There was a video on the NYTimes site, but it was really short. And I just realized that the New York Times has one of the most irritating video players I have ever used.

Von Braun risked his life to even think about using his rockets for space travel while working under the nazis. He almost single-handedly dragged the Americans into the space age. He is not perfect. But he did change our world in a positive way.

This article argues that Elon Musk is in many ways like Werner Von Braun or the Soviet scientist Sergei Korolev (who pushed the Soviets into space). One thing I got from this article was that the original and primary motivation for building rockets was to make weapons. Von Braun and Kovolev almost singlehandedly pushed their own countries into building rockets to put people into space. Without them, we might not have had satellites as quickly or at all. Placing satellites into orbit and putting humans into orbit was once considered crazy. American government officials considered Von Braun to be eccentric, but they didn't care as long as he gave them better ICBM's. Now our entire civilization is built around satellite technology, and our moon shots have brought us technology advances such as the microchip.

When we talk about putting more humans it can sound a little crazy. However I don't think it is any more crazy than having people climb Mt. Everest, having bases in Antarctica, or sending three small ships westward into the unknown ocean to find a new world. We humans have an inbuilt desire to explore. To ignore that is to go against our fundamental nature.

I can speculate that it is a matter of size...too large and radiofrequency penetration will not work. But if the plasma body is small enough, they can get sufficient penetration.

Agreed. Thus my signature. Sometimes I feel like slashdot is like this:

Oh puleeaze. This is Skunkworks. Thomas McGuire did his PhD thesis on fusors at MIT. This isn't just some investment scam. Do some research.

Yeah. I'm somewhat disappointed that shallow dismissive/mocking comments seem to outnumber more engaged comments by three to one. We are supposed to be geeks. How many of us have heard about this reactor? It was announced many months ago. How many of us have searched the term "high beta reactor"? This development is potentially world-changing. It would solve the world's energy problems. It would make human deep space travel feasible. And the announcement is coming from a credible scientist from a credible laboratory.

I am beginning to suspect that slashdot is getting spammed by agenda driven posters.

Yes, but this is Lockheed Martin. And we live in the age of computer aided design, where we can simulate much of an object before building this. In addition, I'm fairly sure that they have built smaller versions of this as proofs of concept. And now they have Thomas McGuire making the announcements, who is the lead scientist on the project, instead of the project manager doing presentations. He wrote his PhD thesis at MIT on fusors.

I am inclined to believe that this is the real thing. My main question is this: They use radio frequency radiation to heat the plasma; how have they overcome the rf shielding effect caused by hot plasma?

I thought the article had a fairly succinct criticism of D-Wave's computer:

I will assume you are being sarcastic here. Warming the core is pure science fiction IMHO.

By comparison, warming Mars would be relatively easy. Just manufacture large amounts of CFC's and emit them into the atmosphere. They are very strong greenhouse gasses and are relatively persistent, though they won't last forever. Emit enough of these and you may warm Mars up enough to release the frozen CO2 in the ground, which will lead to even more warming. Eventually you may be able to melt the frozen water, which will make life possible.

That isn't to say that this would be easy. You would have to mine fluorine and chlorine and then use a factory to make the gas. But it isn't that difficult. And even with Mars' lack of magnetic field, any atmospheric densification will likely last for millions of years. The MAVEN satellite will give us more reliable information on this.