Skylab was always intended to get boosted to a higher orbit for future use, but NASA got too busy with the shuttle. Then delays.

Being built out of a surplus rocket stage, it was pretty robust. Big too. Why so much of it survived re-entry.

The Soviet Salyut and Almaz stations were a bit smaller, and burned up more or less completely even during the (several) uncontrolled re-entries that took place.

It's been a while since the US and EU intentionally fired rockets such that the stages landed on people (did they ever?)
USSR/Russia and China have done this repeatedly. Doing so with super-toxic hypergolic fuels on the main stages makes it even worse.

The "giant lawn dart" that is the Long March 5A, while using safer fuels, isn't much better.

At this point, it seems best to keep the ordering online, and let the massive logistics apparatus that has already been built work most efficiently. Consider it one of the better Sears/Pennys catalog replacements for the 21st century.

All Amazon really needs at this point past blue/grey vans is pickup centers with storage lockers in denser population areas. This could be a good use of some of the recently closed K-mart locations. Those may just be more van centers tho, still fulfilling a need.

This doesn't address the "all your eggs in one basket" conundrum you have with anything Amazon, but the distribution centers that serve the front-line van centers, which are already local by necessity, are increasingly located near you... folks have jobs sending all of us stuff.

Products can be created anywhere these days. Nice to have it close to home, but either way local folks are gonna get it to you. The past year has made this more clear to me.

The riot was the culmination of well over 2 months of election denial, and that's only if we are going back to Nov 3rd.

We could have a discussion that this started far, far earlier.

The Dems wanted him out of office. Impeachment was not the first option, but rather the 3rd. First was hoping for a resignation, second was hoping for invocation of the 25th.

The color of the sky is generally blue on my planet, more or less.

You are correct that the N-1 was a 4-for-4 failure.

The Energia booster on the other hand, was a success. 2-for-2. Polyus (1st Energia payload) failed it reach orbit, but not because of the booster, which performed flawlessly.

It was lack of a use beyond the Buran shuttle that doomed Energia. It's too bad, as it was one of the USSR's first successful HydroLOX engines (RD-0120).

The boosters used RD-170 4-chamber engines, the world's most powerful liquid fuel rocket engine, which were used extensively on Zenit rockets after Energia. Then a 2-chamber version (RD-180) was developed which is STILL used on US Atlas boosters.

Hardly a failure in technology... now that socialist/command funding & prioritization schedule... that's where the bulk of the failure lies...

Why not hybrid?

One that uses electric motors to handle takeoff (with say, conta-rotating props) and getting close to cruise altitude, then flip on the turbofans for the majority of the cruise portion of the flight.

It may even be feasable to bleed off some of the power being generated by the turbofans while cruising to partially charge the battery.

This could have a twofold benefit of a quieter airport while saving on fuel for longer-haul flights. Spooling up those turbofans to get a stationary plane moving uses alot of fuel that would be better used at altitude where the efficiencies can be maximized.

You wouldn't need a battery to handle the entire flight, which makes less weight.

Even then, should you NEED to take off using the turbofans, they are available.

Sure we'd still need liquid fuels for the turbofans, it would still be a lower per-mile usage, meaning we could use more expensive processes to get CO2-neutral fuel and still come out money ahead vs. dumping Jet A/B into the turbines alone.

" CD sales made up roughly $485 million of the industry's revenue over the first six months of the year, and vinyl sales brought in an additional $224 million."

Am I the only one seeing vinyl sales sitting at 46% of CD sales and smiling? Ever since MP3 (1994) and FLAC a bit later CDs were only a physical conduit to a digital file, and having vinyl started to have meaning again... for actual sit-down listening.

How long before this figure is inverted? Vinyl will always have a market, niche as it may be. I haven't used an actual CD in years...

Streaming works, folks want the data link anyways. Glad they could monetize it.

For others, there are digital files on your phone, and vinyl when you wanna sip on some whisky. ;-)

Well played. ;-)

My question: Do we also get Erasmus points for slightly "out of the box" thinking too?

Where was there a "capsule" on board Challenger, Columbia, or any shuttle, American or Soviet? There wasn't? K, thought so.

The Soviets did a decent job duplicating the EOS from the Mercury program, which was improved for Apollo manned flights (thankfully never used).

Scare mongering on DDT eh?

For my part I'd rather have Bald Eagles and Peregrine falcons these days and continue sending mosquito nets to areas where malaria is endemic. It's not a perfect solution, but things rarely are.

Iceland still has commercial level H2 generation via electrolysis. The energy comes from hydro and geothermal.

The bigger debate is when the CO2 emissions from other forms of energy generation are added back into the total cost of the fuel, well-to-wheel as it were.

Or, if we are discussing the use of surplus French nuclear generation, factor in the waste disposal/reprocessing costs since there is zero CO2 generation.

Steam reforming NG is subsidized by this lack of emissions calculation. The math is in it's favor, for now.

Correct. Bulk CO2 emissions are on the decline.

Correct again, the current President is Trump.

To correlate these two facts is misleading. Emissions are going down due to the transition from coal to natural gas.

Basically, the "war on coal" is producing results and the current administration is the benefactor. Not BECAUSE of the current administration, but DESPITE the current administration.

Indeed the ACA did promise to fix this.

Think of it as a brand-new Tesla that can do 0-60 under 4 seconds vs. a brand-new Tesla trying to move at all with a huge log chain tying it to a tree (GOP opposition).

Yes, the car capable if ALLOWED TO DO SO.

Think about the package delivery industry. UPS and FedEx have fleets of trucks that drive fixed routes day in, day out. They load up at a hub, then drive to the next destination. Then fill up again and return home. Rinse/repeat. These use-cases alone would be a good use for these types of vehicles.

The next step would be the "around town" delivery vans. Most run a fixed circuit of mostly right-hand turns, with regular stops for pickup and delivery.

Start simple. Do the math. If companies can save money using these vehicles and shift their diesel to other tasks they will do it.

Long haul routes will continue to be dominated by diesel rigs for the time being.

blah blah nuclear... we know already.

the problem isn't the nuclear itself, it's all the side crap like the totally inefficient way the fuel is USED...

thorium, on paper is a great idea, so is pebble bed. we should do that. we should build reactors that use the VAST MAJORITY of the fuel before it is designated waste and stored in a pool...

fix the underlying technical issues, deal with the proliferation possibility. once we get past that a reactor is simple.

that's why solar is a good idea NOW. even if we are buying it all from china, belching pollution into the air it is STILL a better deal for the environment than these half-assed reactors that have been foisted upon us.