since global ore reserves of current substrates such as silicon and aluminum dioxide are rare and almost depleted.

Another advantage of cellulose based wafers is that using traditional Japanese technology, they can be made even smaller, and in pretty shapes like swans.

Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

As I understand it, Russia threatened to, but didn't actually withdraw the supply of rocket motors (i.e., the RD-180 used by the Atlas V), but the US Congress has prevented any military contractors from giving Russia any money (e.g, ULA for rocket motors) because of the Crimea/Ukraine situation. Sadly, Russia probably just inadvertently seeded the idea to the US congress and they ran with it...

Apparently, there is an out. In the event of a national emergency, NASA can actually finish purchases of these rocket motors from Russia and sell them to the ULA because the ban technically only applies to military contracts, not civilian contracts. This is totally stupid as either way the bulk of the money is going to the same Russian company: NPO Energomash. Of course the biggest beneficiary of the ban this might be SpaceX (and maybe even the ULA if you count the additional money the congress threw at them to get the votes for the ban and the fact that they will probably eventually get permission to buy enough engines to tide them over until Vulkan launches).

LOL at how C++ gets new smart pointers every couple years.

It's like they're trolling their own users with their:

• classes are kinda like structs, so you can use 'typedef struct ... *' for classes and 'void *' for generic functions (Everything from CFront in 83 through ARM in 99)
• no! 'void *' pointers are broken! use 'auto_ptr' instead (C++03)
• no! 'auto_ptr' is broken! use 'shared_ptr' instead (C++07/TR1)
• no! 'shared_ptr' is broken!(for most use cases) use
• 'boost::scoped_ptr' instead (non-standard, but more useful than the standard's shared_ptr)
• no! 'boost::scoped_ptr' is broken! use 'std::unique_ptr const' instead (C++11)
• no! 'std::unique_ptr const' is fugly! use "auto" and hope C++14's "return type deduction" will guess a safe type and hope C++17's "new rules for auto deduction" won't break stuff (C++14)

crap.

How the heck can people take an "object oriented" language seriously when it takes literally 30 years (1983 to 2014) for them to come up with a non broken way of making a reference to an object....

... and in the end they give it a syntax like "std::unique_ptr const".

W.T.F.

And if you find one from a rover rolling on the surface, it obviously does not need considerable earth moving equipment to gain access.

The mind boggles that anyone with an IQ over room temperature can make such a statement. Have you ever actually been out of your parent's basement and looked at geological formations in the real world?
 

And the low gravity on Mars means structural strength is most likely a non-issue, since lava tubes are already plenty strong on earth.

Yeah - that would be why one of the main methods of locating lava tubes in aerial or orbital photography (on the Earth, Moon, and Mars) is to look for collapsed tubes and collapsed segments (called "skylights").

Presuming there are lava tubes in useful locations... and that they're sufficiently structurally sound... and that you don't need to do considerable earth moving or construction to gain and maintain useful access... Etc... etc...

Lava tubes make for a great buzzword, but there's still many complicated practical considerations.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

There's still a big killer lurking out in space that can't be easily avoided: radiation.

Except underground, which is the obvious solution but people are too fixated on making housing above the ground.

Except, like most obvious solutions - moving underground poses as many (if not more) problems as it purports to solve. For example, adding many tons of earth moving machinery to a manifest already bulging at the seams. (Machinery which will add to the maintenance burden as well.) This solution also limits the location of your colony/base to places where the Martian soil can be (at least relatively) easily worked. (If such places exist.) The there's the question of chemical reactions between the soil and the structures. (The chemistry of Martian soil being... well, it's being extremely charitable to call it extraordinarily poorly understood.) Etc... etc...

Can someone tell me how this isn't just unseemly science rather than bad science? Sure it might seem like you are "cheating", but if the data tells you something that you didn't expect going in and you change your hypothesis along the way, you still are presenting data and you simply just took a shortcut publishing your second paper and just tossed-out your initial attempt at writing a paper.

To me, bad science would be cherry-picking your data to fit your original hypothesis (or perhaps your ideology or world view).

"science" kits where you make kitchen goo instead of actual chemical reactions is lame and boring

Someone who doesn't grasp that making kitchen goo involves chemical reactions, or deliberately ignores it in order to fuel their rant... shouldn't be judging state level science fairs, or taking teachers to task for not understanding science.

Maybe science went off the rails when we replaced the scientific method with scientific consensus?

That presumes some golden era of Pure Science when no scientist ever had an ego, or an agenda, or a patron that had to be appeased, or any other motive to play fast and loose with the truth ever existed.

It didn't.

It depends where you live. I have not had my license checked in many years (just breath tests), so it would be a good-odds bet to drive occasionally when needed.
Might just need to make sure the car is registered in someone else's name.
Of course, I'd just be risking a fine and vehicle impoundment, not arrest! In DC you can even go to prison for driving while suspended. Another reason the incarceration rate is so high in the US.

This news is about as surprising as the Sun rising in the morning. As I, and others, have explained multiple times across the years - the average person isn't the tinfoil hat privacy nutter that so many here on Slashdot are.