Don’t forget insanely lucky and well off enough to afford a masters degree before you’re in your 30s.

Starliner also lands on land, and I believe Dragon has that option or at least was gong to at some point in its design.

I get what you are saying, but the Saturn V was never intended to be an ICBM. Depending on what numbers you look at too, they weren’t actually that well funded. Some of the largest estimates that I’ve seen place NASA’s inflation adjusted budget between 1960 and 1973 at just under $600 billion. Or roughly half of what we’re spending in one year on the military currently.

To put it another way, at its absolute peak budget NASA received roughly 4.6% of the current military budget.

Maybe the people in back had even less of their suit ready. It’s awfully dark back there for them to be wearing shiny pants.

I think people forget that the United States has no official demonym, and that America, like Great Britain, is a place not a country.

Personally, I’m a fan of adopting Station, since we all seem to have decided that the United States is a nation and not a federal system.

As an aside and fun fact: my favorite demonym is Solarian, which encompasses all people from the Solar System. The Solar System, sometimes confusingly, is named like the Moon where all moons are moons, but ours is the Moon. (Solarian is sometimes confused with Terran, but that is specific to the Earth-Moon system. All Terrans are Solarian, but not all Solarians are Terran.)

As a Native American I often feel that it’s just not possible to hate the US government enough.

This mission has clothed and fed 1000s of people already. NASA is one of the USA’s largest jobs programs and most of us are completely okay with our tax dollars being used in that manner.

But a picture is worth a thousand words!

IIRC the original Shuttle design called for an ejection mechanism around the entire cockpit. During STS-1 and I believe STS-2, which was also Colombia, there were extra emergency mechanisms present, but I don’t think the seats themselves ejected through the roof like a fighter pilot’s would. For the most part though these were useless as they could not be used above 30,000 feet or something like that so it could only be used during the first minute or two of the flight.

Several of the safety mechanisms and other things that were going to be part of the original design that had not already been scrapped for weight (like jet engines for powered decent) were scrapped for weight when the DOD stepped in and offered NASA extra money for the Shuttle if the Shuttle could hit very specific, higher and less fuel efficient, orbits. This came from an offhand comment that Jimmy Carter made, and then had to make good on the threats and implications of.

Fun fact: Columbia, pictured with the white tank, was the heaviest shuttle and was not modified to have the airlock necessary to dock with the ISS because the performance losses compared to the other shuttles made it difficult to use for ISS operations.

I hate websites that hijack the back button.

I get irritated with the dilution of the term as well but then I remember calling the computer players in games like Super Mario Kart and GoldenEye AI when talking about them back in the day.

Fun fact: Jupiter has rings too!!!

It’s almost exclusively called River Cane here. Probably why nobody thinks it’s bamboo.

One correction and fun fact: We absolutely had bamboo.

The book came out in 1990.

I understand where you are coming from. But I am a standard transmission kinda person.

Okay, but writing a .desktop file takes like 10 seconds.

I would definitely try it without the KVM at all and see if it still happens.

We absolutely saw those photos in school in the US… maybe this person just didn’t pay attention?