I think that is sort of the point: There are some people within the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community who simply don't even want the bit to be added to the MediaWiki software database structure in the first place, particularly as it applies to adult content. It doesn't matter that this is turned off by default or that it is even optional to put on a page or image and can be removed with a simple edit by an ordinary editor.... there are people in the community who simply don't even want the feature at all and will go out of their way to thwart any effort to censor the project.
Jimmy Wales has long since lost the ability to force a decision like this and arbitrarily put a feature like this into the project. He might have been able to do that back in 2003 or so (perhaps as late as 2005), but he can't force this in at the moment. Wikipedia has sort of frozen its policies with just minor tweaks and prods from time to time. A change in this nature is rather significant and likely isn't going to happen without widespread community support.
Then again Wikipedia changed the terms of its content license (from GFDL to CC-by-SA) and blacked out for a day with SOPA, so a determined group of people might be able to make some change like this. It just needs a widespread constituency from within the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community insisting it happen and not back down from those would would fight the change. It just can't happen with the force of will by one person any more.
I'm just saying that an EULA which forces you to waive your ability to independently use an application programming interface or implement functions of that API in a manner like Google did with the Android system would be declared contrary to law and thus be void. An intelligent lawyer writing up an EULA would also put in a separability clause so the whole EULA would not be void in this situation... I'm just pointing out that some stupid company trying to write up an EULA as a way around this ruling would get similarly slapped down by a future judge reading this opinion.
It completely blows away any attempt to legally prevent interoperability by 3rd party software developers through the use of an API. Assuming this case is upheld in appeals (which Oracle would be stupid not to at least try), this legal opinion is going to become pretty solid case law and certainly be referenced in future copyright lawsuits. Permitting reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is already statutory law, but this ruling strengthens and affirms that statutory clause and specifically puts the API as a part of that interoperability protection for 3rd party developers.
This ruling and opinion looks very water tight. If it goes up through the appeals process, I think it is likely to be affirmed the whole way up the food chain.
The ruling goes way beyond even settling the issue of copyright over APIs, but even goes so far as to say that EULAs that restrict the use of APIs are dead in the water and are void in terms of enforceability. This ruling does strengthen the copyright claims of people who write up API libraries as the original implementation of a particular API function is expressly covered under copyright law, but the way data is passed between two different software packages simply can't be copyrighted at all.
The only way this is going to be overturned is to place a stamp of copyright protection on API interfaces directly and hand this whole case to Oracle, giving them everything they ever wanted and more. I just don't see any higher court will do something like that.
Yes, I was being sarcastic. There have been spaceflights to Mir and the ISS which have lasted longer than it would take for Hohmann transfer orbit trip to Mars, both directions. Indeed that was one of the specific goals of the Skylab missions, at least to document what might happen to astronauts if they were in a microgravity situation for the duration of one-way trip to Mars but with the capability of returning to the Earth quickly (since they were in LEO) if there was some sort of problem they discovered along the way.
I don't even have the time to refute the conspiracy nuts who think nobody went to the Moon. My solution to deal with them is the same as Buzz Aldrin: punch them in the face and tell them to go to hell.
There might still be a role for a giant centrifuge, and there simply isn't any knowledge at all about the physiological impact of living in a partial gravity environment at all. There was an ISS module that was supposed to go up with the Shuttle program to specifically investigate potential impacts of a partial gravity environment (which would spin around at about 1 RPM and stow plants and a few small mammals like mice and such) to investigate this very issue, but unfortunately the funding for the module was cut. For myself, I think it is one area of scientific research that is desperately needed and should be studied seriously if people are going to be traveling beyond the Earth, and really should be done before a serious effort to go to Mars is even started. It is also an area of research that could be started today if anybody cared to pay attention to the issue.
For myself and this is pure speculation and conjecture, I think many of the health problems we see in microgravity environments like on the ISS will go away or at least be significantly reduced in a partial gravity environment like on the Moon. There may still be specific health problems for people who live for a long time on the Moon, and there are some hints that came back from the weekend camping trips that the Apollo astronauts performed on the Moon, but it will take actually sending people there to find out eventually. There may not be any problem at all to live in a gravitational environment as found on Mars. Other issues like being isolated from other people and radiation dangers are easily dealt with and are just engineering problems, not really health problems.
Obviously no astronauts have gone beyond low-Earth orbit, nor have been in space for any length of time to figure out how to survive in space beyond a couple of days. I'm glad to see that mankind is condemned to live upon this poor excuse of a rock called Earth.
I'm not complaining to you. This is something the Slashdot editors should have caught as well, as they can even now change the logo away from the NASA meatball.
It all goes back to the notion that obviously everything dealing with space must involve NASA at some point. That is a notion I would like to eventually see dispelled completely so you really aren't to blame in this case. I'm just saying that a more obvious commercial spaceflight logo should be made available to designate activity in space rather than something just related to NASA.
Please don't take this personally.... in fact I'm sort of jealous that you got credit for this story instead of me. At the very least, this is most definitely "News for Nerds" and something which deserved to be on the front page and get the attention of the Slashdot readership, so making a minor mistake like this is really small potatoes. You got the gist of the story down correctly and deserve to get credit for this scoop with a pretty well written summary of what was going on.
Columbus had a globe which was about 2/3rd the size of reality, but claimed to be an expert on the topic. When he approached the Portuguese about traveling west to Asia, they laughed at him because they were fully aware of what the true size of the Earth was at the time. Then again, it is arguable that the Portuguese even knew about South America at the time but kept it secret for "national security" reasons. Columbus was contemporary with Henry the Navigator, and arguably the fastest route to Asia by sea from Portugal and Spain was going around Africa... unless you wished to work with the people of the Arabian Peninsula and nearby countries.
What Columbus accomplished though was to establish the notion of regular trips between Europe and America for the purpose of trade. You might be able to argue different people ranging from Irish monks to lost sailors who may have happened upon the shores of one of the American continents, but it wasn't until Columbus made his famous voyage that such trips were common and purposeful. Having Leif Erikson land on the shores of Newfoundland was remarkable, but his accomplishment is more like what happened with Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon. Momentous perhaps and certainly something worthy of recording as a significant historical event, but Neil Armstrong has not led to regular commerce to the Moon, and neither did Leif Erikson.
I'd have to agree with you on this issue. The official SpaceX manifest doesn't suggest anything about USAF launches at all (that may be legitimate in terms of trying to keep official secrets, but it isn't listed there). There are technically scheduled four more Falcon 9 launches for this year, with OrbComm claiming to be the next customer stepping up to the bat even before NASA gets another run to the ISS with another Dragon spaceship.
It wouldn't surprise me to see a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg though. That would be amazing by itself. Such a launch also couldn't happen unnoticed.
The funny thing about SpaceX is that their rockets seem to be ever increasing in size. SpaceX still technically has their Falcon 1 in their product catalog and will sell one to you if you absolutely insist, but almost every time they seem to be dealing with customers and responding to the market demand, the size of their rockets seem to continue to get larger.
