So, the rail takes the x-43-like launcher to 600 (10x60) mph? That's not nearly enough to ignite the engine. Assuming it gets 5 times as fast (3000 mph should be enough to ignite it) it will be very close to the ground. 3000 mph close to the ground must generate non-trivial amounts of heat (and broken windows). Ignore that (because the launcher appears to have SR-71-like engines) for a moment and imagine the launcher now has to propel itself to the upper atmosphere, where it reaches Mach 10 (something we never did on an air-breathing engine) points itself upward (perhaps getting rid of more atmosphere) and launches the expendable stage. The launcher then glides back to the ground and lands safely.

Am I the only skeptical one here?

I am glad NASA is thinking on stuff, but, seriously, they could as well think about viable stuff. They don't need milestones like these - they need, as one expert once said, "inchstones".

> will bomb a data center in a foreign country

Data-centers and would be the first thing I would go after. It's about as bad as bombing someone back to stone-age...

> You cannot get by with stuff like this without angering a lot of people.

And what will they do? Armed revolt? Civil war? Vote Republican?

When it comes to respecting civil rights, there is no such thing as shades of gray.

But non-US citizens were subject to extraordinary rendition while passing through the US and being shipped to be tortured by foreign countries they had no relation with. For me, this looks a lot like "being disappeared".

Such RC environments do exist today - most of deep-sea operation is conducted through remote-controlled devices, as is a lot of combat-zone flying. The Moon is close enough for remote-control (2.5 second feedback delay) and vacuum with robot with arms on wheels is a much more friendly environment than deep water with floating rig or a light airplane.

The Moon is even close enough for you to send another robot to kick stuff when the first one gets stuck.

Complex manufacturing will not happen on the Moon until there is some need for it, but having simple automated factories for cooking soil to grab volatiles (oxygen, water), to make rocket fuel (splitting water into LOx/LH2) and RC robots for digging construction sites and for assembling stuff sent from Earth would be very useful. If the volatile extraction facilities also make elements (tubular metal structures and sheets) for construction, all the better.

Having a stockpile of materials would be great when the time comes to establish permanent human occupation. It's not about removing humans from space exploration - remote control is severely limited by the speed of light and is not an option for anything beyond Moon orbit (although one could assemble space station components with robots before the structure is occupied by humans - that could remote control the robots from inside the habitat), but to make it easier to put humans on-scene later.

All of it seems quite doable and most of it has been done in the past. The Russians had a moon rover that was remote controlled from Earth.

Great.

Now we can recreate a complete ZX80/ZX81/Atari 400 experience with an emulator. And now I can have a Symbolics keyboard for programming.

Seriously: A virtual keyboard for extended usage is something that remains to be tested. It will require some clever mechanisms to compensate for fat fingers and some feedback for touch typists. I would not discard it as impossible.

You won't have a worforce problem - just remote-control everything. You also won't need to send all the infrastructure, only the parts that cannot be built there, like motors and the most basic equipment that gets you started.

While you can't see the Great Lakes in this picture, the Moon is not that big compared to them.

They would completely dominate Rhea's surface.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Rhea_Earth_Moon_Comparison.png

It's far less difficult than you imagine.

The worst part would be mining for raw materials. You would need some heavy machinery. Luckily, you can send lighter machinery that grabs and processes materials for the heavier machines that, in turn, can grab more materials to be used to build more of them. You will have to send parts from Earth, but they would be comparatively small.

As for sending containers (obviously manufactured on the Moon) all you need is a big magnetic rail. Given no atmospheric resistance, it's not hard to reach the 2 Km/second escape velocity. Energy is abundant too - as are materials for building solar panels. And since the Moon is tidally locked, you can easily accelerate those payloads to a very precise point in the Earth atmosphere.

With that kind structure in place, human occupation would be easy.

For all I car, Facebook folks can play whack-a-mole as much as they want.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=123387014356443

Experience.

What usage scenarios would you point as those an iPad is an easy replacement? E-mail and media consumption is the only one that comes to my mind. The iPad, as it is, is a poor replacement for a generic computer

The incident will make his allegations be investigated. He can still file the harassment complaint. Or sue the TSA

Who would want a server running Windows, anyway?