Wrong robot. It's Curiosity that's in the alleged lake bed, not one of the MERs (Spirit or Opportunity)

The spot on Mars was not picked at random. It was picked because the overall geomorphology suggested that there may have been liquid water there in the past.

Don't be ridiculous. Americans would never stand for these things. That's why the government is focussed on facial recognition. Why provoke a violent backlash when you don't need to? Everyone has a face. Everyone has a cell phone. Ergo, everyone's is tagged by voice, appearance, and location already.

Some people have no imagination when it comes to technology.

Don't tell him that. We'll always need mindless drones to work the mines.

The Constellation Program... Riiight! The orbit that Ares I would have put the Orion module into had a negative perigee. That means crash into the Earth. But that's okay. The test flight showed that it would have shaken the crew to pieces. Oh, and if they had to abort, the heat from the flaming solid rocket fuel would have melted Orion's parachutes. Not bad for a $14billion rocket. Ares V could have carried it easily, but the cost of the Ares V was upwards of $20billion to develop and half a billion per launch. By the way, that would have taken all the money NASA had. No more telescopes. No money for Mars rovers, comet missions, or other such plans.

Constellation deserved to be axed. There were cheaper plans out there. Plans that would have eliminated the gap in American space flight capacity. Plans that would have put us on the moon for a third of the $35billion dollar Constellation program.

That was the plan long before the current president began "running" things.

It needs to be small so that the launch abort system can pull the capsule away from the exploding rocket in the event of a catastrophic failure. The roomy, skylab-sized module is expendable. The crew is not. What will happen is the roomy skylab type module will ride beneath the Orion. Once they get into orbit, the Orion will separate, turn around, and dock with the lab, exactly the same way as the Apollo capsules docked with the Lunar Modules.

The Orion capsule is used to get people to and from space, and that'll be about it. It lacks facilities for anything longer term than that.

NASA can't do that. It would be political suicide for them if the astronauts died, even if they were volunteers.

No rocket capable of sending the Orion capsule to the moon exists at the moment.

You can feel static electricity, but you can't touch it.

When a gear or cog-wheel loses its teeth, it also becomes less powerful, does it not?

I'm confused. Doesn't "loses its teeth" mean that it has failed and/or become less powerful? I was expecting to hear how the research had failed.

The rest of the universe always acts upon. One of the laws of thermodynamics.

For the confused: A milk float is a small flatbed vehicle for delivering milk, and not an alternative name for a milkshake.

And people wonder why companies don't release software for Linux.