Once Sudafed became something you had to ask for at the counter, this was the drug that was put everywhere as a decongestant that you didn’t have to ask for. It never worked for me, I suppose because it’s worthless as a drug for everyone. If only pseudoephedrine wasn’t used in cooking meth, right?

$100 million to build an engine with an established, in-production design seems very expensive. Is it made out of gold?

They also researched lunar space flight basically from the ground up using all that money (which is basically why there was so much of it needed - we had almost none of the knowledge required to get the job done at that point.) After all, when that fella you referred to held his speech, the US had yet to even shoot a…

Why are we even trying to go to the moon again?

I am genuinely curious, what actually makes these rockets sooooooo expensive? Is it just the materials/fuel are scarce or hard to produce or the sheer volume of metal/fuel or is it the rocket assembly, etc.

It was never intended to be cost efficient! Obama canceled the Constellation moon program, but Republicans who wanted white collar welfare for their constituencies force the creation of the Artemis program attempting to do the same thing out of left over parts.

It’s just part of the game. If NASA told congress up front how much anything would REALLY cost and how long it was REALLY going to take they never would get any funding at all.

SLS is a congressional pork project. Reps and Senators in the various areas where Shuttle parts were built want this project to keep those plants alive and profitable for their voters. The SLS was never meant to be cheap or good, just pork. Kill it.

The power of foreshortening in the choice of camera lens and magnification.

It’s all in the lens. Here is the same intersection from a different perspective:

also anyone who gets permitted to leave the USSR to tour the states for 10 weeks is a dyed in the wool true believer.

In the end (and perhaps, quite predictably in Stalin’s USSR) the two find American culture has been wrapped into a vapid, one-dimensional worship of money and wealth which makes them miss their socialist homeland.

There are no Marxists anymore because they are all Leninists

USSR, Socialist Workers Paradise which did the Holodomor in 32-33

It’s typical of the bass ackwards sound bite over substance handling of passenger rail. The Northeast Corridor is the best use case for high speed rail in the country and runs on the oldest routes in the country. The unglamorous, politically difficult and expensive solution is a massive track improvement including…

I took the Acela for the first time a few weeks ago from NYC to DC. It was neat to do 150mph for a few short stints, but I’m not really convinced I’d ever do it again when it’s only 30-45 min faster than driving. Plus, that’s not counting extra time you’re spending getting to/from the train stations and your actual…

And complicating the problem is that the rail network exists for freight traffic, not passenger traffic; the lines are built for 50mph freight consists, which have right of way over passenger traffic. Realistically, high-speed rail would require separate right-of-way, and as we’ve seen with the California high-speed…

Rail, the nineteenth century solution to eighteenth century transport problems.

Trains are never going to be big again in the United States. The distances are just too great to manage it nationwide. So no matter what happens, it’ll always be confined to limited regional routes like Acela and slow longer routes like the current Amtrak offerings.

Elon, cut it off because Ukraine was using Starlink for Drone RC targeting and bombing, not it’s intended purpose of Free Internet. Don’t be a tool... Elon does what he wants not what anyone says.