With the Heavy you are right that it hasn't entered service.
Though none of their products are vaporware. They have delivered.

Its valid logic to say any one launch maybe lucky, however launching something in to space is so complex that doing it once is a pretty strong indicator that you can do it again.

If the Falcon Heavy has one successful launch Arianespace will be really worried. Of course if SpaceX then lose the next 3 it will be a disaster. But I said before.. Arianespace would be counting on them to fail, if SpaceX doesn't then they are out of business.

On the face of it, yes insurance is easy.

But its more complex. What is being insured? The parts, labor.. design time?
The cost of employing 100 people for another few years while its being rebuilt?
What if you can't launch again because of time, not money?

That would almost never be true.
The cost of launch is almost (probably always) a tiny part of the total cost of designing, building and launching something.

The launch might be $80m, but if you lose a $200m payload its not so good.

There is insurance which makes the cost analysis more complex, I'm not sure how that would factor in. However it would have to be far more reliable than 1/5 for 1/3 the cost.

Falcon 9 is cheaper and has been pretty successful.

If I was running the Ariane program I would be worried. You are betting on the Falcon 9 having failures. Otherwise you cannot compete for a large part of the market.

If the Heavy works, you are out of business. It might be FUD, but it is also true.

America doesn't set the oil price. Its set by the market.

Krugman is right in that he says America can't go "bankrupt" because they print their own money. It doesn't even really make sense what bankrupt would mean. Printing money causes inflation and reduces the debt. It depends what you think is the bigger problem, the debt or what the money is worth.

It gets complicated when you can print money and fund works that increase employment.

America has a unique position, the US dollar is not going to be abandoned. It is the global currency.

The comparison between America and Japan makes no sense. There are so many differences, even now America is growing faster than almost any other western country.

Unlimited plans make no sense. It means data has no value.. which is non-sense. There is a cost to provide capacity.

Unlimited plans are a marketing tool. Its worth providing if you aren't hitting your capacity limit. Or if you are shaping traffic to avoid hitting the limit.

Unlimited plans make no sense. A discussion on the fair price of data makes sense. It gets more complex though because data grows with each subscriber but what only matters to providers is capacity. So they can keep shaping throughput while offering unlimited (or just any) data plans.

It would be better to just ban the sale of unlimited plans. If the ISP controls the throughput, then unlimited has no meaning. Once all providers are using a per MB price (combined with peoples reports of throughput) things get much more simple and more realistic.

I love the options, government or corporations. So.. we should have individuals running nuclear power?

Oh maybe its the "existing" clause.. because any new government or corporation would be different for some unknown reason.

Between the Shuttle program and the SLC program how is it 0?

Living on mars is crazy, try living in Antarctica and multiply that by 1000. The idea that people on mars could be self sufficient is a pipe dream. Maybe one day it can be done but it seems extremely hard. Every inch of mars has to be won inch by inch to live there. Its hard enough on earth.

For one, NASA can't look for life. Second, for 100-200bn dollars are humans really going to do better? I don't think its so obvious.

Whats the point? We could send dozens (more likely hundreds) of missions to titan with increasingly better probes / landers for the same cost. Titan is cold and dark, its not a place people are going to be of much use at.

The moon and mars are the only really logical places to visit. I don't buy the whole "human spaceflight inspires people". How many Apollo missions did it take before they stopped broadcasting the launch?

Since everything we know (which is not small) about physics says we cannot travel or communicate FTL I wouldn't use sci-fi shows as things that are possible if we just tried harder.

The travel time to a highly unlikely journey to another star is hundreds of thousands of years. How they are related to anyone on earth by that time is hard to imagine. Let alone the ethical problem of forcing future generations to sit around on the journey while earth is left behind. If you used some sort of suspended animation then you would remove the ethics but would have no meaningful communications with them anymore.

The notion of "possible" is rooted in life on earth. There are many things that are possible but completely impractical.

NASA is forbidden by congress to fund the search for ET.

Palin for 2012!

this isnt that crazy.

As a nerd I this seems like the best way to spend a trillion dollars but its hardly the craziest thing this guy has said.

Experiments have been done. They don't match these findings. (http://www.nist.gov/mml/analytical/14c_091410.cfm)