SpaceX started with the Falcon 5, which grew into the Falcon 9 by adding four more engines and a much larger payload faring. Now SpaceX just announced a new "version 1.1" of the Falcon 9 which will have an even larger fuselage (requiring more work on their Cape Canaveral launch pad to rebuild their launch tower and assembly complex) and will carry larger payloads into orbit. Add into that concept vehicles like the Falcon XX, which is something not even in Arianespace's dreams (a vehicle with twice the lift capacity of the Saturn V), and you start to wonder just who SpaceX is talking to in terms of payload sizes.
The funny thing about the small launcher market is that there are a whole bunch of companies coming up that are likely going to fill that niche very quickly. Armadillo Aerospace is already doing sub-orbital launches past the Kármán line, as is Blue Origin and soon "The Spaceship Company" as well. I can think of a few other companies who are in a position that they could start lofting up small sats at prices which would make SpaceX look expensive. If ESA decides to compete with those emerging launch providers, I think they will find their competition intense as an understatement.
Going out and hiring the best aerospace engineers on the planet and having them teach you how to build spacecraft by working with them to actually build some stuff is an excellent kind of classroom. I'm sure Elon Musk has learned quite a bit over this past decade since he came up with that crazy idea to send a terrarium to Mars and couldn't find anybody to help him out.
I hate to imagine what would have happened had somebody at Boeing simply said to Elon, "we can put that terrarium on Mars for $1 billion.... sign here with this contract". I suppose that would be good alternate timeline fiction, as because Boeing executives simply laughed in his face saying it couldn't be done at any price he decided to build a rocket company that would at least provide the opportunity for would be entrepreneurs to go into space if they had the money.
In order to build the Falcon XX, SpaceX will need to finish development of the Merlin 2 engine. The goal is to replace the current 9-engine cluster of the Falcon 9 with a single engine, then build a cluster of those babies for the the Falcon XX.
Then again, I would need to worry about what the USAF needs for sending the mass equivalent of a fully loaded 747 (passengers and cargo included) into low-Earth orbit. If they need to replace the ISS with a USAF station (re-energizing the MOL program) sent up in a single launch, I suppose there might be a point to the whole endeavor. That is one massive rocket doing some really serious work, and I'm not sure there is a market for something like that at the moment even for a major effort returning to the Moon.
SpaceX has loads of NASA people and technology, and couldn't exist except as a NASA contractor backed by NASA.
SpaceX has a great many former NASA employees and has studied some of the data that NASA contractors have produced at taxpayer expense (which data is available to anybody who wants it, including China, Russia, India, and anybody else in the world). I suppose you could argue that SpaceX is using Velcro, Tang, and Space Pens.... please don't get me started on "NASA technology" as I can go off on what kind of joke that really is.
It should also be noted that the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule that SpaceX has developed was started independently without a government contract and SpaceX is not dependent upon government funds to get either of those products produced by SpaceX completed. That NASA was handing out money under various programs and SpaceX decided to bring a bucket to catch that money only shows SpaceX has some people who are intelligent and perhaps are a bunch of money grubbers. They may even take that as a compliment, and is a good thing if you want to remain a for-profit company.
SpaceX can survive without NASA, but could NASA survive without SpaceX?
Why does this story have the NASA logo? Maybe the Govt will sell NASA to Spacex
I think this is a very valid question and deserves to be asked.
I would have to say the proper answer is the presumption that NASA is "America's space program", therefore anything having to do with spaceflight obviously must have something to do with NASA.
The real truth here is that neither Intelsat, nor SpaceX in this particular contract have anything at all to do with NASA, any more than FedEx signing a contract with Wal-Mart for parcel shipments between stores would involve NASA either... or NASA would have the same degree of involvement (I am being completely serious here too!) I suppose NASA research went into the airplane designs that FedEx is using, so it might be somewhat relevant.
If there is any federal government agency that has a legitimate role in this contract at all, it would be the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Spaceflight. That is the regulatory agency involved and will need to issue launch licenses for this contract to function. The question should then be asked: Does Slashdot have an FAA-AST logo to replace the NASA meatball?
Individual companies suck as risk management. I'd have to agree on this one. Here is the problem for government vs. private enterprise though:
An organization, any organization (government, private enterprise, even a non-profit group) can have some brilliant leadership which does some amazing things, go to unique places, or achieve some remarkable accomplishments. Occasionally you will even find some organizations which can even produce a series of amazing results one after another.
The problem with a government agency is when that organization no longer is being productive, and has a group of people who don't know what they are doing or lacks the leadership for them to continue beyond their current status quo. With a government agency, about the only thing which will get rid of that organization is something so dramatic that often people will die, such as armed revolution, civil insurrection, or having the agency do something so horrible that it simply can't be tolerated and it is finally shut down. Generally speaking, government agencies simply don't get shut down. They have a constituency in place that protects them, and attempting to kill any organization of government bureaucrats is often an exercise in futility. We only have one government, so either it works or we all fail as a society.
On the other hand with private organizations, they simply must be responsive to the market or they perish. A for-profit company must continue to earn money or they go bankrupt. If they keep screwing up, if they are so paranoid about risk that they refuse to take any sort of risk, they simply start to lose markets. That is precisely what SpaceX is doing, where they are a new start-up which is willing to take risks and do some things which are different from their competitors who were so risk averse that they refused to do some of the things that SpaceX has been doing.
For non-profit organizations, their options are even more dramatic. If they start to seriously screw up, their donation stream comes to an end and the organization eventually is disbanded. Non-profit groups also go bankrupt through mismanagement, corruption, and failing to innovate. The fact that the focus of the organization may be for profit or for some other motivating factor is irrelevant.
The one distinction about non-profit groups though is where their source of funding comes from. If their donations are primarily from private donors and individuals, they will be much more responsive to the needs of those individuals. On the other hand if they get most of their money from a government, they are essentially a government agency in all but name only and suffer from the same problems of all government agencies: eternal life and ossification of ideas. Sometimes a legislative body will cut funding to these groups, but usually not. Just think about how often Head Start agencies become a poster child of insensitive legislators (members of congress, state legislators, and even city council members) when their funding is cut. Merely suggesting that you will cut a supposedly popular program is enough to get you defeated.
BTW, this is also what has been happening with spaceflight in America too. Instead of "non-profit" groups, you have a bunch of companies who for decades have been riding almost exclusively on government funding to the point that they might as well be government agencies in their own right. Many of these companies have offices right next door to the congressional office buildings where in some cases they simply put their staff members directly into the staff of members of congress for the express purpose of making sure their company is strongly considered when the next round of funding happens. Essentially there is no way for these companies to go bankrupt or even for other companies to enter the market as it all becomes government services.
In all of this, there are several people who have leveled criticism at SpaceX as a company for even trying to pursue government contracts such as the NA
While it is up to the individual postmasters to decide how they organize the last four digits of a 9-digit zipcode, there are some typical standards employed for them. The first five digits of the postal code usually (but not always) designates a specific post office.
For some zip codes, the last four digits are simply the post office box number (10k boxes is usually more than enough). For some larger post offices, the PO boxes get their own 5-digit zipcode separate from the rest of the city they are in.
