You mean the... wait for it... Apollo lunar module?

Didn't say it was't. I just said it was a lunar mission, but not a mission to the moon.

No question about that. Any mission where the astronauts return home in one piece is at least partially successful, because that one ultra-critical part still went right.

I have to disagree with that. Yeah, the shuttle design sucked in a lot of critical ways, but we mostly have the military to blame for that, because of their requirement that satellite retrieval be a critical feature in any future NASA craft. Pretty much all of what doomed both of the failed shuttle missions ultimately stems from that design decision and the compromises that came out of that decision (specifically, the need to put the shuttle on the side of the stack stemmed from the need to use the SSMEs to have enough lift capacity to bring large satellite payloads to orbit).

Challenger failed because of that. Columbia failed because of that.

Sure, there were other causes. Challenger also failed because warnings about the o-rings were dismissed by middle management and not brought to the attention of the people who could do something about it. It failed because nobody saw the leaking plume and thought, "The tank could blow. We need to do an early SRB sep and an RTLS abort or an abort once around (depending on alitude).

Columbia also failed because NASA failed to deal with the foam problem that had plagued numerous previous shuttle missions. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have any plan in place to repair critical leading edge tiles in orbit. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have a plan for launching a rescue shuttle if something went wrong. Columbia also likely failed in part because NASA didn't replace the oldest bird in the fleet with one of the newer, much lighter versions, which weighed about four tons less (112.4 pounds per square foot of wing area on Columbia versus 107.5 pounds per square foot for Endeavor, for example). Maybe that small difference wouldn't have made it survivable, or maybe it would have.

Columbia also failed because they deliberately didn't look to see the state of things, believing that nothing could be done, and therefore they did not launch a supply rocket to restock them so that they could extend the mission until they could come up with a solution or launch a rescue shuttle. They did not sacrificially open the landing gear early to cool the wing and allow plasma a path out of the damaged wing during reentry (and increase drag). They did not deploy the drag chute early sacrificially to increase drag. They did not perform all of their turns in a way that would minimize heating on the bad wing or bring the thing down in a continuous curve to increase heat on one side and decrease the heat on the other side. And so on. None of those things were even discussed, because they took it as a foregone conclusion that there was nothing they could do, so they didn't even try.

But at the same time, the number of things they *did* think of, at least during the design stages, is incredible. For example, if they *had* caught the Challenger problem in time to do an early ET and SRB separation, they trained for aborting back to KSC, and the crew could have been saved. Columbia was pretty much screwed without a rescue mission, of course, but the fact that the computer could basically autoland the shuttle (except for the landing gear, which required an umbilical and some new software) meant that *if* they had caught that in time and sent a supply mission and a later rescue mission to bring the crew home, they could have attempted a landing of the shuttle without sacrificing anyone. It meant that if the crew became incapacitated, it could probably mostly bring itself to a landing, albeit a very tile-destroying landing. And so on.

So at least for Columbia, it isn't so much that they believed that they were smarter than they were so much as that they gave up. I don't know which is worse.

I definitely don't think it's worth the expense. They're doing three flights with the design and then throwing it away for a different version in the fourth flight, then throwing it away again in the ninth flight, meanwhile, assuming SpaceX continues on its current trajectory (with Starship block 3 launching in 2026), the Artemis block 2 lift vehicle will be hopelessly out of date years before its first launch (post-2030, with a quarter the payload capacity, and at orders of magnitude higher cost).

It's the best rocket Congress and defense contractor lobbyists could design.

> all those AI hype men are feeding him?

Hype-women are more effective, spotting boobs reduces a man's IQ by 15%.

Karl Marx was 80% right.

Good point! Maybe the first successful AI movies will be comedies and spoofs: "Pirates of the Mar-a-Lago"

Early Model T's broke your arm when the starter backfired. People often bought after-market auto-starters, and then Ford eventually included it as part of the car.

But current AI mostly works, whereas an alleged philosopher's stone did absolutely diddly squat when observed.

Do you actually believe AI is stuck in its D+ state for say 50 years?

Someday such technology will ubiquitous enough to watch the entire news this way.

(Biden looks eerily like Jen Psaki. Foil hat stuff...)

