But at its heart it's the result of the dramatic slashing of the NASA budget after Apollo, the end of the "space race," and constant political interference (mostly in the form of pork projects that Congressmen wanted NASA to lend credibility to).

Well, no. Not really.

Pretty much all of the Saturn V pads and buildings are still there, and still in use - having been repurposed multiple times. The Saturn I pads were abandoned in the late 60's because nobody thought we'd ever use them again. (And then along came Skylab.)

Other pads were abandoned for a wide variety of reasons... For example, we don't need as many as we used to because we don't have vehicles sitting on the pad as long as we used to. Others were abandoned because rockets don't blow up nearly as often, so we don't need "hot spares". Others were abandoned because the booster was replaced by a different one and the activity shifted to a different pad. Yet others because not only do rockets not blow up so often, their payloads fail less often and have a longer lifetime, so we don't need much of the the frenetic launch pace of the 60's. (Or multiple combinations of these.) Etc... etc...

The number of pads required aren't pushed by raw budget, they're pulled by user requirements. Now, I won't disagree that budgets effect the pull rate, but so do a variety of other factors.

People where hostile to people with Cell phones in the 1980's, In college back in my day, if a student went to class with a Laptop we were hostile towards them. Portable technology takes a while to get into the culture.

Walkman's and portable CD players too... However the feeling was less about the technology or being portable (or new), and more about the price tag and what it was perceived to say about the owner. People walking about with expensive portable technology were classed alongside those walking about with expensive wristwatches - pretentious yuppie assholes with more money than sense.

You saw the same thing when iPods first hit the market, and again with iPhones, and again with iWatch.

I did not say "in a coma". I said "drugged out of their gourd". This does not imply "comatose". No catheter.

  If they were comatose, their consumables would be even less.

Nukes, solar, wind, wave means what? Those are energy generation technologies, not desalination technologies. $0.50/m is actually a rather cheap rate for water desalination, most is more expensive at current power prices.

Wake me up when "nukes, solar, wind, wave" means "desalination water costs only a couple cents per cubic meter".

You know, this gets me thinking... what's really the minimum necessary for a person to stand a chance of making it to the surface of Mars alive? Let's say:

1) 150 days transit
2) Passenger remains drugged out of their gourd during the whole voyage so that they don't go crazy in the ridiculously small amount of space they're allocated, nor burn more than a minimal amount of consumables.
3) No extra radiation shielding; craft keeps its thickest end toward the sun and puts its consumables around the passenger but otherwise does nothing special
4) Landing hardware done as an exact duplicate of MSL, no re-engineering. MSL used a 4 tonne spacecraft to deliver a 900kg payload to the surface. An incredibly cramped capsule may fit that payload profile.
5) No attempt to get back or even survive for any significant length of time. Passenger has to be someone who wants to die on Mars.

Normal O2 consumption is 0,9kg/day; let's say 0,7 due to #2. Consumption of pure fat for say 1500 calories per day is 166g; let's say 300. I don't have numbers on CO2 scrubbers, let's put it at the same as O2. Let's say 3 liters (3kg) water consumption per day, 2kg recovered from the air via a chiller, 1kg lost to excretion, so 1kg total per day. Let's say 1kg other consumables per day. No complex recycling systems or anything that could seriously inflate your costs. We're at the ballpark of 3.7kg per day, so 555kg for the journey there, which doesn't need to be landed. Give them 600kg for some margin and a little time alive. These figures probably wouldn't size your spacecraft out of an affordable launch vehicles.

So yeah, if you really wanted to, I bet you could have a moderate chance of delivering a suicidal human alive but very ill to the surface of Mars to live for a short period of time for only a couple billion dollars in development + launch costs.

Who wants to sign up? ;)

Biosphere 2 was pretty flawed but it actually did something. Even had some educational value.

This is just a scam. I think the only unknown is whether the founders believe it to be a scam or whether they're truly convinced by their own BS.

What about the prelatic, mesoperiodic, catechetic and eupotamic values of the US GDP? Should we remove them too?

Aquifers do not fill up with a single rainfall.

And farmers are used to buying water for 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than that, so what's your point?

In the US farmers buy/pump water by the "acre foot". When you're using such large measurements to describe the amount of water purchased/pumped, you know that the consumption is going to be vast. And if you're paying for that consumption with almonds, you know it's going to be cheap.

Lots of sunlight with little cloudcover, long growing seasons, and tons of water available from rivers and aquifers.

That is, until you deplete them.

While this may cause short-term fluctuations, the long-term picture will be fine. A higher price on almonds will make other global regions start growing them more. The price will come back down in 5 years or so. And that's if the water issue caused an abrupt change, more realistic is a gradual shift.

Growing water-intensive crops in the desert is a stupid, stupid thing that people have been doing way too much because there was little cost associated with depleting aquifers. Payback time for that short-term thinking is rapidly approaching to many different regions.

As for bees, well, sort of. CCD isn't a threat to the species, as one can mass-breed queens, and a new hive can be readily produced just with a queen and a handful of workers. CCD brought the average winter hive loss rate in the US from about 15% to about 30%. But honeybees themselves wouldn't be threatened even if the loss rate was 90% (not to mention that they're not even native to the US). It's just a question of how expensive it becomes to keep them; it's a cost to beekeepers.

On the other hand, pollination services are a major *profit* to beekeepers. If they lose that, then they're losing money. So even if the significant reduction in pollination services increased winter survival rates, it's still going to be a big loss to beekeepers. Which means fewer beekeepers, which means fewer hives.

On the other hand, that's probably good for local pollinators who compete with honeybees for resources...

(as a completely unrelated side note, I've been pondering a lot about how one could fight a lot of the honeybee pests and diseases that affect hives, and handle management better... I'm awfully tempted to some day try to make an electrical tomography brood frame controlled by a couple multiplexers and monitored by a raspberry pi running EIDORS or other tomography software to see what's developing, where, what's walking around on the comb, what's developing malformed, whats clearly a pest, etc, and potentially run significant current through infested cells to kill / sterilize them... you probably couldn't catch mites but hive beetles, bacterial brood infections, etc should be catchable.. the big question, apart from how easy it'd be to interpret the data, is how much of an effect the monitoring (and potentially sterilization) would have on the hive, bees can sense electric fields)

Hey, if you like consuming massive amounts of energy to produce water that costs about $0.50/m, that's your call. But water that expensive won't support water-intensive agriculture anyway, so....

This plan seems to forget that it takes time to grow these crops. It takes 3 years for your first crop of almonds and 8 before the tree is delivering anything like commercial quantities.

You think California's water crises are just going to disappear in a decade? This is a long-term problem. The long timeframes on crop switchovers for certain types of crops is just more reason one needs to take immediate action.

There are lots and lots of ways to lower the water usage of both the general population and water intensive applications such as farming.

And all of them will be properly handled if there's a fair market pricing for water.

Using RO membrane treatment plants the water is purer then what falls from the sky

Are you talking RO of salty or fresh water? Even RO of freshwater can be pretty expensive; RO of saltwater is in most places cost prohibitive (not to mention a massive energy consumer). Though there are some interesting alternative technologies which may provide for affordable desalination in the future.

Well, if we want to extend the analogy of SpaceShipTwo vs. Falcon 9 + Dragon (with delta-V as range), compared to a baseline Model S, then Virgin's car would go about 30 miles with a top speed of 20mph and would cost $750.

In short, Virgin's electric "car" would actually be an electric bike.

Same reason that he hid every last radioactive isotopes that has a half life of less than 80 million years which is not not continually produced by natural processes but left around every last isotope with a half life of greater than 700 million years.

I reject Satan and all of his works!