Kryten

Why do you assume a rover wouldn't be able to find something like the genesis rock, for example? After all, it could have a lot more time at the landing site than any plausible human mission.

That they can do less than a human is absolutely not the same thing as saying they can't do enough for the mission to work. Doing analysis at the landing site isn't terribly useful anyway, you'd never be able to launch anything comparable to what we have in labs on earth. All you need is some photographs and quick spectroscopic anlyses (or just grabbing surrounding rocks as well), and you've put your sample/s into context.

Bion-M has returned to earth; apparently had some major equipment failures. All the gerbils, the fish, and almost all of the mice (39/45) are dead .

You can do that easily enough with a simple rover. Even something like curiosity would be a lot cheaper to send along (and, crucially, not bring back) than even a single human.

Are we on the same planet here? We're talking about a western space project in the 21st century. If everything goes as well as could possibly be expected, they'll probably over-run the reported timeframe by about 30% or so.

In that case replace 'russia' with 'nasa', and the sentence still makes sense.

I like how Russia is supposed to have a moonbase before work on their HLV is supposed to be finished (so at least a decade before it will be finished...).

Why will it need to happen? What could possibly happen to the earth to make it less habitable than, say, Mars?

If that was true, ESA wouldn't exist at all. It's entire focus is unmanned research done on the cheap. It'd also mean Apollo wouldn't have been cancelled before it even got anywhere, N1 would have gone forward, et.c. etc.c. It's seeing the world as you want it to be, not how it is.

If we lose ten sample return missions due to mistakes easily fixed by humans for every one that works, that'll still be value for money, easily. Looking at actual missions, we've achieved a lot better than that.

It won't be clear if they'll be up to it? They've been doing it since 1970. There's some very simple arithmetic involved in which is cheaper; if I want to return a rock sample; do I return the rock sample, or the rock sample and a person, who has to be kept alive?

If the hypothesis said that if you make a device in exactly this way it would act as an FTL drive, and it didn't, it would be falsified. My point is it says nothing of the sort. It simply throws in some nearly-meaningless generic terms for fictional FTL drives.

Because playing games isn't the same as allocating budgets. Do you think everyone who plays GTA is in favour of randomly shooting people?

Manned spaceflight is a black hole that's absorbing all the money that could be used for something useful. Look what Apollo actually did for NASA funding; it was cut down below the point they could sustain it before Apollo 11 even landed.

You convince people the budget is being spent wisely by spending most of it on the things that are least cost-effective? Are you a congressman by any chance?

Robotic sample return would still be far cheaper than sending humans anywhere.

What's the point of doing those? Robots can explore far cheaper, and frequently better.

What would be the point of having a lunar outpost?

What's the point in going for a shuttle at all if you're throwing engines away anyway?

Those are extremely generic descriptors. Say I have I have a prototype Aclubierre[sic] drive, and I turn it on, and nothing happens. Have I been able to disprove the statement above? Or do I just need to rejig the flux capacitor, or the lambda core, or just use a totally different design? A hypothesis needs to be able to make specific predictions to be testable, and that one simply doesn't.

2/10. Look like a reasonably active member, but never actually seen you.

Except there's no 'the device' to be found in that statement. It just says it's possible, somehow.

That's not an experimentally falsifiable hypothesis. It's useless.

How many of these physical discoveries are overturning basic laws like causality and conservation of energy?

There are two options here; 1) Our understanding of extremely basic physical laws in 1926 meant it would be impossible for a rocket to reach space. 2) The reporter in a non-scientific publication had no clue what they were talking about. 1 is required for your example to actually be relevant, but doesn't work any time after Newton, never mind Einstein. 2 happens every day.