By diverting time and resources towards manned moon landings, the US government may have delayed useful exploitation of space by decades (a similar argument can be made against the original transcontinental railroad).

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The answer was to take something we're intimately familiar with -- our smartphones and tablets -- and make them more useful in the combined space of videogaming and living room entertainment, a space that the Xbox 360 dominates.

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That breathing space would be useful if something really bad, such as the collapse into the sea of part of the Greenland ice-shelf, was in imminent danger of happening, and the realisation of the danger led to a political agreement that climate change had to be stopped rapidly.

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Industry standards in the nascent space would probably be useful as well.

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The space shuttle today serves no useful scientific purpose, certainly not considering the billions of dollars it soaks up.

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Space-based systems are especially useful in the vast distances of the Pacific, which is one reason Pentagon leaders highlighted their priority last week.

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Like many applications developed for space, this one, spaceman Petit points out, could also be useful to people who want to track their diets here on Earth.

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