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Comment Re:Good thing it didn't hit US. (Score 1) 107

If it happened in the US there would be an immediate assumption that it was a terrorist attack, even if it just plopped down in a cornfield, and the Pentagon would be invading someone before the first investigators arrived on the site.

Back in the '80s the Norwegians launched a sounding rocket. All the forms had been filled out, but apparently got lost on some bureaucrat's desk in the Kremlin. The launch path looked like a SLBM coming from the North Sea with a trajectory in the general direction of Moscow. The Kremlin wanted to retaliate for the assumed attack immediately of course, but Yeltsin made them wait until the full trajectory had been confirmed. The world had a close call that day. If it had been Washington down-range Reagan would have launched immediately.

Comment Re:Screw DARPA, give it to NASA (Score 1) 10

I remember proposals for robotic servicing of satellites in GEO when I was in high school, so that would have been the late-'70s, because it was not thought to be worthwhile to send humans to that distance. All of the satellite servicing missions NASA was able to carry out were done in LEO, IIRC the Hubble servicing missions were at the maximum altitude the Shuttle could reach. There has been some movement in the last few years to standardize on fuel inlets for GEO comm satellites in the hope that future refueling operations can extend their functional lifespan, but I'm not sure how far that has gotten.

Comment Re:Not so sure it's harmless (Score 2) 251

When I pretty much start the call by telling them that I have 18 years of desktop, server and network administration you would think that should scare them off, but no. They have a script to follow, and they'll follow it to the end of the Earth and over the edge. Most of the guys that I get tell me they work for Microsoft, and having worked on campus (and in fact having done security for a lot of those buildings) I find it amusing to take them on a mental tour of the Redmond campus. Eventually they drag me back onto the script. They're quite dogged, impressive in their own way.

About 30 seconds into one call I told the guy that I knew he was a scammer, and that he didn't work for MS. He still stayed on the line, doing his worst to try to get me to comply with his script, for another 23 minutes. The only reason that the call ended then was because it was time to toss stuff in the wok and I needed two hands.

Comment Re:Wind and sunlight? (Score 1) 46

The average surface temperature on Titan is about -180 C. On Titan water is a rock, and since these (and all other Terran) organisms are mostly water I think it unlikely. Any critter that lives on Titan will not be at all similar to anything on Earth, no matter how extreme its environment.

Comment Re:Just don't deal with Americans (Score 1) 251

It's a common mistake, made more common by the fact that at one time it was more-or-less true. Many municipalities did grant exclusive franchises (generally for 20 years) during the initial cable build-out in the 1950s and '60s, but those agreements have long ago expired. The nominal justification was that it would take companies that long to recoup their investment (the actual time to break-even was closer to 10 years, but cable companies were already earning their well-deserved reputation as liars.) It's become a major plank of the Libertaridan platform now so it gets repeated a lot, never mind that it's every bit as inaccurate as most of the rest of their talking points.

Comment Re:And today (Score 1) 211

for the enormous cost of servicing the Hubble it could have simply been replaced,

No, there's not enough pork in a new telescope for Congress to pass funding, which is why Webb took so long to get funded. To dig a tunnel out of prison you might want a boring machine, but if all you have is a shovel you'll use that. NASA was stuck using a spoon because that was all that Congress would allow. The most disappointing thing that we learned from the entire Hubble mission is that while they wouldn't even pay for basic maintenance on Hubble until NASA had grovelled sufficiently and promised even more giveaways to the Pentagon, they gleefully purchased so many Hubble-class telescopes for the National Recon Office that the NRO couldn't even use two of them.

If Webb ever needs servicing it will be abandoned, since Congress will never budget the funding for the R&D in time to prevent minor malfunctions from cascading into complete failure. There just isn't enough pork in it.

Comment Re:"Moondust" (Score 1) 211

Non-obligatory XKCD. 'Number of living humans who have walked on another world.'

The overtext says, "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

Comment Re:What if we hadn't? (Score 1) 211

Early on VonBraun planned on using multiple launches and assemble the spacecraft in orbit. Kennedy's 'end of the decade' deadline made that proposal a non-starter, since we didn't have the time necessary to learn the proper construction techniques, so we ended up with the enormous beast of the Saturn V as our booster. It's too bad, VonBraun's design would have had people working on the surface for as much as a month at a time before returning, and the program would have grown at a sustainable rate that could have been integrated into the economy and government.

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