JoeCooper

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• Commented on NASA's Sprawling Web Presence

  I'm familiar with the problem - I've seen so many loosely connected NASA sites, sometimes with cool stuff stashed around - but I'm also not sure how to deal with it. To a large extent I wound up in the...

• Commented on News Embargo Inconsistencies

  On Space.com right now, something like half of the six front page stories about it. It's also on the front page of nasa.gov....

• Commented on News Embargo Inconsistencies

  That might be news for us, but it's easy to not realize how the media regurgitates things and how people'll hear it and become desensitized. There was a period where every Neptune-sized star-hugger with iron rain was announced with the...

• Commented on Why is NASA Langley Wasting Time on Cold Fusion Research?

  I saw it once on the Munsters. Grandpa made a pill that turns water into gasoline and the man from the oil company paid him $50,000 to shut his mouth. True story....

• Commented on Newt Skywalker

  Well one could buy the brand for that purpose. But even the novelty value wouldn't be that high....

• Commented on Neil Tyson: Misquoted or Missing The Point?

  I second KC's comment about the probes. I'd go on to say that the US has done far more "pure exploration" than any country including multiple deep space exploration missions, the only missions to Saturn, Mercury, Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Ceres,...

• Commented on MSL Is On Its Way To Mars

  Ironically I think people treat it too much as a product when opposed as well; it's too often used as an example of why reusability doesn't work. But I think more than anything it shows that it can, and with...

• Commented on Medvedev: Punishment for Space Failures Will Not Include Firing Squads

  "I'm afraid that American exceptionalism is precisely focused on winning at this 'competition' ..." I apologize to the mod if this is spam, but I totally know what you mean there....

• Commented on Medvedev: Punishment for Space Failures Will Not Include Firing Squads

  This may well be an ongoing problem already. Phobos-Grunt is, if I remember right, their 19th Mars mission of which only 2 have succeeded (non-landers), and most of them involved problems that shouldn't occurred if they were done rigorously. As...

• Commented on ESA Contact With Phobos-Grunt - Off and On and Off

  Can't from the space station. Not to be pedantic or anything but you seem interested. You should have a read here. It's requires an orbital plane change, which is very expensive. The vehicles they have there are Soyuz capsules which,...

• Commented on SpaceX's Secret Sauce

  "The problem with that is if you (a satellite manufacturer or the US government) has spent a lot of money working towards a SpaceX launch vehicle and they give up, you've wasted a lot of money." What, half a G?...

• Commented on SpaceX's Secret Sauce

  SpaceX is successfully building rockets and they're fueled with kerolox, not hope; you're the one who brought up hope. Speaking of which, do we have an alternative to this semi-privatization scheme that doesn't involve hoping the United States congress will...

• Commented on Does SMD Have a Bias Against Venus?

  Mercury might actually be much, much better for #2. I realize that Venus is the cheapest planet to reach and Mercury is the most expensive (in terms of delta-v) but, due to the difficulty of reaching orbit from the surface...

• Commented on Does SMD Have a Bias Against Venus?

  I see no reason whatsoever to build an aerostat colony on Venus, though I (and I assume everyone here) is already aware of the idea. It would be one of the last places we'd go, after the outer planet moons,...

• Commented on LRO Offers New Look at Apollo Landing Sites

  I love seeing human-tracks on the Moon. These pictures are amazing. They remind me of a quote - and maybe that's only because it's printed on the cheap wine bottle sitting next to my screen - "Cats do not go...

• Commented on Blue Origin Suffers Major Accident (Update)

  This here. A lot of space stuff is very counter intuitive; this is one reason conspiracy theories (e.g. Moon landing hoax) are such easy sells it that they rely on human experience (dark sky = stars!) when space is the...

• Commented on Apollo 18 Review: Good Fun. Go See It.

  That sounds fair enough. Rockets go up with "secret unmanned DoD payloads" all the time. If it was the 1960s I could accept a Saturn V with one....

• Commented on Does SMD Have a Bias Against Venus?

  People want to know about places we might go some day or might use. Icelands, not Greenlands. I can envision, maybe a few hundred years down the line, people living on Mars and the moons of Saturn. Venus? Not for...

• Commented on Sudden Self-doubt in Russia

  I'd be careful taking that Pravda too seriously. There's a lot of sensationalist, Weekly World News tabloid-type garbage, articles about perpetual motion machines and magical reaction-less drives and news articles that use terms like "hormonal bitch" for Condolezza Rice. There's...

• Commented on A Startup Project Worthy Of Your Support

  I'm pretty confused by it all. There seem to be multiple companies mentioned in different articles and neither the Kickstarter page nor the associated company's webpages mention Moonbase Alpha. In any case, if they can't find investors or money, it's...

• Commented on A Startup Project Worthy Of Your Support

  The article you linked said the first installment was due in 2010 ("next year" in 2009). A year or two delay is normal. A game like this ought to take 3 years or so. It should also cost a lot...

• Commented on Why Can't Everyone Get A Chance To Name Things on Mars?

  I had the impression that the IAU is more of a tool so that everyone can refer to something and everyone else knows what they're talking about, hence official jargon and "what's a planet" debates. This gets too emotionally charged....

• Commented on SpaceX - Becoming a Market Leader?

  FWIW, Paypal needs to be a pretty high reliability product; minor typos or bugs can result in hackers modifying financial data or in the system ruining that data on its own. This is not easy to do. Even very serious...

• Commented on Earth View Helps Mental Health

  For some reason it's never occurred to me how amazing it'd be to be on the Moon or Mars at night. If anyone ever goes there again, they oughtta have a window on the ceiling....

• Commented on Musk Talks About Getting to Mars

  Well there was this winged booster that recovered from orbital velocities like a hundred, thirty something times. *Ducks out of swatting distance* Also the SRBs. To my untrained eye the entry and landing looks about like what the SRBs have...

• Commented on NASA Releases Vesta Images

  It's not the New York Times, but here it is on the front page of Yahoo! news. Yahoo is one of the biggest on the internet by a wide margin and not much of an intellectual hangout. So I'll throw...

• Commented on Musk Talks About Getting to Mars

  In any case, they're a long way away from that being something they have to deal with. I think they've made excellent decisions on everything they've bothered to actually do. And solar power is under active development is the way...

• Commented on The Solid Rocket Lobby - and Utah - Have Been Busy in Congress

  As would the fact that the two largest launch vehicles ever built used no solids except for ullage motors....

• Commented on NASA Releases Vesta Images

  While it's always important to improve, space & NASA has a lot of devoted fans, evangelists, books written on it and enough enthusiasm to get pretty decent funding. We're all PR people. I don't know exactly what you want NASA...

• Commented on Musk Talks About Getting to Mars

  The guy's comments seemed a tad off-topic anyway. Wasn't he talked about electric propulsion? It comes up every so often how to power electric propulsion and a few folks here have suggested that the mass per watt is actually better...