No doubt advances in storage technology would go a long way towards making renewables feasible, however the prices need to come down for that to become a reality. Teslas power wall for example will run $3,000 - $3,500 for the battery pack alone (not including inverter & installation. It doesn't appear powerful enough to handle your average homes peak wattage draw, it maxes out at 3.3 KW. I have a small RV generator that can handle 4.5 KW peaks and cost me about $220, most whole house generators put out 15KW and cost about $2,500.
Constellation killed itself, massive cost overruns were pushing it into the $150 - 230 Billion dollar range. SLS is bad, but nowhere near that bad coming in at the $40 - $80 Billion price range.
I'll stick with chicken until they either come out with artificially grown meat or bugs that are big enough that you can strip out all of the nasty bits (exoskeleton, guts, brain eyes, etc). You can raise modern broilers in 5 to 7 weeks on about 5 lbs of feed each.
Buwahahahahahaaahaha, Ah. Either you're lying or you have some very selective perceptions of reality. First of all science is based on proving something did exist/happen, you don't "prove" your argument by someone else not disproving it. It is the burden of the person making the claim to back up that claim with facts & evidence, especially when it is about events that supposedly occurred around/over 2,000 years ago when we can't keep our history from around a hundred years or more ago perfectly straight. Secondly the "Noahs flood" stories in the bible would pretty much blow your statement out of the water, millions of years of global geological/biological evidence with hundreds of years of empirical scientific study show that it is impossible that the entire planet flooded, and we're not even getting to the fact lumber isn't physically capable of taking the stresses necessary to build an arc as described in the Bible.
You might want to actually read history beyond a decade or two. When Social Security numbers were created they explicitly placed requirements (virtually ignored) making it illegal to use for unique ID for citizens. Some of these requirements have quietly been removed in the name of "fighting terrorism". Virtually every attempt at the federal level to openly create a national ID card has been crushed. If you want to go really far back several of the Founding fathers and influential authors made pushes for independence via pen names (Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, John Adams).
"it doesn't have 2000+ years of tradition behind it"
And neither does most Christian sects. Even going back a few hundred years the religion was VERY different from what it is today. Christians often tout "Christmas" as one of these traditions, but what they celebrate today only goes back about 150 years. In early America "Christmas" wasn't celebrated in any real way, in fact in Boston you were fined if you showed any holiday spirit. Going back further to the Middle ages it was much more in common with Oktoberfest then what we know as Christmas.
Is that anything like the multitude of thinly veiled attacks by Christians on pretty much everyone else? The "war on Christmas" is the first thing that comes to mind, somehow celebrating the time of year without including numerous references to Christianity draws the ire of their fundamentalist branch. Despite of course the fact that this time of year historically speaking has nothing to do with Christianity, beyond the attempt by the church to bolster their numbers hundreds of years ago by absorbing the winter solstice celebrations of pagan Europe. Constantly trying to attach religion to various government institutions ("In God we Trust" on money, "10 Commandments" in Courthouses, etc).
Its a "drivers license", its intended purpose is simply to prove that you have the skills to control a certain class of motor vehicle. Its disturbing that more and more they are becoming a de facto national ID card which is requiring an ever increasing amount of identifying data (photo, eye color, weight, ss number, etc), something generations of our forefathers fought to prevent.
Hydrofoils never caught on because with the technology of the day unless you were traveling stupid proof route, in fairly nice weather with a pretty decent depth they were extremely dangerous. Hit a sand bar or a whale or some other fairly solid object and your ship takes a nose dive at 50 knots. That could (perhaps should) change today with GPS, sonar, radar & computer systems which could nowadays decrease the chances of such incidents or at least blunt their impact but there are still cost/maintenance issues involved with them. More widespread usage could eventually solve these issues (economies of scale & greater production competition) but it'll probably take time especially in as conservative of an environment as maritime travel.
Oxygen is only a small part of the possible advantage of an air breathing rocket engine. Reaction mass is a much larger advantage. Standard rocket engines have to carry all of their reaction mass. Jets carry only their energy source (fuel) and use the atmosphere and external oxygen as an additional reaction mass. I believe a 747 for example sucks in and expels over 5,000 lbs of air a second. That is why jet engines have such a major advantage over rocket engines in terms of Isp (specific impulse: IE fuel efficiency), while a rocket engine has an Isp of around 300-400 jet engines routinely have Isps of 4k-6k. Its not a perfect situation by any means, jet engines have significantly more drag due to the action of having to consume atmosphere but up to about mach 5 they are 3 times or more efficient than rocket engines.
