It was modded as troll because of the following sentences made at the beginning:

That it a completely unnecessary personal attack on someone that dared ask a question on a discussion forum. Had the parent skipped these inflammatory four sentences and started immediately with the body of his otherwise good post, it would of been +5 Insightful instantly.

Their parents.

This is what parents are supposed to do: educate their children about the world, so that they can make rational decisions as soon as they are capable of.

That right there is pure quality flamebait.

It is magnificent!

So why the fuck are you posting in this story?

How many more decades before this "Moon landing hoax" shit will finally die?! It was never even funny for fucks sake. It was always used as an insult to demonstrate how moronic and dumb some americans are!

Because of national pride. But seeing how people of USA absolutely, passionately HATE their government, I guess there isn't much of pride left.

All of those points you made are true.

It was the time of the cold war with plenty of corruption and bad decisions. However, in my personal opinion when looking at the country and its accomplishments as a whole, it was still the greatest time for the nation.

But then perhaps I just idealize the Greatest/Silent generations. But given how they fought in the world war and recovered from its aftermath, I think they deserve the names they have been given.

I do not have a degree in psychology. I have been diagnosed with depression. The statements I made come from my first-hand experience. I also have a relative that shows strong signs, but has not been diagnosed since he is too damn proud to admit that something is wrong and see someone.

I wanted your opinion not to tear it apart, but to have a more constructive exchange of opinions. Slashdot is full of posts how something does not work, but without specifying what they think does. The posts with "In my opinion x, y and z should help, rather than s, t, u" are much more insightful rather than "x is a waste of time". The former make for a much better discussion. Isn't a discussion is why both of us post in this place?

Why is it you are of the opinion that we can not do things in parallel?

Robot development is essential and critical. No one is arguing against that. But that is just one part of the whole thing. Robots don't need life support or as much of radiation protection. Are we thus should stop research into those two areas until robots get perfected?

Surely there are many scientists and engineers that have specialized in the area of human space presence, but do not have as much to contribute towards designing next generation of robots. They also need funding, launches and experiments to keep their field alive. We do not want to lose the experience that we have so painstakingly gained thus far. Continual human presence on the ISS is providing a lot of good data that will be very useful in the future.

The Sun is not able to produce gold. If I remember correctly, our star is not able to create any matter above the atomic number of iron. All the gold present in our solar system is thought to have come from supernova remnants that occured before the formation.

What IS the energy requirement of your basement anyway? Does the gold your alchemical process creates covers your electricity bill? :-)

Your post deserves a much better answer than what you have received thus far. Unfortunately I am not a physicist and my communication skills are terrible, but I will give it a try. Hopefully someone else will come along and give a much better explanation.

As I understand it, destructive power comes from energy impacted by the projectile. One way to achieve that energy is to have the projectile explode (bombs, artillery shells, nuclear explosions) or just using the kinetic energy (bullets). It is the later type that is being pointed to.

The damage of the kinetic projectile is (I think) based on the mass of the projectile and the amount of force used to propel it forth. Essentially the more dense the projectile and the more force is used to launch it, the more energy it will transfer on impact. Given large enough values, it is possible that a pure kinetic projectile can transfer more energy than a nuclear explosion.

The premise of the post is the assumption that a projectile (rocks and rods) simply thrown from a satelite towards the surface of the Earth, has enough potential energy to achieve this level of destruction.

The post was made to point out the reasons to go back to the moon (Which it does), but the depressive thing is that this was written back in 2005. Bush's "new" Vision for Space Exploration was nothing but yet another bit of polical pretension of doing something other than rearanging deck chairs on the Titanic. The whole thing was cancelled as soon as Obama got into office.

Constellation Program

Now Obama got his own version. When next president is elected that will be scrapped because another version will be made. At this rate, my hat goes off to all the NASA personel that get any achievements carried out under such conditions.

That is incorrect. USA as of this moment is still millitary-wise the mightiest superpower. Economically it is still one of the top nations. And while its physical territory area is not biggest the world has ever seen, influentially it is the greatest.

Every nation has internal problems. IMO the golden era (That peaked with the moon landings. USA will be forever remembered and respected for that) is over, but there is still VERY long to go before you can say that USA is of no consequence.

We can only hope that when the day finally comes of the collapse (Long time in the future) that it will be a clean and peaceful one.

Fusion? Last I heard, that power generation method has still failed to produce more power than is being put in. It has been worked on since 1950s and while progress has been made, it still doesn't work as well as we need. It is used as a poster child of empty promises. How long has it been 6 years in the future perpetually?

Detrimental to long-term?! Even if one were to agree with your view that the space race went in the wrong direction, it still developed technologies that would be essential to any space activity.

You want human activity in space? That means you need stuff to be launched up there as cheaply as possible. Show me a hypersonic plane design for cargo delivery and tell me how much it could carry per launch. I bet you that it is less than 100 metric tons to Low Earth Orbit. Because only Saturn V (for USA) and Energia (for USSR) launch vehicles are capable of that. Both of those were developed for the purposes of the space race. I do not believe that two hyperplane launches at 50 tons each will be cheaper than one Energia mission. And the shuttle spaceplane was notoriously more expensive than straight up rockets. Buran (Soviet's responce to the shuttle) was said to be so expensive that some point to it as a non-trivial factor of USSR's collapse.

Next even you admit that rockets are good in the vacuum of space. Therefore the space race was beneficial to the long-term, because it improved our knowledge of rocket design that will need to be used once you are in LEO.

Next you seem to hope that there is no another space race while still supporting space activity. That is contradictory. Space race means that the country devotes much more attension, recources and funding towards this area of R&D, which is exactly that we need to get any significant progress.