his "tanks don't need a visa" message.

There's no reason this should've happened except for incompetence.

I feel bad for Russia's space industry. It seems like it's falling apart while the US tried and true private approach is succeeding (nothing against NASA at all, it's just, weird, I guess, that the commercial thing is "working&quot .

and well funded NASA, but I have to agree with you.

I didn't know you could make a space movie that would bore me, but they did it.

1 - No one as panicky as Sandra's character would have been cleared through astronaut training to begin with.

2 - The Russians clearly just started a world war. Several trillion dollars worth of critical strategic assets were scrubbed from LEO.

3 - George Cloony's character dies a senseless and useless death just because the plot called for it. Clearly he could have hooked his foot in the cable loop and pulled himself back to ISS.

Lets ask elon musk if he can help out, next time.

The normally spectacular NASA website went black this week and the space agency tweeted, “Sorry, but we won’t be tweeting/responding to replies during the government shutdown. Be back as soon as possible.” The future can apparently be put on hold if it is government run.

In fact, the media noise surrounding the looming shutdown overshadowed an important space milestone that occurred on Sunday, the nearly simultaneous liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket and the docking of a Cygnus capsule with the International Space Station. What was most significant is that NASA wasn’t the designer, builder, or operator of either of these spacecraft. Both were designed and launched by private firms operating in what is now a competitive space launch market, and we can get all the details at the still functioning websites of SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.

To NASA’s credit, both have also been beneficiaries of the agency’s visionary programs. The Commercial Orbital Transport Services program, or COTS, has been the Federal government’s best kept secret. Starting in 2006 under the flexibility of the Space Act Agreements, our national space agency subsidized the development and testing of commercial replacements for the aging and expensive Space Shuttle by rewarding firms for attaining certain milestones. The program was a resounding success. More than 20 businesses applied for the program, three were selected, and one of those was quickly eliminated. The total COTS investment of approximately $700 million is about half the estimated (fixed and operating) $1.5 billion cost of a Space Shuttle flight. The payoffs from this public investment include two new American companies capable of launching NASA’s Earth orbit payloads, critical redundancy for U.S. military launches, and the first entirely commercial options for non-governmental customers.

With the COTS milestones complete, the SpaceX Dragon Capsule and the Orbital Cygnus are now operating on a fee-for-service basis under the Commercial Resupply Services program. In fact, SpaceX is on track for its third CRS delivery this December. Building on this little leg up, SpaceX has built a launch manifest of more than 40 missions serving commercial clients and foreign governments, capturing new dollars for the U.S. economy. In fact, Elon Musk’s crazy little space company appears to be the fastest creator of high-paying jobs in Southern California and now employs more that 3,000 incredibly enthused space cadets.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2013/10/02/houston-we-have-a-market-privatizing-space-launches-pays-off-big/

Like this????