And what, you want to be able to use spy satellites to see your neighbor sunbathing in the backyard?

These are military satellites, to look at military shit like what planes an enemy has on the runway and how many, where tanks are on a battlefield, if a convoy is getting ready to leave a depot and how many vehicles it has. Not to mention, what they are even capable of seeing is a matter of national security. If an enemy knows your satellite only has a certain resolution, they can figure out exactly what camouflage they need to defeat it. If they know how the infrared photography works, they can develop strategies to fake the number of functional vehicles they have. Not everyone in the whole world should know that shit. Otherwise the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States should just pack up and retire.

We already have a global low latency communication network, it’s the thing I’m sending you this message on now. When we don’t need is a global, high quality, spy satellite network that everyone and their brother can use and learn the capabilities of.

You have no idea how a spy satellite works, do you?

They take pictures.

With really, really fancy cameras.

Cameras that are very carefully, and secretly, designed to be very good at their jobs.

No, you can’t just let some third party decide to use your fancy spy satellite, that means they now know what your satellite can and can’t do, which means they can hide things from it, which means it’s now just a very expensive lump in orbit.

And need I remind you that SpaceX is not some magical self funded space ferry service. They’re a US Government contractor, that’s where most of their money comes from. The satellites are made by other contractors. There’s not a government satellite factory somewhere in the desert, they pay companies like Boeing and Honeywell to make them the parts for the satellite, and then SpaceX gets money to launch it.

When the government pays for something, the contractor is legally required to keep their mouth shut about it, hand over the keys, and be available if it breaks. The contractor cannot just decide to let someone else play with the government’s toys, that’s called espionage.

Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York, And Washington are the states you can use this in, since the site in the OP just gives you a link to the IRS website that lists the states.

My god, that’s fewer than 5.

Also that’s getting really close to “Adam & Eve” level inbreeding. Those penguins have a family wreath, I wonder if they can develop a Hapsburg beak.

Unfortunately the US has basically been running on the polite fiction that people who want to be leaders will be good leaders and behave like rational human beings.

So when someone who has no good intentions and is not rational got into power, we learned that a lot of things we thought of as laws were really just habits.

And as much as it sucks, it’s actually sensible that trump can run until he’s been proven guilty. Otherwise a wannabe dictator could just drown the opposition in frivolous lawsuits and bar them from running because of the suspicion of crime.

Don’t get me wrong, I think trump is guilty as sin and is a danger to our democracy. But, we need to be careful how we respond to this, or it could be worse when the next maniac gets into power and starts banning people from running because all of his opponents are suddenly under investigation for tax irregularities or littering.

Space travel is very expensive and NASA has a very small budget these days.

Back during the space race, NASA could afford to launch multiple missions per year. Now they can barely afford to maintain existing missions and are lucky to launch a major missions every few years. Which is why they’ve moved to buying space on commercial missions, as it’s cheaper to only pay for a spot on a rocket/craft than to pay for the whole thing.

NASA also has to justify its missions to congress. Sending rovers to mars and probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have actual scientific interest and can answer questions about the formation of the solar system, and the viability of life off of earth.

Slingshotting something really fast sounds cool as fuck, but there’s not much data to be gathered there. We’ve also recently beaten the “fastest man made object” record with the Parker Solar Probe, as it’s currently whipping around the sun at ludicrous speeds while it collects data about the solar atmosphere and magnetic fields. It’s moving a lot faster than voyager ever did, as it needs an insane amount of speed to orbit so low to the sun. It’s actually much cheaper, fuel wise, to travel to Pluto than the sun.

So why waste billions of dollars to fling something out into deep space? We have barely even seen all Of the celestial bodies in our own star system, and there’s not much to be learned about the empty vacuum beyond the sun. The only justifiable reason would be to send a probe to another star system entirely. But that probe alone would have to be the largest, most expensive space craft humanity has ever built. It would need to be able to power itself for centuries, have a communication system capable of sending data over interstellar distances, and likely need a way to autonomously harvest its own fuel, as there’s very little point in sending a probe screaming past Proxima Centauri and taking a few hazy pictures of planets as it goes. We’d want the probe to be able to stay in and explore the new star system, and the only way to do that is to have enough fuel to move around an entire system, or create more fuel as it goes. Something like that has never even been tried before, and the risk is high when you won’t know if it worked or not for a few hundred years.

You wanna know a great way to stop a burning man from setting other people on fire? A fire extinguisher

Probably because the craft that were just in orbit could be considered “in flight” for their entire duration.

Aircraft in flight are considered under the jurisdiction of the country they took off from. So if the spacecraft started in Florida, landed in international waters, and was recovered by a US vehicle, then the astronauts never technically left the jurisdiction of the United States.

But because Apollo 11 did land somewhere, it could be argued they ended the first flight and began a second one when they took off. Due to this, they had left US jurisdiction as they landed and left the vehicle. This means they left the country, and need to go through immigration.

It’s also a piece of the official paper trail that helps to prove to other nations that the US did land on the moon, and that placing the flag in the moon was symbolic and not an attempt to annex the moon. If Apollo 11 had claimed the moon as US territory, then they wouldn’t have needed to fill out immigration papers.

All I’m gonna say is that ULAs Vulcan flew for the first time last month, and performed perfectly.

Blue origin developed the engines for Vulcan, and they performed perfectly.

Starship has had 2 test flights that they’ve had to backtrack and spin as “successful” because they cleared the pad. This is supposed to be a human rated launch vehicle, and it took SpaceX a few minutes on the second launch to even notice that the fucking thing blew up on the edge of space.

I don’t really care how reliable the falcon is, when they haven’t seemed to apply a single thing they learned from it to Starship.

