Cynically, I do think you’re often right. DEI initiatives frequently exist primarily to be the equivalent of a company’s black friend. They’re great for reports, for marketing, for statements on websites, and so forth because they neatly lump all of the nice friendly “we care about people” stuff in one convenient…

WOW. I just wish I could say I was surprised that happened.

That might be a worthwhile thing to explore, although I’m not sure how feasible it is. I don’t have any detailed insight into either suit beyond what we can see in the pictures, but they do appears to be shaped a little differently — enough that there could possibly be couch fit issues, which could possibly lead to…

FYI: in this case, “they” is Futurism, not NASA or Boeing. And they do have a point. You get what you pay for.

They’re custom fit, apparently, just like the Sokol suits used on Soyuz.

You can’t just rebuild the Space Shuttles from blue prints. At this point, you wouldn’t even be able to pull them out of the museums and refly them. There are too many items in the supply chain that can no longer be manufactured. The effort would be gargantuan, and essentially equivalent to designing a new spacecraft.…

Correct. Neither Boeing nor SpaceX could have designed their spacecraft to use the other’s suits, given the way this is structured. That would have been true no matter who had won. (Note: the same circumstance exists with Soyuz, and existed with the Space Shuttle, so it’s a little puzzling that this is surprising any…

Given that fire departments are still addressing EV fires by putting huge amounts of water on them, I’d say the answer is clearly “not”.

His blog is awesome. It’s where I learned about the really wonderful book “Ignition!” that is a fantastic read. (Quoted in that piece, actually, and available both in print and as a free PDF on the Web.)

Well, you never know what can cause an inexhaustible fire....

We definitely are in need of new solutions for fighting these kinds of fires. Although this is not quite so nasty as chlorine trifluoride, this reminds me of the title of Derek Lowe’s fantastic piece on that chemical, “Sand Won’t Save You This Time”:

“Traditionally, Europe isn’t an ideal location for a rocket launch because of its distance from the equator.”

I don’t know which is cheaper, but they should do *something*. Any solution that works would be a lot better than the f***-all they’re doing currently.

“carried a Palm Pilot in middle school”

Yeah, we believed it less *before* his “refutation”.  :-D

Eternity, since it will break down before it even leaves Chechnya.  :-D

That’s how it started, but then the Internet’s gotta Internet, so some guys started trying to one-up each other about it.

I fly Delta a lot, since my local airport is MSP, one of their hubs. They have a notoriously ancient fleet, so they still don’t have flight maps on a lot of their flights.

FedEx would do their damndest, but when it absolutely, positively has to get there . . . send it with a courier.

I’m kinda weird, maybe, but I like that low frequency rumble.