In general the GOP wants to reduce the size of government. She was very successful at reducing the size of HP. Clearly she is the perfect choice.

So Jeff Bezos isn't following Musk, he's doing his own thing. Musk isn't following Bezos either. Bezos wasn't trying to solve the specific problem that Musk wants to solve, so he started a company to do it. Both generally want to bring down the price of spaceflight, both believe reusable VTVL rockets are the way to do it, but they have very different philosophies on how to get there.

1. SpaceX is a profitable company and has been for years.
2. The US had completely lost the commercial launch market. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and their bastard child ULA could not compete with the Russians nor ESA. And now SpaceX is regularly winning contracts and launching payloads and using the profits to develop a reusable first stage and a Saturn V class rocket. If that's not "worth a shit," then I don't know what it.
3. Musk is heavily involved in not only the day to day operations of SpaceX and Tesla, but does also get involved in strategic technical decisions.
4. Sour grapes taste sour.

No, it's the same party (Republicans) that want a return to the bronze age. No regulations, might makes right, women are chattel, etc... Though truthfully, the Republicans prefer the Middle Ages. Yes, many extreme liberals dream of a fantasy "Age of Gia" just as extreme conservatives dream of a fantasy "Randian" period. Neither period existed. Life used to be much more brutal, and the human species survived largely by banding together (rarely in some communist equalitarian fantasy, but first as tribes, later as city states, etc.) Nature never made it easy to go it alone. The reactionaries on both sides of the aisle or full of shit, wanting to return to a time that never existed.

Oddly enough, some people want to spend all weekend customizing their desktop while simultaneously resenting the fact that they "have to."

Maybe it's mostly an ego thing. Building oneself up by looking down on people with different strengths and interests. Or now that I think about it, I bet it's mostly that people need something or someone to blame for their own frustrations. "I'm not happy, it must be your fault!"

And I stand by my response, it's better to reduce the likelihood of shit happening. There are ways to reduce sticton and there are ways to handle it better when it happens. Trying to fight an oscillation induced by a lag/overcorrection of a main engine with a thruster is a losing battle. If the thruster is up top it will just rotate the stage around the center of mass (which is really what a thrusters job is, to orient the stage. Not move it through space laterally.) If you look at the thruster firing during the failed landing attempt, it's trying to stop the rotation of the stage. It is not trying to stop the stage's "lateral motion." The direction it's firing, a crazy powerful thruster that could have made a difference would have added to it's lateral motion right off the barge. And it would have driven the opposite leg into the deck by using the already collapsing leg as a pivot point.

To some situations the correct response is to do less, not more.

You, like many people, are trying to solve the wrong problem. Fix the over-correction and there is no need for rocket powered thrusters in place of the cold gas thrusters. Fix the root cause, don't mask it with a heavy/expensive kludge that will come with a host of it's own failure modes.

He's tech savvy enough to know it's not scrubbed from the internets nor the collective consciousness. This just seems to be how he uses twitter. He regularly tweets things he leaves up, but he also uses twitter to have conversations with people and then he deletes those tweets after the conversation is over. One theory is that he likes a "clean" twitter history. But who the hell knows?

It did not come down way too fast. It just overcorrected at the end. It's called a hover slam (unfortunately) and it's all about using the minimum amount of fuel and dealing with the reality that even a single engine throttled down to 40% has a T/W > 1. They are extremely close to successful landing a first stage booster used to deliver a payload to orbit. Only experimental rockets have done this before (landers don't count, they are tiny in comparison. Amazing feets but a different kettle of fish.) This is a big deal. This is going to make spaceflight cheaper.

Yes, that's correct. Technically I think it's actually a one minute launch window, but there is not really any scenario where that matters. This is because if there is a launch hold the clock cycles back to T-13 minutes. There is no practical way to have a hold at T-13 or less, resolve the problem, and then target a new launch time within that one minute window. So the launch targets the specific second which optimizes rendezvous with the ISS.

They also call this an instantaneous launch window.

I am admittedly a fan of SpaceX. But ULA does employ smart people too and I'm really curious what they will propose. While I hope SpaceX is successful and I think they will eventually work through any issues, it's good to have people exploring different approaches and possibilities. I'm assuming it will be a less expensive (than Atlas V), methane powered (via Blue Origin engines), expendable rocket leveraging modern production techniques. But the question is "how low can they go" price wise.

I wish Slashdot had an edit capability. It could keep back links to older versions for context to responses. But I just reread this and it's too cranky. Sure, I should have fixed that before I hit submit, but this being human thing seems to be an error prone endeavor.

No production first stage has every landed propulsively, so they are not going backward to something that was done before. The Shuttle was more "refurbished" then reused. The main fuel tank was discarded. The booster cases were fished out of the water (how modern) and basically rebuilt. The main engines were removed after each flight and rebuilt. The tiles painstakingly inspected and repaired. It was a technological marvel but a financial disaster. The Dream Chaser is just the payload, not launch system. They planned to launch on an expendable rocket. So your examples are all non-sequitors, not "how to do it right."

"Flying back" is not really an option for a first stage booster. You'd need to add wings (more weight and drag, or complex mechanisms) and you'd need to add some sort of heat shield (more weight.) Propulsive landing requires more fuel (weight). The reentry burn itself acts as the primary thermal protection system (counterintuitive, but true.) It's a very elegant solution for recovering the entire first stage for reuse. And it's ridiculous that no major aerospace company was willing to pursue it. (There was the DC-X experimental rocket, but that was a government funded experiment which McDonnell Douglas dropped as soon as the "cost plus" gravy train left the station.)

Now if you love wings, then the right way to do that is probably something like Skylon, but it's a long way from flying and SpaceX is already forcing launch prices lower.

OK, I hate our draconian "tough on crime" bullshit and ridiculous "cyber crime" laws. But the summary left off some important information. He'd been busted for this before (WTF school, change your passwords) and:

So basically their just giving him a good scare.

This is a really stupid idea. Most people never have to code. First, we don't need it. And second, this will not lead to having more software engineers, this will institutionalize "programming sucks" because now schools will be forcing it on people in a way that turns them off to programming. I'm serious.

If you want to make the world a better place, then add a small mix of logic, critical thinking and basic behavioral economics to the core. Coding is not nearly as important of a foundational skill as getting a clue how to think and how bad we are at it.