There is one asteroid, Vesta, which can be seen every couple of years or so by people with decent (not exceptional) naked eye eyesight. I've seen it a few times, you just need to know exactly where to look and a have a bit of stargazing experience at picking out faint objects. Its last opposition was in April 2014. Without looking it up I'd guess the next is in late 2015 or early 2016.

"NASA" hasn't built a launch vehicle since the Saturn 1 in the early '60s. Everything since then has been built by private contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, North American, etc. And only the first eight Saturn I's were built by government personnel (von Braun's group in Hunstville). The last two were built by Chrysler -- it was a big deal to pass the assembly to them (I think it may have been only the first stage at that time). As far as schedules are concerned there is no schedule pressure now for anyone like there was for NASA with Apollo in the '60s.

One nitpick, you weren't clear that Apollo 1 was totally a payload failure (Apollo Command Module). Nothing to do with the Saturn 1B. Same situation as Apollo 13.

Oops, you are right and I jumped in too soon. Guess I'm just tired of the "Pluto is a planet" contorted arguments which I really shouldn't care about. In reality does the nomenclature really matter that much? Pluto and Charon are what they are, Kuiper belt objects if they must be classified; more similar to a bunch of others out there than to any other solar system objects. The term "planet" seems to be too broad and undefinable to be useful; it's often pointed out that the newish IAU definition has problems. And whether they are a "dwarf planet and moon" or "double planet", an accurate description requires more detail about their system than a couple of words can convey. I'm staying out of it going forward.

Technically the Pluto-Charon system is not a primary with a satellite, but a double system. The center of mass of the system is not within either body, but in the space between them. Anyway, several asteroids have been found to have tiny satellites, so owning a satellite doesn't count for much anyway.

Maybe you consider it unfortunate, but throughout human existence (longer than recorded history) the people with the bigger guns got to decide events and the outcome of disagreements. That is why the mid-20th century cultures of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany no longer have any say in world affairs. It is still true now and will remain so that the cultures with the smaller guns (or none) continue to exist only at the forbearance of the stronger cultures. You don't have to like it, but that is the way it is, it's practically a natural law. Now what gave the European societies of the 15th through 20th centuries their bigger guns? That would be their continuous development of technology during that time, all kinds of technology, including bigger guns. Their pursuit of knowledge about the natural world and its forces (science) is what enabled the technology. Technology and those who wield it will have the final say in how things come out -- you can't rail against that any more than you can rail against gravity. And for "stewards of the land" -- the Land couldn't care less, it was here before the Native Americans and European Americans were here and will be here long after people are gone. It was here during the Cretaceous and saw the dinosaurs and their entire ecosystem wiped out -- the Land doesn't care.

Native Southerner here -- born in Texas, also raised in Louisiana and Alabama. I don't know if you are trolling or not, but we just went through all this a couple of days ago. Here is what Southern culture was in 1860 -- in South Carolina there were more slaves than free people. So that's it, for the MAJORITY of S. Carolina's residents their culture consisted of being enslaved. SOME of the people who weren't slaves had a pretty good life, being rich and owning other people. That is what the Confederacy seceded to preserve and if you dig down to the root of it that is what the Southerners flying the Confederate Battle Flag now are celebrating, that plus their resentment from the 1950's and 60's when they were forced to dismantle much of the segregation and legalized oppression which they managed to maintain for 90 years after losing the war. So, other than a bunch of 1% ers even worse than today there is nothing to celebrate about Southern culture if you look at the reality of it rather than the lies and bullshit.

"Its meaning has evolved in complex ways after the war" -- actually that is the more salient point here. It doesn't (much) matter what the Confederate Battle Flag meant in the 19th century, but in the 20th century it was adopted by the southern states and private groups to represent resistance to the civil rights laws and movement and as symbol of determination to preserve the oppression of their African-American citizens. Slavery and the Civil War are dead history, but Jim Crow is living memory -- that is the shame of the Confederate Battle Flag.

OK, suppose the states of the Confederacy had taken a popular vote on whether to secede or whether to stay in the Union knowing that the days of slavery were numbered. Do the slaves get to vote? In 1860, Mississippi and South Carolina had more more slaves than free persons. Alabama, Florida, Georgia were over 40% enslaved. When the Southern states which vote to go do get to leave the Union do the slaves of those states get to emigrate out of the Confederacy? The situation in the USA in 1860 was considerably different than that of Spain and the UK now.

So what I get from your post is that through some sort of intelligence/espionage the US and UK investors avoided getting pulled into some money losing scam involving corrupt Petrobras and Brazilian officials. Sounds like due diligence to me, not economic espionage.

"Overrun" can mean more than just someone having a house covering a spot. In that 3/4 of the world that is ocean, look at how several of the commercially important fisheries have collapsed. And the big whales? They had all those oceans to live in and it didn't do them any good once technological humans decided they had useful oil and parts. Just because an area is big and no one has a house there doesn't mean it hasn't been effectively "overrun". As it is now, we need a lot of open land, water, and air to provide the resources we want and to take back the trash we create. Those areas are "overrun".

Did what she paid for it cover the cost of what she got? Those SS and Medicare tax rates were mighty low back in the 60's. SS (with its early too low taxes) didn't start until 1935 and Medicare didn't even start until 1965. Those first generation SS and Medicare retirees made out like bandits. Nope, Ayn Rand almost certainly leached more out of them than she put in.

I already posted, but I would bet that they just couldn't get any Pu-238 if they had wanted it. The stuff is in really short supply now. The New Horizons mission to Pluto launched with a less than the desired amount because it wasn't available. The Juno spacecraft enroute to Jupiter doesn't have any and was designed for solar power.
http://www.universetoday.com/1...

Apollo 13's radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) with a load of Plutonium 238 entered the atmosphere at earth escape speed (greater than orbital speeds) and didn't cause any atmospheric problems. These things are designed to survive launch vehicle explosions. I suspect the main reason that Philae didn't have nuclear power is that the preferred fuel, Pu 238, is in very short supply. No one who has any is willing to share. Spacecraft designers are doing all they can to avoid it just because it is too hard to get right now.

I can't believe that no one has yet pointed out the obvious self-contradiction in your post. You start out by complaining about international trade agreements which the government has and is likely to make and end by ranting about more Government. But the purpose of these trade agreements is to remove government imposed barriers to trade across international boundaries. So every trade agreement reduces government interference in how corporations and people to do business internationally, overriding those pesky labor, product safety, and environmental laws. The secret deals everyone claims to be outraged about are all about how badly the multinational corporations can screw the people of each country without them having any recourse in local law. Sounds like the libertarian Utopia to me; smaller government advocates should be all for these deals.