That's the thing that kind of bugs me is that Global Climate change gets all of the attention at the expense, it seems, over other issues. For example, coal fired power plants.
Coal-fired power-stations DO contribute to global warming. The down-wind mercury levels, whilst elevated, aren't high enough cause the well-known chronic toxity effects (google 'minimata' for the gory details), but they could (collectively) lead to TEOCAWKI. Which would be bad.
This is the bit I don't get:
Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who's nearby.'
Really? How does that work? Have the people who happen to be nearby all have to have signed up for the trial, or is their presence somehow automagically detected and uploaded? Hey, if you want to sign away YOUR privacy, feel free (though I'd rather you didn't) It doesn't give you the right to sign away my privacy at the same time!!
Does this mean I should be avoiding people who use Windows Mobile smartphones? Oh wait, the universe already took care of that for me.
That's not socialism that's evidence of fascism
OMFG Hitler was a vegetarian???!!!! PETA are fascists!!!oneoneslashslash?!
it would be so much cheaper to build the probes needed to colonize it from lunar materials.
Take ten seconds to think about a steel plant. Have you ever seen a steel plant? Now, consider the mass of such a plant. Consider the cost of moving it up the gravity well from earth and then back down onto the moon. Realise that you're talking about several orders of magnitude more mass than
Your ISS comment is just shortsighted and ignorant. The ISS is providing scientific data and increasing human experience in space exploration.
Apart from work on pysiological adaption to weightlessness, can you cite a few papers on worthwhile original research carried out on ISS? (hint - no, you can't.)
The ISS will be a platform for future missions,...
That's the sort of fatuous reasoning that convinced Dubya that returning to the moon would enable some sort of "way station" where a weary crew bound for Mars can pull over, take a comfort break, refuel, let the kids stretch their legs and so on. It's nonsense.
Sure, but that's not what would happen.
Why not?
You're right, except that there is no such market beyond the handful of people willing to drop a few tens of millions on a Soyuz to ISS, or a few hundred thousand on a Branson/Rutan "Suicide Special". Certainly nothing like enough to cover developing and flight-testing human-rated flight hardware on top of Delta and show a profit.
Glad to see the "asteroid mining" trolls have finally shut up & gone away though
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982