You must be a Ranger, and the OP a Paladin.

Me, I'm just a fighter, neutral and available as a mercenary (in case anyone's hiring)

I think the feathered reentry would still work at orbital speeds, it's just that the composite material from which SS2 is built can't withstand the heat. Putting heat tiles on SS2 would not work well as that would add too much weight, and they're still gonna have all kinds of problems with the tiles staying in place. So for all intents and purposes the feather reentry is strictly a suborbital design.

The most innovative orbital reentry design I saw was a proposal for using the rocket engine plume to deflect superheated air molecules away from the spacecraft. Yes you would need to use fuel for that but the weight of the fuel you would need compared favorably to the weight and complexity of a heat tile design. But then you have the problem of "what happens if the rocket engine fails to ignite", and the answer is that you melt. So it would be useful for unmanned vehicles that you can afford to lose to engine failure once in a while but not for manned reentry.

Or just one day of funding to the illegal aliens with free stuff.

Hey, how about we cut BOTH, no more military occupations and no more free stuff to illegal aliens? Then we can fund NASA for TWO years!

I went through some effort to make myself as clear as possible, but let me go further since you're still not getting it.

Your point was that US Army is so overwhelmingly powerful that nobody has a chance to win against them and thus civilians should be disarmed. My rebuttal to that was, that's only true in conventional warfare. Then I cite Taliban as an example of how US Army is vulnerable to guerrilla tactics.

Then in a separate paragraph, with its own introductory sentence that starts with "And there's the question of loyalty in the military...", I point out that the army might not even fight at all. Robert E. Lee was mentioned in this paragraph as an example of a US Army officer deciding not to fight for the US Army. The citation of Robert E. Lee was in context of this paragraph only, not the entire post.

Get it now?

Not this tired old argument again.

There is no force on earth that can stand up to the US military in a conventional battle. Does that mean every other group or nation should stop buying weapons because that would be wasted money?

Taliban and others have shown that US military is quite vulnerable in unconventional warfare. And that was in places where US soldiers didn't care that much about the local population. How do you think it will go down when the guerrilla fighters are blending into the civilian population of Kansas and Virginia instead of Mosul and Kandahar?

And there's the question of loyalty in the military. If things got so bad and the federal gov't so hated that a large scale armed uprising took place, it's quite likely that many of soldiers will either refuse to fight or join the other side. (look up Robert E. Lee sometime, he was a guy in the US Army but quit when his hometown buddies rose up against the gov't)

If the army refused to fight, the Capitol police and Secret Service can still own any unarmed mob storming DC and mow them down. But an armed mob? Not so easy.

The exact same argument can be applied to Flash, at least a few years ago when it was used by vast majority of users on the internet.

That's fairly insane, but you know what's REALLY insane?

Chinese gov't is now allowing people to put up collateral and buy stocks on credit. What kind of collateral you ask? Real estate!

That's out-of-this-world insane, if you ask me. Frankly I'm stumped, because up to this point the Communist party leaders have been pretty competent, all things considered. Definitely more competent than the current USA regime.

Only answer I can think of is, the Commies are really noob when it comes to the stock market and don't know much about it. And, they're really, I mean REALLY scared of people with money (middle class and upwards) getting angry at the Party. People with money have disproportionately large influence in China (well okay it's like that everywhere but it's even more so in China) and an angry upper-middle class threatens the current regime's grip on power far more than angry peasants.

Lucas electrical system.

In rockets.

Isn't Jurassic actually the period BEFORE dinosaurs ruled the earth, and therefore the movie should've been called "Cretaceous Park"?

Never underestimate the ability of entertainment people to change facts around if they think it sounds better.

From TFA:

I'm no aerodynamicist, but common sense tells me that the volume of your balloon city will have to be very large and the amount of 1" thick steel you need to bring from Earth will be so massive, most Mars colony proposals will seem lightweight in comparison. Might as well just go to Mars.

if you're gonna have a launch failure with total loss of all stages, at least this seems to be one of the better outcomes. First stage is very expensive and complex, fixing a major flaw there could take a long time and lots of money. But it looks like the first stage was working fine all the way to the (fiery) end, and it was a ruptured tank on the 2nd stage that caused the failure. Much better than the first stage exploding soon after liftoff.

https://www.google.com/maps/@3...

TFA doesn't link to it, so I had to some additional mouse clicking and text parsing to find it.

Mortal Kombat was banned simultaneously in Australia, Germany, U.K. and several other countries on what became known as Mortal Monday, 1993.

Fatality!

Interesting point, I haven't thought of that. Maybe you could even build obstacle courses and windmills (like mini golf) that drones have to go through. That could be fun. Drones crashing is no big deal compared to a real airplanes crashing so they could add lots of stuff and fly very low.

FPV technology still sucks though, it needs to improve. Those beautiful FPV videos you see on Youtube, that's NOT what the pilot sees. Those footages are from GoPro recording that the guy retrieved from the SD card afterwards. Real-time transmission quality is very poor, it's just barely enough for the pilot to make out the sky, ground, tree.

but I can't see anyone getting interested as a spectator.

Real air racing is still around, featuring WW2 fighters thundering through the skies at 400mph, and interest from the general public is nil. There's a niche audience of aviation buffs but that's about it.

Drones are tiny compared to the majestic P-51s and Corsairs, and very twitchy, so it would be very difficult to keep a steady camera on them.

It could still take off, just don't expect to see it on ESPN anytime soon (or ever).