The Moon is actually a harder test of habitat recycling. Mars has good amounts of CO2 which may be used for oxygen extraction (see the MOXIE experiment). Mars does have a minimal atmosphere (not a complete vacuum) and possibly easily accessible water ice resources.

If we can figure out how to live in orbit or on the Moon for long term, without resupply, then Mars should be a snap.

Note that they ARE working on a lot of self-sufficiency initiatives on the ISS - water recycling and such. Long term this is stuff that needs to be figured out cold for mankind to go anyplace in space. Similar initiatives on the Moon would allow use of the regolith and perhaps water ices for material needs.

We should not go to the moon every generation or so just for the glory of putting more prints in the lunar dust; we should use it as a boot camp to train to go to other, less hostile places in space.

I'm going to get modded to Hades in a second by the Dice fanbois, but damn...why don't we just post some Beiber videos here and be done with it? I don't think ten Slashdot posters locked in a room with two sticks could reinvent fire.

Seeing viruses? Under any visible magnification, using whatever material as your lens, viruses are invisible. Unless transparent aluminium comes in the form of an electron microscope you're not going to see anything except for your willy, if you're lucky (where else would you be looking for viruses, hmm?).

Does anybody with a B.S. degree (not a BS degree, a B.S. degree) preview any of this crap before posting it?

Signed

The Even More Irate Engineer

True, good point. Though, with a parachute, there needs to be some clear abort envelopes and interlocks in place to prevent parachute deployment at an inappropriate time.

Adding backup systems increases the complexity of the system as a whole, and can sometimes introduce more failure modes, actually decreasing the overall safety of the system. Having a simple system with no backup can actually be the safest arrangement. It depends on whether you want to gamble with an 0.01% chance of a completely unsurvivable failure with no backup, or have a 1% chance of failure, with a backup that might save you 99% of the time, but the backup system may itself cause a unrecoverable failure in 0.5% of the flights.

It's complex, requires a lot of engineering analysis, and personal feelings about safety can actually lead to the most unsafe solution.

A redundant parachute would be worthless. Deploying a parachute at supersonic speeds from an spacecraft will simply make confetti. The unfeathered spacecraft likely would be torn to pieces before it could slow down to speeds where a parachute might be effective, hence the problem.

The feathering mechanism, like many things in engineering, simply must work without fail as there is no plausible backup option. Failure of the feathering mechanism means likely loss of crew and vehicle.

I can't wait to see the first test flight when a flock of sea gulls intercepts the beam, explode into flames, and their burnt carcasses rain down on the beach. The subsequent loss of thrust and fiery crash or range safety termination should also make for interesting viewing on YouTube.

You don't deorbit anything. That's the idea - get materials into space by using the materials that are already in space.

Asteroid mining isn't meant to provide raw materials for Earth.

The cost of commodities in space is currently driven by the cost to put it on a rocket to put it into space. A kilogram of steel? $5000. A kilogram of water? $5000. A kilogram of oxygen? $5000.

If a company can mine asteroids and prepare usable materials (water, steel, etc.) in space, they can basically sell it all to customers for $4990 per kilogram. The alternative is for the customer to pay for a rocket to get it off of Earth at $5000 per kilogram.

USPS Form 1500 only pertains to sexually oriented advertisements. Unless one wants to claim an obscure fetish about credit card offers I don't see how this form would help.

Is there such a thing as a spam filter for regular (paper) junk mail?

It's like some perverse life cycle - my paper recycling gets picked up, made into paper, which is then made into junk mail, which is then delivered, and unceremoniously dumped into my paper recycling without being read.

That had NOTHING to do with the fact that former pilots of Cessna and Piper prop aircraft were jumping into a freaking jet

and getting way over their head, nothing at all.

Transitioning up from low speed propeller aircraft to transonic jets is a steep learning curve. If the pilot can't keep ahead of the airplane, bad things happen. It has nothing to do with the design of the jet, just merely the fact that jets go places faster.

You'll have to have a credit card number registered on an online server just to maintain an OS (that still forces updates on your machine whether you want them or not).

So much for owning your own computer.

Yeah, of course! There are hundreds of designers that can automagically conjur up a 3d titanium skull implant that will make the patient an adult model for eyebrow weaves, because publicity!

Actually, fuck no; you're an idiot at best, and a misanthrope at worst. Did you perhaps think that maybe a bunch of people with relatively little experience in building fucking craniums did the best they could under the circumstances in order to give this little girl a chance at life extending into adulthood?

My money is that you didn't give a flying fuck. I'm glad you're not my neighbor as I'd have to burn you house down because living next to someone so absolutely hateful would be worse than the prison term for arson. Fuck you and have a bad day, please.

Zip up your skirt, hot house orchid. You don't know what cold is.

Pucker up. Winter is coming.

The image shows the implant which appears to have gaps resembling skull sutures. It does look like this implant will permit growth of the cranium.

Really, the engineering to make and guide a missile is not formidable these days. Iran is more than capable, though testing is probably hard for them being landlocked. A good machine shop and a knowledge of F=ma is all that is really needed. The rest is detail, easily accessible on Wikipedia.

The nuclear capability is a bit harder, but only a bit harder, than missile technology. Again, testing is probably the hard part. But Pakistan figured it out. Iran certainly has the capability.

Iran is (or soon will be) a state capable of nuclear weapons delivered by missiles. The genie is out of the bottle. Life sucks, deal.

Either Iran nukes Israel or Israel nukes Iran (or both) within the next 10 years. Place your bets.