Yup, the machine fell on its side. It wasn't ruined, just damaged. Fixing it wouldn't have been a huge project. That's what makes it unforgivable. Twenty years wasted.

The Delta Clipper (DC/X) performed the very same stunt back in the 90s: Take off and land on its rocket. That was 20 years ago.

The DC/X was a demonstrator of a single-stage-to-orbit project. It promised to bring down the cost of space flight by an order of magnitude and make the Space Shuttle obsolete.

It flew several times, achieving perfect flights, then was given to NASA. They "acccidentally" forgot to connect the hydraulic line that deployed on of the landing struts and the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing. And oh darn, they couldn't find the couple of millions needed to fix it.

This dangerous competitor to the shuttle was thus killed. The Shuttle program was safe. Whew.

Now that the Shuttle is no more, revolutionary concepts such as DC/X or its Xombie imitation might safely crawl out of the hole in which NASA had thrown them. Maybe.

The first rule of a bureaucracy is self-perpetuation. The fact that a bureaucracy is building space shuttles doesn't change its bureaucratic nature.

What do you do now?

You get your law school buddies on the phone. One of them knows alumni who are lobbying in DC. You get them to write a law making it illegal to dispense robot-assisted legal services. To, ya know, protect the public. Then you slip the law as an amendment into the Turnip Calibration and Uniformization Act of 2012, and important 450-page text regulating the color, texture, size and water content of turnip for sale in the US that will be passed at 3 AM during the electoral campaign, and that nobody will bother to touch, much less read.

If you think I am joking, look at the way the MAFIAA got artists to work for free: they slipped an amendment in the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999 that turns most new recordings into work-for-hire jobs where the studio owns the copyright.

The exact same thing happened when will-writing software started to appear. The call to ban was not very effective -- only family law practitioners were threatened, after all. But if you threaten the very income of trial lawyers, they'll be surprisingly effective at quashing the threat.

There are now almost 3,000 megawatts of solar electric energy installed in the U.S., enough to power 600,000 homes.

This would mean that each home consumes 5 kW. That's really low. Most small houses have a 100 A panel if their stove is electric. 200 A panels are pretty common. The reality is closer to 10 kW.

For comparison, 3 GW is either three large gas or coal thermal plants, or 1.5 nuclear reactors.

Remember, on top of that, that you cannot store electricity unless your production is near a hydro dam -- you can then pump up water back into the dam as storage, at a 30 to 50% efficiency loss. So your 3GW solar plant need a load-following thermal or nuclear plant to absorb the loss when the sun hides or at night. You have to factor that in the cost. That adds $5 to $10 per watt.

Apologies for not replying sooner. Costs can be pretty opaque when the State is in charge of selling something. In the present case, however, acquisition of the fuel and disposal of the waste have been factored in. A provision is also made to dismantle each plant by paying into an escrow.

Wind is interesting but has the major problem of being rapidly variable. Moreover, Germany and Spain, which are big on wind, went through several episodes of zero wind during days of high power consumption (Germany in particular had a stationary anticyclone sitting on the country, resulting in no wind and freezing cold, which brought down the grid thanks to electric heating).

The only way to make wind viable is to associate it with generators powered by natural gas turbines, which are able to increase their production from 0 to 100% within seconds. This can be viable only in countries with large gas resources. Interestingly, large natural gas companies are investing in wind energy -- see T. Boone Pickens in the US. Otherwise, since wind turbines can't follow the load, they would wreck havoc on the grid. In general, energy sources that can't follow the load (that is, adjust their output to regional consumption) are doomed to being accessories at best, and must be supplemented by highly variable generators (read: gas). Wind falls into that category. I wish it was otherwise, but physics is a harsh mistress.

I disagree about your assessment of nuclear energy. Until fusion comes along, this technology is the only practical way we can wean the world from burning fossil fuels.

Wrong, they pay heavily all the way. Nuclear fuel, reprocessing, building the plant, operating it, and dismantling it are all separate accounts, and it's handled by scores of private contractors. All of that is paid for by the electricity bills. That's still cheaper than other forms of electric power.

I agree. I question the mode of cost calculation in the article.

Here is a reference point. 82% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. The price of power for industrial customers is about 0.06 USD/kWh. This includes huge personnel and pension costs (powerful unions) and sloppy financial management (politically appointed execs). So it means that actual production and delivery costs are below this price point. Since EDF, the French electricity semi-public firm, is a monopoly, there is little incentive to be more cost-effective. And yet, even so, they achieve a cost of 6 cents per kWh.

I am therefore not impressed with the 0.16,USD/kWh quoted. It' s almost 3 times more expensive than what the French can get, without even trying to be cost-effective.