Pratt & Whitney used to have a engineering and manufacturing facility across the road. I still think that they (RTX now) own that facility still, but it is heavily underutilized after P&W consolidated their operations up north. I don’t see a commercial use for the racetrack property until that large facility across…

Look at Derek Guy’s Twitter/X page. He talks about how to dress people who don’t have ideal model-esque figures (like me, not having anywhere close to some desirable figure, that is). I can’t say I do any of it, but I appreciate his insights.

I’m the last guy to normalize it, but damn if I don’t love it when I see it.

He respects Ferrari’s image, and as a new ambassador for that image, he’s embracing it.

That may be more that he doesn’t want to deal with a car that was fairly diabolical, and by the time Mercedes had somewhat tamed it, he was maybe checked out from Mercedes.

I am a huge fan of NASA, even worked a bit on Space Shuttle and Centaur upper stage, but much of the spinoff talk is PR to justify funding (heck, I’d be giving them the money one way or another). The economic benefits of NASA research spending for spinoffs are not necessarily higher than funding of other scientific…

This is the problem with iterative design. I can’t tell you if they’re 3 launches or 40 launches away from a usable rocket. Agile works well for smaller projects, but it hits limitations on very large, complex ones with highly complex and highly interconnected systems. Physics doesn’t permit you to just have a…

When it comes back in one piece and they strip it down to study it. See the Orion spacecraft that returned from the moon.

Simon Pagenaud’s story is an indication that some series, IndyCar in particular, are taking it more seriously. Simon himself said that, if it weren’t for the protocol, he might have gone back to the car the next race. As it is, he has not returned to racing due to lingering effects. Dario Franchitti’s retirement was…

Thank you for the first hand information. I would guess that they try to use retardant in areas where firefighters aren’t working on the ground, such as to slow the progression of the fire while the ground firefighters are working on a firebreak?

It’s not like a little “Crystal Light” added to a large tank of water. Scoops aren’t really that mechanically complex. They’ve been added post-hoc to many different types of aircraft (I was reading earlier how they added one to a gigantic Martin Mars flying boat - too bad it’s retired), and just use dynamic pressure…

Checking out the Juan Browne “Blancolirio” channel on Youtube (he’s a professional airline pilot and former aerial firefighter), he points out that the CL415s that are scooping water out of the Pacific and dropping it on the fire might be doing less to fight the fire than planes dropping retardant. Even though it’s…

I thought that they were definitely going electric with the next GTI.

In the United States, at least, that would still be 1.5 million people. You can move the decimal point a place or 2 to the left at least.

This speaks to the validity of WEC Hypercar’s BOP approach. Attracting new entrants, and retaining existing ones. Stark contrast to the WEC/WSPC/LMP cycles of boom and bust as one or two manufacturers dominate, usually after spending frightful amounts of money, and the others get tired and leave.

It’s 469 words. It’s not a Herman Melville epic. Anyone who spews bile at Bradley Brownell for not reading to the last paragraph deserves the pushback they get.

But remember that incident with the Soyuz MS-09. What was probably a hole probably accidentally drilled by a worker was repaired in a substandard manner, and when it leaked again, they tried to blame it on psychological distress American astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, implying that she couldn’t hack the stresses…

How does that help? It buys 1 1/4 second off your tens of minutes latency, under the best of circumstances.

The thing that lessens the likelihood of this is not the backstop of the US, but if Putin can’t invade lil’ ole Ukraine, how would he do against the whole of the European portion of NATO? If nothing else, Poland is loaded for Russian Bear.

United States Government doesn’t pay to keep warship museums going. They have to raise their own money for maintaining the ship (See USS Texas and USS New Jersey for well-documented examples). Definitely not going to do it for a civilian ocean liner, no matter her historical significance. After the asbestos…