2 points - a point for each Airplane reference.

2 points for Sulu wiggling his sword...

2 points for Ria right off the bat...

Hmmmm. Nah.

And there is a universe that is exactly like this one, the only difference being that your head is replaced by a foot.
(I don’t think the ‘infinite universes’ idea is well thought out...)

Wow.
I refused to watch the first three years. I watched the first episode, and hated it. (The new captain is a little bald guy, and he says “we surrender” in the first episode?!? PULEEZ!!) Plus I was young and pretty busy anyway. I did tape pretty much all of them, tho- but never watched them. Then I got sick and was…

Yes, and maybe some of those universes have planets that all look like this:

I was suggesting that the idea that they faked it was silly.
When they do a montage, they (JPL, NASA, et. al.) usually do something like this:

To be fair, it wasn’t a mass produced thing. For comparison, a brand new car back then might cost as little as $2000. Difference between a mass produced thing and a hand made prototype thing.

Best thing since... the Orgasmatron.

then why wouldn’t they throw in some space ships

Stunning landscapes.
These always blow my mind.
And then when we get there, it’s nothing like we expect!
Exploration is AWESOME!!

Truly I say to you - I was not expecting that...

Probably these. But truthfully, I don’t have them anymore. If I did, I’d probably read one...

We would need a large launch system to get off of Venus. Along with that, an infrastructure to make that possible. I can’t see that could be done in the near term, or cheaply (ever)...

i think we should first ask “why” and then go for the “why not” - cuz we probably would just stop after the “why” - at least most people would

nice

That is certainly true.
But it bugs me when we point to these disasters as systemic failures of the systems.
The first loss was completely preventable. (They went WAY overboard on risk to meet economics-based schedules; a real no-no.)
The second should have been preventable, but wasn’t. (Gee, if one of those tiles gets…

Our “reusable” systems were only reusable in name. The whole giant gas tank was not reusable. The solid rocket boosters were, but the cost to recycle them was enormous. So yeah, reusable, but not economically so. And the whole point of reusable is to help contrel costs, right? At a billion plus per launch, it’s hard…

you mean the silly conspiracy theory