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US Should Use Trampolines To Get Astronauts To the ISS Suggests Russian Official
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "The Washington Post reports that Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has lashed out again, this time at newly announced US ban on high-tech exports to Russia suggesting that 'after analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I propose the US delivers its astronauts to the ISS with a trampoline.' Rogozin does actually have a point, although his threats carry much less weight than he may hope. Russia is due to get a $457.9 million payment for its services soon and few believe that Russia would actually give it up. Plus, as Jeffrey Kluger noted at Time Magazine, Russia may not want to push the United States into the hands of SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, two private American companies that hope to be able to send passengers to the station soon. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences have already made successful unmanned resupply runs to the ISS and both are also working on upgrading their cargo vehicles to carry people. SpaceX is currently in the lead and expects to launch US astronauts, employed by SpaceX itself, into orbit by 2016. NASA is building its own heavy-lift rocket for carrying astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, but it won't be ready for anything but test flights until after 2020. 'That schedule, of course, could be accelerated considerably if Washington gave NASA the green light and the cash,' says Kluger. 'America's manned space program went from a standing start in 1961 to the surface of the moon in 1969—eight years from Al Shepard to Tranquility Base. The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now.'"
Or we could use trampolines to bounce some multi-megaton nuclear warheads onto Moscow. It might eliminate the telltale launch signatures. Thanks!
Is the Ariane project not suitable to conversion?
"The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now."
Back then those in power and the people in general cared that the Russians could do something we could not. That is no longer the case when it comes to space. Most people don't understand why space is important at all outside of things like satellites that provides communications around the planet.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
The ISS is largely symbolic and the "science" is mostly cargo cultish. It's a symbol of a decades-dead ideology. Let the thing die. There's no value in sending people into the the upper atmosphere other than an international dick-waving contest. Sure it's romantic and you have a great view, but so did the Concorde and no one gets upset over that. Time marches on, kill the damn thing and move on.
Hey US, IN SOVIET RUSSIA ROCKET LAUNCH YOU. Sincerely, US citizens for restoring manned American space exploration.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
That's one helluva double-bounce. Start jumping Russia, well keep up!
Life is not for the lazy.
this is news?
If years of Saturday morning cartooning have taught us nothing else, it's clear you would need, like, several dozen hundred trampolines to pull it off.
Yep, trampolines all the way down.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
a trampoline gap!
And we're arguing over a comment about a failing space station.
... why the private sector needs to be more involved in space exploration instead of the toddlers currently in charge of the governments of the world.
I know that's an unpopular viewpoint on Slashdot (where Elon Musk is a god who can do no wrong). But SpaceX isn't ready to just "take over." Soyuz has a rock solid safety record and is much more versatile. SpaceX's design is still largely untested, particularly with human cargo.
If they try to push too hard too soon, people are going to get killed.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
When SpaceX and Orbital have the ability to take people then the Russians are likely to lose business anyway, so strike this as a reason.
A mere 400 Million is nothing to the Russians. Their GDP exceeds this many times over. They don't really the Americans, they are just doing you a favour.
Right now America's hands are tied. You have decided the military is more important than space, and over the last few decades cut NASA into the ground and worse, failed to educate your next generation. The USA has fallen out of the space faring nations well behind China who has developed their own capabilities and India who can launch state funded rockets. The French have of course been superior for a long time. The USA is now at the level of Canada, Japan, and New Zealand in space capability.
There are no two ways about this, until South Africa's SpaceX can take passengers America relies on Russia because they have the know-how, the capability and equipment - and because they are not Chinese. America fears communism too much to ever pay the Chinese to carry your people.
Better to not try to police the world to your standards eh? Just pay your dollars to Russia, cap in hand and nod "Yes Sir" to them as Russia reams you. You used to have aleading space program but you let it decay. This is the cost of that.
