I even wonder why they haven't done it much sooner.

We didn't have good ion thrusters back in the 50s, 60s and 70s and after that launching nuclear reactors into space was considered a bad idea, not without reason. A nuke plus ion engines isn't a slam dunk either, ion engines produce very little thrust and reactors are heavy even if you don't have to bother shielding them much, so there's an efficiency threshold you need to hit before it's worthwhile.

NASA has realized that beating, or at least competing with, the Chinese to a moon base is probably going to require a reactor, so why not demonstrate it as part of a drive too?

the original formulation of relativity and physics in general did not distinguish between rest mass creating gravitation and light speed particles generating gravitation

Maybe you have access to some early draft notes of Einstein's, but in his actual papers on relativity mass does not "create gravitation." Energy, momentum and some off-diagonal terms like stress and pressure gravitate. There is no mass term in the stress-energy tensor, nor anywhere else in the Einstein Field Equation. Mass is not fundamental in relativity, it's a property of a system. That property is the product of energy and momentum (and the other stuff) in particular configurations within the system so in many situations it can be used as a surrogate for the underlying energy, momentum and other stuff.

Physics prior to relativity did indeed say a lot of different, confusing things about mass, gravitation and light speed particles.

"Creating fusion" isn't hard. Kids do it for science fair projects. Here's a guy on Youtube making a fusion reactor.

Making a fusion reactor that produces more electricity than it uses is hard. That's what you're thinking of. Rocket engines famously do not usually produce electricity, and if they do they do it extremely inefficiently, so it's a completely different problem.

we don’t have massless drives

Reactionless drives. A massless drive would be an engine that didn't have any mass, I guess. We have lots of drives that don't involve throwing mass out the back, including solar sails, magnetotorquers, electrodynamic tethers, flashlights, etc. Hard drives have a few. Your car has at least one big one and a bunch of others besides, as does your body. None of them are reactionless though.

Reactionless drives are called that because they violate Newton's third law, which is really a statement about the conservation of momentum.

Individual photons don't have mass, abstract or ortherwise, they have energy and momentum. Individual fundamental particles of any kind don't really have mass because mass is a property of a system.

A system of multiple photons can have regular old non-abstract mass if they're configured properly.

Yes?

As for the one in New York, I'll give you three guesses where La Liberté éclairant le monde was made.

Aaak. I think it was. That'll teach me to work off of decade old memories...

Well, it probably won't teach me.

Damn science believers, always messing up people's fantasies.

Have you ever seen a shiny new penny versus an old tarnished one? Or the Statue of Liberty? Or an old building with one of those weird green roofs?

They're all copper, with varying amounts of oxygen. Oxygen free copper is expensive copper that's specially made to get rid of as much of the oxygen as possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If the article got something so simple as THIS completely wrong, one can easily presume that the REST of the article is incorrect gibberish.

"oXyGEn-fREE cOppER", lmao

Indeed.

You can of course have it delivered to your door as well. If you can't receive it at home, as is the case being discussed in this thread, then you can have something delivered to a locker. When you go to pick it up you tell Amazon you're there and they pop open the correct door.

It's interesting how practically everything is "the most convincing proof we have."

The Moon is target practice. We need to get away from innovative bespoke engineering, into industrial mass production with continuous improvement. To do that we need to fly often. Mars just doesn't have the launch window availability. The biggest part of the challenge is that we were born in the bottom of a deep well. To toss enough stuff out of the well for a long journey is critical. Boosters that reliably fly on time often and cheaply enough to get ships and fuel out of the well. Ships that carry fuel into orbit and return over and over since the vast majority of the material we need to send out of the well isn't payloads or ships, it's fuel. Kilotons of fuel. Once the factories and processes are set up for that going far beyond the Moon is fairly easy. But with a narrow opportunity every two years that's not going to happen in a human lifespan. It's not enough refinement cycles per year.

I see this accelerating the Mars objective, not deferring it.

Are you crying? There's certainly some starting, but probably a ways to go yet.

Do you not already have this? Amazon has local lockers here in drug stores, gas stations and convenience stores, most of which are open 24 hours. Most of the postal locations are also in drug stores.