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RichardKennaway comments on Link: White House wants your advice on space exploration - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: polymathwannabe 18 October 2014 02:32PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 19 October 2014 08:47:11AM 7 points [-]

"massless"? Is that a funny way of saying "not actually going anywhere"?

Is that a funny way of saying "haw haw politicians hur hur"?

A glance at the link shows that "massless" here means using mass that's already out there, instead of hauling everything up from the Earth's gravity well. Digging a little further, the term appears to have been coined by Mason Peck of Cornell University and formerly Chief Technologist at NASA.