For more residential areas, the 6th and 7th digits represent the "carrier route" number, in other words it indicates which individual postal worker is actually hauling out the mail. In those cases, the 8th & 9th digits are usually block numbers in that route, or major postal stops in the case of larger commercial customers or an apartment complex.
There are also some high volume mail customers who get their own 5-digit zip code (usually bulk mail printers and clearing houses for mail-in offers). In a case like that, the last four digits are mainly an internal code to help separate the mail between clients or internal categories of mail and can be very arbitrary.
Regardless, the full 9-digit zip code can get you to within a few hundred feet of a street address in most situations.
First of all, the decision to begin shutting down the Shuttle program happened under the Clinton administration and was accelerated under the Bush (W) administration, arguably even going back to the Reagan administration due to policy changes that happened after the loss of the Challenger. Regardless, the actual shutdown process was begun by Michael Griffin, administrator for NASA. To blame Obama for shutting down the Shuttle program and giving us the mess that NASA is in right now is patently unfair to the guy for a great many reasons... other than the horrible lack of leadership that the Obama administration is providing at the moment.
This is ditto for the COTS program that SpaceX is operating under for this flight, which was another program started under the Bush adminsitration (through Griffin) as a sort of back-up contingency plan to the Constellation program. At best all Obama did was continue the program.
As far as a lack of leadership in space is concerned, the last president who actually gave a damn about NASA and spaceflight in any meaningful way was Lyndon Johnson, with perhaps Reagan getting an honorable mention with at least pushing forward the concept of Space Station Freedom and getting the Endeavor built. Both Presidents Bush announced plans to go to Mars yet failed to provide any leadership in terms of getting funding to get it to happen or even building any infrastructure to make it happen.
Constellation was such a horrible mess of a program that it simply had to be shut down, with more money spent on the Ares I launch tower alone than SpaceX has spent in its entire history as a company including launching 8 rockets (with admittedly 3 failures), building three spaceport complexes (launch pads at Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg, and Kwajalein), two factory complexes (one that SpaceX simply outgrew), developed three different rockets (Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and the soon to be launched Falcon 9-Heavy), three different rocket motors, and still managed to get something to the ISS all on that same budget. For another billion dollars or so, ATK managed to send the Ares 1-X on a suborbital flight that looked impressive but didn't really do anything at all, and those were the "successful" parts of the Constellation program. The Orion spacecraft is all that is left from the several billion dollars spent towards the development of that program, and I would give it at best 50:50 odds of even making a trip into space on any kind of spacecraft.
It should be pointed out that the appointment of Charles Bolden as administrator of NASA was nearly the very last of any high level agency appointments made by Barack Obama, and the longest it took for any president since Eisenhower to appoint somebody into that position after taking office (assuming the chair of NACA was the predecessor to the NASA administrator position). Obama has basically put any sort of serious discussion of space policy on the back burner and doesn't really care to offer any real leadership. Then again neither does Mitt Romney, so it doesn't look good for NASA in the next decade or so.
The Dragon spacecraft is the first vehicle which has been built primarily with private funds, where the "ownership" of the vehicle does not belong to a government agency. When this vehicle returns to the Earth, while NASA will get all of the stuff that is inside of the vehicle, it doesn't "belong" to NASA. In fact SpaceX has even hinted that this particular vehicle might see a 2nd or 3rd flight in the future (in terms of the capsule itself). NASA's COTS contract requires a new vehicle for every flight, so those subsequent flights will likely go to paying commercial (read non-government) customers, but the spacecraft doesn't "belong" to NASA.
The comparison here is more like how commercial airlines can lease their aircraft and crews to other people, including government agencies.
In the case of most of those "privately built spacecraft", there is a huge difference between them and the Dragon. For things like the Space Shuttle, the Apollo spacecraft, or even things like the probes to other planets, they were designed by NASA engineers where all of the specifications and design requirements were decided upon by NASA management and had NASA personnel at nearly all levels of production. Any "private" companies were really contractors and sub-contractors who followed the lead of NASA supervision.
Also it is important to point out that the other spacecraft that have flown to the ISS by American companies have also all been "owned" by NASA. If you tried to buy a Space Shuttle from North American-Rockwell International (yes, I know those companies are now owned by Boeing), you would have been politely told you simply can't buy them at any price. There were some people who tried to buy a Shuttle in the 1980's and simply couldn't. In the case of the Dragon, SpaceX will gladly sell you one and even help you out with the government paperwork needed to be able to use it and help schedule a launch for you as well. They will even help you through the process if you aren't an American (which does add paperwork and some hassles, but it can be arranged).
I'll admit that commercial companies have been involved with the construction of spacecraft in the past, but this is something new. How different it can be will be seen with other projects that SpaceX is doing that will be completely private for-profit ventures not involving NASA at all.
The U.S.A. may not have legal authority or jurisdiction over the moon directly (assuming that the U.S. Congress doesn't simply withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty and claim the land in a blatant land grab), but under the terms of the Outer Space Treaty the physical objects on the Moon are claimed by the U.S. government, where permission of the "owner" of that object is needed before it can be used, moved, or even touched (without violating the terms of that treaty). There is a presumption that laws in the country of origin of the object can deal with their own citizens through their own legal process, but it becomes an international incident potentially becoming casus belli if somebody from another country messes with those items.
As far as how long something needs to be "inactive" for it to be considered abandoned, I don't think there is any sort of standard that can apply in space. Most spacecraft are usually unmanned, virtually by definition (manned spacecraft are clearly a very small minority of spacecraft that have been sent into space). There is also very legitimate scientific research that can happen when these older vehicles are recovered, including investigations on how the environment of space has stressed various materials. This can be demonstrated with no less than the Apollo 12 flight, which recovered pieces of the earlier Surveyor mission to the same site and yielded some very interesting results. I can only imagine that they would want to do that again... which is sort of the point of the guidelines as well.
The guidelines explicitly skirt around the issue of Russian vehicles on the Moon, and in particular leave the issue of what to do with Richard Garriott's lunar rover alone entirely as that is owned by a private individual. I presume he could grant or deny permission for that separately.
Regardless, other than trying to stir up a war between nuclear powers, I don't know what could realistically be done to stop somebody outside of America from confiscating all of the Apollo artifacts on the Moon and bringing them back to the Earth or even selling them.
You can come to your own conclusions on the matter. Here is the official "guideline" for NASA equipment on the Moon (it can't be rules because that would be a claim of sovereignty on the Moon):
The only way these rules could be enforced is for the U.S. government to claim these hunks of lunar real estate and establish them with National Monument status under the Antiquities Act of 1906 (16 USC 431–433). I've love to see National Park Service rangers go up to the Moon to enforce such laws.
Actually I would love to see the day come where there is a NPS ranger on the Moon in some sort of interpretive center near the Apollo 11 landing site, but I don't think that will happen in my lifetime. I certainly would love to bring some of these conspiracy nut cases up to the Moon and show them the sites myself, but then they would still claim it was some sort of NASA conspiracy that dressed up the landing site in the 21st Century in some sort of movie reenactment by James Cameron to falsify the record. Even bringing these idiots to the Moon won't convince them that people from the 1960's could achieve such a technological feat.
