people need to realize there is now an alternative!

"Pick up any math paper on number theory, and you're bound to find the sentence 'Let p be an odd prime number.' without citation, but that would hardly qualify as plagiarism."

I wonder how often you see specifically an odd prime number... since two is the only even prime, its really the oddest of the bunch.

one way to change an asteroid's trajectory over a long period of time is to take advantage of the Yarkovsky effect.

I suspect that it might start something more like this

I'd say start with something practical that builds on knowledge you may already have. For instance, many people use Excel in their day to day lives... I'd start with the vbscript macros to do simple tasks to make your data more useful.

Here is an interesting study on electric powertrains... it comes to some remarkable conclusions about the wheel to well efficiencies of different technologies, and the long term cost projections... Their analysis seems to point to Battery Electric Vehicles as the least likely long term solution to the transportation section, instead favoring HEVs, PHEVs, and FCVs. Very interesting read!

the Toyota Fuel Cell vehicle gets 420 miles per tank of compressed hydrogen... sounds like they have the storage problem in hand. I agree that combustion hydrogen seems unlikely, but I still have high hopes for FCVs.

If electric cars were the best solution (or energy efficiency was the only concern), we would be exclusively burn oil in more efficient power plants, and using that to charge batteries in cars... rather than converting crude to gasoline to fill up.

Maybe the poster was thinking of "Whistler", which probably did exist in the late 90's...

well I certainly am not a trajectory analyst or anything, but the guy next to me uses STK to do his analysis (the astrogator plugin). You could be right that they are using Titan to do a swingby, but I've seen some pretty crazy trajectories as a result of unstable orbits around Lagrange points. That is the basis of the space highway.

They probably are using a tool like this to analyze possible trajectories... these tools do use numerical optimization libraries to pick paths between targets and destinations. Just guessing based on what was said in the summary, they are using the Saturn-Titan Lagrange points to alter their trajectories without using much fuel. You can do some pretty crazy maneuvers around these points.

NASA's budget is less than 0.5% of the federal budget, so arguing cost cutting is a red herring. Entitlement spending expansion without end as the baby boomers retire is the real structural deficit that needs to be addressed. Here is a slightly dated article that explains this a little better. And, as I understand it, they are actually expanding funding for NASA, just taking the plans for an american moon mission off the table, and redirecting that to R&D.

For those lofty orbits in prime real estate (think Geosynchronous), they do push satellites out further into a graveyard orbit. It would take about 1500 m/s deltav to deorbit from way up there, and only a fraction of that to just push it a little further out of the way.

still not good enough to count as a valid password at my company =P

Yeah but shipping charges from Mars are a bitch