No.  The US is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty.  In this case, NASA is only asserting ownership of the Hubble Space Telescope, specifically.

Far better. ;-)

Oh, man, I really wish it worked that way. But no. You really can’t just stamp out another Hubble with the simple assembly line blueprints folks seem to think exists, and even if you could, it definitely wouldn’t be a fraction of the price of the original. It’s been forty years — it’d be a huge engineering effort.

I have now seen one! I was driving around near the MN Zoo and there it was. This one had no wrap — bare metal. Clean and pristine, except a lotta fingerprints around the back gate.  Reminded me I need to clean my refrigerator.  :-D

I’ve seen one now!  In Apple Valley.  I wonder if they’ll still look as good in February.

“Other General Lee Cybertrucks do exist”

I’m not sure getting snarky is going to help him much in persuading NASA that he knows what he’s doing. What he needs to do is prove his team can execute the mission without making things worse. There are a huge number of unknowns, and refusing to acknowledge that there’s a very real chance of breaking Hubble entirely…

Adjusted for inflation, Hubble cost about $12 billion before the servicing missions were added to the price tag.  So no, it would not be trivial financing, even for him.  Heck, it wasn’t trivial financing even for NASA.

Well, it’s not quite like it sounds. His company, Draken, owns the jets, and it gets paid a lot of money by the DoD to fly them as adversaries for training exercises. If he lost those contracts, I guarantee he’d have to sell a lot of them off.  They’re not cheap to operate and maintain.

Different incident, actually. The Gimli Glider ran out of fuel over land and glided to a landing at an airfield one of the pilots coincidentally happened to be familiar with, having been stationed there in his RCAF days. What he didn’t know was that the runway he was aiming at had been decomissioned and was now used…

We had Chinese takeout for dinner last night.  There was absolutely a wonton massacre.

I probably just don’t drive around enough. I live in the south Metro, and the 494 construction has me avoiding the freeways as much as possible. I do hope to see one, though, because I am saving up my Space Mutiny David Ryder names for when I see one, since they (extremely vaguely) resemble the stupid Enforcer floor…

Well, per the headline, my dad once grilled weenies over the engine block of a rental car while we were vacationing in Hawaii. We were in Volcanoes National Park at the time. I was four, so I don’t remember much of that trip, but I remember that. I also remember tripping on lava and tearing up my leg, watching hula…

I have yet to see one, but living in the Land of 10,000 Piles of Road Salt, I’m guessing people are having second, third, and even fourth thoughts about buying something that rusts if you leave it in the sun too long.

Not surprised it hit a private jet. I mean, I’m surprised it hit any jet, but I’m not surprised that the jet it happened to hit was a private one. His jet would have to go park with the other corporate jets at almost any airport, and that would mean squeezing into the Signature apron with these smaller jets most of…

There’s a YouTuber named refashionedhippie and if she doesn’t cover this hammer I’ll be disappointed. Although honestly, it’s beginner stuff in the category of “overpriced crap with a designer label on it for rich people with far more money than sense”.

Thank you, I was trying to figure out what in the Sam Hill that “gym use” could possibly be other than “bring this heavy thing to the gym so you can have a weight that’s awkward and will therefore hurt you but it’s *expensive* so you can show off that you have money”.

As it happens, we sold my mom’s house for 300K last year in a walkable, park-adjacent neighborhood in the midwest. Two bedrooms, one and a half baths. Two car detached garage. Mostly unfinished basement. Slightly updated, thanks to the sewer backup in 2022 that forced a tearout and renovation of the basement half bath…

We may need to stop building certain kinds of houses, and start building others. There is a shortage of “starter home” properties, yet most of the new construction I’m seeing, even in high density housing, is luxury housing. I can certainly see why: the financial incentives definitely encourage builders to aim for…

By the time the famous flag which would come to be known as the Star Spangled Banner was made and flown over Fort McHenry, both Vermont and Kentucky had joined the Union. (Fun fact: the flag also had fifteen stripes. This practice of adding stripes was later discontinued, as it was increasing the width and would…