Supercars this fast have tires that last less than fifteen minutes, perhaps eighty miles traveled on the track of you're lucky. And since the wear isn't linear, if you go just a little bit faster, you might only get a minute or two at the speeds this car goes before you have to change all the tires, which will set you back $40,000.

The point of such a thing is the same as one of those suborbital tourist space flights. The point is to *have had* the experience, which is too brief to be practically useful.

Wait ... isn't selling consumers on features that will be available real-soon-now-trust-us-on-that the way American electric car companies sell *their* vehicles?

Once again, Chinese companies are stealing American (ish) ideas.

On the planet perhaps but if you remove that condition then the fastest electric car would be the Tesla that Elon Musk launched into space. It's now in orbit around the sun and its estimated speed at perihelion is 121,000 km/h.

And here is the problem: you're so bad at social interaction that you can't tell the difference between a rebuttal and "rage". You have some sort of fantasy about someone on the other side of the world smashing their keyboard and stewing over your words all day.

I hate it to break it to you, but that's just your pathetic imagination.

I take it you believe the Apollo program shouldn't have happened

What did you pull that out of? The technology was nowhere near mature enough back then. That doesn't change the economic picture of throwing away your entire rocket every flight.

(We can argue whether "flags and footsteps" were worth spending an amount of money best measured in a percentage of your GDP, but that has nothing to do with the reuse question)

Next up

Lol, "next up"? You clearly think you hit your straw man out of the park ;)

since return is paramount - are you in agreement that only launch envelopes that allow return hold be allowed

"Be allowed"? Do you do anything other than straw men, or is that literally the only way you know how to carry out conversations on the internet?

SpaceX "allows" anyone to choose a disposable mission. Almost nobody chooses that because reuse is cheaper. In general, the only times when disposal is chosen is when there is literally no option but disposal in order to meet the spacecraft's performance needs.

Again: if you were given a choice when buying a plane ticket, either it can be cheap, or it can be expensive because they're going to wreck the plane specifically on your behalf, unless you had some really pressing need to wreck the plane, you're not choosing that option.

As a smart person who understands orbit mechanics

As an internet asshole, do you know that you actually have the option to not be an asshole online?

you do know that only very specific launch envelopes allow return.

First off, it's not even clear what you're referring to with "return". Boosters don't even reach orbit, so bringing up the concept of launch envelopes and return from them related to "orbital mechanics" is ill-formed. Booster return is entirely contingent on whether the payload needs an extreme level of performance beyond that which the system can meet with reuse, e.g. whether they absolutely have to remove the landing legs and grid fins to lighten the booster and burn every last drop of propellant. Only an extremely small fraction of launches fit into this category. Falcon 9 - the vehicle in question - only does booster return, so this conversation ends there.

If we want to talk about something other than F9, like, say, Starship, saying "only very specific launch envelopes allow return" is also wrong - again, unless your payload needs so much performance that the upper stage will not reenter the atmosphere (or you deliberately designed a trajectory to specifically make the stage come in hard). Their TPS design goal is to be able to burn off the heat of even mars transfer orbits. Now, one can argue that they'll fail in that goal, but you need to list your assumption of failure as a premise. Regardless, though, unless the entire project is a failure, the upper stage will handle return all "normal" Earth orbits. It has on-orbit reignition and can target its entry trajectory.

If a falcon 9 or heavy needs to go to a different orbit, it has to be abandoned

Again, this makes no sense. Are you positing launches where they change their mind partway through ascent or after it reaches orbit? "Nah, we don't REALLY want it in that trajectory, let's do a different one!"?

In the real world, again, the only times they expend a booster is when the performance needs of the payload are beyond what they can deliver in reusable mode, even with Falcon Heavy (or occasionally for testing, etc). And the upper stage of F9/FH never returns, because it can't, so it's not part of the discussion (they've done some work on trying to make it recoverable, but in each cases it was a "better to put the effort toward Starship" situation... which is IMHO kind of a shame, in that I'd love to see the maturation of e.g. inflatable entry systems, one of the possibilities they were considering).

He'll just come back in disguise as Bowsette ;)

Payload is absolutely not the most important thing in rocketry. *Payload per unit cost* is.

Exactly how cheap do you think air travel would be if, after every flight, they threw the plane away?

A contract is not a subsidy. They get contracts because they easily undercut their competitors.

NASA and the DoD want a service. SpaceX sells that service to them. It's not complicated. The government has saved massive amounts of money with SpaceX relative to ULA.

Also, for the record, most of SpaceX's work is internal (Starlink), and the nextmost is commercial. Government is in third place

Private companies aren't funding "exploration" to any meaningful degree, and nor do they want to.

SpaceX's goal is to be "the bus" for getting to space and Mars. Not to be launching expeditions into remote areas and conducting basic science.

I agree that Nintendo has relatively simple graphics, but I wouldn't call their games simple. Zelda is known for massive worlds overflowing with well designed puzzles and deep gameplay.

If you want to sabotage your competition though you can do the reverse - buy chips that they make overseas and it will trigger a 100% tariff on all their overseas chips taking out your competition. I suspect the net effect of this will be to just move manufacturing that uses chips out of the US - businesses generally hate uncertainty and 100% tariffs randomly turning on randomly and doubling your chip costs overnight is not something anyone wants to deal with.

You do realize that Neantherthals did not just live in Neanderthal right? They actually lived all over Europe and Western and Central Asia. The Neander valley was just where the first remains were found. In fact the only humans who do not contain Neanderthal DNA are native Africans so presumably it was only humans who left Africa that interbred with Neanderthals.

I'm guessing MAGA didn't onboard the economic laissez-faire espoused by the traditional - now defunct - Republican party.

So just like the GOP, MAGA pretends to have national interests at heart. But unlike the GOP, MAGA's approach is much more socialist.

A kind of national socialism if you will...

Your argument isn't entirely wrong, but there's a big piece of nuance in there :)

New, growing forests: *capture* carbon
Mature forests in equilibrium: *hold* carbon
Deforestation: *releases* carbon

So you're correct (with another further caveat, in a bit) that mature forests aren't sequestering carbon. But they hold mind-bogglingly massive amounts of carbon. And if you convert them to, say, pastureland, that holds far less carbon (both above and belowground), and the difference is released to the atmosphere (slowly through rot, or rapidly through fire). And you can throw those emissions into reverse via reforestation.

The further caveat is that it's not actually true that mature forests are always in equilibrium. Cold climates, water logging, etc can lead to the formation of things like peat and coal, which actually do continually sequester more and more carbon over time, potentially over geological timescales if left undisturbed. Unfortunately, we're kind of screwing that up too, with mining peat, draining wetlands for farming/ranching, etc.

Also, some soil compounds can also bind carbon long term. For example, in Iceland we have a mineral called allophane, which forms in subglacial eruptions and blows across the country. It's really annoying stuff (tightly binds phosphorus and other essential minerals and renders them inaccessible; binds water inaccessible to plants, but makes the ground liquefy easily; etc), but on the plus side, it also binds carbon very tightly and prevents its loss through decay - at least over human timescales, and potentially longer.

Big trees in the Amazon still famously lack chainsaw resistance.