We're finished as a country and on the decline. It's time for a new growing economy to take our place (China). Hopefully, they will reach farther than we did.
http://imgur.com/P7x32KY
The glory days of Russian trampoline champions are gone forever. Time for a US resurgence. Move over China, you're about to get bounced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Simply because the Americans have temporarily abandoned a focus on manned missions in favor of autonomous exploration, you couldn't be more wrong.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has issued a preliminary injunction that prohibits United Launch Alliance from buying NPO Energomash RD-180 engines from Russia.
http://spaceksc.blogspot.com/2...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
... as the US are lacking the proper Nazis for the job: https://xkcd.com/984/
lighten up! Nobody is bombing anybody.
It's May 1, not April 1.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The U.S. has rovers on the surface of Mars.
Simply because the Americans have temporarily abandoned a focus on manned missions in favor of autonomous exploration, you couldn't be more wrong.
So you are saying that the ting to do is pay several orders of magnitude more money, to send people to mars, to do essentially the same thing the rovers are doing, just so you can have a nationalist orgasm over Americans being the first to set a foot on Mars?
We must not allow a trampoline gap!
the Trampoline!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
...the reason we find ourselves in this position.
1. The never ending need for social welfare spending, which pressures NASA to cut programs.
a. The Stupid decision to end the Shuttle Program.
b. The stupid decision to end the program to replace the Shuttle.
2. Complete mismanagement of our Foreign Policy by the amateurs in the Obama Administration.
a. Putin claims that the U.S was involved in the political upheavals in the Ukraine and right now, given Obama's history with telling lies, I am inclined to believe him.
3. Turning NASA into political patronage Post run by pencil pushing bureaucrats.
No, the thing to do is establish colonies on the Moon and Mars, perform fission experimentation in space vice the Earth's atmosphere, and mine some asteroids.
It was a huge waste of resources and the supposed diplomatic gains from the expense clearly were an illusion.
For the same money we spent on the ISS we could have put a base on the moon. I'm not saying we should have put a base on the moon... just saying we could have done that for the same money.
Wind the ISS down. Sell it if anyone wants to buy it. And then take the money NASA now has open in their budget to do something worthwhile.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Apparently reading comprehension is not your forté.
In any combination of Boeing, Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, or Lockheed Martin vehicles, we'll get up there with people fairly soon and in modern spacecraft that will be able to do useful things for the next few decades. What we do with them then and how much it will cost is the key question. The NASA program is stuck in pork that traps its potential so we may well lose the Space Station. Not many really care about it anyway, other than those who work on it. Those companies that are innovating for cost, certainly SpaceX, perhaps Sierra Nevada and Boeing, could make the NASA program moot. The Russian problem of access to the ISS might accelerate the non-NASA New Space regime slightly, but it will happen. If our national space program can take advantage of this new capability, if the politics of supporting old players dies, we could be in for an exciting future of human space exploration. That might still happen if human spaceflight becomes a mostly private affair. We'll know in a few years.
No, the thing to do is establish colonies on the Moon and Mars, perform fission experimentation in space vice the Earth's atmosphere, and mine some asteroids.
It would make a lot more sense to kick off a few more Mars missions and learn more about the place before we actually sent humans. Maybe build a better communications infrastructure between the two, first, so that there's always contact. Can't do anything about transmission time, can do something about bandwidth and coverage. A colony on the moon is a really good idea, though. It's nearby, so we could feasibly make a withdrawal plan. Mars is a one-way trip in case of failure. You maybe could bring people back, but not in a hurry, or probably in a timely fashion.
Also, I'd like to see some missions to asteroids which are on the level of this Mars mission, with some kind of rover. Let's get a clearer idea of what asteroid mining is going to look like. If we're really going to get development and exploration of space kicked off, we're going to need to do our heavy manufacturing in space anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
is to use a teeter board, and have an average American jump onto the other end.
... a rail gun up the side of a tall mountain as a sort of first-stage booster stands a better chance of, ahem, taking off. (All puns intended.)
The glaring error is the claim that Orbital Sciences is upgrading their Cygnus cargo vehicle to carry crew; they are NOT.
