As of this posting, there’s an interesting thread going on over at Slashdot discussing a recent statement by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin in which he said he thought that the Space Shuttle and ISS were mistakes.
I say “as of this posting” because as of 0946 PST the discussion is relatively informative, insightful and mature. [...]
Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of celestial mechanics should appreciate this. A scientist at JPL has mapped the Lagrange points (the point where one body’s gravity balances another’s) for every planet and moon in the solar system and then mapped those Lagrange points against possible spacecraft trajectories. The resultant mapping is a “freeway [...]