To remind @bobknight33 in a place where he can’t erase it and pretend he doesn’t know what a baby criminal his MAGA daddy is, Trump, coward that he is, walked away from two retaliatory lawsuits today, one against Cohen for revealing the payoff to a porn star to hide his affair and humiliating sexual performance because he was absolutely terrified of being deposed by someone who knows his secrets, and the other against the judge hearing his NY fraud case Judge Engoron, and then he ran away in shame after saying he would show up in court every day to stand up to the judge and DA, but instead fled to Florida after 2 1/2 days of grumbling in his seat. 😂
Trump claims he will refile against Cohen after he wins his criminal cases, so never. Cohen will be filing if he hasn’t already to recover maybe millions for defending the frivolous lawsuit and he will win.

Trump was tossed off the Forbes richest Americans list, citing a $650 million loss on Toth Senchal, the closure of all of his New York businesses, and the absurdity of accepting his own valuations for his properties like $650 million to $1.5 billion for Maralago he himself said wasn’t worth $20 million last year in court in an effort to try to avoid taxes. Truth is he may be exceedingly deep in debt well beyond the true value of his holdings…in debt to hostile foreign powers and criminal organizations.

Republicans have finally realized rules they put in place make him ineligible for speaker…you might think they would have looked into that before floating the idea but no. You people are so inept and incompetent.

Again he’s been exposed showing top secret highest classification level military secrets to foreigners for no reason beyond braggadocio. This time exposing nuclear submarine specs including payloads and stealth capabilities to an Australian who instantly told everyone he knew and some he didn’t…making the military secrets public knowledge. That’s treason…you know the penalty for treason, don’t you? String him up! 😂

Big daddy T is having a very bad really terrible day/week/month/year. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving person.

My intuition says this could never work, but Brian McManus lends a hell of a lot of credibility to it in my book.

If it does work out, then hopefully lots of cheap small payloads in similar orbits won't cause too much space debris.

Is that an intentional miss, or? The payload seems very light or not weighted for a more controlled vertical drop. Besides, looking at the rather static foliage, wind speed seems minimal. Seems like the drop is just meant to - or barely just powerful enough - to scare and not kill.

50 mile delivery radius (over flat terrain)
80mph max, 63mph cruise
4lb payload. I doubt there’s onboard cooling, but cool insulated boxes would be fine for maximum 45minute deliveries
Yes, weather is a factor…that’s why they’re setting up their own weather monitoring for higher resolution on local weather to fly around smaller systems and ground for big storms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery)

Don't they also need a rocket that can actually use such a launch platform? Is there a rocket currently made they will be using which make sense for such a system (payload size, cost effective)?

Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon say the F-35’s superiority over its rivals lies in its ability to remain undetected, giving it “first look, first shot, first kill.”

Hugh Harkins, a highly respected author on military combat aircraft, called that claim “a marketing and publicity gimmick” in his book on Russia’s Sukhoi Su-35S, a potential opponent of the F-35. He also wrote, “In real terms an aircraft in the class of the F-35 cannot compete with the Su-35S for out and out performance such as speed, climb, altitude, and maneuverability.”

Other critics have been even harsher. Pierre Sprey, a cofounding member of the so-called “fighter mafia” at the Pentagon and a co-designer of the F-16, calls the F-35 an “inherently a terrible airplane” that is the product of “an exceptionally dumb piece of Air Force PR spin.” He has said the F-35 would likely lose a close-in combat encounter to a well-flown MiG-21, a 1950s Soviet fighter design.

Robert Dorr, an Air Force veteran, career diplomat and military air combat historian, wrote in his book “Air Power Abandoned,” “The F-35 demonstrates repeatedly that it can’t live up to promises made for it. … It’s that bad.”

The development of the F-35 has been a mess by any measurement. There are numerous reasons, but they all come back to what F-35 critics would call the jet's original sin: the Pentagon's attempt to make a one-size-fits-all warplane, a Joint Strike Fighter.

History is littered with illustrations of multi-mission aircraft that never quite measured up. Take Germany's WWII Junkers Ju-88, or the 1970s Panavia Tornado, or even the original F/A-18. Today the Hornet is a mainstay of the American military, but when it debuted it lacked the range and payload of the A-7 Corsair and acceleration and climb performance of the F-4 Phantom it was meant to replace.

