Shuttle over the bridge

It inspired a generation? A bygone age where America actually seemed to live up to it's "leader of the free world" slogan?

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But you aren't the kind of engineer who knows the numbers, or even where to start looking for them.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

We could use cheaper gold. It has lots of interesting applications, if it just hadn't been so expensive. It's so wasteful to just hoard the stuff.

Jeroen Belleman

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And what - precisely - are those robots going to be doing?

That's been going on for years. I don't think that there are yet any asteroid-mapping telescopes in orbit - Nrw Scientist has reported a private initiative that hopes to get one up in 2017.

You might first ask how nuking it would help. A nuclear bomb doesn't have a lot of mass, and while it might make one side of the asteroid quite warm, it's less obvious that the orbit of the asteroid would be significantly changed.

Drilling a hole into the asteroid, and burying the bomb before you set it off, might split it into several fragments, each with a slightly different orbit from the original satellite. You'd want to check that none of the fragments were going to hit the earth, and would need to be equipped to repeat the operation.

This would probably need human supervision. The discussions of asteroid deflection I've seen don't seem all that fond of the single nuclear bomb appraoch.

"If you can put enough mass into space to deflect an asteroid or a comet, throwing in a human or two and their life-support is very likely to be a small - but worthwhile - extra investment."

Life support includes radiation shielding. It's already figured into trips to Mars.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Worse, we throw so much away: cheap electronics in landfills.

I'd like cheap diamond. That's all sorts of cool, starting with heatsinks. And cutting tools.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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There is one obvious one, embodied in the ISS, which has been mentioned - the capacity to do sustained experiments in a weightless environment.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The Do's & Don'ts of an Engineering student.

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The list is too long to copy:

"Broken Window" fallacy.

That sounds like an idea for a new program. Genius!

Old windows are bad, ruining the climate ... those people need to be fined, do their fair share--for the common good--etc. Slap ten billion and a coat of green paint on it, and ship it.

BTW, Atlas Shrugged pt. II coming out 10.12.12. And Citizens United's The Hope and the Change is cycling on TV now. The CU YouTube trailer is pretty good. Darn good.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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A lot of those are the physiological effects of flying humans in space, something you wouldn't need to know if you weren't doing that. But hey, the frankenstein flora/fauna experiments are cool--maybe they can breed a new radiation-resistant invasive species. Maybe we could even send it to invade^H^H^H^H^Hterraform other planets.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

So it's claimed. We seem to have inspired a lot of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll. NASA Tech Briefs sure didn't inspire me; it took forever to get them to stop sending me that junk.

A bygone age where America actually seemed to

Imagine if all those hundreds of billions had been spent doing real good.

That's a capacity. I was hoping someone could name a useful result.

About 20 years ago I had a summer job at Fokker Space in the microgravity department. There are many experiments which can only be conducted at low or close to zero gravity. If 'vomit commets', free fall towers, etc are insufficient then there is only one place left: space

Mostly silly science-fair make-work.

CCISS - Space travel can be dizzying[96]

Great stuff.

A nuke would deliver about 6 orders of magnitude more energy than anything else. It could ablate meters of surface off one side, ejecting it at high velocity. That would be a huge momentun kick.

All we'd want to do is alter its orbit slightly, not blow it to bits.

From the ground, of course.

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I heard that a large number of todays 'best and brightest' are being hired by homeland security (and other 'spin off' departments) to figure out how to find terrorist's by monitoring cells phones and email. I'm probably on some list now for using terrorist twice in one usernet post . :^)

George H.

.highlandtechnology.com=A0 jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

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Diamond ice cream scoop. (hand heat will melt the ice cream.)

George H.

What an ass you are. I design electronics used to test jet engines, control the world's biggest laser, expose a good fraction of the world's silicon wafers, do instrumentation for several different kinds of analytical chemistry, and you do nothing.

This weekend I designed an e/o modulator driver, just for fun. Some number of numbers were involved. I'm doing the PCB layout now, because The Brat is too busy doing more important stuff. Sometimes these little projects sell, sometimes they don't.

This is the sort of small-project thing you might be able to do, but you won't. Something having to do with imagination.