The disposibility is going to be a problem eventually, of course, because it makes these things so expensive. They have to be built to exorbitant reliability standards, since there’s no hope of repair, and they’re just thrown away at the end of a relatively short mission. (That’s only part of what makes them…

*facepalm* Yeah, that’s a typo. Hundreds of millions. :P

Maybe; I’m not that good with orbital mechanics. ;-) I know the calculations get tricky because there are a lot of resonances with the major planets you have to deal with at that point, and also they’re light and brightly painted so they are sensitive to perturbation by solar pressure. Over large timescales, they’re…

Excellent description of the stresses that are placed on stuff. I mean, ships at sea generally are lucky to get a thirty year service life, thanks to saltwater corrosion, and airliners have a similar service life thanks to pressurization cycles. Stresses add up.

Wow, you’re touchy. No, obviously I hadn’t noticed that he’d responded to you directly.  Have a better day.  ;-)

I realize it was an attempt at humor, but it was a very bad one.

That would be pretty cool. Unfortunately, I understand it won’t be so easy to pull the modules apart. It would take a lot of labor to disconnect everything, repack the solar arrays and radiators, fold and restow them, and then there’s a problem where things in space vacuum-weld together so you’d have to cut a lot of…

A great deal of it will survive, but in pieces. It will be similar to the deorbit of Mir, although more mass will survive. This is why it’s so important to target the “satellite graveyard” in the South Pacific, for safety reasons. When Mir was deorbited, a lot of scientific resources were marshaled to observe the…

It came down prematurely; they didn’t destroy it on purpose. (That’s partially accurate — in fact they did somewhat control the reentry. It had no propulsion, so they tried to partially control the reentry by adjusting the angle of the solar arrays. It didn’t completely work, and they ended up hitting Australia…

And they used to actually be one of the better ones for science content.

The subtitle is even stupider:

Fun fact: being in a heliocentric orbit doesn’t mean they can’t still come back and hit us. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance they will, since unless a lot of effort is expended, they’re likely to be on an Earth-crossing orbit. For instance, the Apollo 14 S-IV B upper stage has already returned to Earth orbit at…

I’m afraid you will have to get used to more than one person answering the same question Try not to take it personally. It just means he didn’t see your answer before he posted his.

Oh that brings back memories.

Yeah, always with the windows down.  Of course, we kids would be left in the car like that too sometimes.  :-P  This was before the days when that would get CPS called.

The weird thing is that leaving your dog in the car was considered perfectly normal back in the days before people referred to their pets as “fur babies”, and nobody called the cops to bust open the window and charge the owner with neglect for leaving the dog in there. So, I’m not entirely sure the assumptions in this…

I stand corrected: I thought it didn’t, since Starliner wasn’t expected to be doing any long-duration free-flying operations.  That’s a relief (pun intended).  ;-)

Unluckily for him, the name is already taken twice over.  Car-X is an auto repair chain, and CarX is a racing simulator game.

It’s legal, mostly because I think nobody thought anyone would be dumb enough to try and make their car look like the automotive version of Wonder Woman’s airplane on the road.

Accurately put, and much better than the article. There’s no indication yet that Starliner won’t be able to bring them home. The problem is that since Starliner keeps it propulsion in the expendable service module, they can’t study it after the mission. That’s a significant difference from Dragon, which retains all of…