Blazing saddles was written with the golden rule of offensive comedy: don’t punch down or up, punch in all directions.

While wearing suicide vests

I’ll yank your units

Right now nothing is leaking.

The leaks are only present when the fuel system is open or ready to fire

It’s having problems with its RCS system

The thrusters that turn the craft around and allow precise movement aren’t working properly, they barely got the thing to dock with the ISS.

Despite what nasa says publicly, I’m sure there’s a lot of internal debate about if it’s even safe to undock the thing from the station. If it loses orientation control while still close to the ISS, it could easily damage the station and kill people. That’s if some of the damaged thrusters aren’t the ones that allow the craft to go backwards, kind of important if you want to leave the station.

The US navy has almost as many aircraft as all of Russia.

The US Army has more aircraft than all of Russia.

The US Airforce has more aircraft than the US navy and army.

That’s just planes and helicopters.

If you think any of the countries you talked about are a serious threat to the US outside of nuclear war, then you’re sorely mistaken about how truly insane US defense spending is.

There’s already enough nukes on hair triggers to destroy modern civilization several times over.

We don’t need more nukes, so it’s extremely concerning that countries are spending so much money on building more.

It’s important to remember that every single day, the world is about 30 minutes away from nuclear annihilation. And that in about an hour, every major city on the planet could be an irradiated wasteland.

‘pandemic is defined as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people”’

From an article on the national institute of health, specifically about the definition of a pandemic. And how the old definition of it being a global disease that spreads rapidly may not be effective anymore with flu strains due to vaccines.

God, I hope it doesn’t spread, because then people will keep saying global pandemic.

Pandemic already means global.

It’s like saying Mariachi Band, or ATM Machine.

Implying they ever stopped.

You can’t think all of those private military contractors get all of their money from Uncle Sam.

Corporations have been using mercenaries for hundreds of years, they’ve just refined their PR departments lately.

That’s why they made it a pin.

Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.

They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.

What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.

I can land any plane you put me in.

I can’t promise you can use the plane again, or that I’ll be alive, but the plane will be somewhere on the ground.

If it really did, then nasa would not have committed to this hare brained scheme of musk’s.

The fact that the SpaceX proposal was accepted by an interim director who then went to work at SpaceX 6 months later, and no one has investigated this or challenged the acceptance of this contract tells me that safety is clearly not the priority. If safety was the priority, the new director would have looked at the current proposal and demanded a renegotiation or reconsideration.

If only that philosophy existed today.

NASA landed on the moon with 1960’s technology, not because it was easy in the 60’s, but because every single aspect of the mission was planned, tested, rehearsed, and made as simple as possible where it couldn’t have a redundancy. The only time something went really wrong was when a faulty tank exploded on Apollo 13, but due to having an entirely separate craft in the form of the lander attached, the astronauts were able to ride out the failure all the way around the moon and back to earth. Oh yeah, even the orbit they picked would let the whole spacecraft fly around the moon and come back to earth without having to do any engine burns.

Look at planned missions today. Launch the Human Landing system. Have it sit in space for an unknown amount of time while anywhere from 6 to 12 refueling rockets are launched to refuel the lander. Relight lander engines in earth orbit, go to moon, relight engines again to orbit the moon. Launch the Orion spacecraft with crew on board, this also must burns its engines once at the moon to enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous and dock with the HLS, transfer crew and supplies over. Undock Orion, relight HLS engines for a 4th time to deorbit and land HLS. Use an elevator to get from HLS to the lunar surface for the next week or so. Board the HLS, which needed at least 6 refueling tankers full of cryogenic fuel to get to the moon and has now been sitting on the 200 degree lunar surface for a week, and light the engines a 5th time to take off and enter lunar orbit. Rendezvous with Orion, and return home. NASA has demonstrated that Orion can do the mission. But HLS has not even shown the technical capability of doing this. Its engines have never been relit in space, it has never sat in space for a week to see what happens to the engines. The entire interior isn’t even built yet and NASA is just using a 9 meter steel circle to train astronauts on the airlock section because no one knows what it will look like.

This mission couldn’t be more complicated if you tried. Apollo needed a total of 1 engine relight on the transfer stage, and 2 engine relights on the command module: one to enter lunar orbit, and one to leave and return to earth. The lander used pressure fed engines that only needed to work once each. One engine got them from orbit to the surface, one got them from the surface to orbit. If the Ascent engine didn’t work, NASA had plans for everything from literally jump starting it with the descent module’s batteries like it’s a dead car, to having an astronaut use bolt cutters to cut the safety pins on the engine so the valves can be manually opened.

If your car doesn’t start in the morning, you might call off work and get it towed to a mechanic. What do you do when you’re trying to leave the moon, and your rocket engines won’t light because they’ve been sitting in space for almost 2 weeks? The nearest rocket engineer is 240,000 miles away back on earth, and so are all the spare parts. And what do you do if only some of those engines light, and the others either don’t or explode while you’re on a suborbital trajectory. Complexity kills on harsh environments. Space is one of the harshest environment we’ve ever been in, so things need to be as simple as possible and known to work.

The fact that this was your take away is concerning.

No government service should have to show a profit. If it’s an essential service, then it needs to be done. The only time money should come into it is in regular audits to ensure the budget is being used efficiently.

Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.

30 isn’t so bad as long as it’s not really humid out.

That’s still ludicrously hot

You want to know a better system?

What if each person had some kind of physical passkey that linked them to their money, and they used that to pay for food?

We could even have a bunch of security put around this passkey that makes it’s really easy to disable it if it gets lost or stolen.

As for shoplifting, what if we had some kind of societal system that levied punishments against people by providing a place where the victim and accused can show evidence for and against the infraction, and an impartial pool of people decides if they need to be punished or not.

DeltaV is the amount you can change your velocity in space.

To put it another way, if a semi truck company says it’s new truck can haul 20 tons of cargo 500 miles on one tank/charge, and then during the press release with an empty trailer, it has to pull to side of the road at 400 miles driven because it’s out of gas, do you think it can get to 500 miles when it has 20 tons in the back? And the previous 2 press releases had the vehicle spontaneously detonate just after leaving the driveway.

That’s what starship did, it ran out of gas at almost the finish line while completely empty. There’s no way it can get itself + 100 tons to orbit if it can’t even get itself to orbit.