Kerbface

I'm not totally sure what you mean with the first part of (A) there, but in regards to cost, is cafeteria food in the US free? If so, why do kids have lunch money? I mean when it comes to paying for crappy food or paying for less crappy food you know what I'd pick. As for B, yes, it's true, you usually can not have hot food brought from home (except maybe if it's in a thermos) but if your school food sucks that much, I don't see how this is a better option than room temperature food from home. Unless you can't bear to eat anything that isn't warm. I mean I went most of my school life without hot food at lunch and I lived. But that's just me.

The thing that gives most of the lifelong reccomended occupational dose of radiation is mostly the trip there and back, on the surface, it's a significantly smaller issue on the surface plus there's plenty of dirt to help deal with it. Additionally, this reccomended dose only gives a 3% increase of cancer risk, and that's based on more concentrated doses in the first place. As for water, if they use it as the primary radiation shielding on the way there, they could bring some of it down. Water can be recycled plenty of times though I'm sure some would be lost to evaporation over time, so they'd want to find some way of either getting it from the atmosphere or making sure they land near an area where ice-water is accessible. If people were to go with the life-time colony route, I expect it'd be a multi-step process that builds the base up to a fairly significant size, at least eventually 20 people or something.

There will be no breeding animals on Mars (or at least any early settlements). Livestock is an utter waste of resources because you have to grow plants and then feed them to the animals. They'd just have to live with a vegetarian diet once their Earth-brought supplies run out.

Everyone always complains their school serves crappy food. Ever heard of bringing food from home? Is this some taboo in the states or something?

These replies are all very interesting.

I don't want a lot out of an operating system. I want it to be easy to use, unintrusive, clear, compatible with the programs I want to run, not buggy, and fast. Windows 7 was all of these except fast and bug free. I am glad that Windows 8 is faster. I have not used it enough to determine if it is buggy. But I can't stand the interface changes. They do not make anything easier and as has been mentioned many times before are clearly touchscreen focused. Not clear, not intuitive or unintrusive, not user friendly. Fortunately I've heard that many of these problems can be fixed with a traditional interface addon so when I get a new computer I'll get that.

"Who created the universe?" "That... is not important." "Tell me!" "Alright... it was... Slatrtibartfast." "What?" "I told you it wasn't important."

The last page of this thread is hilarious.

Doesn't look that comfortable to hold.

By that logic you could say also that there are essentially no missions orbiting Earth, when you compare it to the number of missions on the ground. There are plenty of "space missions" even excluding Earth-orbiting ones. If we put more stuff into orbit would that make there fewer space missions?

There's an aspen grove that's the single oldest and largest known living organism on Earth.

It didn't work.

If Sputnik is attatched to the rocket, it would be considered either first due to being "in front" or equal first due to being connected to the other first object and thus technically reaching orbit at the same time.

Just wondering, what's the necessity of this when the side hatch isn't connected to an airlock anyway, so it's essentially the same as the docking hatch? It just opens an area large enough for a human to get through. Couldn't they evacuate the craft and do EVA when necessary with the docking hatch?

I wonder at what time something will happen...

How lucky and unusual that I checked in just before it starts.

Additionally, didn't he basically say this was open source and anyone could make it without going through him or his company?

Such a smooth landing. Of course it's yet to be seen how this will go for long return flights, but pretty impressive so far.

It's not quite accurate, but it reminds me of this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM#t=1m10s In case the time link doesn't work, it's 1m 10s.

I'm intrigued. What flaws do they share?

To me Dreamchaser is sounding more like the shuttle was, as far as I'm aware, originally supposed to have been.

You don't, but you don't have to live either. I wish I had an infinite number of wishes and all of them would be answered in the manner I intended them to be in my head, without being corrupted due to insufficient detail, poor phrasing or any other reason. EDIT: Dernit!

Slavery enforced by water! Genius! It's flawless. Only what if it's hot out, he might want to get wet. Damn. It was so close to perfect.

Less than 1G is just closer to zero G. There is no way partial G could NOT be helpful to astronauts, and it certainly can't have any worse or different effects than zero G (having a too small radius or too high a rotation speed is a different issue). It WOULD minimise the negative effects of zero G, the question is simply how much. But people's bone mass, for example, would surely not degrade below the level required for comfortable standing on the level of gravity they have in the ship.

Well, there is a lot of disagreement on the exact maximum RPM that could be liveable (though full 1G is certainly not necessary to minimise the effects, might be needed if you wanted permanent habitation with the ability for future generations to get back to Earth without trouble), there haven't been many tests (and all on Earth so the sideways (to the person in the centrifuge) force of gravity is a factor) but usually the figure I've heard for reasonable comfort for most, or at least after a time to get used to it, is between 2 and 4 RPM max. But I have heard of some cases where people were able to cope with higher. But on a pedantic note, how is the split difference between "hundreds of metres" and "not really hundreds of metres" "a couple of hundred metres"?