Wish I had mod points for you today.

If Eduardo Saverin can leave the US and renounce his citizenship to avoid paying a legal and justifiable tax on his earnings, then Tenenbaum should be able to leave in order to avoid paying a debt that is legal but of severely questionable justification.

Oh. Wait. I forgot. Saverin is a wealthy businessman whose dodged debt represented a tiny fraction of his capital gains earnings. Tenebaum is a poor college student whose debt amounts to a decade of what he may expect for a gross salary after he finishes his Physics postdoc and moves on to industry.

I suggest he may have better luck using his post doc in Physics to land a job working on derivative equations for a Wall Street investment firm.

Besides, there's usually tits.

Maybe it's not the coffee, but the California water used to brew the coffee?

You can be certain, however, if the correlation had been between coffee drinking and decreased life expectancy, then there would have been no such disclaimer discouraging the inference of any causation.

Well, at least this thread has gotten rid of that "not so fresh feeling."

Agree with you: Too little, too late.

There are any number of ways to roll your own DVR system these days that will allow you to buffer the first 20 minutes of a broadcast TV so that you can skip the commercials, and also allow you to download or torrent content that you don't subscribe to.

Anyone who has put together a PC-based home theater system has this capability.

For as little as a hundred bucks or so, anyone with a PC can add an external decoder and do the same thing. I did this with an iMac in our kitchen and now we watch TV in there as much as in the TV room.

No, it's not irrelevant. The TAWS switch in the off state means that someone turned it off between the last pre-flight and the time of the photo. In a post-accident investigation, the questions "when was it turned off, and why" are quite relevant. Was someone (e.g., the pilot) in the habit of turning it off during flight? Post flight? Does it really get turned back on during pre-flight?

All very relevant questions after someone flies the very same airplane into a mountain.

What a coincidence... last night I watched Another Black Hole Torn Apart by a Massive Star. (Number 19, I think...)

As usual, the ending was no surprise. Some stellar material was ejected, and then Fin.

In other words, a large articulated structure that must be insulated but still function perfectly over an extremely large range of temperatures, pressures, and airspeeds (including some combinations of which we've never made such a thing work - see the recent news about the HTV-2 failure board report). It must operate reliably within strict tolerances both before and after being subjected to the dynamic stresses of launch and the thermal stresses of re-entry, and it must be economically re-usable, re-workable, cleanable and inspectable. I can see the "oh, shits" already.

Those are some serious engineering challenges. I'm not saying they're insurmountable, but they're certainly not to be treated casually either.

There's an engineering definition of the word "risk," which includes factors like probability of failure and effects of failure. Right now, both of those factors are large. Clever and diligent engineering can reduce the probability of failure, but there's not much one can do to mitigate the effects of failure of the main engine on a manned spacecraft, especially when it's required for both liftoff and landing. The best you can do is add redundancy and backup systems... ... and there goes your improvement in payload fraction that gives you competitive advantage, right out the window. At some point it may still be technically feasible, but the economic reason for doing it becomes moot. You will not find any customers because a Soyuz or Proton is cheaper and more reliable, and their insurance companies will insist on the reliable part, that's for sure.

It sucks that it's that way. I am another "space nutter" who wants to see the human race develop better options than being confined to one gravity well.* But the technical and economic realities are harsh, and produce many victims. Any entrepreneur who is not aware of these realities is making a grave error.

(And the pessimists and nihilists who believe that it's a wasted effort are welcome to stay here at home, but we won't let you hold us back. We'll send home goodies, we promise...)

STS didn't need to have air intakes that hang out in the breeze... that simple difference makes the engineering problems a whole lot more difficult.

I've worked in commercial and government space for nearly 30 years, and one thing I've learned is that most, nay almost every, new launch system idea that sounds promising and brilliant in the concept stage runs aground on shoals of engineering problems with the result of either grossly inflated cost and schedule, or catastrophic failure. Layman frequently underestimate how much of the technology space has been explored and found to be dead ends due to either unsurmountable technical difficulties or simple economics. Incremental materials improvements are the most common route to innovation, but they can only do so much to open up new avenues.

In other words, it's not always possible to identify technical risks early on. The history of launch systems is full of "oh, shits." The cliche "the devil is in the details" may very well have been coined by a rocket scientist.

That said, I wish them luck and good fortune. If there's a way that we haven't yet achieved of bumping up the payload fraction of conventional launch systems, this is it. Hybrid jet/rocket engine approaches are also one place where I believe the introduction of improved materials can be disruptive. REL may have found a new route to orbit, and I hope it works for them.