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Just to clarify - Orion is a partially reusable spaceship, developed by NASA with Lockheed Martin as the prime contractor, while SLS is a non-reusable launch vehicle, developed by NASA with Boeing as the largest contractor. SLS has been a poster child for cost overruns and delays - but so far is still intended to launch the crewed missions to Gateway, while it was never intended to launch the non-crewed Gateway launches.

NASA is looking at domestic commercial launchers powerful enough to reach lunar orbit for non-crewed elements of Gateway. As far as we know now of what will be available at the intended launch time in 2024, that will be SpaceX Falcon Heavy, ULA Vulcan, or Blue Origin New Glenn.

Falcon Heavy has the advantage that it's already in service. The other two are currently expected to make their maiden flights late this year.

It's possible that SpaceX could get Starship ready for launch by 2024 too, at their aggressive rate of development, which would be super cool, though it's early to order for launch services.

I'm super excited about returning people to the Moon. But Lunar Gateway is a bad mission architecture that really reduces the cost-effectiveness of returning to the Moon. It costs way more delta-v to reach the Gateway and then proceed to the lunar surface than just to go straight to the surface.

A brief rundown of authoritative criticisms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Gateway#Reactions

I really hope the new administration takes the opportunity to revise the mission architecture.

I've really come to admire Satya Nadella as a great CEO.

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http://x-r.ai/ is working on a patent attorney AI to automate a lot of patent attorney work to resolve patent disputes more quickly and cheaply.

Patent owners could use it too, but overall it would make invalidating patents and resolving patent disputes faster, easier, and cheaper.

Most patents are probably not valid, and most patents used in licensing offers / threats are probably not strong enough to avoid being invalidated or found not infringed if litigated, but the would-be licensor / troll counts on the threatened party to settle rather than pay millions of dollars for litigation.

While there aren't any easy tactical solutions and a policy fix is a dim hope, we should be able to at least partly solve the problem by training an AI to do automated and thorough prior art search and analysis relevant to a patent, so a lot of the legwork of a patent litigation threat becomes orders of magnitude faster and cheaper, and it becomes vastly easier and less intimidating for a trolling target to respond to a patent threat like this, and quickly get their focus and resources back to developing their technology. Software eats patent attorneys, and reduces the burden of patents on the technology community.

(disclaimers: I am a patent attorney and I'm currently working full-time on coding a patent search & analysis AI service, this is not legal advice, etc.)

Thanks, this looks great.

The author, Andrea Ghez, is one of the leading researchers on observing the center of our galaxy, and the stars that orbit the central black hole, among other things.

Looking for more, Paul. This from a Swiss news site says he had previously reported threats to the police, S3's data center was broken into and flooded with a fire hose, and that he remained in the hospital in serious condition with burns on his torso, arm, neck, and face, and would likely need transplants:

http://www.24heures.ch/vaud-regions/patron-s3-sauvagement-ag...

This one speculates on a connection with the SpaceX explosion, but has no new info:

http://www.bilan.ch/techno-plus-de-redaction/pascal-jaussi-u...

Swiss Space's web page's last press release is from 2014. There are threads on reddit and nasaspaceflight also just with speculation and no new info:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/518zy3/pascal_...

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=31278.140

The breakout-success rate thus far is also skewed low by YC's growth curve. Things have still just begun.

This site was built as a side project by one guy who got it acquired by Planetary Resources.

He's got some other fun projects: http://www.ianww.com/

Yes, brief sitting meditation and running meditation every day. There's evidence of physical and mental health benefits. It seems to help bring calmness, focus, and new ideas.

This stylometry analysis is 95% of a stylometry obfuscator/homogenizer.

More generalized, compassion and integrity seem to be in a positive feedback loop with drivers of technological and economic growth.

Gov't contracts are only something like one-third of SpaceX's revenues.

Yes -- even a breakeven on the satellite business that pays for more launches would be a big win, though I don't think SpaceX would do this without having good ideas for a niche with decent margins. But I wonder if this might mean foregoing potential future launch business with other satellite providers who would see SpaceX as a competitor instead of just launch service provider.

Me too. Add fires to energy consumption among the perverse results skeptics will harp on for the arbitrary constraints imposed by bitcoin.

Fitting that this comes just after Bezos also finally does something overtly public with Blue Origin (last month's ULA deal press conference), and that both efforts still seem, relative to time invested & return at stake, remarkably lame.

Progress on all fronts is driving the progress in exoplanets. The Kepler space telescope has been a huge driver, and Hubble, Spitzer, and big ground-based telescopes have played a big role; this new discovery is based on Hubble and Spitzer data runs plus comparison with Kepler data. Exoplanet search will take a giant leap with the planned launch of the TESS space telescope in 2017.

But this exoplanet was first discovered by a small network of at the time 6 extremely modest telescopes (just 110mm / ~4.3 inch objective diameter) automatically controlled by one Linux box in a project built by Gaspar Bakos when he was a student in Hungary.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0282

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gbakos/

Still, modern launch vehicle human ratings were only developed after the second Shuttle disaster, and are far beyond 1965 standards.

http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?Internal_ID=N_PR_...

Falcon 9 v1.1 is almost certainly safer than the Titan II Gemini Launch Vehicle. As with prior Dragon flights, humans could have flown and been just fine.

It's Lockheed Martin that still insists on using imperial units instead of SI, even after the loss of mission that confusion caused in their work with metric-using JPL on Mars Climate Orbiter.

This 14-day interval between Falcon 9 launches was the fastest consecutive launch since Gemini 7 & 6A in December 4 & 15, 1965.

SpaceX plans to beat that record soon with launches a week apart becoming routine.

Given sama's enthusiasm for SpaceX, including as a "great example" in his blog post on the original new RFS, it seems unambitious for the RFS to mention space only in the context of robots and science.

"What comes after programming languages?"

Maybe somewhere in the direction Meteor and Light Table are heading?

"That's mostly a policy problem, not a technology problem."

That's the point though: the right insight might provide a technology solution to what everyone could only think of as a policy problem.

Landing is also a way less serious range safety concern than taking off because the rocket is essentially empty of fuel, rather than full of fuel.

Alan Boyle reports "first-stage reignited during descent and video was being sent back." https://twitter.com/b0yle/statuses/457248899464314880