I believe there is a quote from Arthur C Clark regarding this
"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along."
That's not to say that one should buy into every idea that someone is trying to peddle, but many of the technologies we take for granted today (aircraft, cars, PCs, engineered lumber, etc) were seen as prohibitively expensive, unnecessary and/or dead ends before they became widespread. Air breathing rocket engines of some sort are very likely to be the future of spaceflight, whether or not Skylon will be that future we will have to see.
"Autonomous cars might look great in controlled tests or on pristine highways"
Hasn't Google been testing out their cars in the real world? And if the wiki article is right they've driven over a million miles and only had 14 minor traffic accidents, none of which were the fault of the autonomous system (at least according to Google). If that is true and if my math is correct that puts their accidents per mile ratio at about 1 / 71,400. Again if my math is correct your average human vehicle experiences accidents at a rate of 1 / 66,700. Suggesting Googles autonomous vehicle is safer. Admittedly there are probably limitations, letting one drive in torrential rain or snow/ice covered roads may result in far less advantageous statistics, the roads do have to be pre-mapped and there are almost certainly situations they can't handle. But most of those situations go for any vehicle/driver, I've driven in a variety of terrible weather and I've never been in an accident that was my fault, I have siblings who have been in a half dozen accidents most of which were in good weather. Most humans generally do well when encountering road work areas, I've seen others driving in oncoming lanes because they failed to notice the gigantic signs pointing them somewhere else. Some people are going to be safer drivers than these autonomous vehicles, some people should be encouraged to let the vehicle drive instead.
From what I understand there is really only one preparation, which is the entire reason the Space Weather Prediction Center was created. To know that it's coming and be ready to shut down the grid. This isn't an EMP, it won't overly effect individual electrical systems (like a Hospital running on a generator). It really only effects large networks which have enough surface area to serve as a receiver for the energy of the storm. The biggest threat is operators not reacting fast enough, which would cause the grid voltage to increase to levels that it wasn't designed for which would cause transformers, generators and other control/generation systems to burn out. If that happened replacement of the burnt out systems would take years.
She destroyed the lives of almost certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent people and all she gets is three years? Our "justice" system is insane, hold up a 7-11 with a toy gun and get thrown jail for longer than that, steal billions from millions of people and you see no time at all. Shoot someone kicking through your front door at 3am (without a badge) and get convicted of murder, shoot an 84 year old grandma in bed (with a badge) and its called an "accident" and left unpunished.
Highly depends on where you live. In some areas/countries I'd agree with you, even if everyone had a home, food and utilities provided to them free of charge most would still go out and try to find something meaningful to do. Then you have other areas where I think your statement is pushing it quite a bit. A family member helps manage a retail store in a decently sized urban area, they have reasonable working hours and pay above minimum wage but they can't keep employees because more than half of hires won't show up for 1/4 of their scheduled time. When she managed at a store in another more rural area those people counted for less than ~10% of hires. For better or worse overall I don't think many current economic systems can support those who want to do nothing based on the output of those that do. It gets worse when those who are working see where a portion of their labors are going and their productivity drops or they outright quit in outrage. Perhaps it might work in some countries where the work ethic is high (above 95%), and in the future as production costs fall it might be possible in countries with lower work ethics. But I think we're a ways off from either on most of planet Earth.
Domesticated animals have changed significantly in the past few few decades let alone the past few thousand years. Modern broilers (meat chickens) can't even self procreate due to the changes but also grow from chicks to food in a couple months. Dairy cattle are another example, Today 9.3 Million dairy cattle produce 59% more milk than 25.6 Million cattle produced in the 40s. This isn't limited to animals, grain producing plants have significantly changed since the 30s, corn specifically has went from around 25 bushels per acre in the 30s to over 140 bushels per acre today. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of farming could have told you this. It should be noted though that while these plants/animals work well for modern farming, most would almost certainly go extinct after a few years without human care due to their extreme specialization (grain production, milk production, meat production, egg production etc).
