I am a licensed pilot with an instrument rating and a lot of experience from years ago but may not have a typical attitude. Following are some of my rather random thoughts. Pilots are trained to TRUST THEIR INSTRUMENTS unless there is incontrovertible evidence that the instruments are malfunctioning. The times I came closest to crashing or other unpleasant outcomes were when I was trying to fly by eye when I should have been using the instruments to tell me the parameters of flight (both in clear and cloudy conditions), so that is my experience relating to man vs. machine. I think the machines and instruments at the current stage of development are more reliable than the pilots right now. I've seen the processes required for pilot training and licensing and the processes for certification of software in safety critical aviation applications and the software process is more rigorous and the software doesn't get lazy or hungover or inattentive after being certified.
As others have commented this whole thing is going toward pilot-less airliners. As a passenger I don't have a problem with that. Right now the pilots are only there to deal with unusual circumstances and as those are rare, how much confidence do I have that the pilots up front have recent training to deal with the particular problem which has popped up?
On the point of windows, right now the visibility outside of an airliner is pretty poor in my opinion. I suppose a windowless aircraft could be fitted with a periscope for use during a failure of the display screens and the pilots could train to land using that in the 1 in million chance it became necessary. No matter how this is done, the most dangerous part of an airline trip will remain, as it is now, the drive to the airport.

The Saturn V launch pads also had hold down arms which did not release the vehicle until full thrust was developed by all five engines in the first stage. I believe they gave the system the ability to start engines then shutdown on the pad if an anomaly occurred before release.

Nice theory except the Saturn I was a DOD program before it was a NASA program. It was DOD money which initiated the Saturn program and von Braun's team in Huntsville who developed the Saturn I were not transferred from the Army to NASA until March of 1960, a year and a half after the Saturn program was started by the DOD Advanced Research Projects Agency. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

The AC before me put it perfectly but since you might not see his comment -- the Spanish stole the land from the Native Americans before that. So what is the rule -- the first European conquerors get permanent title to the land? And besides, by the time of the Mexican-American war a lot of the previously Mexican territory had already been lost when Texas won their war of independence and broke off from Mexico -- hey, if it was OK for Mexico to break off from Spain, then it was OK for Texas to break off from Mexico.

Well, no one had to tell us boys that, "girls don't like bookish boys". Most figured it out pretty quickly on our own after about 6th grade.

As much as I would like for the US to withdraw to its borders and let the other democracies defend their own borders in a big, bad world -- the last time we had a multipolar world we got World Wars I and II out of it. A big reason we got WW II is that the US did withdraw to its own borders after WW I and the multipolar world outside proceeded to screw it up on three continents at once.

That's the first thing I thought of too while reading the article. Usually some plan with such an obvious flaw doesn't make it past the press release editing at legitimate labs. Something odd is going on -- I'm waiting to see the reaction of the planetary science community, and either a "correction" issued or I stand by to be amazed at some facet of the physics of tenuous atmospheres which I did not know about.

Galileo didn't have a parachute, and didn't soft land anywhere -- it was intentionally burned up in a high speed plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere. Perhaps you are thinking about the Cassini/Huygens probe of Titan, Saturn's largest moon which does have a dense atmosphere. I have to agree with the OP -- there is something not right about a plan to use Europa's practically non-existent atmosphere for this.

I read them both and it is gratifying to see that every comment so far (there aren't many) attached to the two stories you listed (WashPo and Bloomberg) rips ULA and Sen Shelby new ones for their attacks on Space X. I guess ULA's astroturfing isn't quite up to speed yet.

The US Government doesn't run any lotteries or scratch offs -- those would be the respective State governments. Can't stick the feds with hypocracy in this one.

Ah, you're right. USAF didn't do squat for space exploration as we usually define it. Their boosters were great enablers though. I guess I jumped on your, "captured existing German rockets" statement which doesn't credit the enormous amount of rocket development done in the 40's and 50's independent of the Germans. I read a fascinating recent bio of von Braun, however, which concludes that the V-2 probably pushed rocket development ahead by10 years over the natural progress of technology in the mid-20th century. A lot of interacting factors led to the rapid development of the 40's, 50's, and 60's though.

The USAF did develop the Atlas ICBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas) in the late 50's which had little to do with the Germans. The Germans were over in Huntsville working for the Army where they developed the Redstone IRBM and its successors, which included the Saturn line of boosters. But in the meantime the USAF developed the Titan line of boosters independently of the German/NASA/Huntsville team.
In the early space program the Huntsville team had the first visible successes with their derivative of the Redstone launching the first US satellite and the first US astronaut. However the first US manned orbital mission was launched aboard an Atlas and the two-man Gemini missions after that were launched aboard Titans, though all the manned programs were funded and managed through NASA. Of course it was Saturns which launched all the Apollo missions.
The OP's contention that NASA messed up the space program is an ignorant crock, though. On the other hand, the USAF certainly screwed up the Space Shuttle with their requirements for the vehicle.

Check the history of lead in the environment and exposure of children to lead based paints, lead from leaded gasoline, etc. Here's one reference -- Lead in Drinking Water and Human Blood Lead Levels in the United States, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ot.... All that started to go down in the 70's. Reduction in environmental lead has been proposed as a reason crime rates have dropped since then.

The car going around the curve can be seen to be in a rotating reference frame from the point of view of an observer in the car with the center of rotation at the point inside the curve which the car is maintaining a constant distance from. And the car itself is rotating in inertial space by the fact that the direction it is pointing is changing going through the curve (unless it is understeering very badly).

Check the direction and magnitude of those force vectors there -- whether the car leans inward of outward in the curve the resultant force vector is the same -- the sum of the gravity and the centrifugal force at (about) right angles to the gravity; the direction of this resultant sum as felt in the car is somewhere between down and toward the outside of the curve. The difference is that if the car is leaning inward then your body is more aligned with the resultant and it feels more comfortable (just as in an aircraft turning in a perfectly coordinated turn). If the car is leaning outward, as all conventional cars do, you feel the resultant as more of a sideways force on your body which is more uncomfortable. In either case the magnitude of the resultant is the same.
And for the other repliers who can't seem to get out of the inertial frame, centrifugal force is a perfectly fine concept in the moving reference frame of the car going around the curve. That's what an accelerometer would feel (measure) in the car -- an (apparent) force pointing outward perpendicular to the curved motion of the car.