Sigh. There's nothing that some group won't find a way to protest against. There's a certain percentage of the population that gets off on thinking they're more aware, in a superior way, than ignorant common folk. They tend to think very highly of themselves for taking up a crusade for this or that.

>You can't project today's values back to the people of the past.

Indeed. This is actually a principle subject in the field of historiography - the study of how historians present history. This can differ by generation or another demographic. The term for it is modernism, the application of the worldview of one's (academic) generation to the history of previous decades or centuries.

>SpaceX is selling Falcon launches to Nothrop Grumman to take Cygnus to resupply the ISS -- Cygnus competes with Dragon for the Commercial Resupply program.

True, but SpaceX gains $$$ by the deal and loses no missions. The Cygnus missions that F9 will be covering were already contracted for by NASA for Cygnus. It has certain capabilities Dragon does not, so NASA wouldn't have substituted one for the other and given SpaceX more Dragon missions. The contracted for missions were meant to fly on Antares, of course, but only two of those remain and they will fly their missions. SpaceX wasn't awarded those two.

Labor and other costs are always higher in Europe. Plus the political distribution of work makes for inefficiencies and unnecessary transport costs. Add the complex ESA bureaucracy on top of that and it's hard to see how India and ISRO can't undercut ESA, even if ISRO does involve the government.

Right. And even before that - I've read that in ancient Greece the technology in a temple that was used to do things like open a door or raise a statue from the floor by hidden means was guarded by the priest class. It could have been developed and been useful but instead was lost until archeologists found it and put the findings together with ancient accounts of the moving doors, etc.

This is incredibly cool, on so many levels. (Pun unintended, it only became apparent when I typed out the sentence.) I may have heard of Hipparchus but didn't know all of the other info about his work. Talk about being ahead of your time!

People are taught the importance of Gutenberg's printing press but most fail to realize the watershed it represents between valuable knowledge being easily lost and the same knowledge very likely being preserved. Multiple copies are incredibly important. The Antikythera mechanism is looked at with wonder but I also feel sadness - the immense amount of research and theoretical work that went into creating it could have propagated throughout the ancient world. Who knows what would have resulted?

These articles raising "alarm" about space garbage are mostly idiotic attempts to get some attention for the author. Take a non-issue and add some environmentalist trigger words - boom, you're published. A few scraps on Mars are not a problem. When humans are establishing a long term presence - well, show me a place humans live where they don't produce garbage, even eco-aware communities. The point is to have a back-up place for humans to live, not preserve a pristine Mars. Anyway, we all know almost every gram of material will be precious on Mars and recycled to the max.

A lot of that stuff will be in museum displays. Few people have any idea how many pieces of "junk" the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum stored. Even the scraps of landing systems now on Mars will end up in research museums.

When more stuff is landed on Mars - every gram will be precious due to the cost of getting a gram of anything to Mars. It will be utilized early on.