Surviving a lunar night is a legitimate concern. It doesn't necessarily need an RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) for an energy source and I've seen some very interesting proposals with Google Lunar X-Prize teams that simply bury themselves into the lunar soil at dusk for insulation, but it is a tough challenge. Another approach is to build a "garage" for an exploration vehicle to spend the nights. This is assuming that the exploration vehicle is something like the Sojourner vehicle used in the Mars Pathfinder mission, which is a good example of what many of the GLXP teams are strongly considering as a prototype vehicle.
One really odd proposal I saw was to try and land near one of the Apollo landing sites and try to find some of the RTGs left behind by the Apollo astronauts. With the exception of Apollo 11, all of the rest of the manned landings on the Moon had them and some calculations showed they are still producing a significant amount of heat even today. The trick to using those RTGs as a heat source is mainly political rather than technical, as some folks from NASA got really pissed such ideas were even floated around at all. Checking out an Apollo landing site from the ground level for the first time in 40 years does sound like an interesting prospect in and of itself though.
Most landing system to the Moon do require powered descent of some sort or another, unless the goal is to perform a deliberate impact instead. There have been some lunar exploration missions which that has been an explicit goal so it isn't too far fetched. Keep in mind that the reason you need to get creative on Mars is because it has an atmosphere. There is enough of an atmosphere on Mars that you need to worry about it in mission planning, but there isn't enough of an atmosphere to really be useful like it is for missions to Venus or Titan. There were flights to both of those bodies where the probes landed on the ground and continued to transmit data in spite of the fact that landing was not part of the mission profile. That has never happened on Mars where the opposite has been far more common: spacecraft crashing in spite of good faith attempts to perform a "soft" landing. The Moon isn't nearly so bad and has a much higher success rate for vehicles landing there.
Lunar dust is an issue, mainly because it is so incredibly abrasive. On the Earth and even on Mars, the dust bangs into other dust particles and becomes weathered and rounded. On the Moon, due to a lack of atmosphere, the dust particles just cut through almost everything they encounter and have very sharp edges. Lunar dust can also get very fine and work their way into any joint. By comparison, the extra fine dust on the Earth and on Mars generally stays suspended in the atmosphere (part of what gives Mars its distinctive red colored sky). On the Earth, it also turns into mud and is washed out of the sky in rainstorms. Then again, that is part of what makes clay.
And I don't think that firing your thrusters is such a great idea when in close proximity to another space craft: I would expect that the matter thrown out by the thrusters could damage and push away the other craft if directed at it.
That is sort of what Gemini 8 was all about. I will agree though in terms of being impressed with such a maneuver. If anything, I would consider in-orbit rendezvous to be as difficult if not more difficult to complete even assuming that you have the technology to get into orbit as simply building a rocket to get into orbit in the first place. It is that large of a technical challenge.
That SpaceX is only the fifth organization in the history of humanity to even attempt such a task should speak volumes about how difficult of a task it is. The other four organizations are all national space exploration bodies (with strong ties to the national military organizations of those countries) of permanent members of the UN security council... a rather elite group if I say so myself. That two of those national space organizations have only been able to reach that same goal in the past couple years should be all that more remarkable.
No, the vast majority of the money SpaceX is using right now has come from deposits on future flights they will be making. If a whole bunch of those companies try to back out of those contracts, SpaceX would be in a world of hurt, but the money has been flowing in their direction from that. It represents most of the current revenue stream that SpaceX has been running on so far. SpaceX needs to actually launch some rockets to complete those contracts, so there is some concern there, but then again they are building up the company and expanding to provide those rockets.
Oh, and SpaceX has also been successful at sending up a Falcon 1 rocket too, even though I'll admit that one flight (a genuine revenue flight) is relatively insignificant. There have also been some minor secondary payloads on both this flight (such as the Celestia capsule on the Falcon 9 2nd stage that has been getting press recently) as well as some other minor cube sats sent up by some customers.
All told, the majority of the funding that SpaceX has received has come from private individuals and companies, not government agencies... and of government agencies NASA's money is not even a "vast majority of the funding". SpaceX does see the COTS program as a priority, but not the only one.
It is also important to note that the COTS program has multiple competing companies (currently six companies are "qualified" for receiving funds or services from NASA) and it is all very competitive. If SpaceX starts to miss deadlines or fails to deliver, future funding will be transferred to other companies. BTW, this already happened where Rocketplane Kistler had their funding cut and the money transferred over to Orbital Science for the Taurus II rocket they are developing. ATK is already chomping at the bit hoping for a SpaceX failure, which is why they've really been pushing the development of the Liberty rocket. The success of SpaceX so far doesn't seem to imply that ATK will be successful though.
While there has been some private commercial space projects, most of those (especially Intelsat) had essentially a government granted monopoly on certain aspects of space development. It really had much more in common with... well 1930's Germany than a true form of capitalism and a free market. While technically "commercial" and "private companies", the distinction between what these companies were doing in space and a government agency is mostly semantics. For most of what Boeing has been doing in space is as a government contractor using "cost-plus" contracts where they aren't even risking their own money to make the vehicles they are building. The "cost" part of such contracts is that no matter how much it costs them to make whatever it is that they are making, that the government guarantees it will be paid, and the "plus" is the profit they will earn for doing the job. They are guaranteed a certain amount of money that they will earn regardless of the cost it takes to get the job done.
NASA has gone out of their way to make sure that only companies like Boeing could get into space, where until the past decade or so there wasn't even a government agency which could even authorize somebody to put their own rocket into space. We now have the FAA Office of Commercial Spaceflight (called FAA-AST due to being the "Administrator for Space Transportation") which has the authority to grant that permission and NASA was even explicitly cut out of the loop for deciding if those spacecraft are safe... unless they are being used by NASA personnel or for a NASA contract.
On top of that, at least for the 1970's and 1980's NASA published prices for commercial payloads on the Space Shuttle that were so heavily subsidized that it killed all efforts at commercial spaceflight. If you want specifics, look up the name Jim Benson and look at the companies he started where NASA personnel did repeated political moves to kill his companies and prevent him from getting a rocket into space. At least Jim Benson lived long enough to see SpaceShip One fly and validate his ideas for spaceflight. His company lives on as a subsidiary of the Sierra Nevada corporation.
I could name other examples (look up what Deke Slayton did after he left the NASA astronaut corps), but there certainly are many examples of how many very skilled and intelligent people tried in vain to get private commercial spaceflight to happen. The only reason private companies are more successful today is that the traditional launch builders got complacent thinking their system for building rockets would never be challenged.
Sputnik was a hollowed out ICBM warhead. I can only guess the political reasoning behind doing what they did, besides national pride/one-upsmanship.
I don't think people in 1957 (especially members of the United States Congress at the time or the Eisenhower administration) missed the political message of what Sputnik meant, including the fact that it was a nuclear warhead casing. In fact you can get congressional hearing transcripts which will tell you exactly what they thought that message implied. Those senators and representatives weren't shy about expressing their opinions on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that is sort of the point: There are some people within the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community who simply don't even want the bit to be added to the MediaWiki software database structure in the first place, particularly as it applies to adult content. It doesn't matter that this is turned off by default or that it is even optional to put on a page or image and can be removed with a simple edit by an ordinary editor.... there are people in the community who simply don't even want the feature at all and will go out of their way to thwart any effort to censor the project.
