I'd rather see people killed trying to advance humanity's reach into the stars than killing each other because rich people fooled them into fighting people they've never met on the other side of the globe.

Tough week to be a spaceman. :(

Oh well. We were trapped like insects in amber by relativity anyway.

We're "trapped" like kids in a candy store complaining that there's only all the candy we can eat, rather than infinite candy. Even if we never get FTL, it'll still take us thousands of years before we run out of cool things to do here in our own little solar system.

More like kids that can only unwrap one kind of candy with our primitive little fingers. All the other candy is there, but we can't eat it; just look at it though telescopes.

:(

Sometimes when we reach for the stars, we fall short, but we must pick ourselves up again and press on despite the pain. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.

Isn't this what Reagan said when the Challenger blew up?

Also, this wasn't reaching for the stars, it was reaching for a rich celebrity joyride to lower Earth orbit.

Reaching for the stars' wallets.

Not even that. Low Earth Orbit starts at 160 km; your $250,000 Virgin Galactic ticket gets you (someday, maybe) a suborbital hop that includes about four minutes spent above the 100 km "technically you're in space, for a given definition of 'space'" Karman Line.

But the reality for a private organization is that it has to make financial sense along the way. Early adopters of most new technologies are the people with deep pockets that help finance development to go main-stream. For example, Elon Musk's dream isn't to get rich(er) selling high priced eco-status symbols to rich people, it's to push a more environmentally sound technology to the point where it is the obvious and affordable choice for the majority. Similarly, Burt Rutan has partnered with Richard Branson and Northrop Grumman to make attaining his dream of routine space flight financially practical.

So are we going with false flag ops to distract from Benghazi or that the Military Industrial Complex is eliminating the competition?

Reptilians working to keep the human space program stuck in the 60s.

Hell, that would be an improvement: at least in the 60s we could make it to the moon.

We almost discovered their Moon base. They can't let that happen.

I'm tellin you man, V was real...they're everywhere man, damn reptiles.

"Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
President John F. Kennedy, 1962

You forgot, "And so we can develop ways to send a missile to Russia strapped with nukes very quickly, and then stockpile those."

"We choose to send a few Americans to the moon as a pointless publicity stunt instead of embarking on a sensible, long-term, science-based, international program of space exploration for the good of all humanity because the Rooskies made my weenie feel small!"

The Worst Goddamn President Since That Bastard Lincoln, 1962

Everything I hear about this movie makes me less interested.

Instellar black hole physics

(weird interface, keep scrolling down)

this will make great fuel against the republicans for the midterms