...of simpler times hundreds of years ago...

Pretty sure NASA has blown more on Constellation, Orion and SLS, launchers to no where that never launch, than SpaceX has spent on successful development of 2 new rockets and Dragon1, and will probably spend on Falcon Heavy, Dragon 2 and their reusable program.

NASA's problem is not insufficient funding. Its inefficiency, bureaucratic bloat, corrupt contractors, and the inability to build or do much of anything in the vacinity of its manned space program. JPL and a few others places are doing fine but they are an exception to the rule.

Some people at Orbital probably do need to be sacked for trying to use 40+ year old Russian engines, the engines are actually that old not just the design. Some people at NASA probably should be sacked for buying in to a contractor proposing such a flawed concept.

Software development is usually done in an anti-social way. You chunk up a release or backlog or whatever into features, each dev takes a feature and goes off and writes some code. Later there is some collaboration in testing, code reviews, troubleshooting, etc.

But that is a TERRIBLE way to do it. The wrong code gets written way too often. Designs are bad because people aren't contributing along the way. Requirements get missed because the developer makes an assumption that s/he didn't know was an assumption. The more eyes on the code at all times the better. Devs should be constantly communicating with testers and people who understand the business case (product owners). One way to do that is pair programming. It sounds like a waste of time, but it is actually faster. Silly mistakes get caught right away. Debugging goes faster. Another way to do that is to chunk the work into very small pieces and constantly communicate to integrate your tiny piece with the other devs' tiny pieces. This leads to clean interfaces and modular code.

The Cowboy Superhero model of software development only makes sense if you are the only one developing a project. And remember in that case, your code dies when you get hit by a bus (or kill your wife and go to prison).

Maybe Occam's razor could come in handy here. Maybe you smoked too much weed today.

Haven't you heard of Area 51 and the Zeta Reticulans?

Man, do they groove!

What use is a car if gasoline is not available on your planet, right?

You've heard of Stonehenge, haven't you?

Goodie goodie yum-yum....

The Skinkworks is where the lizardmen work.

....making fish soup.

No way.

I'll bet money that Lockheed have already had this working for years in a Black Project. I'm also willing to wager that some UFO sightings are secret experimental aircraft with fusion reactor power sources and combined electrical/thermal engines (glowing lights, hovering, vertical flight....).

Since they know it already works, they're announcing it so that they can do a (fake) clean-room reimplementation of the physics and engineering research, that makes it work, in the open so that they can get away with commercialising it/patenting it.

We live in a world where software is expected to be the kind of crap any simpleton could write.

Once upon a time, Microsoft brought out this product called Visual Basic...

Its no secret Iraq had chemical weapons. They used them liberally against Iranian human wave attacks during the Iran Iraq war.

The reason they were hushed up is because they were provided by western countries. You do know the U.S. and Europe backed Saddam in the Iran Iraq war and most probably encouraged the use of chemical weapons against Iranian teenagers right? Iran had a huge population advantage, Iraqi Shias weren't that keen on fighting Iranian Shia, so Iraq needed technology to level the field and the West helped with that edge.

The West was really happy about a lengthy, bloody stalemate in that war bleeding both countries white.

Most of the ethics questions around Alexander involve his company IronNet Cybersecurity. He founded it when he retired. He's charging big banks $1,000,000 a month to protect them in cyberspace, and its not exactly clear what he has to offer to justify the price tag, other than classified insider knowledge of cyber threats from his NSA years, he probably shouldn't be selling to the highest bidder.

Greenpeace should use a PWR to power their ships.

One fuel load lasts 30 years, there's plenty waste heat to keep the crew warm, plenty of spare power to generate electricity, and all the waste products are contained within the fuel cladding, so no pollution! And no pesky carbon dioxide, oxides of nitrogen or acid rain...

To be even greener, they could have their reactor loaded with MOX fuel i.e. reprocessed (used) uranium mixed with plutonium, thus helping to reduce nuclear waste from old reactors.

I'm sure Rolls Royce Nuclear Engineering could do them such a great deal.

In case you haven't been following the systemd flame wars, many people think they are trying to create dependency, that is why everyone hates it and them so much.

It could also be considered obstruction of justice if they are intentionally withholding evidence.

It should be noted that the City of London is a tiny part of London, like a square mile. Its the financial district, the Wall Street of London.

It isn't suprising they are taking a pro big business stance.

This contact is for carrying people in to LEO, not satellites or cargo. Your argument doesn't work for human rated launchers.

First, it is difficult and expensive to human rate a launch vehicle so not very many companies are going to do it without a reasonable chance of getting business.

It is also probably not a place you want a company cutting corners to low ball a contract bid. The first priority is keeping the cargo alive, not saving a few dollars by going with launch-by-night Rockets-R-US.