Let's not forget that Joe Barton is perhaps the dumbest and most openly corrupt person in congress today. Yes, that is saying a lot too. This is the man who thought he stumped Energy Secretary Stephen Chu with the question "Where does oil come from?" This is the guy who apologized to BP for Obama making them pay New Horizon reparations in the Gulf Coast. Joe Barton represents everything wrong with modern American politics and he does it with a holier-than-thou attitude.

What I'm saying is if Joe Barton went on TV and said the sky was blue, I'd go out and see if it had changed to green.

The air force is capable of tracking things as small as 1 cm2, which is the size of these chips. Furthermore, you track and avoid them like everything else in orbit. Their orbital information is added to the huge databases that allow mission planners to use a safe trajectory. Proposed ChipSat missions like this are meant to act as an array that follows a common orbit. As for mission lifetime, federal regulations specify that almost without exception, any assets you put in low earth orbit must be able to naturally decay in 25. If you're geosynchronous, then it's your responsibility to place the satellite in a designated graveyard orbit. A lot of safeguards are in place now to make responsible use of orbital territory. The real danger is from things left up there during more careless times. Oh, and China. They're still being massive dicks about generating space debris.

He's from Florida. Quit bringing down the space program so that your district can keep leaching off the system, leech.

I've never heard of this anime before. I'm definitely going to have to check this one out. Thanks for the recommendation.

It's a very real concern. There are extensive regulations and procedures for having and disposing of assets in orbit. When you put something into space, you can't just choose any old path. Orbital trajectories, especially geosynchronous ones, are highly valued and some missions require very specific flight paths. If a unit becomes unresponsive in a critical orbit for a communications network, the entire system cannot as easily adjust it flight path because now there's a new hazard there.

Right now, the probability of hitting something is fairly low. But collisions do happen. Last year Iridium lost one of their satellites when it collided with a large deactivated Russian satellite, creating a very large and hazardous debris cloud. Crashes like that accelerate a scenario called Kessler Syndrome. This is when the amount of mass in space is high enough that large collisions begin happening. Those collisions create even more debris, increasing the amount of collisions at an exponential rate. We can track everything in space above 5 cm right now, but scrap even smaller than that can cut through just about anything we can put in space right now.

It's actually called the Bureau of AIM, Twitter, and Facebook.

Fuck Comcast. Prices are too high, repair services are too slow, and Internet service is extremely unreliable.

By your definition, CERN is not a feat of engineering. Engineering, to me, is about systems. It's about taking many separate things making them function together to create something new. The purpose or application is moot. The real challenge of engineering is to account for the endless variables that can affect your product/system, from material properties to failure points. Engineering is the ability to weave the things and information you have to work with as seamlessly as possible. Yes, engineers make products. But they are also coders who work on simulations and so much more.

At my university, the CS department is part of the engineering college. All CS students are required to take the same introduction to engineering as the rest of us.

I can think of a very wealthy client named NASA. One that can outsource the risk of development and have a competitive market of capable launch vehicles.

For decades, NASA has been woefully risk adverse.

YEAH! Google should be all about the short term and next quarter's profits! That's how our economy's so strong today!

"Critics, though, have always pointed to multiple hurdles - to the cost of launching and assembling large solar stations in orbit, to the losses in efficiency in conversion, and to the safety issues surrounding some wireless transmission methods, particularly those that use microwaves.

Astrium says the latter can be addressed by using infrared lasers which, if misdirected, would not risk "cooking" anyone in their path."

I got a great laugh out of that one. A+ journalism!