She should make more money so she can hire better accountants.

This is a serious fuckup. We win wars on the strength of logistics.

This also how seekers of political asylum are transmogrified into people from insane asylums.

It’s a key component to any well-integrated home air defense system.

The Anglo-American Texian settlers also wanted to continue to own chattel slaves from Africa, but the central Mexican government was fixing to force abolition on the Mexican states. That was a big part of it in 1832.

In case anyone doesn’t know, Bluesky has been fighting a powerful DDoS attack all day long today. It is suspected to be orchestrated by a state actor, possibly Iran.

You mean the “aid” where we dump off our old military equipment and don’t have to pay to dispose it any more? That aid?

Or is it just the regular aid, where Congress cuts some fat checks to Northrup, Lockheed, and General Dynamics, and all that money circulates inside the United States?

The capsules can do a water splashdown with parachutes alone.

The capsules that land on land all seem to have some additional system to slow down in addition to the parachute. Boeing Starliner has airbags that deploy around and below the heat shield. Soyuz has a braking rocket system that fires immediately before impact.

This doesn’t happen “on a distro” because all of the different software functions are at different safety criticalities. The autopilot is (usually) level B, the air data system that delivers altitude and airspeed is level A, the navigation computer is level C (because pilots can still navigate without the aid of the computer). And so on.

At level C, the standard is statement coverage with unit tests. At level B, it’s decision coverage, covering every branch. And at level A, it’s modified condition / decision coverage, which is a lot more complex and expensive to write.

If you mix code for stuff at different levels, you have to develop the whole package to the highest level. Unless you can prove that the lower level code can’t interfere with the higher level code.

The easiest way to prove that is to put the different levels into different computers, so they’re only talking to each other on some digital bus interface. That’s called “hardware partitioning”. There’s also “software partitioning”, but it requires an operating system or supervisor layer to provide the guarantees, and that operating system has to be developed to the highest safety level that it handles.

Final result: you still see a lot of discrete computer boxes on airplanes. Various vendors have developed safety-critical OSes for main avionics computers, but they’re closed-source, and usually not based on Linux at all.

This three judge panel has been quasi-overruled by the en banc court on this case and issue once before. So it seems reasonable to think that might happen again.

There are still a bunch of hurdles to getting close to any kind of real contempt finding, even if that happens. There’s a real argument that the most Boasberg can do with criminal contempt is make a referral to the DOJ for prosecution. And just imagine how much action this DOJ would take on such a referral…

Edit: apparently this is a different three judge panel than the first, but Judge Rao was randomly assigned to both panels.

It was a three-barreled gun that fired shotgun shells, rifle rounds, and rescue flares. 10 rounds of each type of ammunition were supplied. The stock could be detached and used as a machete.

For a while, these guns were on every Soyuz capsule that docked with ISS, and they were under the operational control of the Soyuz commander. I’ve read that they may have been retired in 2007 because Russia finally ran out of the very unique ammo.

They later said it was less than 1 mile away from the target spot.

A big benefit of the ocean is if the capsule loses all attitude control, it can still reenter and survive. But it will be a “ballistic reentry”, much more punishing with the g forces, and also about 1500 miles short of the target zone.

The Pacific Ocean makes it easy to ensure that those backup contingency landing sites are also safe landing sites.

The Russian system has a braking rocket that fires at the very last second to soften up the landing. On one early Soyuz mission, this rocket didn’t fire, and the solo cosmonaut suffered substantial injuries from the landing.

The Orion capsule hits the water at the final parachute speed of 20-30 mph without injuring the crew. But as you state, they also have to design the capsule for flotation and egress in potentially rough sea state.

Boeing Starliner is designed for a land landing, but it uses deployable air bags instead of a braking rocket. It’s not clear that Starliner will ever fly again after the RCS thruster problems.

Whoops! That’s my mistake.

“Nightfall”, by Arthur C. Clarke is a short story based on this premise.

Except in the story it’s a complex multiple-star solar system that makes it very rare for all suns to set at once.

Edit: It’s actually Isaac Asimov.

I highly recommend Python Control Systems Library, python-control on PyPi, as a replacement for the control systems toolbox.

I believe two of these are naval aviators, and they would take exception with the “army” characterization.

But you’re generally correct. It’s very common that astronauts will not only have a military background, they frequently are active duty military officers on a long term detail to NASA.

The army is not well represented in the astronaut corps, because the US army only flies helicopters under an inter-branch coordination agreement.

Toilet drains into two different containers for each type of waste. The urine holding tank periodically vents overboard. The feces canisters are stored and returned to earth.

The ongoing problem is that the urine holding tank is not venting into space very well when they open the valve. The toilet drains both waste types into their containers ok. But since the urine holding tank is about the size of an office trash can, it can fill up very fast.

Especially when you get an excellent photographer who knows how to set up the lighting.

The military loves TI because they still design and fab their own stuff, they still fab a lot of chips in the USA, and they guarantee production for at least ten years.