The article goes on for quite a bit about how much less "safety related hardware" newer plant designs have but I highly doubt that that says anything about how safe a reactor is or not. What DOES make a difference is fail safes, regular inspections, backups, emergency response plans, all with a design double checked by someone with a high school level of common sense. What has caused most of the major nuclear disasters? Rank stupidity. Fukushima was caused by the idiotic placement of backup generators and associated control hardware, in a basement and the subsequent failure of plant operators to call for necessary resources. Chernobyl was caused by them futzing with the reactor outside of normal operating procedures and then activating an emergency system that was not designed to handle those modifications. Three Mile Island was caused by a lack of appropriate sensors to recognize a lack of coolant in the reactor caused by a faulty relief valve. Knowing the reactor coolant level/pressure/temperature with certainty, having the ability to shutdown the reaction, and the ability to keep the reactor cool are the only things you need to prevent 99% of nuclear disasters. I'm not saying that designing a nuclear plant is easy, but keeping your backup cooling systems above water, not experimenting with a full sized nuclear reactor & knowing if your coolant is pouring out of a relief valve would seem to be no brainers that shouldn't have been missed.
"Did run over-budget" is a bit of an understatement, it almost doubled its construction cost estimates (80% over budget). It had to be "restructured" in 1998 to avoid going bankrupt. For most of its history it has ran at a loss and as such has payed off little of its construction costs, unless you count their "debt-for-equity" swap that made them look in better shape on paper without really doing anything to actually "pay" their debts.
The cost overruns they're noting here are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg. It was originally only said to cost around $34 Billion, they've barely gotten started and its already ballooned to at least in the neighborhood of $70 Billion but even the Authority admits it "may" go up to almost $120 Billion suggesting it will probably hit that and quite possibly go even higher. Even at the ~$70 billion number it is almost double the cost per KM as similar European systems. At the same time the anticipated ticket prices will be below that of world counterparts (20%), specifically set to try to attract airline passengers. And even at that rate its not expected to compete very well with car/truck transportation costs.
Why buy an old cargo truck? I suppose it would work, especially if you fixed it up a bit more on the inside but you can get an nice new travel trailer for about $10k, less than $5k if you go used. With that kind of signing bonus ($10k) you could get a used SUV/Truck and a used camper to pull it with. Maybe he's afraid he'll get ticketed/"evicted" for camping in a parking lot? If that's the case they're going to eventually catch you in a cargo truck it might simply take a bit longer.
"The median price for a home there is $1.35 million"
Stayed in San Diego a while with family members, their relatively small 4 bedroom house on a lot who's fences were so close to the house you had to shuffle by if someone was coming from the other direction was worth over $650,000. Where I currently live that house wouldn't pull $70,000. Some areas out there a shack that would be condemned here will fetch $100,000.
I'm not seeing anything suggesting that their service is unreasonably error prone, just a bunch of complaints about how the ratio of medical professionals on their board "doesn't fit" with that of other multinational medical corporations. And even if their testing is not perfect widespread and cheap blood testing could still be of significant use. Even if you come back positive with some serious illness via an expensive test you should be retested to ensure that there wasn't a mix-up, same thing goes with cheap tests. False negative results are a bit more tricky but one should probably be cautious in regards to that possibility no matter what.
Oh wait, some in the highest levels of government have been portraying Assange's "actions" (aka journalism, somewhat sloppy journalism but journalism all the same) as "aiding our enemies (terrorists)". Congressman Peter King stated that Wikileaks should be designated as a terrorist organization. Others have suggested he should "vanish", still others have said he should be prosecuted for espionage, material support of terrorism, aiding the enemy or a number of other charges.
Yeah, the US government has never done anything crazy like abducting someone off the the streets, flying them to a foreign country black site for a little torture, and them realizing "oops, we grabbed the wrong guy" so lets dump him in the countryside another foreign country, oh wait.................
Last time NASA came up with a human mission to Mars Congress got a sticker shock at I believe $450 Billion (a bargain compared to many defense programs). Then a group of Mars enthusiasts came up with a far cheaper and easier program that some in NASA immediately set out to sabotage because it involved a simple three launch system instead of a logistical nightmare involving stations, fuel depots and dozens of craft.
