Nasa's budget it 2.5 times more than ESA's, 5 or 6 times more than roscosmos, and almost a third higher than CNSA's stated budget.

What does "proper" funding mean to you?

Perhaps even more embarrassing than the press kit (https://www.blueorigin.com/missions/ng-3) having one orbital inclination in the text and completely different one in the map below it.

I don't gamble because I do understand probability and statistics.

I don't take silly bets because I don't like humoring people who don't understand probability and statistics or reality in general. I work for my money, same as any honest person does. And when I give my professional opinion on anything, I back it with measured data or proven theory. Not a guesstimate of someone else's mental state at some future time.

My point exactly. With 5 bullets, does a 16% chance of surviving each trigger pull actually mean anything?

Maybe he's qualified to tell me how to build one. Or how much damage one might do. Or where to aim it to effect the most damage against my enemies, or the least damage on my test range.

But his opinion about the other guy's tolerance for pain and/or degree if millenerian with death is no better than Miss Cleo's.

if it is being used to predict the outcome of a single event. Statistics 101.

And that is even assuming you can even make anything other than a wild-ass-guess about this probability.

Looks like some physicists are just as capable of mistaking quantitative statements for authoritative and/or meaningful statements as anyone is.

At one point I remember having a flatbet scanner, 100MB zip drive, and Canon Bubblejet printer daisy chained off a single parallel port on my 166MHz Pentium 2 with 16 MB of ram running windows 95.

Printing a file off a zip drive directly didn't work so well.

If you could figure out how to recreate it on the small scale, you could do away with that pesky second law of thermodynamics and have perfect thermal insulation, heat pumps with double digit COPs over any temperature difference, and probably a perpetual motion Sterling engine while you're at it.

And if you have this magical planet-scale method of stopping the transport of heat from hot equatorial regions to cold polar regions...why you could solve all of global warming too! Just pick your least favorite country and dump all the excess heat there. If you can stop thermally driven ocean currents, you can stop thermally driven air currents too and the heat will just stay there, make the place hot enough to dump all its energy radiatively into space, and problem solved! /sarc

Or maybe the models aren't quite right.

Clarity of communication is a very important part of any human undertaking, especially so for technically difficult things like spaceflight where precision to seven or eight decimal places is the bare minimum for numerical quantities and ambiguity in written or verbal communication can be the difference between success and failure for machines and life and death for people.

I wouldn't say that politically-mandated homophones are innocuous here. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

If we are mature enough as human beings to understand the importance of clarity of speech, then we are also mature enough to not change our vocabulary every few years to keep with with the euphemism treadmill or to keep ahead of an ever-shifting list of taboos defined by a small minority of people whose incentive structure has word games at its base and mission success as an afterthought.

I try not to make my profession or my job into my entire identity for my whole self, but when I am on the clock I do take professional exception to bullshit that stands in the way of the mission objective while adding nothing objective toward its completion. The higher paygrades can argue about the subjective stuff so long as they stay out of the way of the real work.

Probably because they can't afford to pay for the launch themselves.

I'm spitballing here but I'd guess a launch to mars requires a falcon heavy fully expendable...something like $200m or more?

Rounding error if you're the US military and even NASA but not so much if you're ESA with 1/3 the budget of NASA.

They may also need to use the DSN. Not sure if ESAs network has the same 360 degree coverage in longitude as NASA does.

The natural antonym of unmanned is manned.

The natural antonym of uncrewed is crewed.

"Crewed" sounds identical to "crude" in every accent of English I am aware of.

And it has always sounded dumb for a premier space agency to speak of "crude missions" to anywhere.

Doubly so when some of the most famous words uttered by said agency's astronauts were "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Only the pathologically offended or the pathologically misogynistic would interpret that statement to apply to only half the planet.

It's pbs, not npr. I blame millionaires and billionaires for swapping those letters around right under your nose.

None of it is accurate unless the writer's job/life/whatever depends on it. And even then accuracy comes in shades at best.

I've seen fundamental errors of fact slip into legal proceedings. They weren't material to the argument, just context, in the instance I saw. And it wasnâ(TM)t worth anyone's time to try to get it fixed. But it was probably the only official record of that backgrounf context that was ever going to be made. And it was factually wrong.

Reality is either experienced directly or read about indirectly. And both ways are squishier and less rigid than you might like.

I have (and you probably do too) enough stuff under your kitchen sink and in your garage to cause unfathomable trajedies if you out your mind to it and were so inclined.

And yet the world is not a cavalcade of catastrophes.

Similarly, there are more guns than people around here. And yet people getting shot is a rare event confined to a few places with lots of other problems already present.

There is no problem. There are only gullible and/or power hungry control freaks in government.

Being in the firearms business without an FFL will make you a human doing illegal things. Even if you do it with a file and hand-crank drill.

The problem, as you may have guessed, is not that off-the-books firearms manufacturing is illegal. The problem is that the state is getting lazy and doesn't want to enforce its laws. It wants shortcuts, and consequences be damned.

The charitable explanation is that the people who comprise the state are also lazy. They therefore believe the designated scapegoat (phones, social media, ai, cnc machines) are indeed the source of their problems. Not cultural rot, not lax standards in schools, not anything that's hard to fix. So attack the easy target and all will be well.