"You have your Internet persona, and you have what you actually do on the street," Officer Ettienne said on Tuesday. "What you say on the Internet is all bravado talk, like what you say in a locker room." Except that trash talk in locker rooms almost never winds up preserved on a digital server somewhere, available for subpoena.

Critics charge that the [Ares] design, which was supposed to draw heavily on converted parts from the space shuttle, now relies on too many made-to-order parts, driving up development costs and lengthening the time to launch. Defenders of the Ares program say that the changes became necessary, as happens during many complex engineering projects, and that restarting a man-rated launcher program would likely cause more delays and invite a redistribution of NASA's budget. ... [Some] analysts and former space officials who say the Jupiter Direct plan only works well on paper and could suffer from the same kind of delays and design changes that Ares I has encountered. Other analysts argue that the time to decide on a plan has already come and gone--and that the essentials of the Jupiter Direct had been considered and dismissed.