Yeah, the F/A-18 was trash when it first came out and it took YEARS and multiple changes/fixes to allow it to fully outperform the decades old aircraft it was designed to beat when it was released.

The F35 is not the best at anything it does, it is designed to fully be mediocre at all roles in order to allow it to be a single solution aircraft. That may change with more money, time, and data retrieved from hours spent in actual combat, but as it stands it is what it was designed to be. A jack of all trades and master of none, not something I would want to be flying in a role where I could encounter a master of that role.

As @ChaosEngine says, it is far beyond time that we move to a design where the pilot is not in the plane. There is no reason at this time that we cannot field a plane that could successfully perform it's role with the pilot in a secure location nearby. Such planes could be built cheaper, could perform in g-forces that humans cannot withstand, and would be expendable in a way that current planes are not. However, this would mean that our corporate welfare system for huge defense contractors would take a massive hit. We can't have that, can we?

*doublepromote some *quality engineering solutions.

2.0 should be more focused on a larger payload and range and less on speed to open up new categories and areas for deliveries, imo. They seem to have the small payload, rapid delivery model on lock.

They have a point about crowded American air space, but there's also plenty of America with no air service at all that could make good use of this tech and they should never have to think about encountering another plane if they stay under 20000 ft. in many places.

My first thought was it's one of the self driving suitcases malfunctioning.
My second thought was it's a self driving suitcase that's been reprogrammed to deliver it's payload to a certain plane.
If either is correct, I expect self propelled luggage to be banned immediately, so I really hope it's just strong wind and good wheels.

Golly sir, I sure am glad you’re here to explain it to me, but just for shits and giggles, let me take a stab at it.

Elon Musk wants to make humanity a multi-planet species, otherwise we are at risk of some kind of planet wide extinction level event. Having looked at the problem, he thinks the fundamental issue is one of economics. If he can get the price per person for a trip to Mars down to $500k, he figures he’ll get enough mad, bad and rich AF people to give forming a colony a go.

But that first step from earth to orbit is motherfucking expensive and aside from crazy unproven tech like a space elevator, thanks to the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation there really isn’t a cheap way to do this in terms of energy expenditure.

Ok, thinks Elon, what’s the other major cost in this whole shooting things into space gig? Hmm, the big fucking rocket costs a lot... be nice if we could reuse that instead of building a new one each time.

So he works on building a reusable rocket, and after many hilarious videos of “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, fuck me if the damn thing doesn’t start to stick the landing!

So now we need to do the same, but with a bigger rocket and a heavier payload. Can’t really risk an actual payload (see previous video of RUD) so what to do?

Well, the sensible, cost effective thing would be just a big heavy weight. But that’s got fuck all viral marketing appeal, so if you’re gonna shoot something into space as part of a multi billion dollar rocket program, what’s a measly couple of hundred k compared to the millions in free advertising for both Tesla and SpaceX this will generate!

Well, look at that. Turns out I do understand this!

But if think sending an expensive sports car into space WASN’T a frivolous waste of money, I invite you to spend time with someone sleeping rough or a family who doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from.

As I said, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, but don’t pretend this was anything other than a billionaire doing something insanely cool and expensive because he thought it was cool.

Nah, they just let the bots sign up, then after a certain number of times that account adds a channel to to other people's sifts, the login payload deletes their hard drive.

If I was designing a space ark for the perpetuation of the human race and as much of Earth's biodiversity as possible, I would go with as large seed bank as possible, frozen embryos and sperm and wherever possible female animals only. And since it would not make sense to waste payload on unnecessary males the crew would need to be female. In terms of perpetuating humanity the most valuable resource would be wombs. And since the first generation colonists would be female then it would make sense for their mental health to recruit primarily lesbians.

There's 5lbs of science payload wasted.

At least Hadfield's guitar was a genuine personal item and not a one-off gag.

Constant 1G acceleration followed by constant 1 G deceleration gets you to Mars in about 50-75 hours, and you never get anywhere near relativistic velocity. It's just a matter of scalability. If you develop an engine that can accelerate a given mass at. 001g, and it's made light enough that most of that mass is payload, you just scale up with an array of 1000 of them and you're at 1G.