To me, outperform means that it will need to:
1) Hit fewer pedestrians and cyclists
2) Be drivable while drunk
3) Not result in massive traffic jams
4) Not require huge ugly parking lots and parking garages.
5) Be cheap enough so that normal people, instead of rich douchebags, can afford it
6) Require fewer tax subsidies.
7) Allow the user to get some exercise instead of getting progressively fatter.

Well, if I were a NASA engineer working on the LRO (sometimes I kinda wish I were, being the nerd I am) I'd probably ask the question to get a cheap laugh.

I'm sure at least once, somebody in the team asked "Now, you guys do know that this will show the landing sight. We really didn't fake the landing, right?"

Not necessarily. Artificial gravity gives you Coriolis forces and differing levels of artificial gravity at different levels from the hub.

It's not just cost-savings. Carbon-carbon is also much heavier... up to 10 times heavier. Furthermore, do remember that what brought Columbia down was impact on the Carbon-Carbon leading edge.

The options for the shuttle heat shield mostly revolved around "hot structure" using titanium and other refractory metals, which would have been incredibly heavy if it was to take the load, so it wasn't seen as a viable option. They tried an ablative coating on the X-15 and it turned out to be quite hard to maintain in a reusable craft. So the decision was mostly ablatives vs. tiles. It looked, at the time, like they could use tiles and then retreat to ablatives if the tiles turned out not to work.

I tend to be a believer in the "low-density reentry" idea, which got nixed after they ran out of money to make it fully re-usable. See, the less dense the craft re-entering, the less the thermal protection system needs to work. If the orbiter and external tank were combined, the thermal load is reduced. Maybe hot structures could be used in that case.

Note that SpaceX uses hot structure niobium nozzles in the upper stage. This is for a good reason. Regenerative nozzles are expensive and heavy. Carbon-carbon nozzles shatter. Whereas niobium nozzles can be smacked against the upper stage if the staging isn't smooth enough and it mostly works OK (of course, when that happened, tank sloshing ruined the mission anyway... but it would have been fine with just a good smack to the nozzle.

Also, budget cuts at the wrong parts of development. Replacing titanium structure with aluminum, for example.

In retrospect, the real mistake was not acting on the Shuttle II papers in the late eighties and instead concentrating on even more complicated systems like the X-30 and X-33.

Aluminum, Iron, and Titanium. All in sufficient quantities to be worth extracting. And putting a mass driver to get it up to space cheaply is not in anybody's backyard, especially if you do it on the dark side of the moon. For building large things in space (like a version of Iridium where the ERP was the same as a cellphone tower's or solar power satellites or space habitats or any number of other things) it's cheaper to mass-driver it from the moon and have a refinery in orbit than to ship it up from Earth, given that you can't be in somebody's backyard or use nuclear rockets in the atmosphere.

We still haven't established what happens long-term in low-gravity. We know that zero-g is not someplace you could live forever. Is lunar gravity sufficient? We don't actually know. And it's one thing to follow the science fiction cliche that the martians and moonies couldn't adapt to Earth gravity anymore.... it's another thing if the first moonie baby is horribly disfigured.

We don't even know if, were you to raise ten generations of rats in a 1-g centerfuge and ten generations on Earth if the centerfuge rats would be healthy by comparison.

Helium-3 is also present on Earth. You can buy it by the tank. If just getting access to Helium-3 was enough to make fusion possible, we'd at least have one pilot reactor that was able to produce a decent sized net energy gain.

There was a significant concern inside of NASA that our flawless luck of moon launches would run out. What if we had done a few more missions and 19 left us with dead astronauts on the moon when the LM couldn't lift off? Do you think we'd have continued at that point? Remember, there could have been one more moon landing with the hardware we had but NASA didn't want to launch it.

The problem is, cutting off the Apollo program in favor of the Space Shuttle made fairly good sense at the time and awful sense in retrospect. Even a fool can predict the past.

IMHO, were I to have been the governor, after renaming the state to Wireheaddia and instituting my birthday as a state holiday complete with nudist parade, I'd probably lean on child protective services to take Lori Drew's kids away on the grounds of her being an unsuitable parent.

There was a lot of shit going on when I was a kid between various silly kid BBSers. Most of it was stopped by parents doing.. ehrm... the exact opposite of Lori Drew.

Well, she had been under the care of a mental health professional, plus was on three different medications.

There are limits to how much a parent, teacher, neighbor, or peer can do.

That's totally something for one's resume. It's a mark of distinction.

I can picture it now:

AT&T Research, San Jose (1999-2010)
  * Made things suck less
  * Shuffled papers
  * Almost got killed by rotten office fridge.

Do you have statistics to back up your assertion?

So? I live in Silicon Valley. During some months, we get precip most days.

I've got a pair of waterproof pants. If it's raining when I leave, I'll just wear 'em. If I get caught in the rain, I'll stop and put 'em on over my jeans. And then I've got a jacket, a balaclava, and clear glasses. Eventually I'll get around to getting some neoprene overshoes to keep my shoes from getting quite as wet.

Tell that to the people who were first on the layoff list because they telecommuted.

Can't just wave a magic wand here.

So? A nice sized chunk of my income and sales tax money goes to pay for highways that I cannot bike on, walk on, or even take a bus down.