So I take it you're against retiring the internal combustion engine. If the plan is to substantially reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, then expect a dramatic increase in the amount of electric consumed as we electrify the transportation sector.

In weapons yes, however all military reactors use highly enriched uranium (sub reactors even use super-grade uranium which has higher U-235 concentration than what is typically used in weapons)

If there is a fission economy than new sources will be found and developed. Then there are breeder reactors, thorium, sea water extraction, and ultimately the rest of the solar system. People always seem to compare what Solar will be in 10 years to what nuclear was 30 years ago. Or can we abandon Solar because if we go "full solar" we'll run out of Indium or Lithium

> and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.

It doesn't make a difference, the non-nuclear side is already too expensive to build:

https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/fusion-aint-gonna-happen

Oh, no... someone wrote a blog. His argument assumes that the ITER approach is the only one that will work and that costs will never come down, he also assumes that if Fusion were perfected and became widespread we somehow couldn't build additional fission reactors, or build specialized fusion reactors to produce tritium (I guess we've lost the ability to build CANDU reactors), Darlington itself has been approved to build 2-4 new reactors if required. Plus we don't know if Pollywell fusion will pan out, or if Lockheed Martin will somehow live up to their claims. However it's perfectly fine for Solar advocates to assume that breakthroughs in battery technology will solve all of its issues

The energy from the Sun just doesn't magically turn into electricity, it requires the extraction of minerals and elements to produce the physical panels, batteries, controllers, inverters, etc, etc, etc. If you're going to reject Nuclear since we only have 10,000 of years of Uranium, will you also reject Solar as we may only have 10,000 years worth of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium to build panels out of? Plus if we look to the solar system, Earth is not the only place to find Uranium (hey if you can put your fusion reactor in space, why can't I get my uranium from space too)

They haven't flown anything in 3 years (and that was a capsule abort test). The sub-orbital vehicle "New Shepard" hasn't flown since 2011. Even Virgin Galactic flies more often than BO. SpaceX has flown more operational flights in the past 6 months than BO has had test launches since the company was founded. SpaceX may have better PR, but then again they are actually doing stuff beyond publishing the odd PowerPoint every few years

Sounds very similar to the ASSET program from the early '60's http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

The eventual plan is to land near the launch site (SpaceX just signed a deal with the Airforce to lease LC13 at the Cape). As such both launch and landing sites will have the same weather conditions. Going foreword this should only be an issue with the center core of the Falcon 9 Heavy which will be too far down range to return to the launch site.

Of course the moment anything of substantive value is developed or discovered on the Moon, there is nothing stopping any of the signatories from invoking Article XVI of the Treaty and withdrawing.

So now there will be a massive omnibus bill every 4 years that just re-approves all existing laws

Too bad they never made a 5th season

Stage separation on Falcon is not hydraulic (it's electro mechanical), however you are correct there has been no details released on if the grid fins have a separate system or not.

Falcon uses RP-1 as hydraulic fluid so it is likely burned as fuel

I know its horrible. I stopped driving with my kids after a child in my city was killed in a car accident. Then I read that some kids were killed by a gunman at a school and decided to pull them out. Sports was next when I heard that some kid was hit in the chest by a soccer ball and died from cardiac arrest. I am currently thinking about covering my kids with bubble wrap and locking them in their rooms, but then again there was a house fire last week and I saw that someone choked on bubble wrap. I'm not sure what approach I should take to guarantee my children a 100% risk free life. You do realize, that by every measure "Modern Society" is safer for children (and adults) than at any other time in human history. A child has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being kidnapped. We're creating a whole generation of children that are so fragile, they will crumple at the first sign of adversity.

At which point the power grid will collapse as we add an additional 30% load onto the system

Even if the sale of non-electric cars were banned tomorrow. Half the vehicles on the road would still be gas powered in 2026 (average age of a vehicle in the US is 11 years). As much as I am rooting for Tesla, to think that even a moderate proportion of vehicles will be electric 20 years from now is ludicrous. 0.6% of vehicles sold in the US are electric or plug in hybrid, even if this gets to 10%, or 20% in a decade, the majority of vehicles will be gas powered well into the 2040's. Low gas prices makes this even harder to achieve as it impacts the economics of buying an EV. Low prices also impact the movement to more efficiency and investment in alternatives. when fuel is cheap, people wont invest to "drop demand by 40%" because it isn't economically rational. People fail to realize just how dependent the modern world is on fossil fuels. Fully 80% of the energy mankind consumes comes from fossil fuels. Nuclear, hydro, biomass, wind, solar, everything else is only 20%. The amount of infrastructure we would have to replace to make solar and wind anything more than a blip on the radar is measured in the $trillions

Agree on the QA issues, but that reflects on lack of funding and resources. Even then, only 1 of the 4 N-1 launches failed due to QA (The second flight when an engine ingested a loose bolt). The rest were all design issues (Flight 1: high frequency oscillations, Flight 3: insufficient control authority, Flight: 4 pogo). Bear in mind that these were all issues with the first stage, the upper stages were NEVER tested (engines yes, but not stages). Without test stands to validate and debug the design before first flight there was no guarantee that assuming they had finally resolved the first stage issues, that there wouldn't have been a slew of other problems with the 3 upper stages. .