Winter Man

Even if ejecting a hidden thingymabob from a fairing induced a little temporary lag, you could hide it with an animation of the fairing slowly detaching and locking out controls for a couple of seconds.

Cheers for that. It just popped into my head as a 'I can't see why not' kind of thing and couldn't find any examples of it.

Just a quick thought that googling didn't turn up anything for: Energy and mass being interchangeable and all, do especially energetic photons bend space like a point mass would?

Didn't say rain. There could be a massive tidal wave caused by the obscenely dense Mun.

Stops the rockets getting wet.

That's very true, it'd be nice to see.

Scroll wheel, dude.

Eh? You can just collect antimatter in space, you don't have to generate it. Big charged wire sphere. And yes, it's totally zed (on account of when you extend three spatial dimensions to 6 in some theories, you have x, y, z, xi, yi and zi - the first one needs to be zed ).

There's also Skylon. British not American, but who cares. Space access is space access between allies. Hell, even between former enemies (see: USA sending all astronauts up using Soyuz)!

Let's be honest, by the time we have a practical black hole or zero point-based generator, we'll have FTL. It's all that could power one if current theories hold up. edit: or any respectable quantity of antimatter

Built a 32GB machine when the price plummeted about 8 months ago, but then I kind of need it.

We seem to live in an area relatively devoid of dark matter, actually. If it were inversely proportional to regular matter, we'd see high concentrations of it in the intergalactic void rather than in galaxies themselves, and it would appear to have an antigravity-like effect. I think MOND has got the closest to the truth myself, which does away with dark matter altogether (although it can't explain a couple of things).

I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that it isn't a fiction. We're better off waiting until decent centrifuge-based (no tether breaking here) habitats are up and running, like the one planned by Bigelow, than not using one at all. Muscular atrophy is not at all pleasant. Sure you can stick a load of treadmills in there, but the benefits of artificial gravity outweigh (ha!) the current technological drawbacks.

It means there's a precedent, rather than something they're just pulling out their arse.

*ahem* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_11

Considering the price, that'd make a pretty awesome .22 or .23 update.

Something worth noting: Later on down the line ol' Mr. Musk wants to be able to refuel these heavy main stages (or things of equivalent size) in orbit and land them on Mars. Colonisation is his ultimate longterm goal, it's why he started the company. He's just making sure the tech exists by building his own niche on Earth and driving the cost down, so in a decade or two there's no reason not to go.

^ This. Reboot between tests to be sure you've cleared your caches and whatnot.

Did you account for the Earth getting lighter thus requiring less energy each subsequent launch?

Probably North Korea's, judging by their 'very Kerbal' satellite launches!

I'm aware of the milliards and billiards, just didn't think it was still written and pronounced as 'billion', more 'bilion' (with an accent in there somewhere).

Does anywhere still? Or at least, anywhere that calls it 'billion'?

The moon's an obvious first step, it being so much closer and all. 5 day resupply beats the hell out of waiting a year and a bit after a request (although Rickenbacker's customers would probably be quite at home). Order of business for Mars, once it's been tried out on the moon, is to grow food. Water can be recycled, as can air to a certain extent.

On the whole 'direct imaging' thing, it's not possible (if you're a pedant at least, because we don't have the tech to see hawking radiation at 1x10^-silly Kelvin), but check this out. Pretty cool way of getting close. http://www.space.com/21866-black-hole-event-horizon-telescope-technology.html

Who knows, if the Empire had been a little less tax-y and exploitative, maybe we'd all be living under one world rule by now. Because let's be honest, much like the Roman empire before it, it did bring genuine standard-of-life benefits to a lot of places (when not enslaving or enforcing foreign laws).