My ballpark estimate would be that they could launch missions like this at least 500x -1000x for the price of one manned mission with return.

My guess is that the people who would do that (except for the part about the $830M misssion only being about this one experiment) are the people who have to deal withthe reality that they couldn’t lift a fully functional drilling rig to Mars, so they used a pointy bit of metal with a small weight inside it that…

And 1,200 children (twelve hundred) have DIED from measles in Madagascar. Are you offering us the number in Ukraine as goal we should try to reach?

A thousand cases in the US is something like 10x the average number of reported cases over the last 20 years. There’s been documented transmission between people here in the US; this event is not restricted to people who contracted the disease overseas and carried it home like an especially shitty souvenir. So yes,…

Of course the media wants you to get vaccinated, dipshit. EVERYONE wants you to get vaccinated.

That might be due to a <50% vaccination rate, vaccine shortages, and civil unrest, but I could be wrong. 

I’m glad that no matter how much things change and how much the world moves on, you’re still here fighting your crusade against astronauts for mostly bathroom-related reasons.  Consistency!

I imagine that’s something like trying to interchange use a wood drill or a metal drill and not woring properly, so they have to adapt it without another tool kit

These things are super-tightly balanced for mass, so they can fit as much scientific experiment instrumentation and the power needed for it on there as possible. They probably could have made the drill more robust and give it more maneuverability, but that might have come at the cost of one of the other instruments.

“the absurdity of spending $830 million and 10 years to design, fund, and launch a mission that then can’t be completed when a 6-year-old with a cheap plastic beach shovel would do.”

It seems odd that the drill mechanism was so highly specialized that a relatively small difference in soil quality could make it non-functional. But I guess that’s interplanetary space engineering for you.

Nope, that’s natural gas 😆

Depends on the flux capacitors, doesn’t it?

Imagine waking from a coma. It was 2015 the last time you read the news. Imagine reading this article as your introduction to 2019. Imagine letting out the an existentially-charged screech of “WTF?!” tinged with the true vibrato of anguish. Just wait until we explain about the rest...

Lifelong Albertan here. This is the absolute earliest I can remember our city being choked out by smoke. Air quality is a 10+, something we didn’t hit until August last year. This has become the new normal around here, though generally as a result of BC forest fires and our generally westerly-flow. However, we have…

Not that this is related, but $150 is too much for what looks like a gimmicky little toy. Maybe the games will be amazing and I’ll be proven wrong, but ehhhhhhhhhhh.

FWIW the chances of this happening are approximately zero.

Yeah, like the ones I saw at night with my buddies in the 70's.

Apple can maintain its App Store, and it should perhaps lock down everything by default, but they should allow users to disable it and install third-party software if they so choose, just like a computer. Creating a functional monopoly is both anti-competitive and anti-consumer.

These aren’t mutually exclusive, you judgmental ass. And i was trying to generate a bit of dark humor, but since that was obviously lost on you, let’s examine, shall we?