Gemini 11 went from liftoff to docking with its Agena Target Vehicle in 94 minutes. This was in 1966, to demonstrate the capability of rendezvous in one orbit as used later at the moon by Apollo.

If you are using a 4-stroke then you've taken care of 90% of the problem of noise and stink as far as I'm concerned. I don't know what the actual difference in emissions is but it must be significant. And are mufflers on 2-strokes designed to be useless and annoying? Outlawing 2-strokes should be like outlawing leaded gas was -- inconvenient at first, but well worth it in the long run.

Not so well known as the Me 262, but the British had the Gloster Meteor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloster_Meteor) at almost the same time, entered service in July 1944. They saw some action in the war, but it was limited to some extent because the Brits didn't fly them over territory where a downed one would be captured by the Germans or Soviets.

They were made of natural Uranium (not enriched). The by far dominant Uranium isotope in natural (unenriched) Uranium (U-238) is not fissionable except by fast neutrons such as produced by fission of U-235 (0.7% of natural Uranium, though I'd have to look up if the usual fission neutron from U-235 is energetic enough) or fast neutrons from fusion reactions (as occurs in thermonuclear weapons). Uranium used in the common civilian nuclear power reactors has to be enriched to 3-5% to provide useful power (https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment.aspx). And nuclear weapons require far more.
Natural Uranium can sustain a chain reaction due to it's small amount of U-235, the first artificial nuclear pile to sustain a chain reaction (CP-1 at University of Chicago, part of the Manhattan Project) used natural Uranium, but it takes a lot of it and very pure moderators, etc. Anyway, there are plenty of other sources of natural Uranium, these cubes are only historical artifacts/curiosities.

To take the just example of cars, the difference in a car from the 50's and a modern car is so vast such they are practically not comparable. A typical 50's car had no A/C, a three speed manual transmission, at best an AM radio, manual steering, drum brakes, and probably about 65 horsepower at the rear wheels. Due to the lack of safety equipment the death rate per mile traveled was far higher back then. And cars last far longer than they used to. Much of that GDP increase since then has gone into capability improvement rather than unit item affordability. This is from market demand, there are still relatively cheap new cars out there, but they don't sell very well. It is hard to say that is part of a declining living standard.

Electrons (and photons) are referred to as "point particles", but that is a bit of a misnomer and is intended only to mean that an electron has no internal structure or constituent particles (in contrast to composite particles like protons). The actual physical extent of an electron is not well described as a mathematical point for at least a couple of reasons 1) uncertainty in location of an electron cannot be brought to zero, and 2) the electron will be "surrounded" by virtual photons by which it interacts through the electromagnetic force (and whatever mediates its weak interactions, too). The words "point", "collision", etc from natural language which we use in these discussions don't describe the underlying math of the actual processes very well.

The linked BBC article is misleading and compares the Feb 1966 landing of the uncrewed Luna 9 to the July 1969 crewed landing of Apollo 11. The BBC article doesn't mention at all the first US uncrewed lander on the moon, Surveyor 1, which landed in June 1966, 4 months after Luna 9, followed by the successful landings of Surveyors 3, 5, 6, and 7 through early 1968 and then by the crewed Apollo landings.

Good observation. The central gas heaters I've seen here all require electric service to run the blower and electronics. However, my gas water heater does not require any electric hookup, so if the electricity had gone out (assuming gas and water stayed up) we were going to draw some hot baths! The water heater is fairly new and has some control electronics including status LEDs -- I assume it does some kind of thermoelectric generation to produce its own small amount of required electric power.

This is anecdotal but I'm a native Texan and have lived here for 50+ years. The first time I ever saw a heat pump for residential heating was in a new house built in 2018. Every other house I've lived in or noticed the type of central heat, it was natural gas. My house here is relatively new at 20 years old and is installed with natural gas central heat. Maybe the new houses are being built with heat pumps but the vast majority of older ones are gas heated. The new house I saw the heat pump in was all-electric with no gas service, so it may not even be typical of new construction. I doubt that heat pumps brought down the Texas grid. Might have been a lot of electric space heaters turned on when it got cold. One thing which was mentioned in some reporting here is that residential heating was competing with the gas fired power plants for gas in the distribution system. One of the suburbs north of here lost gas pressure in their lines early in the weather event.

Do the fixed, land based ICBMs really buy us any deterrence that the submarine-based and aircraft launched missiles don't provide? Land based ICBMs were handy 60 years ago, but now they seem to be obsolete with the drawbacks of being fixed targets themselves and not recallable once they are on their 30 minute trip. The USA could make a statement about nuclear disarmament by getting rid of the land based ICBMs and still maintain unstoppable nuclear deterrent forces. Put the ICBM money into modernizing sea and air based platforms if necessary. And, as the B-52s and B-1s have shown, aircraft developed for strategic nuclear missions can be utilized for other roles when the threats change.

He IS a pilot, a jet pilot. He owns and flies military jet fighters and trainers. This article from six years ago (https://www.fastcompany.com/3044942/meet-the-fighter-jet-flying-32-year-old-on-top-of-the-payments-industry) says he owns the largest fleet of of privately owned former military tactical jets in the world via a company he founded, Draken International. So he is a "tactical jet services startup entrepreneur", too.

You know (or maybe not), "passed" in reference to death often is just a shortened version of "passed away", maybe with an implication of a peaceful death but with no implication of religion or afterlife. It's just a euphemism for "died" sometimes used in polite company. I'm an atheist and when I go I'd like to "pass away".

If you read through the links in the submission, Mr. AC, you get to these quotes (two links down at https://phys.org/news/2019-04-...:
"EAST (the Chinese tokamak) is part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, which seeks to prove the feasibility of fusion power.
Funded and run by the European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, and the United States, the multi-billion-dollar project's centrepiece will be a giant cylindrical fusion device, called a tokamak."
and
"Wu Songtao, a top Chinese engineer with ITER, conceded that China's technical capabilities on fusion still lag behind more developed countries, and that US and Japanese tokamaks have achieved more valuable overall results."
I don't know why every time the Chinese do something cool it spawns all the uninformed remarks that the USA or Europe can't or won't or gave up on something similar. It's like reverse jingoism. In this case (controlled fusion) China is a valuable member of the research team, like all the other participants. Seems win-win-win to me.

Probably bad form to reply to my own post but the whole story of the Saturn V problems on Apollo 6 is fascinating and anyone interested can start at the Wikipedia page for "Apollo 6" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_6). To make a complicated story short, the hydrogen line which failed first did so due to a vibrational mode not caught in ground testing because in ground testing air liquefied and froze around the lines and damped the vibration -- no air around in the actual flight so no damping. The third stage of that vehicle also malfunctioned; it had the same type of engine so the assumption is that it had the same type of line failure. NASA was confident of their trouble diagnoses and fixes that they launched the next Saturn V crewed (Apollo 8) on a mission around the moon.

A similar assembly error was part of a cascade of failures during the flight of the second Saturn V (the uncrewed Apollo 6 mission). During the operation of the second stage (the S-II stage with five engines) engine Number 2 shut down early due to mechanical failure of a fuel (hydrogen) line. The safety system on-board then automatically shut off the oxygen supply to normally operating engine Number 3 because some wiring between engines 2 and 3 was mixed up. The flight had other problems, too, and would have been a mission abort if a crew had been on-board. This was the second Saturn V launched, the first one had flown almost flawlessly.