Grid fins were designed by the Russians for missiles

Here is a photo of the grid fins on the MOAB: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

America is definitely not a secular state.
The first amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; "

The government cannot prohibit citizens from exercising their religion. The whole separation of church and state is from something Thomas Jefferson wrote but its not in the constitution or bill of rights. It was their first amendment right to exercise their religious beliefs during the inauguration (as it would be anytime).

I would feel very safe in betting my house on many millions of people being very interested.

from memory the plank length is the distance where the energy to measure it would create a black hole so its the limit of measurement.
plank time is the length of time traveling at c to travel the plank length, so is also immeasurable.

i would say it has the most extreme physical significance, its only in the theoretical it could be less significant.

Sure, just like america is.

Pursuing the desire that many people share to learn and explore and to push the limits of that new knowledge does not require a balance sheet justification.

If you feel the goal of life is to balance the short term budget of america (even though the nasa budget has essentially no impact on this at all) you should probably spend some time thinking about the fact we are all going to die, the earth will die, the universe will die, and when the last human dies, do you think they will wish we could have siphoned off some more money from nasa's budget to pay some some tiny fraction of the 2014 deficit off?

Load balanced or mirrored systems. You can upgrade part of it any time, validate it, then swap it over to the live system when you are happy.

Having someone with little or no sleep doing critical updates is not really the best strategy.

*Whoosh* - The sound of a metaphor going over your head.

Because no member of the EU can punish someone by death.

http://europa.eu/legislation_s...

Sure but they weren't making a TV show. They have the telemetry (from what I can tell), its just the video that is so poor. Getting high bandwidth data from below the horizon of a fast moving object is hardly easy.

They will have nice enough videos when they bring the first stage back to land :)

They will shortly, there was a planned launch last month but it has been pushed back for various reasons. http://www.space.com/25822-spa...

The fact they have this thing vertical at well below terminal velocity and apparently not spinning means the rest is just details. Controlling it down from supersonic is the hard part. They have made many successful landings with grasshopper from a vertical, low speed non spinning state.

I guess its just a marketing problem, they need drugs that make the person not move so no one feels bad. And at the end the person looks like they died naturally.

500g of c4 on someone's head would do the job and be completely painless, and cost almost nothing.

I'm guessing that its hard to get drugs that don't cause convulsions or toxic side effects Or at least they only are made by companies who dont want to be known for killing people. Because getting drugs to kill someone doesn't seem so hard.

Disclaimer: Im against the death penalty.

But I don't understand why its so hard to kill someone. Making someone unconscious for major surgery seems to be a solved problem. Once someone is unconscious, and paralysed, how hard is it to kill them?

If you are unconscious, no oxygen will kill you in a few minutes without pain. Even if you are concious, from what I understand its CO2 in the lungs that causes pain.. just filling a room with helium should probably kill you without you feeling much pain in a few minutes.

Why these injections are taking 20+ minutes to kill people who are in pain, I don't understand.