Jimmy Wales has long since lost the ability to force a decision like this and arbitrarily put a feature like this into the project. He might have been able to do that back in 2003 or so (perhaps as late as 2005), but he can't force this in at the moment. Wikipedia has sort of frozen its policies with just minor tweaks and prods from time to time. A change in this nature is rather significant and likely isn't going to happen without widespread community support.
Then again Wikipedia changed the terms of its content license (from GFDL to CC-by-SA) and blacked out for a day with SOPA, so a determined group of people might be able to make some change like this. It just needs a widespread constituency from within the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community insisting it happen and not back down from those would would fight the change. It just can't happen with the force of will by one person any more.
I'm just saying that an EULA which forces you to waive your ability to independently use an application programming interface or implement functions of that API in a manner like Google did with the Android system would be declared contrary to law and thus be void. An intelligent lawyer writing up an EULA would also put in a separability clause so the whole EULA would not be void in this situation... I'm just pointing out that some stupid company trying to write up an EULA as a way around this ruling would get similarly slapped down by a future judge reading this opinion.
It completely blows away any attempt to legally prevent interoperability by 3rd party software developers through the use of an API. Assuming this case is upheld in appeals (which Oracle would be stupid not to at least try), this legal opinion is going to become pretty solid case law and certainly be referenced in future copyright lawsuits. Permitting reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is already statutory law, but this ruling strengthens and affirms that statutory clause and specifically puts the API as a part of that interoperability protection for 3rd party developers.
This ruling and opinion looks very water tight. If it goes up through the appeals process, I think it is likely to be affirmed the whole way up the food chain.
The ruling goes way beyond even settling the issue of copyright over APIs, but even goes so far as to say that EULAs that restrict the use of APIs are dead in the water and are void in terms of enforceability. This ruling does strengthen the copyright claims of people who write up API libraries as the original implementation of a particular API function is expressly covered under copyright law, but the way data is passed between two different software packages simply can't be copyrighted at all.
The only way this is going to be overturned is to place a stamp of copyright protection on API interfaces directly and hand this whole case to Oracle, giving them everything they ever wanted and more. I just don't see any higher court will do something like that.
Yes, I was being sarcastic. There have been spaceflights to Mir and the ISS which have lasted longer than it would take for Hohmann transfer orbit trip to Mars, both directions. Indeed that was one of the specific goals of the Skylab missions, at least to document what might happen to astronauts if they were in a microgravity situation for the duration of one-way trip to Mars but with the capability of returning to the Earth quickly (since they were in LEO) if there was some sort of problem they discovered along the way.
I don't even have the time to refute the conspiracy nuts who think nobody went to the Moon. My solution to deal with them is the same as Buzz Aldrin: punch them in the face and tell them to go to hell.
There might still be a role for a giant centrifuge, and there simply isn't any knowledge at all about the physiological impact of living in a partial gravity environment at all. There was an ISS module that was supposed to go up with the Shuttle program to specifically investigate potential impacts of a partial gravity environment (which would spin around at about 1 RPM and stow plants and a few small mammals like mice and such) to investigate this very issue, but unfortunately the funding for the module was cut. For myself, I think it is one area of scientific research that is desperately needed and should be studied seriously if people are going to be traveling beyond the Earth, and really should be done before a serious effort to go to Mars is even started. It is also an area of research that could be started today if anybody cared to pay attention to the issue.
For myself and this is pure speculation and conjecture, I think many of the health problems we see in microgravity environments like on the ISS will go away or at least be significantly reduced in a partial gravity environment like on the Moon. There may still be specific health problems for people who live for a long time on the Moon, and there are some hints that came back from the weekend camping trips that the Apollo astronauts performed on the Moon, but it will take actually sending people there to find out eventually. There may not be any problem at all to live in a gravitational environment as found on Mars. Other issues like being isolated from other people and radiation dangers are easily dealt with and are just engineering problems, not really health problems.
Obviously no astronauts have gone beyond low-Earth orbit, nor have been in space for any length of time to figure out how to survive in space beyond a couple of days. I'm glad to see that mankind is condemned to live upon this poor excuse of a rock called Earth.
I'm not complaining to you. This is something the Slashdot editors should have caught as well, as they can even now change the logo away from the NASA meatball.
It all goes back to the notion that obviously everything dealing with space must involve NASA at some point. That is a notion I would like to eventually see dispelled completely so you really aren't to blame in this case. I'm just saying that a more obvious commercial spaceflight logo should be made available to designate activity in space rather than something just related to NASA.
Please don't take this personally.... in fact I'm sort of jealous that you got credit for this story instead of me. At the very least, this is most definitely "News for Nerds" and something which deserved to be on the front page and get the attention of the Slashdot readership, so making a minor mistake like this is really small potatoes. You got the gist of the story down correctly and deserve to get credit for this scoop with a pretty well written summary of what was going on.
Columbus had a globe which was about 2/3rd the size of reality, but claimed to be an expert on the topic. When he approached the Portuguese about traveling west to Asia, they laughed at him because they were fully aware of what the true size of the Earth was at the time. Then again, it is arguable that the Portuguese even knew about South America at the time but kept it secret for "national security" reasons. Columbus was contemporary with Henry the Navigator, and arguably the fastest route to Asia by sea from Portugal and Spain was going around Africa... unless you wished to work with the people of the Arabian Peninsula and nearby countries.
What Columbus accomplished though was to establish the notion of regular trips between Europe and America for the purpose of trade. You might be able to argue different people ranging from Irish monks to lost sailors who may have happened upon the shores of one of the American continents, but it wasn't until Columbus made his famous voyage that such trips were common and purposeful. Having Leif Erikson land on the shores of Newfoundland was remarkable, but his accomplishment is more like what happened with Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon. Momentous perhaps and certainly something worthy of recording as a significant historical event, but Neil Armstrong has not led to regular commerce to the Moon, and neither did Leif Erikson.
I'd have to agree with you on this issue. The official SpaceX manifest doesn't suggest anything about USAF launches at all (that may be legitimate in terms of trying to keep official secrets, but it isn't listed there). There are technically scheduled four more Falcon 9 launches for this year, with OrbComm claiming to be the next customer stepping up to the bat even before NASA gets another run to the ISS with another Dragon spaceship.
It wouldn't surprise me to see a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg though. That would be amazing by itself. Such a launch also couldn't happen unnoticed.
The funny thing about SpaceX is that their rockets seem to be ever increasing in size. SpaceX still technically has their Falcon 1 in their product catalog and will sell one to you if you absolutely insist, but almost every time they seem to be dealing with customers and responding to the market demand, the size of their rockets seem to continue to get larger.
SpaceX started with the Falcon 5, which grew into the Falcon 9 by adding four more engines and a much larger payload faring. Now SpaceX just announced a new "version 1.1" of the Falcon 9 which will have an even larger fuselage (requiring more work on their Cape Canaveral launch pad to rebuild their launch tower and assembly complex) and will carry larger payloads into orbit. Add into that concept vehicles like the Falcon XX, which is something not even in Arianespace's dreams (a vehicle with twice the lift capacity of the Saturn V), and you start to wonder just who SpaceX is talking to in terms of payload sizes.
