I think these mars lander things have been some of the coolest, most inspiring technology-based endeavors in our time.

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"?)

Because we would like to be able to express "no, we think you're really, really wrong."

This isn't reddit, you know: the goal isn't to "punish" people for saying something "really, really wrong" (unless they're being uncivil or trolling, or other antisocial things). The idea is just to point out that they're wrong and move on. Think of it as a community, rather than just a random aggregation of strangers: when you tell a friend that they've done something wrong, you do it once, more or less gently, and then get on with things.

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.

I don't know if it's piling on as much as "I also disagree with this".

'Probably' does not constitute a black and white line. Although this topic will be covered on the news over the next week, it is one that pertains to majority of the users' interests, and is highly tech related.

Yup. Personally, my brain is having a real hard time putting the concepts of NASA and spam together.