until the private concerns get it together, the Russians are the only ticket up and back

Russian closet looks like closet! What a backwards country!

Didn't she say it was the oldest part of the station too? You smell.

they make videos of cats in freefall and don petit playing with balls of water for millions of people. they are beyond your "journals" and "articles".

Most of the benefits of space exploration are derived from the technology that enables it...solar power, fuel cells, velcro, tang, etc.

Also, 2 Trillion spent on mid-east wars...

Seriously, cry some more. They can't hear you cry in space.

Don't you DARE suggest cutting space exploration funding around here, never mind that it could have paid for a year of college eduction for every student in the country.

It's akin to suggesting cutting back military spending to Texans.

College should be free and the military murders tens of thousands.

Sorry, space exploration isn't fucking retarded like the shit we actually spend money on. Way to throw college students under your space-hate bus though, none of them would EVER work for NASA.

I'm all for space exploration, by the way. Most of which is done out of Pasadena, CA.

The manned space program, on the other hand, is largely congressional pork for Houston etc. and a means of keeping Russian rocket scientists from working for other adversaries.

Memedumb-ster. Murder? We don't murder people.

Fucking Navy wants 2 billion dollar destroyers, while we're still using cutters from the 60s. Lets cut the Navy's budget and give more to NASA.

100% of the time, scientists who are against manned space exploration are just jealous that they will never get to go into outer space.

Sorry dude, it's hard to write research papers for journals when you're in MOTHERFUCKING SPACE!

these are for "space-hate bus"

Exploration is IMPORTANT. Recently, a whole range of non-pathogenic antibiotic resistant bacteria were discovered isolated inside one of the earth's deepest caves. These bacteria have been isolated for millions of years. Their study will likely give us great insight into what leads to antibiotic resistance, which in turn should play a key role in fighting the current antibiotic crisis.

Who knows what the fuck can be found on other planets or by experimenting in space. That's why it MUST be financed.

What is urgently needed is for fuel to be extracted and processed IN SPACE. A space-based fuel industry would attract private investment and greatly reduce the costs associated with space exploration.

More on the bacteria I mentioned, in case you are interested: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/120411-drug-resist ance-bacteria-caves-diseases-human-health-science/

Big science vs. small science. That cave bacterial resistance wasn't found by one of the big science projects (ISS, LHC, etc).

For an fan of space exploration rather than space parking, its pretty clear the big discoveries of the past 3 decades have all come from unmanned probes, which compete for a small fraction of the space budget for manned space.

NEAR Shoemaker (4 million), Mars Pathfinder (0 million), Lunar Prospector ( million), Dawn (6 million), Kepler (0 million) were all done for less than the cost of a single shuttle launch (.5 billion).

Dissing the LHC destroys your credibility. Particle physics is way more important than this space hate boring culture war.

Where's the diss? Just saying spelunking for microbes isn't Big Science.

FWIW the LHC seems to have kept theoretical physicists in business for a few more decades, if the preliminary mass for the Higgs boson holds (a quadrillienth as heavy as predicted). Certainly beats the largely untestable speculations of string theory...

Its possible that the proposed Earth-Moon L2 station will result in some interesting engineering - how to arrange the mass of a spacecraft's contents to protect against radiation outside the protective VanAllen belts. Course it would be cheaper to just do a single-launch Zubrin style mission to Mars to avoid the long transit, but that wouldn't maximise pork.

Actually, the LHC made a lot of string theory testable and disproved it. No other dimensions, no mini black holes. Also, quark gluon plasma, the other end of the spectrum from the Bose Einstein condensate. Neutrino assymetry and the trend of matter over antimatter, etc.

What you call "theoretical," which I assume you have redefined to mean "somehow worked on but not real" is actually quantum mechanics and is the basis for all computing technology.

I'll have to look into those. It was already known that the LHC wouldn't produce quantum black holes of any significant/dangerous duration, as the energies involved are lower than those of cosmic ray impacts in the upper atmosphere. But the main result (in the press, so far) has been a very, very light Higgs boson, which means theoreticians are already speculating on other particles nearer the original predicted mass to satisfy conservation laws.

By theoretical, I mean simply the bifurcation of modern physics between the blackboard pros and experimentalists who set out to confirm or disprove them. As the Standard Model (the most "proven" theory in all science) is largely "complete", there's a real problem for the longevity of theoretical physics as an active field. String theory, by delving to smaller dimensions and ever closer to Big Bang conditions, would require extraplanetary sized colliders (or so I've read) to provide experimental confirmation.

Five stars for the space love shuttle. Who needs results or cost efficiency when you have SPACE?

Also, godot, your science can go suck a dick. If the interests of "science" aren't being served by NASA's manned spaceflight programs, then it's time we showed science the door.

NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. Education is 3% and military is 25%.

I would say the satellites alone are a good ROI on our space budget. Our degrading education system and the wholesale destruction of the Middle East are a bit less so. Not that I think we should be spending less on education.

She's pretty cool but not as cool as Daniel C. Burbank.

yeah but I would not tap Daniel C. Burbank

Even though my phone has more computing power than the earliest space crafts there's nothing archaic and quaint about them. They're in fucking space. It'll only seem that way when its a casual thing, which it may never be.

for once CM, you have a good point

As our surviving descendants huddle around the encroaching Arctic Ocean, artifacts like this will seem a golden age before the fall of man.

Humans wont go extinct on earth if people like yourself are stopped from fostering the terrestrial extinction love and support manned spaceflight.

Humanity won't go extinct in a PETM redux runnaway greenhouse, or nuclear winter, for that matter. But it can lose the economic surplus required to fund space exploration for a very, very long time.

Mars could be terraformed over a few thousand years, but so far its hasn't been possible to get humanity to agree on a project to save their own skins that lasts fifty.

Anyway, barring some unforseen physics loopholes, its not going to be Star Trek. Humanity (or rather our creations) will get to the stars via gossamer Von Neumann probes.

Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars" is about the practical realities of space travel, and it sure as hell ain't Star Trek, though it is what "Enterprise" should have been like.

- ACTUAL EXCERPT FROM APOLLO 10 MISSION TRANSCRIPT -

MISSION COMMANDER STAFFORD: "Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air."

COMMAND MODULE PILOT YOUNG: "I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine."

LUNAR MODULE PILOT CERNAN: "I don’t think it’s one of mine."

STAFFORD: "Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away."

YOUNG: "God almighty."

[8 minutes later]

CERNAN: "Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys?"

hey, in zero G, shit happens