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Not so fast Vincent, it's still 6 days and 6 hours  ... every day counts.

Real-Time Simulation

The flag pin is a national symbol, it is not to be worshiped.  It is quite appropriate for a country at war.

So the people should "kick the governments asses" until they do what the people want, and who exactly represents the people and decides which asses to kick? The unelected media?

The government is elected to represent the people on the basis of a party policy, it's not a perfect system, but it works better than any other.

From Constellation Enabled Missions (PDF 8MB) - 18 Jul 2007

The are plenty of NEOs to keep explorers busy for a while!

Looks like a dune field to me.

Yep, it's in the plan.

Yep. And to complete the system it would rendezvous with a reusable transit vessel that would be refueled by lunar/Martian ISRU supplied by reusable tankers.

Reusable from Earth to LEO, then space based fuel the rest of the way again and closed life support. Should be quite game for passengers guessing who previously ate their food. For Mars EDL/ascent again a reusable craft would be needed.

Of course all this is at least one more generation of space craft along or perhaps two.

GLAST Gets Shades, Blankets for the Beach - 13 May 2008

Yes, it's an impressive piece of work - probably about 100 frames each taken with 3 filters - so about 300 images. Getting the light conditions balanced needs images to be taken at the same time each day, so an astronaut may need to return several times to complete it. Travel to location and setup time starts to add up.

The tricky part is estimating the cost of astronaut time. A crew of six can't all be exploring every day as they need to recover and maintain their hab and equipment. Using the same basis as MER one would have to count the entire development cost which would be a LOT of dosh (probably far more than $30billion, maybe ten times that). Otherwise one could try to estimate the replacement cost of a rover and use an estimated cost per human mission. Human missions initially will be about 500 sols on Mars. The MERs have lasted over 1400 sols. So a lot of unknowns, play with the assumptions and almost any answer is possible. It's very hard to see that a human on Mars could take that photo as cheaply as a robot, unless they used a robot to take it

Video of ISS fly over - 12 May 2008 - from spaceweather.com

Gotta see these amazingly clear images from such a small scope!

The point was a general one about technology not breakthroughs. Free markets allow the fast transfer of technologies between markets and states. Most democracies support free markets even though protectionism is still rife, controls are fast disappearing as globalization speeds up this process to everyone's benefit.

As to your examples:

Yes, ballistic missiles, GPS and nuclear weapons were all the result of government military programs.

The Internet is a collection of technologies, most of which were privately developed. The underlying TCP/IP protocol was developed by government for military networks, but it was just an extension of other network protocols. The real breakthrough happened when the Internet was commercialized and private enterprise constructed its vast infrastructure and provided an enormous number of services.

The breakthrough developments in microchips were done by private industry (namely Fairchild)

Cheap cars were not exactly a "breakthrough" or a technology. The technology was mass production and that was done by the private sector, namely Ford Motor Company.

Yes, and it's even clearer in the section about using commercial services. RKA, ESA and JAXA would all want to send their astronauts to the Outpost. A trip there is going to be very expensive, the ticket price will be beyond everyone else except billionaires and it won't make much sense until the Outpost is fully functional and the basic exploration work is complete.

Anyone think this is useful?