Hopefully it’s at least secure. Has anyone asked the Lockpicking Lawyer, yet?  ;-)

Vans are AWESOME.  Panel vans, conversion vans, minivans....  Vans are great. As far as trades not using pickup trucks, the main exception I can think of for that is landscapers and lawncare providers. A lot of them use pickup trucks, and use them hard. But then, their work happens out in the elements, so getting…

An owner called it “mostly waterproof,”

Yeah, this is Jalopnik, so that’s important. Very few clues given. The scratched paint at least rules out a Cybertruck. :-P

I’d love to see it posted to AITA just to see the blistering replies. :-D But here’s the thing: if his neighbor is as well-heeled as he thinks, he’s gonna lose that lawsuit, because they’ll be able to afford competent defense. They may even countersue for legal fees. And making it that public may bring it to the attent…

Agreed. Definitely sounds like an emergency descent, which would admittedly be a very frightening experience for the passengers.

Yeah, that was one of the dumber things he’s said, which is fairly impressive.

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.