There is word for Trump, and that word is moron. He has absolutely no clue what he is throwing away in the name of petty vindictiveness. People are scrambling around to find some geopolitical reason for why he wants Greenland and Canada and Panama and now, inexplicably, Gaza. But there isn’t a reason. I don’t think he…

Honestly, Starliner in its current state would be vastly preferable to reentering without a spacecraft. The studies that you’re referring to consisted almost entirely of pen-and-paper proposals, and were abandoned mostly because of how suicidal they were; I’d be much more comfortable with Starliner than with strapping…

Ah, now it makes sense. *sigh*

Well, the alternative is Soyuz, which could take them down one at a time, I suppose, which, at the available schedule, would likely lead to at least one of them breaking the all-time spaceflight endurance record. Or . . . waiting for Boeing to maybe decide if it’s not going to cancel Starliner altogether, I guess, whic…

And right there you have the REAL reason he wants to control the FAA. It’s been issuing fines to SpaceX and requiring safety reviews after mishaps. He doesn’t like that. It’s crimping his style.

I was gonna say, it’s not the most dangerous in decades, because when I was a kid there was the Ford Pinto. Then I did the math.

And he’s had almost nothing to do with their rearing. He has people for that. (And he’s had . . . less than one would think to do with their conception as well. His family life is somehow even stranger than one can imagine, even after one reads about what it actually is like. It’s like “nope, can’t be that weird,…

Exactly. They aren’t after the appearance of equality. That would be a major step up from what they’re trying for, which is “screw equality, I want mine”.

My paternal grandmother was a stewardess — back in the early days, when you needed serious qualifications for that. Specifically, you needed to be an RN, because the aircraft weren’t pressurized and there were some serious concerns about altitude sickness. She’d previously served for the US Army in the South Pacific…

Well, cathode ray tubes really are so much heavier and power-hungry than liquid crystal displays....

Oh, absolutely.  And they *relate* to his fragility.  Calling it tough helps them pretend they’re tough too.

He’s been raging about the FAA taking pretty mild regulatory actions against SpaceX.  I’m actually sort of surprised he didn’t go after them first.  Maybe his attack on USAID was meant to be a warning, since it would’ve been too obvious if he’d attacked the FAA first?

Well, they think they’re getting what they wanted.  They are all still being willfully blind to the reality of it.

Because nothing says “I’m the best” like getting furiously mad whenever anyone else succeeds, or “I’m a leader” like handing down hundreds of petty edicts in a fit of late-night emotional pique.

Especially since Boeing has, since the late 90s, been run entirely by dealmakers willing to do pretty much anything, cut any corner, bribe any program officer, etc. Seriously. I mean, people are aghast at Hegseth, but does anyone remember who he tapped to replace Mattis? Before Esper? Patrick Shanahan. He wasn’t…

Oh, there is also a second factor — not merely the risk of damaging the aircraft or the pilot, but also the risk of causing the aircraft to *stop flying*. This is more a problem of getting into a low-gee situation, since lift requires both air moving over the wings and the downward force of gravity. If you read the…

Oh, absolutely. Neither aircraft nor pilots come with a single, solitary “this is my G-load limit” sticker. The direction is very important; Give Me Tacos, or Give Me Death gave a great explanation of how that works with pilots, where people can handle it differently in different directions, but it’s also true with…

It wasn’t quite *that* bad, but if there was the teensiest bit of precipitation, they were out salting liberally.  Like, the parking lot was crunchy. It was ridiculous. They’d sold it as “other contractors charge you a flat rate and you get soaked if it doesn’t snow; we only bill you if we actually have to come out”.

My church made the mistake of hiring a cheaper plowing service one year. The contract stipulated they’d be paid for how much salt they applied.

I’ll stick with my snowblower. It’s self-propelled, and easier to get out of the garage when everthing’s nasty than my car is. :-)