I think I’ve been overusing “presumably”.

Ships totally do flex.

Too many swords in the movie. Swords are rich people propaganda. Back then your main weapon is the spear.

At least they got use out of their reactors for a while. Austria went and built one and then decided to just never turn it on.

Aren’t you just making my point for me? Congress and politics are woven into NASA and any other national agency. Sure it’s not great that Musk is in charge, but it’s much easier to replace a CEO than to get politics out of NASA.

The disaster part is that the shuttle never achieved its goal of reusable space flight, its inception was compromised by politics, and they continued the program instead of pivoting to a different platform. These are systemic issues with NASA. Just look at how they launched Challenger even though engineers knew of the O-ring defect.

So we’d get a disaster like the Space Shuttle and then continue funding it with tax payer money and legally requiring stuff to be built in Alabama?

Wouldn’t that mean it’d be run by Trump?

Ian M Banks book series. The Culture is a hyper advanced civilization run by sentient AIs who control giant colony ships and interact with other civilizations.

An Arabian night?

They do when the conflict affects oil prices.

Quite large margin for both.