Strange timing for this article to be posted nearly the moment -after- the dragon has splashed down and DSCOVR was delayed to Wednesday. Couldn't have waited one more hour?

Funny to see people complain about knee-jerk reactions with a massive knee jerk of their own.

Chemistry kits and lasers aren't outlawed, so neither of the things are true. Why was this modded up?

Certain chemicals aren't commonly included in chemistry kits marketed for children for liability reasons. Make of that what you will, but that is still a long ways from "outlawed". In fact, I'd guess that most of the things that you might have found in those kids are still easy enough to find. They just don't come in a tin case with fancy graphics.

Sweet, then this is a problem easy to solve.

The second set of guys we can give an MP3 of classic cars, they don't even have to be on the road to enjoy it, and leave the rest of us in peace.

I found the real-name policy to be a real negative too. I think it's perfectly reasonable to want a level of privacy on the web. Total anonymity is probably not possible from any sort of social media, and maybe not wholly desirable, but I think it's fully within my rights to have a part of my life that isn't in the view of the management at my work. Or that a teacher might not want her social life being just a web search away from young students. Or hell, maybe there are just things I'd rather not have my grandmother see.

The 'circles' thing was nice, but it's really just not much of a privacy wall.

They don't have stock-holders or congressmen holding the purse strings to try and impress. They don't need to downplay or spin the outcome of a test flight because everyone involved knows that a good testing program will have some failures. And in fact finding new failure modes in early testing is better then not finding them at all.

So while to SpaceX this was a useful test; their stocks would be falling right now, sending bean counters into a panic were they publicly traded.

It looks like they lost a hydraulic pump for one of their thrusters from the photos I've seen. So not quite unscathed, that was probably tens of thousands of dollars of damage, but that's chump change if they can make it work.

Interesting that despite running out of fluid 30 seconds before the crash. It still landed in nearly the exact center of the platform. Is it just that it dosn't take much maneuvering even to cover that distance? Or was the platform moving to 'catch' it I wonder?

If buying cars were simply a matter of price vs purely practical specifications, we'd all be driving Toyota Yaris or commercial vans. Nothing wrong with these vehicles, but sometimes people want to pay a little more to get a little something else or extra out of one of the items that is to most people one of their largest personal investments.

Yes, for a small few it might be a choice to seem trendy or fashionable.. but so what? For the vast majority of people interested there are many big picture and pragmatic reasons to want a car like this. Yet, the criticisms and concerns people often express about cars like the Tesla are far less superficial then what seems to be the average criteria most people use to put value on their gas powered cars.

Also, Zarya is actually owned by the US. It was built, launched and I presume operated by the Russians, but it's still owned by NASA.

Considering that most channels seem to work under the model of "Get as much to fill the schedule for as little as possible" I'm not sure that very much of value will be lost.

Look at it another way: The Travel Channel hires many different producers for it's shows. If the travel channel goes away, the channels that survive will be eager to snatch up the shows from the Travel Channel people (hypothetically) actually watched while all the filler just dries up. So now you have channels competing with each other to get people to buy their channels (like HBO does now), rather then just hoping people land on their channels for an hour and see a few commercials before moving on.

I have a feeling that channels will probably stick better to their formats, too. If they drift away from what their core wants, they will have to try and re-market themselves for their new format while the original watchers maybe don't renew that channel the next time their contract comes around.

Even space launch economics aside, the dragon spacecraft can return cargo to earth from LEO.

This is a technology that only only a number of countries you can count on your fingers can do. Fewer still with anything actively doing it. Even if SpaceX stops developing tech tomorrow, it's still had an immediate impact the US and the world's ability to do research in space now and for years to come.

The summery isn't quite correct. The engines aren't based on an engine from the 60s. These -are- the engines built by the soviets in the 1970s. These things are 40 years old.

The RD-180s used by the Atlas-V are built new, despite their relationship to the abandoned Energia/Buran. The NK-33s that are used by the Antares sat for decades in a Russian warehouse.

It was clarified later that both companies would fly six missions each (not counting the test mission).

I don't know if the director misspoke or was misunderstood, but she said later in the conference call they have the same requirements for the number of missions.

Indeed. Now that I am writing from the future (IE, after 5pm after this was actually announced). Both Boeing and SpaceX were awarded the exact same contract: certification, a test flight, and then six missions to the space station.

The only difference is that Boeing charged $1.6B more for the same service. Make of that what you will, but I can't say I can blame NASA -too- much for not wanting to put all their eggs in one basket.

And in it's place we got the commercial cargo and commercial crew programs, which have been highly successful so far. So much so that NASA is now looking to duplicate the process in other endeavors: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1407/27marstelecom/#.VANoxEi0b0c

Meanwhile the Orion capsule, which was the part of the constellation project that actually put humans on top of those rockets to get them into space, was kept. It's still over budget, under speced and years off from putting anyone in space.