Somehow I bet most of the non-male, white, non-asians no-college degrees are 'Geniuses' at a store at best.

Arianespace is the premier commercial launch company in the world and they delay launches all the time. It is better to delay a launch than to have an unsuccessful launch. Quite often the launch company has to wait for the satellites to be completed before the launch and I bet that is where a lot of the delays are. Also SpaceX has needed to ramp up production and procure more launch sites to satisfy their quite hefty order log. That cannot be done in an instant.

In fact the customer of that secondary payload which crashed on reentry was NOT the government but a private company called Orbcomm. They were so dissatisfied with SpaceX in that case, which was covered by insurance BTW, that they continued their contract their SpaceX. SpaceX successfully launched 6 of those same satellites for Orbcomm on July 14.

That was a partial failure and the only reason the satellite was not deployed at the proper orbit was because NASA, which had the primary payload in that mission, requested that their payload not be delayed to deploy that satellite. That was a test satellite, the launch cost was peanuts as it was deployed as a secondary payload, and they still managed to test most of its systems in space before it crashed down. So to call it a mission failure is a misnomer.

The Space Shuttle Main Engines used Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen which was stored in the External Tank. The Solid Rocket Boosters are the ones which used Aluminum. Hydrazine was used in the Reaction Control System and Orbit Maneuvering System.

rules are different for them than they would be if NASA themselves built the rockets

NASA does not build a damned thing. ULA (Lockheed Martin, Boeing) builds the EELV rockets. SLS is being build by ATK while Orion is built by Lockheed Martin.

This is just ULA being afraid they will lose their iron rice bowl.

Imagine if I covered the sun with a Dyson sphere blanketed with solar panels. Would solar power stop being a "renewable" then?

s/higher/lower/

This is why the world "renewable" is such a misnomer. Oil is also a renewable resource. It formed naturally on the Earth and is continuously replenishing itself. Some say the replenishing rate is higher than our current consumption rate but that does not make it any less renewable. Same thing for coal.

Both solar pv and windmills are powered by the energy of the sun so they are both ways of harnessing a natural fusion power source.

Nothing new considering William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the 1980s.

Go to Wikipedia and read the entry on Entropy.

'Renewable' fuels are a misnomer. The sun will run out of fuel too sometime. When that happens you can forget about solar panels or windmills.

Of course that's in geological timescales so it does not matter. There is enough nuclear fission fuel to last for thousands of years so that is irrelevant as well. As for oil we have been using it for over a century by now and it seems we haven't ran out of it yet.

The main back story plot point of the botched first contact was fine. You have to remember their leader died in that first contact. Wars start for all sorts of stupid reasons. As for the number of fatalities being low that is explained as they mostly fought in the colonies or in space where few people actually lived. If they actually started bombarding Earth as they planned then the fatalities would increase a lot.

But by collecting the data and storing it they make it available to government requests asking for it.

They probably use it as a unique id to identify users. Apple and Google do the same.