nknight

The capsules holding astronauts obviously have to land intact at some point, unless you thought we sent all astronauts prior to the Shuttle up to their deaths. The Shuttle's uncontrollable SRBs have been jettisoned and recovered after every flight.

Reusability is of no ground-safety consequence. By basic physical law, these devices will be very nearly empty of fuel by the time they reach the ground -- in fact almost all fuel will have been expended within minutes of liftoff.

The first stage of a Falcon 9 has a dry mass less than a 14-seat Gulfstream V business jet, the Dragon capsule is less than 1/3rd that.

If you trust thousands of planes to fly through the air over and into major cities every day without killing thousands of people on the ground, you should trust spacecraft far, far more.

> Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful.

Oh please. Space operations grew directly out of unbridled Cold War militarism, and have been pure political football at least since the approval of the absolutely insane space shuttle program.

I want high taxes, I want big government, I want single-payer health care, I want a welfare and social security system that makes Scandinavia look like a libertarian wasteland. I want ten times the corporate regulation we have now.

But there is no reason for the government to be the primary driver or provider of routine space launch services, especially when it's done such a piss-poor job of it since Apollo.

Private companies like SpaceX have ample incentive to advance the state of the art in launch services and are demonstrably doing so for less than the government has ever managed before. NASA can and should take advantage of that.

Where exactly have you lived that you've avoided knowledge of Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, the Space Shuttle, Skylab, Salyut, Mir, the International Space Station, and the thousands of observation, spy, communications, and scientific satellites that have been launched since Sputnik in 1957?

WTF?!

I'd call that more like three orders of magnitude, and the world has been launching rockets and landing capsules since 1961. Nothing even remotely like what you are speaking of has ever come remotely close to happening.

No one launches rockets over populated areas, nobody aims capsules for populated areas, the CIA spent the 1960s recovering CORONA satellite film canisters with such precision they captured them with planes in mid-air.

Stop fear-mongering.

No, in many cases these are actual, realized losses, as in "we bought at this price and sold at this much lower price". They have no money, and no stock. Recovery of the stock is irrelevant to them.

The problem I have with this attitude is that transparency only helps if people are paying attention.

Americans aren't paying attention.

He's actually wrong. Starcraft introduced usernames/passwords and unique names to Battle.net in early 1998. The support was then patched into Diablo 1.05. Diablo I's Battle.net functionality did not originally include usernames/passwords at all.

It was quite a strange little architecture, initially. Your displayed name was whatever you'd named your character, with the distinguishing feature being an "account number" that could be re-generated by deleting a file in your Diablo directory (the corollary being if you didn't back the file up, your account number would change upon a reformat or migration to a new computer).

I decline to engage in a debate with someone who has decided he can divine my worldview from a single comment about privately-owned search engines.

Hint: I'm a socialist.