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No doubt advances in storage technology would go a long way towards making renewables feasible, however the prices need to come down for that to become a reality. Teslas power wall for example will run $3,000 - $3,500 for the battery pack alone (not including inverter & installation. It doesn't appear powerful enough to handle your average homes peak wattage draw, it maxes out at 3.3 KW. I have a small RV generator that can handle 4.5 KW peaks and cost me about $220, most whole house generators put out 15KW and cost about $2,500.
Constellation killed itself, massive cost overruns were pushing it into the $150 - 230 Billion dollar range. SLS is bad, but nowhere near that bad coming in at the $40 - $80 Billion price range.
I'll stick with chicken until they either come out with artificially grown meat or bugs that are big enough that you can strip out all of the nasty bits (exoskeleton, guts, brain eyes, etc). You can raise modern broilers in 5 to 7 weeks on about 5 lbs of feed each.
"The bible has never been discredited"
Buwahahahahahaaahaha, Ah. Either you're lying or you have some very selective perceptions of reality. First of all science is based on proving something did exist/happen, you don't "prove" your argument by someone else not disproving it. It is the burden of the person making the claim to back up that claim with facts & evidence, especially when it is about events that supposedly occurred around/over 2,000 years ago when we can't keep our history from around a hundred years or more ago perfectly straight. Secondly the "Noahs flood" stories in the bible would pretty much blow your statement out of the water, millions of years of global geological/biological evidence with hundreds of years of empirical scientific study show that it is impossible that the entire planet flooded, and we're not even getting to the fact lumber isn't physically capable of taking the stresses necessary to build an arc as described in the Bible.
You might want to actually read history beyond a decade or two. When Social Security numbers were created they explicitly placed requirements (virtually ignored) making it illegal to use for unique ID for citizens. Some of these requirements have quietly been removed in the name of "fighting terrorism". Virtually every attempt at the federal level to openly create a national ID card has been crushed. If you want to go really far back several of the Founding fathers and influential authors made pushes for independence via pen names (Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, John Adams).
"it doesn't have 2000+ years of tradition behind it"
And neither does most Christian sects. Even going back a few hundred years the religion was VERY different from what it is today. Christians often tout "Christmas" as one of these traditions, but what they celebrate today only goes back about 150 years. In early America "Christmas" wasn't celebrated in any real way, in fact in Boston you were fined if you showed any holiday spirit. Going back further to the Middle ages it was much more in common with Oktoberfest then what we know as Christmas.
Is that anything like the multitude of thinly veiled attacks by Christians on pretty much everyone else? The "war on Christmas" is the first thing that comes to mind, somehow celebrating the time of year without including numerous references to Christianity draws the ire of their fundamentalist branch. Despite of course the fact that this time of year historically speaking has nothing to do with Christianity, beyond the attempt by the church to bolster their numbers hundreds of years ago by absorbing the winter solstice celebrations of pagan Europe. Constantly trying to attach religion to various government institutions ("In God we Trust" on money, "10 Commandments" in Courthouses, etc).
Its a "drivers license", its intended purpose is simply to prove that you have the skills to control a certain class of motor vehicle. Its disturbing that more and more they are becoming a de facto national ID card which is requiring an ever increasing amount of identifying data (photo, eye color, weight, ss number, etc), something generations of our forefathers fought to prevent.
Hydrofoils never caught on because with the technology of the day unless you were traveling stupid proof route, in fairly nice weather with a pretty decent depth they were extremely dangerous. Hit a sand bar or a whale or some other fairly solid object and your ship takes a nose dive at 50 knots. That could (perhaps should) change today with GPS, sonar, radar & computer systems which could nowadays decrease the chances of such incidents or at least blunt their impact but there are still cost/maintenance issues involved with them. More widespread usage could eventually solve these issues (economies of scale & greater production competition) but it'll probably take time especially in as conservative of an environment as maritime travel.
Oxygen is only a small part of the possible advantage of an air breathing rocket engine. Reaction mass is a much larger advantage. Standard rocket engines have to carry all of their reaction mass. Jets carry only their energy source (fuel) and use the atmosphere and external oxygen as an additional reaction mass. I believe a 747 for example sucks in and expels over 5,000 lbs of air a second. That is why jet engines have such a major advantage over rocket engines in terms of Isp (specific impulse: IE fuel efficiency), while a rocket engine has an Isp of around 300-400 jet engines routinely have Isps of 4k-6k. Its not a perfect situation by any means, jet engines have significantly more drag due to the action of having to consume atmosphere but up to about mach 5 they are 3 times or more efficient than rocket engines.
