It's not just the money, it's the tech. No other country on Earth comes close to matching the military technology of the US. And that's not just in obvious stuff like nuclear weapons and aircraft, it's across the board - avionics, radar, communications, etc. It gives the US military unrivalled reach and power. One day others will catch up, presumably, but not in the near future.
(Finally, my nick pays off!)
I'd be interested to know what your sources are, but I suspect they are not scholarly, well-referenced works by professional historians. In which case, you should take their "findings" with a very large grain of salt, and at the very least should check more conventional historiography for a second opinion.
PS I'm Australian, not American. But every country has its nutty conspiracy theories and apparently we are no exception.
Is that from David Brin, Earth? Good book, that.
Sorry to butt in here, but since the OP's reference was in the context of orbiting the Earth, surely Earth-Moon Lagrange points were the ones intended. Personally, though, whenever I hear Lagrange I think O'Neill colonies anyway ...
I enjoy the occult Nazi myth as much as the next guy, but it's not got a lot to do with the history of the Third Reich. (The post-war neo-nazi movements are another matter entirely, see Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun.)
I doubt it, there is no Babylon 5, as such, for them to work on. Attempts to start a Trek-like B5 franchise have so far faltered (there have been a few telemovies and a spinoff series which didn't make it past the first season). Although JMS always seems to have a few B5 ideas on the boil, this could explain why he is now pitching for Trek ...
I hate to quote from TCS since its a crap site but 300,000 appears to be a totally bogus figure. Please cite some evidence or revise your statement.
Doubling the fuel means doubling the weight that has to hoisted to orbit, means doubling the price. I hate to be the one waving dollar signs here, but yes Virginia these things do cost money.
Well, you were the one who said that the nuclear rocket plan "merely" saved fuel ... But anyway, the whole point of Mars Direct is that it harvests the fuel for the return trip on Mars so you don't have to bring it all the way from Earth. As you point out yourself, there's a huge cost saving right there. (Oh, and I should also point out that Mars Direct tries to minimise the number of launches from Earth; you only need one Saturn V class booster per spacecraft - that is to say three in the limited scenario I originally suggested. True, we don't have any Saturn V class boosters any more (unless you count the Russian Energiya which I don't think has been used in many years) so to be fair development costs for that should probably be included in Mars Direct's costs. It could also be done with smaller boosters and in-orbit assembly, which also brings costs and risks.)
I don't know what you do at night; all I know about you is what you write, and while your objections are not all irrelevant, they are not the end of the story either. They can be solved, and clever people have suggested clever solutions for them. We need a can-do attitude to get there, not a can't-do one.
Also, I never said anything about whether going to Mars was more worthwhile than curing world hunger; I was merely responding to your assertion that it would be too difficult to build a factory on Mars to produce propellent. I just wanted to point out that the best plans we have don't require astronauts to do this, and I got flamed for my troubles. But I will point out that we can do both (that is, both go to Mars and cure world hunger or whathaveyou); people always bring this false dichotomy up in relation to space travel but at the same time seem to ignore the massively wasteful spending on military hardware (even if you accept the need for a powerful military, annual cost overruns alone on large projects would fund NASA ten times over - yes, I just plucked that figure from nowhere, but its something like that). Mars Direct m
I hope you're joking! Otherwise YHBT.
The first site talks about launching a nuclear powered factory to mars to produce methane-based rocket fuel.
Methane is a LOUSY rocket fuel.
Does it say it can't be used as a rocket fuel? No, it's not ideal, but it's much easier to produce on Mars, and it has been used as a rocket propellant before. Have you ever heard the saying, the best is the enemy of the good? Sometimes you can use a merely good enough solution rather than wait for a technically superior one. Or do you think we should wait to develop anti-gravity first?
Well no. The NTP engine was NOT developed to near-flight status. It was never physically constructed, let alone tested. The operation of this device violates most nuclear test ban treaties, and operating one withing the Van Allen belt would eventually contaminate the Earth's surface with nuclear material.
The only nuclear propulsion system which of necessity would contaminate its surroundings is Orion. But NTP (eg Nerva) uses a nuclear reactor to expel any propellant you like (best with hydrogen though). The propellant in the basic design does get somewhat contaminated, but this can be eliminated using modfied designs. (BTW, that "almost humerous" site you mention is NASA's. Of course, you're smarter than they are ...) And FYI they did build and fire test rigs on the ground which showed that engineering-wise the principle is sound, but did not get a chance to test it in space before the program was cancelled.
Even with this wonderous (but never actually built) form of propulsion, you merely cut down the amount of fuel. It still takes 6 months to get there because any faster or slower and you are increasing the distance to be traversed. Indeed the one study still has the same travel times I was talking about EVEN WITH THE NUCLEAR ENGINE.
Um, and so? Is there some law of physics which says a trip has to be made within a certain number of days? Why are you so hung up on the length of the trip? (Yes, I've read your original post about putting the astronauts to sleep and whatnot. I'm not sure why you think these issues are showstoppers when nobody in the field seems to.) And why do you think cutting down on the amount of fuel is a trivial concern? The more fuel you carry, the more fuel you have to carry to push THAT around. The point is to make the spacecraft smaller, lighter and CHEAPER. That's why we haven't gone to Mars, because every proposed mission from von Braun onwards has come with a $500 billion price tag attached to build some massive spacecraft, not because its "damn near impossible". Zubrin's plan can get it done much cheaper.
BTW, your "because any faster or slower and you are increasing the distance to be traversed" is silly. The standard 260 day travel time is the Hohmann minimum energy transfer orbit. If you burn more energy and go faster, you can indeed get there a lot quicker (you'll just have to burn even more to match orbits when you get there).
I don't get people like you. We can't do something right now, therefore it's impossible or not worth the attempt. With an ounce of imagination and historical awareness, you'd see how ridiculous this is.
Actually, looking a bit further, other accounts by people who claim to have read it say its about a 60s radical, Saul Alinsky, who apparently advocated lying as a path to power (never heard of him before, myself, so don't quote me on that) ... see here and here. To be fair, that's a more disturbing thesis for a former First Lady and current Senator to have written. But it was 1969 and she was young; revolution was in the air. Give her a break!
You don't scratch build the factory on Mars. You build it on Earth, send it to Mars 18 months before the astronauts, let it churn away for that time, lots of consumables for them by the time they get there. In case of problems, you send an identical automated factory in a separate ship at the same time the manned ship leaves, which will arrive at roughly the same time. Seriously, the GP is correct; it's not that hard to get there using Mars Direct; see here, here and even here (NASA adopted a more conservative version of Mars Direct some time ago). Or read The Case for Mars .
Those are quite amusing. But, speaking as an historian, it doesn't prove anything about the justness of current wars one way or the other - nor does the opposite of tactic of reworking WWII propaganda posters into satirical comments on contemporary US policy. Saddam was the merest shadow of Hitler, and Iraq was certainly no Germany, so the fact that a straw-man liberal critique of WWII comes across as ludicrous does not mean invading Iraq was justified or smart. (And although my area is modern British history, I think it is fair to say that the most notable contemporary American critics of participation in WW2 were on the right - Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, etc.) However, I do agree with the grandparent post; the Slate article is making a contemporary mountain out of a historical molehill.