People make fun of "too many letters", so some propose calling it just "gender liberty" (GL), meaning old fashioned mores about romantic partner and fashion choices related to gender are dropped per regular public settings.

Thus "a GL person" would be equivalent to "an LGBTQ+ person".

Being there is a shortage of women in China due to cultural habits, the Chinese gov't should embrace homosexuality to reduce the chance of riots. People who "get some" tend to be calmer*.

But there has been an anti-LGBTQ+ push by the Chinese gov't in the last few years. Seems some "Archie Bunker" in the brass got triggered by overly fem boy bands.

* There is a theory mid-east violence is caused by polygamy, which leaves many men without mates.

*shrugs*

I *would* argue that Apollo 8 and 13 did not go to the moon, though Apollo 8 is notable for being the first human spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, which means it still a huge milestone. Apollo 13, of course, failed spectacularly in its attempt to reach the moon, and is notable for being one of the most amazing saves in the history of the space program. And clearly they are both lunar missions, in that they are moon-related, whereas when I think of a moon mission, I think of a mission specifically to the moon's surface. Very esoteric linguistic distinction, and I may just be splitting hairs.

This is going to happen in red states soon enough.

Is it really? I think it's more personal than political, though in general it gets really fuzzy when political views take aim at individual identity.

His ammunition had obscure internet meme references that are used more by the alt-right than the left, though it's really hard to tell because Internet extremists apply many layers of irony, making it really hard to tell.

No, his political motivations are not very clear.

Except that Crooks was also tracking events of the Democratic candidates. He wanted to shoot a prominent figure, it didn't matter which side. Ryan Routh was definitely political, but he wasn't any sort of left-winger. He voted for Trump, then supported Bernie, then Tulsi Gabbard, then Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.

I think it's highly likely that Robinson was similarly all over the place, but likely less clear since he was young probably didn't think much about politics.

No, I think he was probably already further to the right, but moved at least some of his views to the left. You do know who Nick Fuentes and the groypers are, right?

This almost earned you a "Foe" tag. I haven't impugned your intelligence or other personal characteristics. Keep it civil, please.

Indeed, left-wing violence is on the rise, but that's coming from a point where right-wing violence utterly dominated the space for decades. Don't go assuming that your side is somehow less violent just because they've been relatively quiet this year. And although I'm actually not on the left, if I were I wouldn't assume that my side is inherently less violent, either, because the opposite was true in the 60s.

The only correct reaction here is to condemn political violence, full stop, and not to care what the motivations of the individuals were (though, obviously, I have a sick fascination with understanding their motivations and spend way too much time digging into whatever we have).

Note that condemning political violence, full stop, is not what Trump and the GOP leadership are doing. They're condemning only violence from the left and ignoring violence from the right. This is very bad for all of us left, right and center.

What makes you think it wasn't?

Like the flat Earth conspiracy theories, the COVID conspiracy theories are really amusing, and for the same reason: The theorists can offer no plausible explanation as to why the alleged conspirators are doing the dastardly thing. During COVID, the best rationale on offer was "To control us!". Okay, but if someone wants to control you, don't they generally use that control to make you do something that benefits them? If I built a mind control machine, would I use it to make people give me money and sex, or would I use it to get them to turn in a circle three times before going to bed?

The best the flat Earthers can come up with is "It's a plot by NASA to get money from the government", which they then "prove" by ginning up some math that shows that the cost of deceiving the world just happens to be about the same amount as NASA's budget. Except that actually disproves their point. If I'm going to create a hoax to extract government funding, I definitely don't want to spend every penny of the funding on running the hoax. That's just working for a living, and if I'm a scammer it's exactly what I don't want to do.

It has not, though keep in mind that you don't actually kiss their cheeks, you kiss the air next to their cheeks. What touches their cheek is your cheek, if anything (often there is no actual contact).

Huh? Right-handers writing left to right and top to bottom have no problem with this. When you go to the next line, you don't touch the line above. It's above, and the pen extends beyond your fingers, so your fingers stay well away from the just-written line. If you're a left-hander, going to the next line isn't the issue, the problem is smudging the just-written characters on the same line... except that left-handers often avoid that problem by cocking their wrist sharply to move the edge of their palm up out of the way so it doesn't touch the just-written letters. That then means they might smudge lines above. They make it work, mostly, but it's tricky.