I believe there is a quote from Arthur C Clark regarding this
"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along."
That's not to say that one should buy into every idea that someone is trying to peddle, but many of the technologies we take for granted today (aircraft, cars, PCs, engineered lumber, etc) were seen as prohibitively expensive, unnecessary and/or dead ends before they became widespread. Air breathing rocket engines of some sort are very likely to be the future of spaceflight, whether or not Skylon will be that future we will have to see.
"Autonomous cars might look great in controlled tests or on pristine highways"
Hasn't Google been testing out their cars in the real world? And if the wiki article is right they've driven over a million miles and only had 14 minor traffic accidents, none of which were the fault of the autonomous system (at least according to Google). If that is true and if my math is correct that puts their accidents per mile ratio at about 1 / 71,400. Again if my math is correct your average human vehicle experiences accidents at a rate of 1 / 66,700. Suggesting Googles autonomous vehicle is safer. Admittedly there are probably limitations, letting one drive in torrential rain or snow/ice covered roads may result in far less advantageous statistics, the roads do have to be pre-mapped and there are almost certainly situations they can't handle. But most of those situations go for any vehicle/driver, I've driven in a variety of terrible weather and I've never been in an accident that was my fault, I have siblings who have been in a half dozen accidents most of which were in good weather. Most humans generally do well when encountering road work areas, I've seen others driving in oncoming lanes because they failed to notice the gigantic signs pointing them somewhere else. Some people are going to be safer drivers than these autonomous vehicles, some people should be encouraged to let the vehicle drive instead.
From what I understand there is really only one preparation, which is the entire reason the Space Weather Prediction Center was created. To know that it's coming and be ready to shut down the grid. This isn't an EMP, it won't overly effect individual electrical systems (like a Hospital running on a generator). It really only effects large networks which have enough surface area to serve as a receiver for the energy of the storm. The biggest threat is operators not reacting fast enough, which would cause the grid voltage to increase to levels that it wasn't designed for which would cause transformers, generators and other control/generation systems to burn out. If that happened replacement of the burnt out systems would take years.
She destroyed the lives of almost certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent people and all she gets is three years? Our "justice" system is insane, hold up a 7-11 with a toy gun and get thrown jail for longer than that, steal billions from millions of people and you see no time at all. Shoot someone kicking through your front door at 3am (without a badge) and get convicted of murder, shoot an 84 year old grandma in bed (with a badge) and its called an "accident" and left unpunished.
"Most people want to work"
Highly depends on where you live. In some areas/countries I'd agree with you, even if everyone had a home, food and utilities provided to them free of charge most would still go out and try to find something meaningful to do. Then you have other areas where I think your statement is pushing it quite a bit. A family member helps manage a retail store in a decently sized urban area, they have reasonable working hours and pay above minimum wage but they can't keep employees because more than half of hires won't show up for 1/4 of their scheduled time. When she managed at a store in another more rural area those people counted for less than ~10% of hires. For better or worse overall I don't think many current economic systems can support those who want to do nothing based on the output of those that do. It gets worse when those who are working see where a portion of their labors are going and their productivity drops or they outright quit in outrage. Perhaps it might work in some countries where the work ethic is high (above 95%), and in the future as production costs fall it might be possible in countries with lower work ethics. But I think we're a ways off from either on most of planet Earth.
Domesticated animals have changed significantly in the past few few decades let alone the past few thousand years. Modern broilers (meat chickens) can't even self procreate due to the changes but also grow from chicks to food in a couple months. Dairy cattle are another example, Today 9.3 Million dairy cattle produce 59% more milk than 25.6 Million cattle produced in the 40s. This isn't limited to animals, grain producing plants have significantly changed since the 30s, corn specifically has went from around 25 bushels per acre in the 30s to over 140 bushels per acre today. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of farming could have told you this. It should be noted though that while these plants/animals work well for modern farming, most would almost certainly go extinct after a few years without human care due to their extreme specialization (grain production, milk production, meat production, egg production etc).
