"Ah, the good old days when launching a rocket involved someone named "Hans" and a big red button."

Funny you should mention that ... Dr. Hans Koenigsmann at SpaceX. Also see their people page here: SpaceX People

You gotta admit that's pretty cool, eh?

"You see, the problem here is this faulty thingamijigger-whosamawhatsit on engine 5."
"Really? Well, that's too bad..."
"Sure is, but you're in luck, we've got a spare rocket engine just sitting over in the hangar there. We'll swap the parts and you'll be on your merry way to orbit in a couple days!"
"Oh! How fortuitous!"

I mean, how many launch companies can realistically have a dialogue like that?

Well, actually the explosions (9 of them, 18 technically if you count the gas generators) happened. Rewatch the videos, you can see the engines light, very brightly if I do say so. They were just cut off when a commanded abort closed some valves somewhere along the fuel/ox supply lines.

As for being able to shut rocket engines off, well that's simply a matter of what kind of fuel you're burning and how much control you have over your valves if the fuels are liquid or gaseous.

Technically it's the Dragon spacecraft that services the ISS.

The Falcon's just the ride to one of the nicer views of the horizon. ;)

Could give us some insight into unknown gravity field configurations throughout our solar system. That could prove to be pretty useful one day. Right now we mostly have only analytical models of our system's gravity field. If we could get some hard data of paths that we have not commonly traveled, we might find something useful.

When the fuck did $175,000 / year get classified as not "all that much." Both of my parents combined never made even close to that amount and we grew up fine and dandy.

Donate to sperm banks often. You may not know your offspring, but chances are you will have some.

That actually depends on the rifle and the animal. I'm pretty sure a simple .32 wouldn't bring down a full grown bull elephant... or, for that matter, even an octopus. And I'd still be interested in seeing the rifle that can take out a large ant colony.

It is always amazing to me when folks are willing to hold up a piece of fictional art to contest a15,000 year old (how long have modern humans been around exactly?) historical trend. We've been developing earth-shattering technologies that could be used to royally obliterate ourselves for awhile now. Think about it, designing a metallic blade that could, literally, break every other blade wielded against it back during the various transitions from stone-age to bronze-age probably convinced many of the folks at the time that the individual wielding the metallic blade was all but invincible. And yet, somehow one metal blade wielding psychopath didn't conquer the whole world (though, some tried).

Technology breakthroughs have been occuring for thousands of years. The nuclear bomb, dynamite, machine guns, rifles, muskets, long bows, hell, even something as simple as putting a rotten corpse on a catapult and flinging it at your enemies could be considered technology. We've managed not to kill ourselves yet.

Does this new technology have the potential to destroy the human race? Maybe it will eventually, but so have a dozen other inventions throughout history. One badass, epic science fiction T.V. series is not an adequate bit of evidence to hold up and dispute this trend.

I think my favorite thing about your posts, Grishnakh, is that you post one or two comments in a story that interests you that are pretty insightful and frank, but simple enough to not be rude or flamebaitish. Then when someone replies to your posts, you almost always respond with a link and a direct insult on their intelligence. It's quite amusing.

Meh. It will save on cheap plastic/foam sword expenses ... and the home blackmail videos that you can show to their future significant others will be much more entertaining.

The kids ate it all.

Well there is upward of 500 Lex Luthor wannabes in Congress at the moment, from what I can tell...

I am not sure cutting down the size of the military drastically is necessarily the best way to go after the bloated DoD budget. You could just as easily scrap and cancel a number of government-military-industiral-complex boondoggles and save a lot of money. I mean, if you look at some of the weapon systems being developed by Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics (is that what they're still called nowadays?), etc. you'll see that they are still, essentially, fighting the cold war. It could even be funny if it weren't so god-damned expensive.