The funny thing about the small launcher market is that there are a whole bunch of companies coming up that are likely going to fill that niche very quickly. Armadillo Aerospace is already doing sub-orbital launches past the Kármán line, as is Blue Origin and soon "The Spaceship Company" as well. I can think of a few other companies who are in a position that they could start lofting up small sats at prices which would make SpaceX look expensive. If ESA decides to compete with those emerging launch providers, I think they will find their competition intense as an understatement.
Going out and hiring the best aerospace engineers on the planet and having them teach you how to build spacecraft by working with them to actually build some stuff is an excellent kind of classroom. I'm sure Elon Musk has learned quite a bit over this past decade since he came up with that crazy idea to send a terrarium to Mars and couldn't find anybody to help him out.
I hate to imagine what would have happened had somebody at Boeing simply said to Elon, "we can put that terrarium on Mars for $1 billion.... sign here with this contract". I suppose that would be good alternate timeline fiction, as because Boeing executives simply laughed in his face saying it couldn't be done at any price he decided to build a rocket company that would at least provide the opportunity for would be entrepreneurs to go into space if they had the money.
In order to build the Falcon XX, SpaceX will need to finish development of the Merlin 2 engine. The goal is to replace the current 9-engine cluster of the Falcon 9 with a single engine, then build a cluster of those babies for the the Falcon XX.
Then again, I would need to worry about what the USAF needs for sending the mass equivalent of a fully loaded 747 (passengers and cargo included) into low-Earth orbit. If they need to replace the ISS with a USAF station (re-energizing the MOL program) sent up in a single launch, I suppose there might be a point to the whole endeavor. That is one massive rocket doing some really serious work, and I'm not sure there is a market for something like that at the moment even for a major effort returning to the Moon.
SpaceX has loads of NASA people and technology, and couldn't exist except as a NASA contractor backed by NASA.
SpaceX has a great many former NASA employees and has studied some of the data that NASA contractors have produced at taxpayer expense (which data is available to anybody who wants it, including China, Russia, India, and anybody else in the world). I suppose you could argue that SpaceX is using Velcro, Tang, and Space Pens.... please don't get me started on "NASA technology" as I can go off on what kind of joke that really is.
It should also be noted that the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule that SpaceX has developed was started independently without a government contract and SpaceX is not dependent upon government funds to get either of those products produced by SpaceX completed. That NASA was handing out money under various programs and SpaceX decided to bring a bucket to catch that money only shows SpaceX has some people who are intelligent and perhaps are a bunch of money grubbers. They may even take that as a compliment, and is a good thing if you want to remain a for-profit company.
SpaceX can survive without NASA, but could NASA survive without SpaceX?
Why does this story have the NASA logo?
Maybe the Govt will sell NASA to Spacex
I think this is a very valid question and deserves to be asked.
I would have to say the proper answer is the presumption that NASA is "America's space program", therefore anything having to do with spaceflight obviously must have something to do with NASA.
The real truth here is that neither Intelsat, nor SpaceX in this particular contract have anything at all to do with NASA, any more than FedEx signing a contract with Wal-Mart for parcel shipments between stores would involve NASA either... or NASA would have the same degree of involvement (I am being completely serious here too!) I suppose NASA research went into the airplane designs that FedEx is using, so it might be somewhat relevant.
If there is any federal government agency that has a legitimate role in this contract at all, it would be the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Spaceflight. That is the regulatory agency involved and will need to issue launch licenses for this contract to function. The question should then be asked: Does Slashdot have an FAA-AST logo to replace the NASA meatball?
Individual companies suck as risk management. I'd have to agree on this one. Here is the problem for government vs. private enterprise though:
An organization, any organization (government, private enterprise, even a non-profit group) can have some brilliant leadership which does some amazing things, go to unique places, or achieve some remarkable accomplishments. Occasionally you will even find some organizations which can even produce a series of amazing results one after another.
The problem with a government agency is when that organization no longer is being productive, and has a group of people who don't know what they are doing or lacks the leadership for them to continue beyond their current status quo. With a government agency, about the only thing which will get rid of that organization is something so dramatic that often people will die, such as armed revolution, civil insurrection, or having the agency do something so horrible that it simply can't be tolerated and it is finally shut down. Generally speaking, government agencies simply don't get shut down. They have a constituency in place that protects them, and attempting to kill any organization of government bureaucrats is often an exercise in futility. We only have one government, so either it works or we all fail as a society.
On the other hand with private organizations, they simply must be responsive to the market or they perish. A for-profit company must continue to earn money or they go bankrupt. If they keep screwing up, if they are so paranoid about risk that they refuse to take any sort of risk, they simply start to lose markets. That is precisely what SpaceX is doing, where they are a new start-up which is willing to take risks and do some things which are different from their competitors who were so risk averse that they refused to do some of the things that SpaceX has been doing.
For non-profit organizations, their options are even more dramatic. If they start to seriously screw up, their donation stream comes to an end and the organization eventually is disbanded. Non-profit groups also go bankrupt through mismanagement, corruption, and failing to innovate. The fact that the focus of the organization may be for profit or for some other motivating factor is irrelevant.
The one distinction about non-profit groups though is where their source of funding comes from. If their donations are primarily from private donors and individuals, they will be much more responsive to the needs of those individuals. On the other hand if they get most of their money from a government, they are essentially a government agency in all but name only and suffer from the same problems of all government agencies: eternal life and ossification of ideas. Sometimes a legislative body will cut funding to these groups, but usually not. Just think about how often Head Start agencies become a poster child of insensitive legislators (members of congress, state legislators, and even city council members) when their funding is cut. Merely suggesting that you will cut a supposedly popular program is enough to get you defeated.
BTW, this is also what has been happening with spaceflight in America too. Instead of "non-profit" groups, you have a bunch of companies who for decades have been riding almost exclusively on government funding to the point that they might as well be government agencies in their own right. Many of these companies have offices right next door to the congressional office buildings where in some cases they simply put their staff members directly into the staff of members of congress for the express purpose of making sure their company is strongly considered when the next round of funding happens. Essentially there is no way for these companies to go bankrupt or even for other companies to enter the market as it all becomes government services.
In all of this, there are several people who have leveled criticism at SpaceX as a company for even trying to pursue government contracts such as the NA
While it is up to the individual postmasters to decide how they organize the last four digits of a 9-digit zipcode, there are some typical standards employed for them. The first five digits of the postal code usually (but not always) designates a specific post office.
For some zip codes, the last four digits are simply the post office box number (10k boxes is usually more than enough). For some larger post offices, the PO boxes get their own 5-digit zipcode separate from the rest of the city they are in.
For more residential areas, the 6th and 7th digits represent the "carrier route" number, in other words it indicates which individual postal worker is actually hauling out the mail. In those cases, the 8th & 9th digits are usually block numbers in that route, or major postal stops in the case of larger commercial customers or an apartment complex.
