That's what I tried to tell everyone, but no one listened to me. :(

The Nautliux-X design doesn't propose fitting "the" space station with a rocket and sending it to other planets, it proposes building "a" space station with rockets and sending it to other planets. The idea is to use a modular design like the ISS that is built in orbit and use it as the vehicle for interplanetary missions. The modular design cuts costs and enables NASA to customize the design for different missions.

I swear to god, not thirty seconds before I came to slashdot and saw this story, I closed the gnome-look.com tab and had just finished pimpin' out my Gnome desktop. Good thing I didn't download any screensavers...

This is absolutely absurd. I live in the Manhattan, Kansas area and to hear people actually questioning the location of this lab because of tornadoes is beyond stupid. Anyone who lives in the Midwest would know that tornadoes aren't actually as common as people apparently think they are. The chances of a tornado hitting the exact location the NBAF lab is to be built is next to nothing. Of course, anything is possible, but it's not likely. There's 50,000 people in Manhattan and we don't spend our lives in constant fear of being killed in a tornado. I've never once in my life ever witnessed even a funnel cloud and I've only heard tornado sirens go off a few times. In the last 100 years, Manhattan has been hit by two tornadoes: once sometime in the 60s and another time in 2008 (it caused pretty minimal damage). I will admit that there are valid questions about locating the NBAF lab in Kansas (mostly the proximity to livestock that could be infected by some of the diseases and placing it in the middle of the mainland continential US rather than an isolated island), but the article makes it sound like the decision to locate it in Kansas was made purely for politcal reason. It wasn't. The primary reason for putting it in Manhattan was to place it near Kansas State University, a college that specializes mostly in agriculture and the fact that a similar, but smaller facility already exists here. Anywho, I best be leaving. Gotta head down to the shelter before the twisters come and suck up me and maw and paw and the lil'uns..... Also, LAWL at the comments suggesting the entire facility be built underground. Does Kansas really have that bad of a reputation elsewhere in the world?