1. Orbital DOES NOT MAKE THE CYGNUS nor do they make the rocket that launches it. They mostly just integrate stuff they buy. The Antares has a first stage liquid-fueled rocket body built in Ukraine and using engines built in Russia. The upper stages of Anares are solid-fueled units purchased from ATK (which made the shuttle SRBs and with whom Orbital has just announced a merger). The Pressurised cargo portion of the Cygnus spacecraft is made by Thales in Italy.
2. The Cygnus has no heat shield, no parachutes or wings, etc. It burns up on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere (plunging into the atmosphere at Mach 20+ without thermal protection tends to have that effect). Making Cygnus survive re-entry and landing would require a complete re-design and would produce a "new" spacecraft.
All is not lost, however. There ARE several US firms working on manned access to space:
1. SpaceX has their Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule which currently carry cargo to AND from the ISS. The Dragon was designed from the outset for crew but does not yet have a tested launch abort system or life support system (this should be resolved within the next 3 years).
2. Sierra Nevada Corp has built and drop-tested the early (non-space) version of their Dreamchaser (HL-20 derived) lifting body. They've scheduled more flight tests for this vehicle (the equivalent of the Shuttle programs's "Enterprise") for later this year and have purchased an Atlas to fly a space-worthy airframe into orbit in 2016
3. Boeing is working on their CST-100 capsule which is designed to fly on an Atlas rocket.
4. Lockheed is working on the Orion (a crippled-form of the capsule that would have flown as part of the cancelled Constellation program) for NASA. Orion is NOT part of the "commercial crew" program, which is intended to get people to and from Low Earth Orbit (LEO); Orion is designed for deep-space missions with a heat shield and structure designed for re-entry into Earth's atmosphere at MUCH-higher lunar- and martian-return speeds. The first Orion will fly an unmanned test flight into space in December 2014 atop a Delta IV Heavy (which lacks the horsepower to loft Orion with a crew aboard). Orion will ultimately fly atop the giant SLS rocket which will make its maiden flight in Decemer 2017.
5. Blue Origin (run by Jeff Bazos of Amazon.com fame) is working on both a capsule and a re-usable launch vehicle of their own (with very little publicity).
Notes:
It's interesting that only the two companies run by internet guys are working on re-usable launch vehicles - the traditional aerospace firms are apparently so used to the wasteful government "cost-plus" way of business that they are using throw-away launch vehicles and will never be able to lower their mission costs.
Both Boeing and Sierra Nevada plan to use the Atlas launch vehicle which uses Russian engines and therefore is no more "assured" for US access to space than rented seats aboard Soyuz.
Virgin Galactic's "Space Ship Two" is NOT a competitor; it will never be an orbital vehicle. While SS2 will certainly go into space, this will be highly-ballistic like a WWII V-2 rocket going nearly stright up at a couple times the speed of sound and falling back at similar speeds (therefore not needing a proper heat shield). SS2 lacks the ability to carry enough fuel to get enough horizontal velocity to go into orbit (nearly 15K mph required) and would be incapable of re-entry if it DID attain orbital speed. SS2 will be a fantastic roller-coaster ride out of the atmosphere and back for super-rich tourists but is a dead-end as far as manned spaceflight.
The shuttle program could have kept going until the US has developed a replacement, now figured to be around 2020. (I double the time estimates of big engineering programs.) Most of the shuttles were only into 1/3 of their 100-flight rated lifetimes.
They're not reusable. So what's the cost of the rockets? How much of that $457m is profit. Probably $100m or so.
I bet Putin would give the US the middle finger at a cost of $100m
100% loss in case of problem with shuttle, whereas survival was 10 out 12 with souyuz.
The Soviet Union had ICBMs targeted at American cities
You seriously think China doesn't? China has the capability and I'm sure both China and the USA have some nukes with the other's name on them. It's not as tense as the cold war was (I'm old enough to have lived through a good bit of the cold war) but any time you have two large nation states there is always the possibility of military conflict.
I'm not hugely worried about getting into a shooting war with China but it's hardly inconceivable. Most likely source would be Taiwan. Also could be issues with Japan or on the Korean peninsula.