There are also some high volume mail customers who get their own 5-digit zip code (usually bulk mail printers and clearing houses for mail-in offers). In a case like that, the last four digits are mainly an internal code to help separate the mail between clients or internal categories of mail and can be very arbitrary.
Regardless, the full 9-digit zip code can get you to within a few hundred feet of a street address in most situations.
First of all, the decision to begin shutting down the Shuttle program happened under the Clinton administration and was accelerated under the Bush (W) administration, arguably even going back to the Reagan administration due to policy changes that happened after the loss of the Challenger. Regardless, the actual shutdown process was begun by Michael Griffin, administrator for NASA. To blame Obama for shutting down the Shuttle program and giving us the mess that NASA is in right now is patently unfair to the guy for a great many reasons... other than the horrible lack of leadership that the Obama administration is providing at the moment.
This is ditto for the COTS program that SpaceX is operating under for this flight, which was another program started under the Bush adminsitration (through Griffin) as a sort of back-up contingency plan to the Constellation program. At best all Obama did was continue the program.
As far as a lack of leadership in space is concerned, the last president who actually gave a damn about NASA and spaceflight in any meaningful way was Lyndon Johnson, with perhaps Reagan getting an honorable mention with at least pushing forward the concept of Space Station Freedom and getting the Endeavor built. Both Presidents Bush announced plans to go to Mars yet failed to provide any leadership in terms of getting funding to get it to happen or even building any infrastructure to make it happen.
Constellation was such a horrible mess of a program that it simply had to be shut down, with more money spent on the Ares I launch tower alone than SpaceX has spent in its entire history as a company including launching 8 rockets (with admittedly 3 failures), building three spaceport complexes (launch pads at Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg, and Kwajalein), two factory complexes (one that SpaceX simply outgrew), developed three different rockets (Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and the soon to be launched Falcon 9-Heavy), three different rocket motors, and still managed to get something to the ISS all on that same budget. For another billion dollars or so, ATK managed to send the Ares 1-X on a suborbital flight that looked impressive but didn't really do anything at all, and those were the "successful" parts of the Constellation program. The Orion spacecraft is all that is left from the several billion dollars spent towards the development of that program, and I would give it at best 50:50 odds of even making a trip into space on any kind of spacecraft.
It should be pointed out that the appointment of Charles Bolden as administrator of NASA was nearly the very last of any high level agency appointments made by Barack Obama, and the longest it took for any president since Eisenhower to appoint somebody into that position after taking office (assuming the chair of NACA was the predecessor to the NASA administrator position). Obama has basically put any sort of serious discussion of space policy on the back burner and doesn't really care to offer any real leadership. Then again neither does Mitt Romney, so it doesn't look good for NASA in the next decade or so.
The Dragon spacecraft is the first vehicle which has been built primarily with private funds, where the "ownership" of the vehicle does not belong to a government agency. When this vehicle returns to the Earth, while NASA will get all of the stuff that is inside of the vehicle, it doesn't "belong" to NASA. In fact SpaceX has even hinted that this particular vehicle might see a 2nd or 3rd flight in the future (in terms of the capsule itself). NASA's COTS contract requires a new vehicle for every flight, so those subsequent flights will likely go to paying commercial (read non-government) customers, but the spacecraft doesn't "belong" to NASA.
The comparison here is more like how commercial airlines can lease their aircraft and crews to other people, including government agencies.
In the case of most of those "privately built spacecraft", there is a huge difference between them and the Dragon. For things like the Space Shuttle, the Apollo spacecraft, or even things like the probes to other planets, they were designed by NASA engineers where all of the specifications and design requirements were decided upon by NASA management and had NASA personnel at nearly all levels of production. Any "private" companies were really contractors and sub-contractors who followed the lead of NASA supervision.
Also it is important to point out that the other spacecraft that have flown to the ISS by American companies have also all been "owned" by NASA. If you tried to buy a Space Shuttle from North American-Rockwell International (yes, I know those companies are now owned by Boeing), you would have been politely told you simply can't buy them at any price. There were some people who tried to buy a Shuttle in the 1980's and simply couldn't. In the case of the Dragon, SpaceX will gladly sell you one and even help you out with the government paperwork needed to be able to use it and help schedule a launch for you as well. They will even help you through the process if you aren't an American (which does add paperwork and some hassles, but it can be arranged).
I'll admit that commercial companies have been involved with the construction of spacecraft in the past, but this is something new. How different it can be will be seen with other projects that SpaceX is doing that will be completely private for-profit ventures not involving NASA at all.
treaty that matters in friendly PDF.
Damn, that is one of the funniest posts I've seen on Slashdot for a long time. I'm going to need to use it elsewhere at some point.
The U.S.A. may not have legal authority or jurisdiction over the moon directly (assuming that the U.S. Congress doesn't simply withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty and claim the land in a blatant land grab), but under the terms of the Outer Space Treaty the physical objects on the Moon are claimed by the U.S. government, where permission of the "owner" of that object is needed before it can be used, moved, or even touched (without violating the terms of that treaty). There is a presumption that laws in the country of origin of the object can deal with their own citizens through their own legal process, but it becomes an international incident potentially becoming casus belli if somebody from another country messes with those items.
As far as how long something needs to be "inactive" for it to be considered abandoned, I don't think there is any sort of standard that can apply in space. Most spacecraft are usually unmanned, virtually by definition (manned spacecraft are clearly a very small minority of spacecraft that have been sent into space). There is also very legitimate scientific research that can happen when these older vehicles are recovered, including investigations on how the environment of space has stressed various materials. This can be demonstrated with no less than the Apollo 12 flight, which recovered pieces of the earlier Surveyor mission to the same site and yielded some very interesting results. I can only imagine that they would want to do that again... which is sort of the point of the guidelines as well.
The guidelines explicitly skirt around the issue of Russian vehicles on the Moon, and in particular leave the issue of what to do with Richard Garriott's lunar rover alone entirely as that is owned by a private individual. I presume he could grant or deny permission for that separately.
Regardless, other than trying to stir up a war between nuclear powers, I don't know what could realistically be done to stop somebody outside of America from confiscating all of the Apollo artifacts on the Moon and bringing them back to the Earth or even selling them.
You can come to your own conclusions on the matter. Here is the official "guideline" for NASA equipment on the Moon (it can't be rules because that would be a claim of sovereignty on the Moon):
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/617743main_NASA-USG_LUNAR_HISTORIC_SITES_RevA-508.pdf
The only way these rules could be enforced is for the U.S. government to claim these hunks of lunar real estate and establish them with National Monument status under the Antiquities Act of 1906 (16 USC 431–433). I've love to see National Park Service rangers go up to the Moon to enforce such laws.
Actually I would love to see the day come where there is a NPS ranger on the Moon in some sort of interpretive center near the Apollo 11 landing site, but I don't think that will happen in my lifetime. I certainly would love to bring some of these conspiracy nut cases up to the Moon and show them the sites myself, but then they would still claim it was some sort of NASA conspiracy that dressed up the landing site in the 21st Century in some sort of movie reenactment by James Cameron to falsify the record. Even bringing these idiots to the Moon won't convince them that people from the 1960's could achieve such a technological feat.
