Coffee is only a few bucks at a coffee shop, a few cents at home, and free at work. Now, getting some daily overcomplicated concoction, on the other hand…

Better than nothing. Hopefully this prevents some deaths.

VW must be running them

I voted 3rd party in 2016. I regret it all the time.

On the issue of genocide, the vote is between more or less. Voting 3rd party, Republican, or abstaining is a vote for more genocide.

The moral high ground and smugness is worthless compared to less genocide, abortion, education, trans lives, healthcare, etc.

Front Range Rail would be pretty great

You would carry a gas can

I can echo almost all of this, to the point that I was wondering if we used to work at the same company.

(I fully believe on purpose, to milk more money out of NASA)

I remember a pretty absurd situation along these lines. We ended up delivering faulty hardware to the prime contractor, who said there wasn’t a specific requirement for this failure mode, so they wanted to ship it, get paid, then have NASA fail it, write a new requirement, and buy another. The world of contract modifications and requirement lawyering always left a bad taste in my mouth. There are a handful of companies that I really want to see get banned from NASA contracting.

I’m surprised to learn that he had a heart

It wasn’t a NASA lander, it was an Astrobotic lander. NASA has been busy with Mars landings. The whole point of CLPS is to get cheaper missions by doing less micromanaging. We’ll see how Intuitive Machines does next.

I don’t think anyone even moderately informed has though a 2025 Artemis 3 landing is realistic for years at this point. It sounds like the official delay announcement is coming soon.

He might be right wing from a global perspective, but I’m still gonna vote for him instead of whoever has the R label. I wish we had cooler viable options, but “lesser of two evils” reigns supreme.

60% is still a ton of fossil fuels. At least solar and wind are the cheapest sources of electricity, so hopefully that helps speed things up.

I wish they would just say “I don’t want one” instead of trying to justify it with myths about lifetime emissions or whatever. It’s the same thing with SUVs vs station wagons or hatchbacks- just say “I want the big one” instead of trying to peddle myths about safety or something.

The number I’m seeing is up to 95% recyclable. That’s preeetttty much the entire battery. Are you talking about something else?

I don’t know if their statement is universally true, but the EPA’s fuel economy / total emissions calculator seems to show it for what I’ve put in. You can put in a Prius or random EV and see how they compare.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth1

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=bt2

The batteries are also recyclable, which should make the equation even simpler.

My dad’s VW Touareg could tow like 7700 lbs, which is more than a lot of trucks and easily enough to pull plenty of boats and campers. Even a compact SUV that can tow 3500 lbs can pull some boats and campers as long as people don’t buy giant oversized versions of those, too.

I don’t get where all the chunkiness came from. Even ignoring the bed length and width, what is all that extra height doing?

But also literally everything around us? Of my friends who went into materials sci/eng, two work in civil/commercial aerospace and one went to semiconductor.

Regarding the profitability - spaceflight isn’t profitable yet. Some companies are trying to do manufacturing and mining that could be profitable in the future, especially if launch costs keep dropping. Moving heavy industry off planet seems like a good goal to me. That’s also ignoring different imaging and communications companies that are doing alright.

Regarding privatization - NASA has contacted out services from their literal beginning in the Mercury program. Contracting out basic/boring launch makes sense to me and lets them focus on bigger ideas. I don’t really think SpaceX is “subsidized” vs winning contracts to deliver hardware and provide services, especially when you compare to their competition for programs like ISS commercial crew/cargo and Artemis human landing system, where their direct competitors (Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, etc) are more expensive.

My big gripe is that no one else has launch capacity right now, so SpaceX has no pressure to get cheaper and companies don’t have a choice. Ariane 5 retired, Atlas V is booked out, and Vulcan, Ariane 6, New Glenn, Neutron, Terran R, etc. are not flying yet.

Twitter is so easy for people to get off of. But they won’t.

Now, if any companies could give any serious competition in the US to SpaceX (launch or Starlink) and Tesla, that would be phenomenal.