Europe never got its act together to build a manned vehicle to launch on it, AND they've grown weary of using it in a sub-optimal way as a commercial satellite launcher, to the current plan is to cancel it and replace it with a cheaper, smaller, and NOT man-rated "Ariane 6"
I think this is just another example of how badly the US has slipped in the world standings in just the last decade.
The US now can't even get people up to the space station that just 15 years ago they were taking a lead position in creating.
old "our NAZIs were better than their NAZIs" line as an explanation of the space race. Yes, both the Americans and the Russians benefitted from the Germans they grabbed at the end of WWII (those guys had a lot of hands-on experience designing, building, and flying rockets). The claim that those guys were the brains of both programs, however, is supremely unfair to thousands of hard-working and dedicated engineers in both the US and Russia who designed and built the systems those two nations operated (neither country put men into space aboard V-2 rockets). When the Americans got Von Braun and asked him where he and his fellow Germans got some of their ideas, he responded by saying they'd gotten them from the American rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard and inspiration from Russian genius Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Von Braun and his team brought OPERATIONAL EXPERIENCE to the Americans which was otherwise lacking beacause the US government had not taked rockets seriously pre-WWII (an idiotic move that I see repeated by another AC who is tainting this thread with lots of snarky comments) and Von Braun himself provided a certain PR and engineering-management talent, combined with a drive to put men on the moon that served the US well at the time, but which could well have developed domestically over time (just not in time for a 1969 moon landing)
I personally dislike the "NAZIs took America to the moon" line just like I dislike the "we got our tech by reverse-engineering a crashed UFO" line and for the same reason: It's a flip, vacant, obnoxious comment (usually by some non-technical moron who's career is in marketing, or burger-flipping) that trashes and dismisses all the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds of thousands of tech workers over decades of time who built layers of tachnology step-by-step on top of the work of their predecessors to get us to the hard-won spot we currently occupy. Anybody who works in science or technology should take these memes as an insult and should slap them down with great zeal at every opportunity.
Russia isn't what it used to be...it's anarchy now...basically a gas station that also acts as a front for criminal activities
On a map the country looks big...that's about all they have going for them...that and their oil and illegal activities
The thing is, I agree that most people don't care about Russia being able to do something we cannot...because its temporary and Russia is just a noisy lapdog for international criminals and illuminati
Thank you Dave Raggett
Remember that any object fired from a gun has maximum velocity as it leaves the barrel/rail (it immediately begins to slow due to air friction. Your spacecraft, fired from a gun will, therefore be at its highest Mach number in the low atmosphere and the plasma that forms around it (both from friction and from aerodynamic compression) will be far higher than ANYTHING the space shuttle faced on re-entry (higher even than an Apollo on lunar return).
Current re-usable thermal tile tech would not be good enough (shuttle tiles would melt) so you'd need VERY HEAVY ablative protection (like Soyuz, Apollo, Mercury, Gemin, Orion, etc) which would be consumed during launch and then another thermal protection system for re-entry at the end of the mission. Also, most of the mountains on Earth are not tall enough to give you enough of an advantage to buy what you think. 15K feet sounds high when we talk about mountains, but any reasonable orbit as at a minimum altitude of something like 500K feet; That mountain you dream of buys you only a tiny fraction of the needed altitude, and while it DOES get you up out of the deepest, thickest air it is NOT enough to help a lot. When you travel at high Mach numbers, thin air still seems thick and still gets REALLY hot. Remember that the SR-71, WAY up high at 80K feet (5 to 8 times higher than the mountain) at only Mach3 still experienced skin temps in excess of 500 degrees F.
I'm kind of surprised no one has pointed out that Orbital Sciences is not working on any sort of man-rated spacecraft. The Cygnus, which is used for ISS cargo deliveries, is designed to burn up in the atmosphere and has never been desinged in any way to be man-rated. Other than SpaceX, the other companies working on man-rated spacecraft are Boeing with the CST-100, Sierra Nevada Corp with the Dream Chaser, and Blue Origin which keeps information close to the chest.
