There was one pseudo-interesting Buick made after the GNX -- the 2008-09 LaCrosse Super. GM shoved their 5.3 liter V8 sideways into their front wheel drive W-body platform. It shared this configuration with the Pontiac Grand Prix GXP and the Chevy Impala SS of those years. More interesting from the point of view, "GM really did that" than actual performance, though not too bad for the time.

Your comment is mostly right, but it wasn't Boeing's responsible leadership which cancelled the 2707. It was the US Congress which responsibly pulled the plug on taxpayer funding of the project. The whole thing was a taxpayer funded boondoggle with a design competition between aircraft manufacturers and everything, just like a regular military acquisition program. I don't know if Boeing had any of its own funds in the project or not, but it was over when federal funding ended.

Saudi Arabia production in 2022 was 601 million metric tons, left off a word in that last sentence.

"Yeah, that happens when you cut all domestic oil." But there doesn't seem to be much cutting going on (at least in the in USA) if you look at the numbers.

Headline from a story earlier this year at Forbes, "2022 Saw The Second Highest Oil Production In U.S. History" (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/01/06/2022-saw-the-second-highest-oil-production-in-us-history/?sh=2b084f7e11d7)

and from "https://yearbook.enerdata.net/crude-oil/world-production-statistics.html" it shows that the US in 2022 was the largest producer of oil in the world at 762 million metric tons, easily exceeding #2 Saudis Arabia at 601 metric tons.

The /. summary is misleading. It starts with the recent Sky&Telescope article (a well respected semi-technical magazine for amateur astronomers) and then slides into various writings of Eric Lerner, whose ideas are not much accepted in the professional fields he writes about. The confluence of these in the summary makes it appear that Lerner's claims show up in the S&T article (and receive some legitimacy from S&T) which they don't.

Kind of a clickbait headline highlighting the F-35. Lots of other aircraft affected.
From the linked article, "The Navy said in a statement on Tuesday that the cartridge problem affected aircraft in its and the Marine Corps’ F/A-18B/C/D Hornets, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, E/A-18G Growlers, T-45 Goshawk and F-5 Tiger II training aircraft fleets, but the service did not share exact numbers due to operational security concerns." and for the Air Force, "The grounded aircraft included 203 T-38 Talons and 76 T-6 Texan IIs, which represents about a third of the service’s total training fleet, Air Force Times reported."

Totally agree with you. I read DADoES decades ago after I saw Blade Runner in the theater. Don't remember much about ti now except the book was not much like the movie and disappointing.

The region is referred to as West Antarctica because it is in the longitudes of the Western Hemisphere, so actually this keeps it consistent with the rest of the world's reference frame. The regions of Antarctica relatively far from the S. Pole have quite distinct characteristics so broad names to distinguish them are useful and appropriate. Other names like "Princess Elizabeth Land" and "Marie Byrd Land" are also in use, but refer to smaller areas and are not as immediately recognizable as "West" and "East".

The US has the #1 and #2 heaviest lifting launch vehicles currently operational in the world, Falcon Heavy and Delta IV Heavy, respectively.

So what you are saying is that unless the US trucking industry can push the costs of dirty diesel engines and unsafe practices onto general society (known as privatizing profits and socializing costs) then they can't stay viable. Then there is something wrong with the industry model. Everyone is paying for increased medical costs for this. Not to mention the damage done to publicly funded roads by heavy trucks, not fully paid for by truck registration and fuel taxes. Yes, everyone benefits to some extent by these public subsidies to the industry. But it would be fairer and more economically efficient to push these costs back to the industry as direct costs so that there will be direct economic pressures to reduce the overall costs to everyone. The direct costs of shipping will go up -- fine, then the cost of shipping is truly reflected in the price of an item at the store and there is pressure to source more things locally, along with other efficiency measures. This sort of thing happens a lot -- an industry gets used to operating such that some costs are pushed off onto the public at large then thinks that's they way it should always be. Times change, industries change.

There is a deeper interpretation of this demo/experiment that no one has pointed out yet. As mentioned in the summary and TFA, the hammer and feather fall at the same rate because "both the gravitational force and the acceleration depend on the same mass". But the equivalence of gravitational mass (in the gravitational force equation) and inertial mass (in the acceleration equation) is only a coincidence in Newtonian physics -- there is no reason for it; it's just an observational fact. But in General Relativity the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass is a fundamental result and guided the development of GR theory at its beginning. A better informed discussion on this can be found by searching for "Equivalence Principle".

That's the way things are supposed to work with NASA. Once the commercial operators develop a capability which was formerly only NASA's, it is time for NASA to move on to other things that the commercial folks aren't doing. An analogy I've seen is that when NASA needs someone to go across the country, they don't (usually) send them on a NASA owned airplane, they buy a ticket on a commercial airliner.

"Mini" compared to the Falcons, Ariane 5, Atlas, and Soyuz boosters in service. There is a more informative story on this over on Ars Technica. According to their story, this is a small launcher, not a Falcon 9 competitor. 1 ton to low earth orbit vs 15 tons for Falcon 9. Disclaimer: That's all according to the Ars article which states, "the technical details are sparse."

The Australian government has been contracting for Airbus A-319 flights between Hobart and their base in Antarctica for some years now. https://www.antarctica.gov.au/...

You are correct on that, radarsky. I was just trying to suggest that there isn't much point in arguing about time of launch-to-rendezvous since about the best possible was already demonstrated a long time ago. I looked up the Skylab launch-to-rendezvous times to see how NASA did it back then on a more "operational" basis rather than trying to prove anything -- about 8 hours for the last two missions, Skylab 3 and Skylab 4,