Going back to my original thought and question... Why is exobiology one of the most well-funded "division" of the administration? What does it bring us, as a society (or to the scientific community), if not in parallel to equally or more important goals? Why put this goal before most others?

It almost feels like Christopher Columbus going to the King, asking for ship and crew to see if grass may grow somewhere else,

I have the feeling at every new news report from or about NASA, that its all about "finding life somewhere else". Of course, there is much more to it and this is only the perception.

Still, this seems to be the main message/theme/goal. How about bringing life somewhere else?
How about engineering goals and challenges? Why not "because we want to see if we can"?
  I known these are harder to "sell", but thats also the outreach job of NASA. If they cannot sell the importance of developing new technologies, them who can?

Im not implying not development is being made. Its just not set as a goal. And I can only wish for more and more diversifiied goals them.

I beg to differ. For critical applications where down time costs millions, I would use a dedicated line. I'd even consider a dial-in modem interface rather than an Internet connexion. I'd even rethink remote monitoring. Is it really needed? But connecting critical applications to the Internet, especially when you have hardware requirering old OS verions that are full of holes and unsupported, is playing with fire.

And why would you need internet for this?

You could say this about a lot of surgical and medical procedures.

I agree. This is also why I was pondering about interplanatary travel... Once we are well established on the boundry of our own solar system, I will start to speculate about deep space travel.

How do you believe that nuclear fusion would improve the speed of travel through the solar system?

Sometimes its small details that make a huge difference and allow old ideas to become reality.

Just think about blood tranfusions. The first attemps to store blood to transfuse it at a later point all failed. A simple stabilisation agent made the procedure possible. I wouldn't expect the New Scientist to produce such details in their publications though.

It would be interesting to see a paper from a medical journal on this topic.

This sounds more like science fiction than anything else to me. But if it works and the technique becomes viable to handle patient with heavy injurie - and assuming the patients can be kept suspended for long periods of time without creating further damages, I wonder if the technique could be adapted for space travel. It would solve a lot of problems related to long-duration interplanetary travel.

The idea is not new. I just wonder if this could be the first step in this direction.

Obviously, the crew became incapacitated after they - or someone else - maneuvered the aircraft to its last course. I haven't seen anyone suggest it could have been the other way around.

The sherif was the wrench.

On the contrary. A completely silent CVR tells you a lot; it tells you that the airplane kept on flying with every one on board either unconscious or dead for at least 2 hours before the crash. That's a critical information for the investigation.

Furthermore, through data/media forensic, you might be able to recover the previous data that was overrecorded, although I wouldn't count on it after 3 to 4 record cycles.

I thought he was quite font of his spelling.

I find your view somewhat naive. I've been involved in multiple space projects (some very big ones), although never with NASA. But through my interactions with NASA and JPL scientists and engineer, I doubt that the situation there is any different than the one with the agencies I work with.

We are speaking of purchasing organizations run by politicians. Not scientists. How often have I seen scientists and engineer sake their heads on the attribution of a contract or selection of a mission? I stopped counting when I ran out of fingers to count on.

The attribution of the contracts is highly dependent on geographical distribution rather than on expertise. The selection of wrong contractors, based on geopolitical motive, costs years in delays and millions in over costs. It magnitude over the interaction you describe. If only that was the only source of higher costs...
The selection of the projects or mission that get financing is even worse. It became a real political farce, and is undermined by political marketing (eg. what sells well to the people financing the agencies) and by the true role of these agencies: financing the aerospace industry.

I would answer in short that people who assert things like you do haven't been in the business long enough or have been doing so with their eyes and ears closed. What you describe is entirely correct, but accounts only for a minute fraction of the cause of the high costs found in the space industry.

wooooosh, makes the shooting star.