Countries with lots of space and located close to the equator. You are aware of none ? You should take a closer look. Anyway, you don't need to be close to the equator to be a "target" of a geostationnary satellite. (TV service using GEO are covering Alaska or Norway) But the more away from the equator you are, the more inclined the beam will be, and you lose (horizontal) surface efficiency.

Explosives residue. Hum. Rings a bell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six . Terrorism, religion, false positive. Law enforcement people could use some history classes.

Why do you need a mouse ?

From what I understand in the article, it's a technology for formation flying. You can generate your own magnetic field anywhere, using one of the spacecraft, and use this "non-natural" magnetic field from one of the other spacecrafts.

MTB generate only torque. Here they speak of propulsion system. But if I understand correctly the article, it's more about changing the relative position/attitude of two (or more) spacecraft than "real" propulsion of one spacecraft alone. It's a technology for formation flying

Even a Obama-ordered drone strike is a murder, in most of the countries in the world. Such an attack against Assange in the Ecuador embassy in London will certainly be seen as a murder by Ecuador, maybe even by the UK.

If you don't spend money in research, China will do it, and a Chinese company will patent the result. Not sure it will help to reduce the debt.

It's not only for US spacecraft. I was working a few years back for a French spacecraft manufacturer, and we have got 4 wheels failure in the first 6 month after launch, on 6 spacecraft (so 4 failures out of 24 wheels.) Ok you could call it US spacecraft, because it was done for an American customer, and the wheels were coming from the US(or was it the UK ? not sure, but I think US.) On the other hand, it was "low cost" satellite, and "low cost" wheels.

You are right, but it's TFA (first link, NASA press release) which says

which is an inaccurate description of reaction wheels.

(for those interested, in short : you can use a RWA (A is for Assembly) to provide gyroscopic stiffness to a spacecraft (in that case you could maybe speak of gyroscope-like). But you can also use the RWA for 3 axis pointing (precise pointing, not just gyroscopic stability) in that case it's not a gyroscope. You just transfer angular momentum from the spacecraft to the wheels. The three axis pointing could still include gyroscopic stiffness from the wheel, but it's not only that)(I know, I use too many parenthesis)

You can control attitude using (ion) thruster, but reaction wheels have some advantages. One of the biggest advantage of RWs is that it's (close to) a linear actuator (outside of the zero crossing zone), where thruster are bang bang actuators. In fact they are bad bang bang actuator, because you have some transient at start and end of the pulse.

It's just 3 months if you are in France.

They've won a lot of money.

Not the same guy.

There are also COTS technology order of magnitude cheaper and better for space technology that was available during the cold war. Not for all subsystems, but for some of them. You have higher specific impulse technology (but low thrust, bad point for human mission, but good for mass), cheaper sensor (anything you want, gyro, sun, star, ... you could not have found that easily before, now it's just about making a few phone calls and cash, it's not cheap, but also not millions of $), you can find better space hardened processors/ram which are not comparable to what was available during cold war.

You can also book a launch to earth suburbs "easily"(still expensive) but if this is from Copenhagen Suborbital, I suppose that they want to use their own launcher, if they finish this project)

On the other hand, there are still a lot of place where not a lot of progress have been made, like radiation protection which must still be massive, because humans have a tendency to die easily. Maybe we can change humans ?

They speak of a time frame of 30 to 50 years, 50 years being more than the time between Sputnik and the ISS

Will they make it in 50 years ? Probably not. But it's a hobby, you still have to do something in your free time, no ? And even if it's not a hobby but a paid job, there is not enough job on earth if people only do useful stuff, so why not trying to do something else ?

We cannot (yet) get a STD on porn site.