Done the right thing? Passed a law slavishly devoted to the copyright industry's wishes? So mindlessly copied the US version that it contained the same decade-known flaw, an absence of penalties for false-notices, fraudulent-notices, spamming robo-notices, allowing 3rd party companies to create whole business models around extorting fake "fines" out of people? How is any of that the "right thing"?

You are getting your rocket equation backwards. While small changes to payload result in exponentially increasing changes through the stages, reciprocally it takes a large change to the first stage to have a small effect on payload.

Landing a six story building on a barge in the ocean after launching a commercial capsule to the International Space Station.

The barge itself is 300 x 100ft. The extra width is on the deck only.

Hydraulics ran out just before landing. So it lost control at the last moment.

Or you could just google it.

Yes, and it actually was originally called a googolplexplex, but it has been reformed as "googolduplex", in order to standardise the next orders, googoltriplex, googolquadplex (10^10^10^googol, 10^10^10^10^googol, respectively) ... googol-n-plex.

Once you get above a googoldecaplex (ten repetitions of "plex"), you get into googol-10^n-plex notation. Once you get into googolmilliplex (googol-1000-plex), you get into googol-10^3n-plex notation. And so on. [Note googolmilliplex, googol-10^3-plex, is 10^10^10^10...10^100. With 1000 10's raised to 10^100. Googolmegaplex, googol-10^6-plex, is 1,000,000 10's, raised to 10^100.)

Then you have "Great" numbers which are one power higher than their namesakes. Like "Great Googol", which is 10^101. Or "Great Googolplex", 10^(googol+1). And Googolbang or googol-factorial, (10^100)!, which is roughly 1.63 x googlplex^100 (1.6294... x 10^10^100^100. Interestingly, in spite of having a hundred googolplexes of digits, it only has 18 significant figures.)

These are, of course, only the smaller googol related numbers. At some point it really gets silly.

As opposed to our current limited short-range teleporters?

I haven't tried it, but PLA apparently works well as the "wax" in lost-wax casting.

It's worth noting that unlike Hulu/Netflix/iTunes, Auntie doesn't go out of her way to block people who take even basic measures to bypass geo-blocking.

For example, on Firefox I use the Modify Headers addon and an "X-Forwarded-For" entry with the Beeb's own IP address. (212.58.246.94) There are other addons that make it as simple as clicking on a flag. Bit easier than screwing around with VPNs or DNS spoofing.

Nor have they "egotistically proclaim[ed] that they alone can solve mankind's problems, from aging to space travel." Nor "all the talk of exploration." Nor "shoot endangered animals on safari".

Seriously, the guy is nothing but a walking strawman.

There's plenty of things you can criticise the "PayPal mafia" and NewSpace over, especially Thiel and Branson respectively, but nothing that the Professor is going on about even comes close to a valid criticism. (Or even something that has anything to do with reality.) It's bizarre that someone would say it, but crazy that a major newspaper would actually publish it.

A) "recently", for something that's over a decade old, suggests that he's only just heard about it and because he only just heard about it, thinks it's new.

B) "fleets of rocket ships" is how a child would see it. Suggesting the guy is not only ignorant, but is surrounded by ignorant people.

VG won't be doing anything special, (although even a private sub-orbital system is new; nothing like SS2 exists. X-15 with passengers and open space.)

But Musk already has the cheapest launcher on the market (perhaps ignoring a few micro-launchers), is about to develop fly-back first stage (something the industry has been wishing for since the early sixties), and is developing a private manned capsule, and is developing a heavy lift launcher that costs less than any other medium-lift launcher on the market even if they doesn't achieve reusability, and he's working with NASA to develop a Saturn V F1-class engine for a Saturn V class launcher, and he wants to go to Mars.

Not breaking new ground? What the fuck does this idiot want from them, a warp drive?

No, it's really not.

God I hate that phrase. So many failed NASA programs started because someone said "There's no show stoppers". I needs to be purged from NASA's vocabulary.

The "proper moment" is before you enter the atmosphere. So no. As soon as you enter the atmosphere, you can't do a retro-burn until you are subsonic, and you can't slow to subsonic without multiple hypersonic and supersonic parachutes. (Terminal velocity for a capsule on Mars is supersonic. You would hit the ground before you slowed enough to be able to fire retro-rockets.)

The only alternative is to have enough fuel in Mars orbit to do a retro-burn that virtually zeros the orbital velocity before you enter the atmosphere. And, by definition, that takes as much fuel as it does to launch from the surface into orbit.

Have a look at the entry sequence for MSL-Curiosity, hypersonic heat shield, supersonic drag-chutes, huge subsonic parachutes, and retrorockets, because the parachutes aren't enough to let you land on the surface. And every stage pushed the state of the art to the limits of current technology. All that just to land 900kg.

Now imagine what you'd have to add to land a multi-ton human-scale capsule...

Oh, did I say capsule? No. You have to get back home, so you need to land an entire launch vehicle on the surface of Mars. Plus all the infrastructure necessary to refuel and launch that vehicle.

Earth reentry is much easier than Mars. A nice fat atmosphere to bleed off all your velocity, down to subsonic, before you even worry about parachutes or retro-rockets. Mars' atmosphere is just awful. Too thick to be ignored, too thin to be useful. Exactly, precisely wrong.

Que? The impact force from a small asteroid impact is equivalent to a large nuke. The 20m Russian Chelyabinsk impact was about half a megaton equivalent.

A large asteroid would outstrip the effects of the entire global nuclear arsenal all detonated at the same time on a single site. Asteroids can punch through the ocean crust.

http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/