With a few corrections:

The Moon landing had nothing to do with honoring Kennedy, it was about beating Russians, who had the first 'satellite', the first man orbit flight, and so on.

But he never gave money for this, it was just political talking.

Not the first president to shut down a manned space project, but the first president since the space area with such a huge budget deficit.

Shuttle has flows, no doubts, but it is also a manned space vehicle with many 'firsts', and also many 'only' (in a positive meaning). Also not 'some planetary probes' - most of what we (as human race) know about the Solar System, and the Universe is thanks to NASA space exploration. NASA has done a heck more than all the rest of the world together in robotic space exploration. I am not an American, but can honestly say it.

But there is also another scenario possible: one day, when in other countries only a highly selected few will see the dunes of the Moon, an average American can fly for his vacation to see the Apollo 11 landing site. What I mean is that there is not enough reasoning to say that shutting down the Ares program equals the end of the US manned space flight. AFAIK NASA does not produce anything, they order they hardware from the industry anyway.

Do you know what is the difference between 'The Daily Show' and 'The Fox News' - the former is much more funny.

Playing strategic games taught me, that focusing on domestic problems (only), made me always being conquered by barbarians sooner or later. ;-)

Human nature is to explore, also social life and responsibility for each other (despite what some claim, people are altruistic by nature, and it is proven). We are doomed to perish if we step up against either of them. They may seem to contradict, but they do not, except the need for resources, i.e. the golden center is always the best way.

Possibly will be marked as a troll, but the level of hatred and misinformation about China surprises me. The cultural revolution is a history now, the only things which are left are one party ruling system and a separate government in Taiwan. Any Chinese can start his business and make a fortune, and many indeed did so, the president of China is elected every few years (except that only party members can vote). Architecture of many Chinese cities overshadows many western ones. They have the fastest train, they sent people into space, they can openly criticize their government, they enjoy western culture: music and movies, they are very humorous people, and they do love their country. There were bad things the government did, but I see change, and a big progress. And at the end, please try to reach the sources, learn the history, also the history of your own country, before you throw a stone.

A perfect example! Lets require them to show that they actually had lost income from the very songs during the period, i.e. before she uploaded them the income should be X higher from the very 24 songs (corrected with regard to the natural income curve from selling songs). I believe the records companies know which songs are selling, which are not. It should be very easy to show the loss of income form your hypothetical restaurant. This way a judge can decide about the reasonable penalty.

The statistics are correct, the only difference is that all 2 catastrophes happened withing the first 10 flights of Soyuz. To put it in another perspective Soyuz has 94 safe landings in a row.

Space flights indeed are dangerous and for some time to come will remain in the domain of exploration rather than tourism, but your claim that NASA has no faults in the disasters which happened is not true. Space shuttle, although an awesome looking vehicle, is inherently not safe:

• it is the only man space vehicle with heat shield not protected, where any foam isolation debrees (or any other object, which happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) can easily damage it (all other vehicles are put on top of a rocket), if it followed proven concept Columbia accident would not happen
• it is the only man space vehicle without launch escape system (all other vehicles have small rockets, which take the man capsule away from a rocked in case of any early flight failures), if it followed this basic safety guidelines the astronauts from Challenger most likely would survive the catastrophe (they were still alive after the explosion)

I hear this "argument" over and over again, but I wonder whether you considered in your calculations the number of people involved in road (or eating) vs air traffic daily, and that we have already had flight checks and restrictions. Of course freedom is important, but what kind of importance "freedom" to board a plane carrying whatever you wish has to die for? How about freedom to reach your destination, to see your family? I heard/read some people doubt the safety increase based on the screening, well, this is something we can argue about, but you literally say to give up any checks, because ... "one can die anyway is so many different ways"??? Are you really advising to give up any flight check in the name of "freedom"?

It is a curiosity for me that a post with such a frivolous statement, which is not supported by any scientific data was modded as +5 insightful. Indeed we are in the age of Aquarius, when feelings and believes overshadows reason.

I would say we should hurry-up with this Europa ice driller, because soon we will not have any testing places on Earth.

First of all, 'open' formats has nothing to do with source code.

Second, "open source" is not synonym with "free software" (like software that uses the GPL as license). This has nothing to do with the discussion. And open source does not even means giving work away for free. If somebody sells their code, it is open source, for example.

Creative commons is another example of "opening" stuff that is not code.

I agree that there is a continuum from completely closed to completely open, but any format demanded by governments should be open and non encumbered by patents or other licenses.

There is nothing stopping someone or some company form writing a proprietary piece of software to read/write some open format. But in many cases it is not possible to have a open/free/whatever version of a software to read/write some closed format. This causes an artificial restriction on access to the information made available in that format, what should be inadmissible in certain scenarios.

Why should someone need to license or buy a piece of software form specific companies to have access to government data? This is unacceptable.

I would just add, that in most EU countries, one also pays royalties to the music industry buying any kind of storage (HDD, CD-R*/DVD-R*, or flash).

So My advice is to stop giving them excuse to lobby for more draconian law: do not copy illegally any content, use alternatives, use your voting power, also the money voting power. Fortunately we live in democracies, lets embrace it and use it, because slowly the law becomes insane. I moved to another DVD region, and now I cannot play my new and old movies on the same device. I cannot play movies on my computer (because the system I use is "too" user oriented). I cannot make a home movie and play it on a TV when using a computer with not too user oriented OS without HDMI. To see some movies during traveling I have to either buy another version, or carry all the DVDs I would potentially like to see. And all of these restrictions are not because of technology limits, not because I did not pay for the content, but because even though all the content I have is legal, I am still treated as a thief.

It is pity, that the wish for fame overshadows scientific correctness. Calling this "device" a black hole is like calling a bicycle a space shuttle, because both have wheels. If something is black in certain wavelength, does not mean it is a black-hole.

Not that it is not significant, it surely is, but it is more like a black microwave paint discovery.

The Nobel prize lost its virtue and became a political instrument.

Maybe it happened long before, I just have not noticed.

The only problem is that we still have no protection against solar flares - ergo any long stay of humans either deep in Moon's craters or inside the Earth's protective magnetic field.

You know, there are plenty of successful space missions propelled by chemical jets, and using already proven technology for human missions has a lot of sense.

But I agree, that anything serious regarding space exploration can start with a more efficient propulsion, e.g. an operational VASIMR, which I would welcome with a great joy.