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Jacob Collier, Mahalia, Ty Dolla $Ign: "All I Need" (Live From the Lavatory)

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William Lewis5/30/2020 1:51:34 pm PDT

re: #210 Targetpractice

The ISS is the child of “Space Station Alpha,” which itself was the child of Skylab and other 60s-era proposals for permanent space labs. And “Alpha” itself was NASA giving the Shuttle something to do, as the long list of compromises made to get that off the ground had turned the “reusable orbital U-haul” into a bloated white elephant that they were struggling to justify by the Carter era when programs like Pioneer, Voyager, and Viking were sending back reams of data for a lot less investment. Honestly, if Carter has been reelected or Mondale had been elected, odds are the SST would have been shit-canned after Columbia.

The Russian’s were flabbergasted by the shuttle. They knew the numbers; they knew it couldn’t work. Hell, they tried to sort of build something that might be closer to working in Buran but dropped it after one unmanned flight. It was just too expensive for civilian launches and they had better military boosters.

Just like us. But we had to keep the shuttle going because of how crippled the development system had become and we kept going till the second was lost and that made it obvious that it had to go.

I’m not sure today’s launch is really any better. We should have been doing far more research on aerospike based engines and SSTO concepts.