Death penalty has no place today. It's barbaric, and, at least in america, it's like 5% of those executed are innocent. I don't know the exact number, but that's not good enough. Imagine waking up one day to be executed and you did nothing wrong.
So first off, I don’t like the headline. All US subs are nuclear, but this feels like burying the story: parking an SSBN at South Korea is a very specific message. It carries 20 Trident II missiles, each capable of carry 8 475kt warheads (but likely only armed with 4 due to treaty limitations).
38 Megatons of independently targetable nuclear destruction.
That said, the story also talks about how this will drive KJU from the table - as if he was ever there in the first place. Given the state of their current activities, I don’t think reminding him that he’s fucking around with a country that worked out nuclear delivery via ICBM half a century ago is overly aggressive.
IMO, at some point, someone (and I’m not saying the US necessarily) is going to have to go in and depose the regime and integrate the population into modern society. North Korea is a bigger threat to world stability than Russia, and today that’s really saying something.
Russia may threaten and posture the use of nuclear weapons, and have started a losing war with their neighbor, but it’s far less likely that they would actually use the weapons. Even if Putin ordered it there’s a lot of people between him and the weapons that could prevent the use. He’s a dictator but barely, he needs to keep the oligarchs happy to keep his office, and the oligarchs don’t want to live out the rest of their lives in cramped bunkers in Siberia when the earth is irradiated. DPRK on the other hand is an actual dictatorship, with few people between Kim and a launch, and is actually unstable enough to do it. Also, with their carelessness around their “test launches” they’re much more likely to cause an international incident by dropping a half-fueled rocket stage on Japan.
Didn't the plants all get safely shut down before the Russians got there? If so, they can't cause a meltdown unless they actually try to start the reactors.
Not to say they can't cause something bad to happen, especially since they are storing munitions in there but it wouldn't be a meltdown. I would assume fuel material wouldn't get thrown as far/the core wouldn't be compromised but that would take someone more knowledgable than me on this.
Didn’t the plants all get safely shut down before the Russians got there? If so, they can’t cause a meltdown unless they actually try to start the reactors.
Are the shutdown? Yes. Safely? Definitely not. The type of reactor they are and the fuel they use, requires active cooling as it remains hot for years.
Zaporizhzhia is the plant in question, and it’s water supply is in jeopardy after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
With the plant not in active operation, it’s unlikely we’d see an incident on the level of Chernobyl but it’s far from safe.
How would you feel if you were a South Korean? Knowing that your brothers to the North want to kill or conquer you simply because they’re not happy with the half of the continent they chose because, ultimately, the US was a better development partner than Russia and China?
The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.
My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.
NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.
One of Starship’s engines on the lowest setting would tear the station apart. Regardless of whether they make this based on Starship instead of something more reasonably sized like a Dragon or Falcon 2nd stage, it’ll still need either a new engine design or a big cluster of Dracos. It’ll be something custom.
Regarding their Artemis work- the payments are milestone based, so they get money as they pass milestones. Engine relights and ship to ship prop transfer are some of the next ones.
Regarding their other customers- the Starship manifest includes another moon cruise, several satellite launches, and a lot of Starlinks.
It is been a plan for a while in the USA to shift launches from government run to private run for over a decade. This is just an implementation of that strategy.
Longer - fifteen, closer to twenty years. It took this long for there to be one or two companies that they could be sure wouldn’t just cut and run (especially given how cutthroat the aerospace industry is).
They have had a plan for it, from the very beginning. Big-budget space projects like ISS don’t get anywhere without a wrap-up plan. ISS is in LEO, and its mass contraindicates moving it into a graveyard orbit. Conventionally, stuff in LEO gets de-orbited; same thing happened with Skylab in '79.
Wait, how is Starship failing? They successfully returned from re-entry and made a soft landing with both the booster and starship itself. Seems to me that it’s well on track?
The shocking part isn’t that they did it, or that they even admitted to it, but that there was actually an employee there in a position to actually admit anything in some capacity.
bbc.co.uk
Top