Well trampoline is good , it works, but I recommend using a good quality catapult.
Yes, the Bush admin was stupid to plan to end the Shuttle program before having their replacement "Constellation" program up-and-running (so the money used to operate the shuttles could be shifted to development of the new system - which was scheduled to be operational for ISS missions by 2013). The shuttle program was not, however, irreversibly gone when Obama came into office. President Obama not only put the final nail in the coffin of the shuttle program, but his administration:
1. Ordered the shuttle infrastruture to be either demolished or sold-off so that the decision could never be undone.
2. Cancelled the follow-on Constellation program
3. Cancelled ALL American manned spaceflight programs in his 2010 budget proposal (which congress UNANIMOUSLY threw into the trash bin). Yes, he has subsequently seen how unpopular this was and has extended the life of the ISS (an easy bone to throw to activists) but he has done nothing to make sure a new system is in place while he is still in office (which he COULD have easily done with some of the hundreds of billions of dollars in his "stimulus bill")
4. After the Contellation program ended, and congress DEMANDED in their 2010 NASA budget law that Obama have NASA build a big new rocket to enable future Moon and Mars missions, Obama's team decided to rip all the re-usable engines out of the shuttles and prepare them for one-time use on the giant new rocket (each flight will use four shuttle engines for less than 8 minutes and then crash them into the ocean). EVERY shuttle in a museum display now has dummy engines, and none will be left for future engineers to study (the way young engineers today are able to go study real Apollo engines - one of which was recently removed from storage and had its powerpack test-fired on a test stand with modern instruments)
5. Obama has added $40 BILLION PER YEAR to the food stamp program, doubling its cost (which whould have been unneeded had his economic plans succeeded in reviving the economy and is not matched to poverty rates which have NOT doubled since Bush left office), and in 2009 spent about $850 BILLION on "stimulus" but he currently is proposing to cut the NASA budget (which is approx $17 Billion per year) ...... but at this very same time, Obama is picking a fight with congress over funding for "commercial crew" of only several hundred million dollars.
The real point I'm making is that the policy wonks in the permanent political establishment of Washington D.C. (both Republican AND Democrat) has always hated spending money on manned spaceflight; the OMB has tried to get presidents to kill the shuttle program for decades. With the loss of Columbia in 2003, the anti-spaceflight Republican-leaning budget wonks helped convince the Bush team to kill the shuttle, but failed to get him to abandon manned spaceflight. When Obama got into office (after campaigning on a promise to teachers unions that he would shift money from NASA to education for 5 years) he went on the anti-manned-spaceflight war path to the delight of the anti-spaceflight Democrats (who'd been trying to gut NASA since Walter Mondale tried to use the Apollo 1 fire to do it). The current sad state of NASA is a bi-partisan mess that the establishment in Washington D.C. WANTED.... these things are NOT conspiracies but they are also NOT accidents. In 1959 we could put monkeys into space and we currently cannot.
NASA under Obama has a "commercial crew program" (a manned follow-up to the currently successful Bush administration "commercial cargo program") which pretends to provide a bright future BUT the commercial vendors are making systems for access to the ISS which will go away in the 2024-2028 timeframe leaving them with no destination and no NASA funding. If you want those commercial guys to succeed over the long-term, NASA needs to need them for access to LEO (for a space station and/or to meet-up with trans-lunar vehicles) at a high-enough flight rate (supporting rare mars bootprints-and-flags missions won't be enough) to justify all the overhead and infrastructure.
George Soros (the planet's ONLY proud and unrepentant actual NAZI collaborator billionaire) who makes money manipulating currencies (rather than from productive industry) is FINE in Left-wing circles because he funds most of their groups (usually laundered through his "Open Society Foundation" and its vast array of spin-offs with similarly deceptive "nice" sounding names).