Surviving a lunar night is a legitimate concern. It doesn't necessarily need an RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) for an energy source and I've seen some very interesting proposals with Google Lunar X-Prize teams that simply bury themselves into the lunar soil at dusk for insulation, but it is a tough challenge. Another approach is to build a "garage" for an exploration vehicle to spend the nights. This is assuming that the exploration vehicle is something like the Sojourner vehicle used in the Mars Pathfinder mission, which is a good example of what many of the GLXP teams are strongly considering as a prototype vehicle.
One really odd proposal I saw was to try and land near one of the Apollo landing sites and try to find some of the RTGs left behind by the Apollo astronauts. With the exception of Apollo 11, all of the rest of the manned landings on the Moon had them and some calculations showed they are still producing a significant amount of heat even today. The trick to using those RTGs as a heat source is mainly political rather than technical, as some folks from NASA got really pissed such ideas were even floated around at all. Checking out an Apollo landing site from the ground level for the first time in 40 years does sound like an interesting prospect in and of itself though.
Most landing system to the Moon do require powered descent of some sort or another, unless the goal is to perform a deliberate impact instead. There have been some lunar exploration missions which that has been an explicit goal so it isn't too far fetched. Keep in mind that the reason you need to get creative on Mars is because it has an atmosphere. There is enough of an atmosphere on Mars that you need to worry about it in mission planning, but there isn't enough of an atmosphere to really be useful like it is for missions to Venus or Titan. There were flights to both of those bodies where the probes landed on the ground and continued to transmit data in spite of the fact that landing was not part of the mission profile. That has never happened on Mars where the opposite has been far more common: spacecraft crashing in spite of good faith attempts to perform a "soft" landing. The Moon isn't nearly so bad and has a much higher success rate for vehicles landing there.
Lunar dust is an issue, mainly because it is so incredibly abrasive. On the Earth and even on Mars, the dust bangs into other dust particles and becomes weathered and rounded. On the Moon, due to a lack of atmosphere, the dust particles just cut through almost everything they encounter and have very sharp edges. Lunar dust can also get very fine and work their way into any joint. By comparison, the extra fine dust on the Earth and on Mars generally stays suspended in the atmosphere (part of what gives Mars its distinctive red colored sky). On the Earth, it also turns into mud and is washed out of the sky in rainstorms. Then again, that is part of what makes clay.
And I don't think that firing your thrusters is such a great idea when in close proximity to another space craft: I would expect that the matter thrown out by the thrusters could damage and push away the other craft if directed at it.
That is sort of what Gemini 8 was all about. I will agree though in terms of being impressed with such a maneuver. If anything, I would consider in-orbit rendezvous to be as difficult if not more difficult to complete even assuming that you have the technology to get into orbit as simply building a rocket to get into orbit in the first place. It is that large of a technical challenge.
That SpaceX is only the fifth organization in the history of humanity to even attempt such a task should speak volumes about how difficult of a task it is. The other four organizations are all national space exploration bodies (with strong ties to the national military organizations of those countries) of permanent members of the UN security council... a rather elite group if I say so myself. That two of those national space organizations have only been able to reach that same goal in the past couple years should be all that more remarkable.
No, the vast majority of the money SpaceX is using right now has come from deposits on future flights they will be making. If a whole bunch of those companies try to back out of those contracts, SpaceX would be in a world of hurt, but the money has been flowing in their direction from that. It represents most of the current revenue stream that SpaceX has been running on so far. SpaceX needs to actually launch some rockets to complete those contracts, so there is some concern there, but then again they are building up the company and expanding to provide those rockets.
Oh, and SpaceX has also been successful at sending up a Falcon 1 rocket too, even though I'll admit that one flight (a genuine revenue flight) is relatively insignificant. There have also been some minor secondary payloads on both this flight (such as the Celestia capsule on the Falcon 9 2nd stage that has been getting press recently) as well as some other minor cube sats sent up by some customers.
All told, the majority of the funding that SpaceX has received has come from private individuals and companies, not government agencies... and of government agencies NASA's money is not even a "vast majority of the funding". SpaceX does see the COTS program as a priority, but not the only one.
It is also important to note that the COTS program has multiple competing companies (currently six companies are "qualified" for receiving funds or services from NASA) and it is all very competitive. If SpaceX starts to miss deadlines or fails to deliver, future funding will be transferred to other companies. BTW, this already happened where Rocketplane Kistler had their funding cut and the money transferred over to Orbital Science for the Taurus II rocket they are developing. ATK is already chomping at the bit hoping for a SpaceX failure, which is why they've really been pushing the development of the Liberty rocket. The success of SpaceX so far doesn't seem to imply that ATK will be successful though.
It is made +5 interesting because it is true.
While there has been some private commercial space projects, most of those (especially Intelsat) had essentially a government granted monopoly on certain aspects of space development. It really had much more in common with... well 1930's Germany than a true form of capitalism and a free market. While technically "commercial" and "private companies", the distinction between what these companies were doing in space and a government agency is mostly semantics. For most of what Boeing has been doing in space is as a government contractor using "cost-plus" contracts where they aren't even risking their own money to make the vehicles they are building. The "cost" part of such contracts is that no matter how much it costs them to make whatever it is that they are making, that the government guarantees it will be paid, and the "plus" is the profit they will earn for doing the job. They are guaranteed a certain amount of money that they will earn regardless of the cost it takes to get the job done.
NASA has gone out of their way to make sure that only companies like Boeing could get into space, where until the past decade or so there wasn't even a government agency which could even authorize somebody to put their own rocket into space. We now have the FAA Office of Commercial Spaceflight (called FAA-AST due to being the "Administrator for Space Transportation") which has the authority to grant that permission and NASA was even explicitly cut out of the loop for deciding if those spacecraft are safe... unless they are being used by NASA personnel or for a NASA contract.
On top of that, at least for the 1970's and 1980's NASA published prices for commercial payloads on the Space Shuttle that were so heavily subsidized that it killed all efforts at commercial spaceflight. If you want specifics, look up the name Jim Benson and look at the companies he started where NASA personnel did repeated political moves to kill his companies and prevent him from getting a rocket into space. At least Jim Benson lived long enough to see SpaceShip One fly and validate his ideas for spaceflight. His company lives on as a subsidiary of the Sierra Nevada corporation.
I could name other examples (look up what Deke Slayton did after he left the NASA astronaut corps), but there certainly are many examples of how many very skilled and intelligent people tried in vain to get private commercial spaceflight to happen. The only reason private companies are more successful today is that the traditional launch builders got complacent thinking their system for building rockets would never be challenged.
Sputnik was a hollowed out ICBM warhead. I can only guess the political reasoning behind doing what they did, besides national pride/one-upsmanship.
I don't think people in 1957 (especially members of the United States Congress at the time or the Eisenhower administration) missed the political message of what Sputnik meant, including the fact that it was a nuclear warhead casing. In fact you can get congressional hearing transcripts which will tell you exactly what they thought that message implied. Those senators and representatives weren't shy about expressing their opinions on the matter.