Very fair!  :-D  I’ve gotten in the habit of narrowing my window so I can read them more like an article instead of having to click through them.  (The entire slideshow actually loads into your browser all at once, so if you squeeze down your browser window too narrow to fit the slideshow format, it gives up and just…

Very good question. Famously, Leonov had to partially deflate his suit in order to squeeze back into his Voskhod capsule as it had become difficult to bend. It’s possible they’ve done something to make the suit bend more as well, although that’s harder to accomplish in a soft suit. The NASA EMU is semi-rigid in part…

I expect there’s a seal inside, joining the upper torso to the legs. What you see externally isn’t the pressure bladder, on any spacesuit, so it’s difficult to really judge the integrity of a spacesuit just from a photograph. They’ve probably just made sure the outer layer of the suit overlaps the gasket that joins…

Oh, and technically, Lockheed (well, originally GD Convair) designed the rocket. ULA, which operates the rocket, is owned by Lockheed and Boeing, but the Atlas 5 was designed by Lockheed prior to the formation of ULA.  Boeing’s contribution to ULA was the Delta IV.  The Centaur upper stage’s design legacy goes back to…

You might want to reread my post if you thought I was defending Boeing. ;-) I just described two gigantic screwups on their part that dwarf the billion dollar overrun on Starliner.

There is value to building these kinds of androids, but it’s mostly in the research sphere — that is to say, it’s a valuable exercise that pushes forward the state of the art by driving improvements in a lot of necessary subsystems, but it’s not a useful product in and of itself.

And for all those saying “but it’s generic, it can do many different jobs,” remember — each of those different jobs would have to be done by a single Optimus, nonstop, forever, for this to make sense. And if one Optimus is just doing one job, what’s the point of a stupidly expensive general purpose robot instead of a…

That does worry me. I hope that the deal has been structured very, very, very carefully, because Disney has a way of getting their tentacles very deep into intellectual property and never ever letting go. The BBC has not always been the best steward of it, but they have at least been willing to allow the fans freedom…

The craziest part of this is he *did* test this with a stick. Which broke. And then he went and tested it with his body anyway.

Oh absolutely.  “I’ll test it first with a stick.  Oh, it broke the stick.  Hm.  Well, let’s see if it does that to my bones!”

Yeah, that’s just ridiculously stupid. There’s a bag in the way, so we tried harder to crush it?  I mean, even if their engineers are so stupid as to think nobody would get a hand caught in there, why wouldn’t they foresee a possible fragile item getting damaged?  Or the frunk itself possibly getting damaged from…

“Move fast and break things.”

The government had to approve of the merger for several reasons. Firstly, because it would create a monopoly, and generally mergers that produce monopolies aren’t allowed by the FTC. Secondly, because it went against the whole point of the EELV program, which was to ensure competition would exist. But Boeing’s…

We do have sea bass.....

The interesting thing is that if you list all the spacecraft anywhere that have carried humans at all, the list is only slightly longer. You’d just have to add three more spacecraft: Vostok, Voskhod, and Shenzhou.

It’s stunning (not in a good way) that this actually still happens in the 21st Century.

Weather forecast was 95% favorable, too — a rare thing for Cape Canaveral.

An excellent channel that more should view.  :-)

I think it relates to how rarely they’ve had to be used.  It’s sort of like the Cirrus airframe parachutes -- rarely needed, but damn, when you need ‘em, you’re sure glad they’re there.

You’re welcome! I’m an avid space geek, and as you might have guessed, I’m in the industry as well. FIA is quite a bit more obscure, since it’s an NRO program, so I can understand why it’s not well known. But it still amazes me how quickly the Delta IV pricing scandal faded from public consciousness, because while the…