It's for looking at things IN space, which is much easier to do from the ground.

Already done.

This depends on whether or not the army is part of the insurrection. Which was true historically as well; most successful rebellions in history gained support from some or all of the local armed forces, rather than just being angry mobs.

However, there is a very strong reason why they won't do this, which is that they're police, and so have to deal with irresponsible violent citizens a lot, including those who appeared to be responsible nonviolent ones. So doing that gets police officers killed, or at least injured, and their fellows stop doing that--at the very least, they start treating everyone like a potential threat--and then they inculcate that attitude in new officers. The only way to get around it would be to either have angels for police, which is obviously not very likely, or angels for the policed, which isn't really very likely either.

NOAA (who is the one responsible for most American earth observation satellites, not NASA, although I'd hardly expect the Slashdot editors to know that subtlety) has been releasing image data from the GOES satellites to the public for a while. "GOES" stands for "Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite," so yes, they are in geostationary orbit.

Actually, considering the three letters present in all of the provided options--I think he was thinking of the NSA.

Yes.

And your point is...? (I said "development" not "operational" costs up there. Different things.)

It would have been easy to find a more expensive way to do it (really easy, since Shuttle development costs were quite low); just go with the Paine plan, or the Mueller plan. Much, much more expensive, involved building a big space station (much larger than the ISS), continued production of the Saturn V, and so on. They didn't even have to keep doing Moon missions or Mars missions, it would have been perfectly easy to avoid doing that but still spend money like water.

They didn't do that because they wanted to spend the money on things that would more directly affect people's lives (to paraphrase a few opponents of the Shuttle, sewers and houses), but they couldn't just wipe out NASA funding altogether. So, yes, they did waste quite a lot of money, in the effort to spend the savings relative to a larger program on things which (you could interpret as) buying votes more directly.

Not to mention that high schools and colleges, at least in the basic English 101-style courses, don't cover many types of writing. How many scientific papers did YOU have to write in high school, for instance?

The galaxy rotation problem is basically this: Stars towards the edge of galaxies (mainly spiral galaxies) rotate much faster than they should based on Newtonian gravitation using only the visible material (the Einstein corrections are negligible at the speeds and distances being talked about, so they can't account for the differences). To explain this, you have basically two options: MOND, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (ie., changing the laws of the universe at large distance scales like kiloparsecs), or dark matter (which can include baryonic dark matter as well, but generally refers to non-baryonic things), which corrects for it by assuming that there's a vast halo of objects that outweighs everything else in the galaxy and thus speeds up the rotation of objects far away from the galactic core.

The evidence at the moment seems to be in favor of dark matter, and in any event I have some doubt that we will ever see "examples at the same scale of pure baryonic matter interactions" as you put it; it may be that the phenomena in question are simply things that appear on the very large scale and aren't observable on the small scale, just the same way that relativity only becomes important under certain conditions and Newtonian dynamics works perfectly well in our "normal" world. (But I'm not an astrophysicist, just aiming to be one!)

It's not like diplomats are going to stop checking out their hosts or stop thinking about the host's government...

Yes, but a larger planet will also (in general) have more radioactive "stuff" in the core areas as well.

Well, not so much gravity as the atmosphere (drag eventually makes your orbit intersect the Earth's surface). Anyways, the license itself is reasonable enough for liability purposes (delineating who is responsible for the payload when returned), as practically all previous satellites that have reentered the atmosphere have been governmental. And this is a controlled, purposeful reentry, not a laws-of-physics demanded one.

Check the Encylopedia Astronautica (astronautix.com). Even if they don't have your ATK/Morton Thiokol related article, they do have quite a lot of information related to spaceflight and space technology. I think you have the broad outlines correct, though, Hatch himself actually played something of a role (ISTR) in using the 156" solids instead of the Aerojet 260" (which would have been made in Southern Florida in a monocasing design and barged north to the Cape) ones. There were some other factors (mainly the use of rockets, such as the Titan III, that also used similar-sized segmented SRBs), but politics played a big role in that selection.

Well, there's a good reason for that; the United States doesn't need 200 knot torpedoes or supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles because it's enemies hardly even have navies worthy of the name, let alone the sophisticated anti-cruise missile defenses the US has (because of those supersonic AShMs), or our very quiet submarines (because of those torpedoes). Those kinds of weapons are only really useful for anti-ship warfare, and since other countries need to conduct that type of warfare in a hypothetical "war with US" scenario than we do, we invest much less in them than we do in other technologies that we get more use out of. For example, we have excellent smart bombs and stealth technology because we heavily rely on air power as a force multiplier and the countries with the fast torpedoes and AShMs have good air defense systems.