One would think if there were anything to it, it would have made some kind of news since. Even a fleeting scintilla of something promising surely would have spawned a wave of clickbaity YouTube vids, no?

I sincerely hope you never get your way, and no such governing body is created- at least not until most people could have access to most of the solar system (if they so choose). Developing infrastructure to start moving people, mining operations, and polluting industries- among other things- out of Earth's fragile biosphere is more important than whether or not you, a nobody who knows nothing, are comfortable with some of the smartest and most talented people on the planet poking a rock millions of miles away.

They gonna try to blame this one on a female astronaut too? 🙄

Never give credit to malevolence that's due to incompetence.

SpaceX may make it look easy, but designing and building flight-ready full-flow staged combustion cycle engines is no joke. These people need more Tim Dodd in their lives so they can fully appreciate the gravity (pun intended) of that accomplishment.

They also have New Glenn coming up, and as slow as that's going, I bet it will fly sooner or later and have it's place on the market. Orbital Reef is also really exciting, if for no other reason than the fact that a lot of young and talented engineers will get to cut their teeth on those projects and take that invaluable experience to bigger and more advanced structures.

Relative to well adjusted/normal adults, yes. Obviously they're referring to children with poor self regulatory behavior relative to other children. Were you actually confused about this, or just doing the thing everyone does where they see if they can poke a hole in a study without actually reading it?

Misanthropy is boring

What are batteries generally associated with in this context? OC can choose to identify with who I was teasing, or not. Because beyond that, it was a genuine question.

Would you have such a strong opinion about batteries if Twitter man =/= bad?

Had the Soviets beat us to the moon, more money would have been poured into NASA to catch up and one-up. It's pretty simple, but I guess so are you

Leveraging the cold war for quick cash and public support was obviously a mistake in hindsight. NASA had a whole program planned called "Apollo Applications". Michael Collins talked about it in his book "Carrying the Fire", he was part of the group selecting the astronauts for that program. The general public, thinking the only goal was to beat the Soviets to the lunar surface, would not have allowed it and congress didn't fund it. They went on to build Skylab. Better than nothing, I suppose.

I wish the soviets had beat NASA.

>I think I would feel guilty for spending all of that money that could have helped other people.

Developing the ability to become a spacefaring civilization helps untold trillions of people in the future. All industry should be removed from the surface of the planet and many people should move out of here to alleviate the burden on the biosphere as we take measures to clean up (e.g. carbon capture). Also, most (if not all) major problems in the world cannot be solved simply by throwing money at them.

>I hope I get to live to see the day that middle class people could afford a trip like this though!

A lot of work to be done building a better future. You may yet live in a world where your passage is secured in exchange for useful work. When I think of my future in space, I'm not imagining joyrides- I imagine all the things I might be able to do in space to be useful to the future and turn a small profit. As I said, all industry should be removed from the surface one way or another, sooner or later; we'd all do well to pick something (ideally something that has a net negative impact on life on Earth) and get it out of here.

Nothing about this "rock" is "rotting", you need to relax. We're trying to add places to exist (Luna, Mars, O'Neill cylinders, Stanford toruses), we do not need to replace the Earth.