That's why you carry spare parts with you.
Still, with mass at a premium it would be more efficient to send up a stockpile of raw plastic rather than many combinations of different spare parts. After all you can't perfectly predict which parts will fail and how often, so you could get caught short on a part that was supposed to be reliable but failed more than often it was predicted to.
Ever since Muslims were banned from going to Mars by a fatwa? I guess it is!
Well, they're banned if the mission is one-way rather than two-way, mainly in response to that daft Mars One thing. Of course Islam doesn't have any central authority anyway so it's not like that "no suicide missions to Mars" fatwa is actually binding to anyone.
Thing is, you're melting plastic and placing that melted plastic where you want it to be. In gravity and endless atmosphere this is easy, the gravity helps feed the raw materials through a hopper and ensure that the plastic stays where you place it, and the essentially endless atmosphere carries away noxious fumes so that you don't poison yourself. Unfortunately on a space station or in a spacecraft you have no effective gravity and a very limited atmosphere, so you cannot pollute nor can you rely on gravity to make things go where you want them.
Gravity making things go where you want them?? Gravity is a limiting factor in terrestrial 3D printers! The plastic is loaded as a filament and is mechanically pushed through the nozzle so no gravity required there, and without gravity you could get much better overhangs without requiring supports.
As for the fumes it would be pretty easy to have the printer in a separate fume cupboard if they needed.
The X-37 isn't the launch vehicle, it's the payload...
With an Android device, the manufacturer outright abandons updating the phone the moment their next handset is on sale. (Samsung seems to be the worst about this, but, even Google has done it to stock Nexus phones.)
Pick your poison. Slow, or quick.
At least with Android running a custom build is officially supported by the OS, and some handsets (especially the Nexus line) officially support rooting to install custom builds too. My nearly 4 year old Nexus S is running the latest version of KitKat just fine, and has actually got faster with the last few versions.
It just seems that any time a government spends a lot of money to do anything, it normally ends with a fail worthy of Monty Python
Lets be fair here, the last thing they did on Mars was place a 1 ton nuclear powered tank on the surface using a rocket powered crane, so they've obviously come along way since that unfortunate units mixup...
What, this one? An autonomous rendezvous test satellite that bashed into the derelict satellite it was practising with?
I mean, the whole point of that mission was to get close, tho not quite that close.
personally I'd rather go for Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface over Small Form Factor 8470
To be fair they do just go for "SAS" rather than "SASCSI"
Why do you miss it? It's not gone anywhere -> sudo apt-get install lynx
That "motor" is just another spring!
Is it the same one who would win if you ran a "typical automobile" into a transport truck or a dump truck?
The Syrian civil war is a political conflict sparked by a violent crackdown on anti-Assad protests in 2011 you dolt. Some of the rebel fighters are literally backed by the US government. Does that mean the US government supports Islamic extremists? Maybe you're confusing it with ISIS, an Iraqi group which was at the time of your poll (May 2013) a largely unknown bit player?
And how exactly did you come up with the estimate that 100% of Muslims who support fighting against Assad also support extremism?
According to that link the poll shows three quarters of Dutch Muslims support other Dutch Muslims joining rebels fighting Assad, the very same rebels that the west was so desperate to help.
Claiming three quarters of Muslims support extremism based on that is an outright lie.
That's how many soldiers ISIS has, where did they get money for weapons, outside support. Where are they getting rations, outside support. Where are they getting vehicles, outside support.
Wrong, the vast majority of their finances and equipment comes from money and kit captured in Iraq and Syria. source
n mid-2014, Iraqi intelligence extracted information from an ISIS operative which revealed that the organization had assets worth US$2 billion,[164] making it the richest jihadist group in the world.[165] About three quarters of this sum is said to be represented by assets seized after the group captured Mosul in June 2014; this includes possibly up to US$429 million looted from Mosul's central bank, along with additional millions and a large quantity of gold bullion stolen from a number of other banks in Mosul.
The most common weapons used against US and other Coalition forces during the Iraq insurgency were those taken from Saddam Hussein's weapon stockpiles around the country, these included AKM variant assault rifles, PK machine guns and RPG-7s.[184] ISIS has been able to strengthen its military capability by capturing large quantities and varieties of weaponry during the Syrian Civil War and Post-US Iraq insurgency.
I think there's a world market for about five computers. -- attr. Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board, IBM), 1943