Starship is supposed to put the next humans on the moon. They got the contract because they quoted to NASA that they could do it cheaper than anybody else. They’ve now blown up 2 test vehicles, and failed to demonstrate a single example of any of the new technologies they need in order for the Starship lander to work.

Likely due to this, the next moon landing has been pushed back a year, and likely will keep slipping until NASA grows the balls to pull the contract from SpaceX and give it to a company with more realistic development strategies.

As much as I am annoyed by the time table slip, What I really, really don’t want to see is the first people to land on the moon in 50 years crashing and burning because of Elon’s cartoon rocket. Or getting trapped on the surface because the stupid fucking elevator gets jammed due to moon dust. Or getting all the way out to the moon, only to discover the dammed turbo pumped engines won’t spool up after sitting in space for a week. Or if the thing will be capable of getting to the moon, we’ve never transferred cryogenic fuels in space before, and it’s going to take over a dozen of these transfers to fuel the starship for the landing.

My point is that there’s 2 primary mantras when it comes to human space flight, and we’ve learned them through blood and sacrifice: Keep It Simple Stupid, and Failure is Not an Option. Starship, and SpaceX in general, fundamentally does not follow these. It’s already an over complicated and unproven design, and their whole design strategy is that blowing up is a success. That is unacceptable and contrary to developing a vehicle that is supposed to work 100% of the time while it’s 240,000 miles away. If you don’t design with those 2 goals in mind, you will get people killed, and we will have the very first bodies off of earth.

To end this, I want to talk about some of the procedures that Apollo had. If they were going to leave the moon, and the ascent engine wouldn’t light, they still had options. Option 1 was to exit the lander, and flip a switch that would release a blade to cut safety wires that prevent the engine from lighting accidentally. If that didn’t work, they had a literal pair of bolt cutters, and would go in and cut the safety wires and bolts by hand before coming in and opening the valves for the fuel, which would light itself. Ask yourself what those emergency procedures look like on starship. Ask yourself what the procedure is if those engines won’t light, or the elevator jams with people on the surface, or any of the other dozen things that can go wrong and kill you in space.

They do have a habit of blowing up tho.

Seems to be a theme with Elon’s contraptions.

They also recently announced an anhydrous ammonia engine.

They really really don’t want to do an electric car. Anhydrous ammonia is insanely toxic. You ever spill a like a few drops of gas at the pump and get it on your pants or shoe? Annoying but not a big deal. Do that with anhydrous ammonia and you’ll be in the hospital.

Nah, I’m an adult, I like things that I like and don’t waste time on things that I don’t.

Watched like 5 episodes and gave up on the piss poor plots and 2d companions.

If you enjoyed it, good for you. But I am always confused by people like you who feel the need to defend the virtue of a show just because someone on the internet disagrees with the quality of content you enjoy.

I didn’t like it, you did. I have watched 5 hours of a show and decided it wasn’t worth my time, you telling me otherwise isn’t going to really change my mind. I have better ways to entertain myself than wasting time on a show I know isn’t for me.

The difference is the reason they were “just there”

13s companions were literally just sitting around when she literally fell into their laps.

All the other companions of the modern show have had a compelling stories for how the doctor found them. These people were literally just milling about like they were waiting for someone to fall through the roof and change their lives.

4 is definitely unreasonable for a show known for its character arcs. How am I supposed to connect with any of these characters when they’ll get an average of a couple minutes of dialogue per episode.

You ever seen the myth busters episode where they try to drive a car through cameras and computer monitors?

It didn’t go well

Considering most of the other docs had like 1 or 2, yeah.

They were also just kinda… there.

Like sure that’s how the doctor originally met rose until the did the whole bad wolf plotline, but all the other companions had a compelling reason to be his companion. Martha was also a doctor who was there when her hospital got stolen by alien cops. Donna was gonna marry a guy who was involved in a plot to destroy the earth. Amy was at the center of a crack in the timeline, and Rory just happened to tag along for a lot of it. Even Clara was involved in a plot to kill the doctor.

You sound like you’re fun at orgies.

I really didn’t care for the Jodie Whittaker doctor.

Which is a shame because she is an amazing actor. But the new show runner really fucked over the stories. There were so many companions that I really didn’t give a shit about any of them because I never knew them beyond “woman”, and “one of those guys”

Maybe I’ll give it another go now that the season is over and I can see some tennant after. But I’m really not feeling this show runner, the stories were dull and the villains didn’t feel very convincing, even for doctor who, where the greatest villains of all are trash cans with egg beaters glued to them.

Bit weird that Tennant keeps getting cast as immortal beings with knowledge beyond comprehension.

It’s kind of become his typecast.

Playing doom.

Middle of a boss fight.

Holy shit I’m gonna do it…

Stutter.

Stutter.

Looping audio.

Black screen.

I forgot to feed my cpu.

Kick computer in frustration.

Printer sends out 911 text message.

Arrested for attempted murder.

Old judge gives me life in prison because “all human life is sacred”

Who do you think is subsidizing all of the oil and gas industries that produce the artificially cheap fossil fuels that we burn for energy?

Even if we were all to reduce how much we use, these corporations will still use fossil fuels because large governments are the ones subsidizing it as an energy source. That will buy us a few more years, yeah. But throwing a water bottle at a forest fire isn’t a solution.

Until governments start actually requiring green energy, and subsidize its production to the same extent they do for fossil fuels, we’ll never see any change. The only thing your average person can do is vote for someone who at least says they’ll do that. Reducing your individual carbon footprint is just corporate propaganda to shift blame from their industries and political bribery lobbying to the consumer.

We need to actually implement solutions, and no one is going to do that unless governments step up and fork over the laws and cash needed to do that. Letting companies buy “carbon credits” and all of this shit we’re doing to make ourselves feel better is just song and dance.