Which was just changes the problem to a different domain... diverting the probe is going to be a stone cold bitch. By the time you're a couple of hundred feet up, you're only a few seconds from landing and it'll take quite a bit of energy to divert any significant distance. (Energy == weight.) And that's without pondering how amazing the optics and processing system will have to be.

Interesting work to be sure, but applying it in practice will be even more so.

This isn't about truth and reality. This about Slashdot's daily Two Minutes Hate.

I'm disappointed that he ignored the entire Mars Direct (Dr. Zubrin) component of my question, and instead only responded peripherally to the core component of the question.

Just because he didn't say what you wanted to hear doesn't mean he didn't answer your question. He did answer your question - with the cold sober truth. He correctly identified the bits that matter, and the bits that are handwaving window dressing and addressed the former while ignoring the latter.
 
Zubrin's plans are... more than a little optimistic. (In particular he doesn't have a firm grasp on the difference between speculative laboratory proof-of-concept experiments and actual developed technology. His plan relies heavily on treating the former as the latter.) Musk? Musk is irrelevant. Musk is playing to the fanboy crowd, but don't look behind the curtain. There's nothing there but a pile of powerpoints and someday, maybe's.
 

I think Dr. Stone's Mars response is a great example of everything that's wrong with NASA. There's no leadership at NASA, and NASA is adrift (in the same manner Dr. Stone is afraid a manned mission to Mars would become adrift), and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

I think you represent what's wrong with space fandom, geekdom, and advocacy today.
 
In the first place, you completely fail to grasp that it is not NASA's role to provide leadership - they're a part of the Executive Branch, and their job is to carry out the policies of the Administration within the bounds of the budget as set by Congress. No more, no less. If NASA had it's way, we might have landed on the Moon by the Bicentennial. Or maybe not. Their plans were vague at best. Then Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and LBJ pushed the moon program as a monument to Kennedy. Which momentum didn't last all that long... by '66/'67 Congress was swinging the budget axe, and by '69 the program was running mostly on fumes and force of habit. (which is something else fandom, geekdom, and advocacy have failed to grasp for nearly a half century - just how unique the alignment of circumstances was that propelled Apollo and just how short lived support actually was.)
 
Second, in that you name check... but you complete fail to grasp the meaning of Dr Stone's answer - Mars is going to be very hard, and it's not visionaries and buzzwords that will get us there. It's technology, technology we don't have but are (as Dr Stone says) working on figuring out. By the time we can send men there, the probes will have done the advance scout work and identified the places and areas of research where men can make the real difference.

It can be. It can also crumble in years to decades. It can crack within months to years. In worst case, it can fail completely even before construction is complete.

It all depends on... well, a multitude of factors.

I think that Amazon and others love BTC simply because they dont have to pay a tithe to credit card companies

That's only true if they operate their own exchange - otherwise they're paying exchange fees. (Which admittedly are likely far lower than what they pay the credit card companies.)
 

but credit card companies help us deal with fraud, bad products, identity theft, etc. If you pay your credit cards off in time you get a company that can be helpful in dealing with fraud and identity theft vs nothing.

BTC is like walking around with krugerrands and bearer bonds without security.

This. And also the reason I refer to BTC as "casino tokens" rather than "cash money".

To be fair, in the domain of common experience a 7' tall ape man living in the pacific northwest *is* far less crazy than the idea of a subatomic particle being in two places at once.

Good point, and one many of the /. types often forget.
 

There's this great book

But here... here you come off the rails. How about not acting like a creepy religious zealot who must witness and prosthelytize and lead people to the Light?

Ever wonder why, after almost a century of technological development, a lot of small time and hobby farmers still drive 1940's era tractors?

Because they're either dead broke, stupid, or they're fascinated by retro things. 1940's era tractors are uncomfortable, low power, and at best middling in reliability. (And while you can with ever increasing investment of man hours jerry rig them along, you can't get parts for them anywhere but on the (expensive) hobbyist market.) Just as with cars and most other things, anyone who can afford better has long since moved onto better.

Logic more twisted and tortured I have rarely if ever seen.

That was my thought too... Nineteen pages of the size shown in the pictures is pretty much nothing compared to a complete set of diagrams. It's like getting nineteen pages out of Game of Thrones (which is itself just one volume of a much larger series). If they found errors with so little new information, it does not give me much confidence that their recreation is accurate to any great degree. (Especially given that they tossed out an approach now known to be the one used.)

NASA safety guidelines require any facility handling more than a dozen or so kilograms of hydrogen to have a roof designed to be blown away in an explosion.

FWIW, on the (US) submarine I served on there was only one gas for which we had not one but two (one primary and an identical backup) dedicated real-time atmosphere monitoring devices - good ol' H2. Submarines have learned the hard way over the years just how dangerous it can be.

It didn't work right, did not fully deploy and it was considered a success?

What the summary does not make clear (but which you could have discovered yourself had you followed the second link) is that the part that failed to deploy was a "bonus" test - not the main goal. The main goal was to test the basic handling and flight characteristics of the test vehicle. Two additional tests are planned (and were planned long before today) to test the SIAD and the parachute.
 

Now I see why SpaceX could replace NASA and this is coming from a Sci geek.

Being a science geek doesn't make you an expert on well... anything, it just makes you a science geek. In this case, you haven't [censored] clue what you're talking about - and as proof I invite you to consider the results of SpaceX's first three launches, as well as the preperations for the first Dragon COTS demo, and the second flight's problems as well as the ongoing problems with their current launch campaign. You're just repeating cargo cult crap you've read elsewhere from similarly ignorant soi-disant "geeks". SpaceX has a lot going for them, but unlike you, they and NASA live in the real world. And in the real world, shit breaks. Especially (essentially) one-of-a-kind prototype hardware on it's first flight - like the LDSD.

Score you -1 "Clueless". The purpose of the protest wasn't to be seen by people nearby - it was to generate articles and blog posts and tweets that will be seen by tens of millions.

I thought pretty much the same thing, people routinely get recognized for this kind of stuff. Though a Commendation medal is probably a bit much for what he did, I'd think it would have only have rated a Command letter or a Group or Force Commander letter at best.

But award inflation had already set in when I was in during the 80's, and despite several attempts no one has ever been able to even slow it down more than temporarily.

"But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."

No Larry, the privacy concerns have not melted away. You've simply ignored the issue except where forced by the courts and keep repeating that the privacy issue has gone away - and people believe you because you have the bully pulpit and defenders of privacy don't.

They wanted to widen and straighten the streets. This would have made a pretty significant impact on the road conditions in SF, even today.

The topic under discussion is parking - which is sensitive to the *length* of the streets, and only in unusual conditions sensitive to the *width*.