Not necessarily. If you make the definition of "planet" as wide as possible, you can then create (non-exclusive, overlapping) sub-categories for different classes. Terrestrial, gas-giant, dwarfs, KBOs, super-Jupiter, hot-Jupters, hot-Earths, super-Earths, rogue (or free flying) planets, etc.

And, of course, then you can have "Traditional Planets", which is the nine.

Everyone gets a toy, everyone goes home happy.

[Except I'd make the definition wide enough to include large moons (eg, "non-stellar bodies over 500km diameter and/or hydrodynamically spherised"), then "major moons" would be one of the sub-categories of "planet", which would piss off the sort of people twisting their knickers over Pluto.]

"and whose designers are all in nursing homes."

Basically, they are repeated all the old mistakes of Shuttle and ISS. Single unaffordable top-down designs, expensive sole-source cost-plus contracts, convoluted designs more intended to feed the contractor networks in Congressional districts than to deliver improved hardware, flubbery half-hearted missions that mutate to fit the rapidly contracting hardware abilities rather than hardware designed for missions. And because everything is so expensive and poorly planned, development has to be smeared out over decades, giving time for endless Congressional budget games with the attendant schedule and cost blow-outs, and design compromises piled on top of design compromises just to get something launched.

Paraphrasing Gen. Augustine, in the analysis over Constellation (SLS's precursor), "If someone handed it to NASA, already build and paid for, NASA still couldn't afford to operate it."

He said "Falcon 9 Heavy" (the original name of the Falcon Heavy). So 50,000kg to LEO, should fly in the next year or two, and cost less than $100m per launch (say $150m with a "NASA paperwork tax".)

SLS Block "zero" will lift around 60,000kg, and may fly in 2017 or 2018. Development will have cost $10-12 billion from now 'til then. It won't be able to lift Orion (which won't be ready anyway).

Block I is meant to loft 70,000 kg to LEO, flying in 2021 at the earliest. Development will have cost $21 billion from now 'til then. It will be able to lift Orion, but only for 14 day missions around the moon and back.

Block IA is meant to lift 105,000kg, some time in the mid-2020's. And Block II, the one you are talking about, with 130,000kg to LEO, by 2032. Development will have cost over $50 billion from now 'til then.

That doesn't include any other hardware, nor any launch or mission costs. Just development.

The reason for incremental development is that your engineers and technicians learn their "craft", gradually learn where they can shave off millimetres and where they have to add more. Work out what works better than expected and what is clumsy and stupid and needs to be redesigned. A kind of guided evolution of technology.

However, the first couple of flights of SLS will be using actual Shuttle orbiter engines (SSMEs) salvaged from the three retired orbiters. Experimental, first generation, beyond-the-state-of-the-art-at-the-time, hideously complex and overengineered engines which haven't been in production since the late 1980s and whose designers are all in nursing homes.

Most decidedly not using "proven technology, incrementally advanced."

SLS and the Orion capsule are costing around $3 billion per year during development. The first manned launch will be no earlier than 2021, and insiders suggest that deadline will slip several years. But from now until 2021, ignoring the tens of billions spent so far, SLS/Orion will cost $21 billion in development before the first crew is launched. However, that configuration is only capable of reaching the moon and back, carrying no cargo besides the Orion capsule, and the capsule will only have 14 days life support. By the time the SLS Block II and Orion's long-duration service module are developed for deep space missions, around 2032 (plus delays), the cost will be over $50 billion (plus overruns). That, of course, doesn't include actual launch costs; nor does it allow for developing any mission hardware, such as landers/rovers/surface-habs/etc.

That $21 billion would buy 140 Falcon Heavy launches, or about 7000 tons of payload. The $50 billion could buy over 300 FH launches, or over 16000 tons of payload. The equivalent of more than two full International Space Stations every year.

Or more realistically, four FH and one F9/Dragon, 200 tonnes and 7 crew, for just $750 million per mission, up to four missions per year for the same budget. Or, starting in, say, 2019 to mark the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11, you'd have $15 billion free to develop additional boosters/landers/rovers/habitats/etc, then two missions per year, leaving $1.5 billion every year for other projects, hardware, and operations.

In other words, the opportunity cost of SLS/Orion, ie, what they prevent, is enormous.

If you skip the retarded sites like "Mashable" in TFS, you'll find that it actually does increase the density of parking.

(Even Jalopnik has better information.)

Those kinds of shelf parking systems already exist, however, they require building an entirely new parking structure. The robot "valets" work with existing structures, which means a parking operator can upgrade just for the price of a few robots plus the check-in station, rather than having to tear down and rebuild from scratch. The operator can also introduce the robots gradually, say dedicating one floor to robot parking and charging a premium for "valet" service, increasing the number of robots as revenue allows.

Atmospheric pressure, and hence oxygen content, at the height Tibetans have lived naturally for thousands of years is a bit over half that of sea-level. This story has nothing to do with climbing Everest.

I dunno, polar bear hybrids in the Himalayas. That's pretty interesting.

I was replying to a comment that strongly implied that the four editors were violating Wikipedia's own policies, and "it took a lawsuit" to expose them. On the contrary, everything the tried to put in the article seems to meet Wiki guidelines. And rather than malicious intent, they seem to have been "fighting the good fight" against attempts by sockpuppets to whitewash the article on behalf of Yank Barry.

As for the libel case itself, can you point to anything that suggests the editors "insisted on RE-publishing the false information", "took information out of context", and/or deleted or blocked attempts to correct it? It seems to be Yank Barry who is trying to create a "false light" about himself, and to slander the editors.

There's nothing in the Wikipedia article that hasn't been printed in the press about Barry. And the page is actually pretty tame compared to what they could add. (Putting fake clients on the website for his fake-meat company, for example. His phony "nominations" for a Nobel Peace Prize. Etc. None of those things are mentioned in the article, yet they meet Wikipedia citation standards.)

Yank Barry? He's a convicted extortionist who worked for the Mafia in Montreal in the '80s. After being released from prison, he founded a company that sells fake food to (sometimes fake) clients, through which he conned celebrity endorsements by promising to donate food via his fake charities.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/15/yank-barry/

Jet lag is for people who fly.

As someone with "non-24", I beg to differ.

It's like the old WWII joke: "Vun German panzer can beat 5 American panzers." "Ja wohl... but ze Americans sent 6!"

That's wasteful. All we need to launch is a WWII Japanese battleship.

Sigh. It's not NASA vs SpaceX. It's NASA and SpaceX/Bigelow/etc, versus NASA and LM/ATK/etc.

It's a crew capsule built for NASA for around a billion dollars total, versus a crew capsule built for NASA for around a billion dollars per year.

It's a launcher that will cost NASA less than $100m per launch for 50 tonnes to LEO, versus a launcher that costs NASA $2 billion per year every year for one launch of 70 tonnes to LEO once every year or two.

It's commercial space stations that cost $100-150m/yr each for NASA to lease, versus a space station that costs NASA $3 billion/yr to operate and is dependent on Russian modules and Russian crew capsules (costing an extra $75m per seat.)

It's about the most cost effective way for US taxpayers to achieve the things they apparently want to do, versus repeating the same costly mistakes over and over.