Paying migrant workers 10 cents an hour to inspect the safety of deep space life support systems sounds like a fail-safe idea!

He's taken too many trips into Paul Allen's Sci-Fi piece of blob shit. Hey Holden, why don't you and the SECB take the city's homeless on a field trip to Paul Allen's techno space blob?
Go goodspaceguy! Model yourself on Paul Allen. Spend millions on your masturbatory fantasy, for the sake of "advancement" and slash at yuppie wallets, then as an afterthought, consider the homeless.

best post of the week

also what is up with that whiteboard is that for dead tree layouts? mysterious boxes....

Oh, Goodspaceguy <3

Wow.

Sometimes even an acorn finds a blind squirrel.

We need to invest in technology that allows us to travel to asteroids. This is very important for a few reasons.

Asteroids that just pass by our planet, are in the keyhole and wich each pass of our planet, it gets closer and closer and will eventually hit the planet. We need to send space craft to those asteroids and push them out of our orbit (out of the keyhole), blowing them up is just f**king stupid.

If you can push an asteroid out of the way, then it needs to be refinded so that it can be steered somewhere else, lets say an orbiting moon base that accept the asteroid and then mines it for all its worth, thus eliminating the need to launch raw materials into space. But the orbiting moon base would need to be HUGE in order to capture an asteroid the size of a stadium, bring it in and allow for pressure to normalize so that humans can mine it without space suits (which limit mobility and require alot of power to keep them cool as its very hot in orbit when the sun hits you directly).

Going to Mars is stupid, waste of time and money because theres no way to shield the astronaughts on the journey. Our planets magneticsphere protects us, even in orbit, but once you travel outside it, you are vulnerable to cosmic rays and radiation. You could send someone to mars, have them return safely, but they would probably have early stage cancer. If we can develop a radiation shield around the craft, then were good to go to Mars. Until then, it might as well be a one way trip.

If we can research a way to mass produce carbon nanotubes, then a space elevator would then be an option and we wouldnt need rockets to send men and materials into space.

RANDAL: Well, the thing is, the first Death Star was manned by the Imperial army-storm troopers, dignitaries-
the only people onboard were Imperials.

DANTE: Basically.

RANDAL: So when they blew it up, no prob. Evil is punished.

DANTE: And the second time around? .

RANDAL: The second time around, it wasn't
even finished yet. They were still under construction.

DANTE: So?

RANDAL: A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.

DANTE: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at.

RANDAL: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main?
All they know is killing and white uniforms.

DANTE: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?

RANDAL: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed-casualties of a war they had nothing to do with.
All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius.

Kinison @8, I get the feeling your surface just got scratched. You need to start running for office every single election. You and Goodspaceguy and Stan "Vaccines Are Killing Us" Lippmann should form a slate of candidates - with the new, looser guidelines for voters' guides there's no telling what loopy-lit classic position statements you three could create together.

You could be the "Unregulated-Wage Nonvaccinated Asteroid Miners' Club" or something. Will in Seattle could be your political consultant.

i remain convinced he is in the middle of A VERY ELABORATE and long-term political art performance. right? oh god.

He's kind of loony, so I doubt this what he meant by "What we send to orbit should stay in orbit" but it is the correct thing to say about Shuttle External Fuel Tank. The cost per pound to orbit is thousands of dollars, those things weigh 60,000 pounds empty, and as soon as the Shuttle gets into orbit they are jettisoned and then de-orbit themselves to crash in the Indian Ocean.

NASA set up study groups on re-using them (ex: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.n… ) in orbit but never did. We could have more than 100 of them orbiting now in various uses. Even the unused hollow areas of the tank (beneath the aerodynamic cone top) is larger in volume than the Shuttle cargo bay.

The Shuttle really did seem to miss the mark on all the things it could have been but never did. Let's hope we get something inspiring for NASA to accomplish with it gone.

If it weren't for terrorists and their Republicant enablers, the space elevators would have driven down the cost to lift things into space dramatically by this point.

@8: Well, at least we all know Goodspaceguy's Slog handle now.

@12, that's kind of what I meant about the acorn. He's off his rocker, but he's still right about the shuttle being a boondoggle and the exact opposite of what it was sold to the public as (i.e., a pickup truck).

I eagerly anticipate his proposal to eliminate the job-killing minimum work age so all those tykes can rejoin the workforce and I can finally get my chimney cleaned the old-fashioned way.

"those in leisure"?

Job killing minimum wage? Goodspaceguy and Rob McKenna might have something in common: "But [McKenna] said a high minimum wage contributes to increased unemployment among young workers and minorities, and he suggested that a “training wage” could create jobs and opportunities for young people to learn work and life skills." http://www.columbian.com/news/2011/jan/0…

Imagine if we not only abolished the minimum wage, but instead required workers to pay their masters, er, 'employers' for the blessing of being allowed to work?

I think we'd have 110% employment at that point.

@10

Except most of what I said was what I overheard at the Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture last month at the UW.

We need to find better ways to land space craft to push asteroids out of our orbit, because the only people worried about the next asteroid, is Russia and technically its going to smash off the coast of California. USA doesnt seem interested in doing anything about this.

Once we streamline that method, we can put it to use to mine asteroids in the kuiper belt. Almost all the precious metals we have on Earth, were formed during the birth of our solar system. Theres gold in dem thar belts.

In space, no one can hear you scream about your lousy marketarian paycheck.

i voted for this guy once. just because i could. god bless america.

He's been saying this for years. The amazing thing is that he turns up with a tie and a clean pressed shirt and a suit. Someone cares enough about him to dress him; someone got him to show up to the interview with Slog. He obviously eats enough to stay alive. He's not completely gone. It's kind of touching.

@24. I would wear that outfit! well, not the name tag...

I don’t know what he’s been smoking, but I wouldn’t have wanted any even back in the 70’s. What a loon! As for abolishing unions and the minimum wage, hey that’s been business as usual in China for some time, anyone out there want to live like their workforce?