I'm not outright against some manned missions, I just don't think they should be our top priority and shouldn't crowd out robotic exploration of new places. A manned "space race" is unlikely to get us much relative to other options.

In addition to the robotic missions I mentioned, powerful telescopes that can detect and do spectrographic analysis of planets of other star systems would be far better science than more manned missions to local rocks. We could detect another Earth with clear-cut life signs, for example. That would be a bigger discovery than simple microbes on Mars (which robotic sample return missions can perform).

There would be no Saturn V, no Falcon HR etc.

They are cool in the "wow, big!" sense, but maybe we don't really need them right now.

Stories about that have been getting submitted over and over again since at least yesterday. Dice (which owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot) is suppressing them.

The parent post should not be off-topic. We don't have a choice except to talk about this on unrelated threads, precisely because Dice is suppressing stories about it!

which is unlikely to be touched by a human being ever again

Something slashdot readers can relate to

It's not a flaw, it's a feature.

While it may give grammar nazis fits, a slightly non-standard use of commas could eliminate the ambiguity in the original headline:

Billboard, Advertising Banned Products In Russia, Hides If It Recognizes Cops

Some of them are good and some are bad, in my opinion. It's just that the reactions are inconsistent. And to be fair, the opposite pattern is probably true when the other party is in power, I just haven't noticed it as much.

It's odd how it seems to politically matter who does something more than what is being done. Examples:

"GOOD" (or neutral) WHEN BUSH DID IT:

Corporate welfare
NSA
TSA
DHS
deficits
stimulus
bombing
medicare part D
golfing
hugging Saudi oilers
saluting with things in hand
feet on desk
subsidized cell-phones

"BAD" WHEN OBAMA DID IT:

Corporate welfare
NSA
TSA
DHS
deficits
stimulus
bombing
medicare part D
golfing
hugging Saudi oilers
saluting with things in hand
feet on desk
subsidized cell-phones

motors are not typically shielded much at all.

Typically? Somebody with enough resources could add shielding with high-end light materials. Catching nuts with deep pockets or lots of time may be a much bigger problem than catching off-the-shelf attempts.

What about a combination of image detection and echo-location? Image recognition and/or regular sound detection would identify candidate objects, and narrowly-focused echo location would then scrutinize the candidates further.

And so what if you take out a few birds accidentally? Just place a KFC nearby to handle such. They'll enjoy the free raw materials.

So the secret really is going to plaid.

That's indeed a plausible explanation for the apparent coincidence. Our view of the "recent" universe is essentially limited by the speed of light to a pretty small chunk of the entire universe. It's almost like being stuck with a cable service that plays mostly old reruns.

+1 Funny, I gotta admit.

there are also multitude of valuable scientific experiments that are done on ISS

The science-per-dollar in such ISS experiments has been very poor, considering the total cost of ISS and life-support and maintenance. 100 billion US dollars can buy a hell of a lot of R&D otherwise.

all the Moon missions brought back precious information about its geology. If we could make a self-sufficient base on the Moon and even send a single geologist there they will bring more data then all probes that we sent there to date.

I'm skeptical of that claim. One generally does not know what one is looking at until it's taken back to a lab. And robotic sniffers can do more preliminary analysis than an on-site human geologist per dollar. Robots (multi-spectral cameras) can "see more colors" in a sense. Human eyesight is limited. And we'd have more rocks/soil from more sites if we had sent robots under the same costs.

Our current gap is not really in space-specific technology. An "AI race" and/or 3D-printer/replicator-race would probably better serve the goal of living in space than a "space race" that only focuses on space-specific technology. We should focus on the bottlenecks, and those bottlenecks so far appear to NOT be space-specific.

Think of how difficult it would be to do space exploration in general without compact computers. Computer technology is not space-specific, but computer technology miniaturization happened to be a giant enabler of space exploration. Dumping tons of money into ONLY space-related stuff would not have been nearly as beneficial (being we've mostly plateaued on the mechanical and chem rocket side of things since the late 1950's.)

Similarly, AI and/or flexible manufacturing automation appear to be areas that help in other industries AND space exploration/colonization. Let's try to launch two birds with one rocket.