"My sweet, you know how you said you wanted to travel..."

Seriously, my better half would find me in the darkest Arsia Mons caves, and there'd be bloody murder.

Sure, but in 20 years who is going to have more funds to throw at space travel - the US or China?

We'll never solve population pressure with space travel, it costs too much to get into orbit. But I'd bet the Chinese are considering mining operations off planet.

Facehugger anyone? Seriously though, how many of us would sign up for a one-way trip? I'd do it in a heartbeat, but the wife would kill me.

GPWM

Agreed, it was a problem with the first record this crew did with Thrust SSC. The wind tunnel work they did was almost all about stopping take-off and the nose of the craft was packed with sensors monitoring for catastrophic lift.

I met Nobel and Andy the pilot/driver when Thrust SSC was going and they are both very enthusiastic, utterly committed to breaking land speed records and madder than a sack of badgers. Green said the weirdest thing about the whole drive was dealing with the brain's capacity to process relative speed, or rather the lack of ability to do so. At the end of the run he'd found himself getting ready to brake hard as the vehicle felt like it was going slowly enough and found he was still going around 400mph.

The paper looks very interesting and should be another reason for a full grid upgrade, so we can use smarter power systems. It's a pity Edison's idea of local power stations never took off. Such a system would be much more fault tolerant and scalable. The same thing could be done now with pebble nuclear reactors.

Well, not exactly. Once the petition is signed by more than 500 signatures the government has to make a response. However, you are right in that the response is usually worthless.