I'm not at all interested in nasa spam here. As per the YC guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
In terms of 'current news', the problem is that it's usually about politics, and thus not really more relevant to hackers than anyone else, whereas this clearly is. The politics articles also quickly degrade into boring, tired, rehashed debates, too, whereas something like this shouldn't.
(That said, voting people down that much is just lame, people. What happened to the old hacker news where a -1 was sufficient to say "no, we think you're wrong"?)
The "let's pile on to the guy who was wrong" mentality is a bit too much of a an unfriendly herd instinct for my tastes.