The article goes on for quite a bit about how much less "safety related hardware" newer plant designs have but I highly doubt that that says anything about how safe a reactor is or not. What DOES make a difference is fail safes, regular inspections, backups, emergency response plans, all with a design double checked by someone with a high school level of common sense. What has caused most of the major nuclear disasters? Rank stupidity. Fukushima was caused by the idiotic placement of backup generators and associated control hardware, in a basement and the subsequent failure of plant operators to call for necessary resources. Chernobyl was caused by them futzing with the reactor outside of normal operating procedures and then activating an emergency system that was not designed to handle those modifications. Three Mile Island was caused by a lack of appropriate sensors to recognize a lack of coolant in the reactor caused by a faulty relief valve. Knowing the reactor coolant level/pressure/temperature with certainty, having the ability to shutdown the reaction, and the ability to keep the reactor cool are the only things you need to prevent 99% of nuclear disasters. I'm not saying that designing a nuclear plant is easy, but keeping your backup cooling systems above water, not experimenting with a full sized nuclear reactor & knowing if your coolant is pouring out of a relief valve would seem to be no brainers that shouldn't have been missed.
"Did run over-budget" is a bit of an understatement, it almost doubled its construction cost estimates (80% over budget). It had to be "restructured" in 1998 to avoid going bankrupt. For most of its history it has ran at a loss and as such has payed off little of its construction costs, unless you count their "debt-for-equity" swap that made them look in better shape on paper without really doing anything to actually "pay" their debts.
The cost overruns they're noting here are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg. It was originally only said to cost around $34 Billion, they've barely gotten started and its already ballooned to at least in the neighborhood of $70 Billion but even the Authority admits it "may" go up to almost $120 Billion suggesting it will probably hit that and quite possibly go even higher. Even at the ~$70 billion number it is almost double the cost per KM as similar European systems. At the same time the anticipated ticket prices will be below that of world counterparts (20%), specifically set to try to attract airline passengers. And even at that rate its not expected to compete very well with car/truck transportation costs.
Why buy an old cargo truck? I suppose it would work, especially if you fixed it up a bit more on the inside but you can get an nice new travel trailer for about $10k, less than $5k if you go used. With that kind of signing bonus ($10k) you could get a used SUV/Truck and a used camper to pull it with. Maybe he's afraid he'll get ticketed/"evicted" for camping in a parking lot? If that's the case they're going to eventually catch you in a cargo truck it might simply take a bit longer.
"The median price for a home there is $1.35 million"
Stayed in San Diego a while with family members, their relatively small 4 bedroom house on a lot who's fences were so close to the house you had to shuffle by if someone was coming from the other direction was worth over $650,000. Where I currently live that house wouldn't pull $70,000. Some areas out there a shack that would be condemned here will fetch $100,000.
I'm not seeing anything suggesting that their service is unreasonably error prone, just a bunch of complaints about how the ratio of medical professionals on their board "doesn't fit" with that of other multinational medical corporations. And even if their testing is not perfect widespread and cheap blood testing could still be of significant use. Even if you come back positive with some serious illness via an expensive test you should be retested to ensure that there wasn't a mix-up, same thing goes with cheap tests. False negative results are a bit more tricky but one should probably be cautious in regards to that possibility no matter what.
Oh wait, some in the highest levels of government have been portraying Assange's "actions" (aka journalism, somewhat sloppy journalism but journalism all the same) as "aiding our enemies (terrorists)". Congressman Peter King stated that Wikileaks should be designated as a terrorist organization. Others have suggested he should "vanish", still others have said he should be prosecuted for espionage, material support of terrorism, aiding the enemy or a number of other charges.
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://www.theguardian.com/med...
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
Yeah, the US government has never done anything crazy like abducting someone off the the streets, flying them to a foreign country black site for a little torture, and them realizing "oops, we grabbed the wrong guy" so lets dump him in the countryside another foreign country, oh wait.................
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Last time NASA came up with a human mission to Mars Congress got a sticker shock at I believe $450 Billion (a bargain compared to many defense programs). Then a group of Mars enthusiasts came up with a far cheaper and easier program that some in NASA immediately set out to sabotage because it involved a simple three launch system instead of a logistical nightmare involving stations, fuel depots and dozens of craft.