Warren Buffet is a "good guy" for them too, even though his Berkshire Hathaway was once a productive manufacturer with a bunch of middle-class employees (before he layed them all off and converted it into a shell for his financial business) and even though he now has lots of money in oil-tanker rail road cars (ever wonder WHY Obama cannot OK the Keystone XL Pipeline? It would only be one more in a large number of pipes, and the oil will be pumped and used anyway, but that pipe which union construction guys really want jobs building would eliminate the need for a lot of rail cars... leaving Obama with a multi-pronged dilemma)
Bill Gates is a "good guy" on the left (in non-Steve-Jobs-fanboy circles) as long as he funds lots of "good" liberal causes.
Elon Musk is FINE on the left ... the guy burns TONS of kerosene with ZERO emissions controls with every rocket launch, but they love his elctric cars and they love that he is competing against big defense contractors (who they ignorantly percieve to be aligned with "the right", ignorantly because big defense firms fund ANY politivian they think will mean big contracts)
The left was ok with billionaire Bloomberg (who EVERYBODY knew was a phony Republican before he finally admitted it and went "independent" and then attacked table salt, sugar, and "big gulps")
The left is perfectly OK with rich people (Hillary Clinton is ROLLING in money, as are Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, etc). They're even ok with THEIR people making profits (like all the people who invest in "green" companies that then get huge government grants and loans and then go bankrupt leaving all that cash in the investor hands and the taxpayer holding the debts)
They DO NOT percieve profit to be bad.... they talk like that to rev-up the young-and-dumb part of their base that thinks it's cool to wear Che' shirts, and they talk like that when they want to "tax the rich" (by which they mean the middle class, since they NEVER actually boost taxes on guys like Gates and Buffet) to provide more services that buy the votes of lots of the poor. Everybody in the US can pay as much as they want in taxes every year as long as they pay at least what they owe.... did you ever notice how many super-rich lefties have said "I should pay higher taxes" and/or "I'm perfectly willing to pay higher taxes" as part of an effort to get the middle-class to accept higher taxes???? Those rich guys only SAY this; they do not just sit down and write a big check to the treasury which they certainly would if they were sincere. They've got armies of accountants and lawyers making sure they use every loophole available to them (something the average middle-class person cannot do)
SpaceX should name their first manned vehicle "Trampoline" and watch Dmitry Rogozin's head explode when it delivers astronauts to IIS.
I don't believe that Orbital Sciences (now Orbital ATK as of last week) has any near-term plans for carrying people. Orbital's Antares rocket, which is what they use for the commercial cargo program for ISS, was only ever planned for cargo (And incidentally also uses Russian engines, the NK-33).
The Sierra Nevada Corporation is making their Dream Chaser spacecraft for manned flight, but it relies on the Atlas V as a launch vehicle.
So the only way we are going to get people into space without the Russians, before the SLS is done, is getting the Delta IV heavy human rated, or, SpaceX.
It would be cool if SpaceX renamed Dragon to Trampoline in response.
"Rogozin does actually have a point, although his threats carry much less weight than he may hope. Russia is due to get a $457.9 million payment for its services soon and few believe that Russia would actually give it up."
Apparently Russian energy exports (which is what this whole thing is about) is worth about 160 BILLION dollars annually.
I am not event sure that 458 Million dollars is an annual figure, but even if it is:
0.458/160*100 = 0.286 or about 0.3% of the money at stake here.
If you don't think the Russians (Putin) would be willing to eat 0.3% for a chance to very publicly and embarrassingly throw it into Obama's face at a global scale, you may be mistaken...
Even if he does eat the 0.3%, it's not like Putin has to worry about being re-elected...
badda boom ting... I'm here all week, try the veal it's excellent! :)
A big difference is that the Ukrainian doesn't have the biggest baddest military on the planet.
I remember an article (by Carl Sagan?) that argued that, even if a US-Soviet space station or mission to Mars were not justifiable from a scientific point of view, they worked as an example that peaceful collaboration among the superpowers was possible.
If both countries can't coordinate on keeping human presence in orbit, that's sad.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This could be entertaining. While the U.S. is using trampolines to get astronauts to the ISS; Russia can use a catapult to get supplies to it.
That may be over-thinking. As we already saw in "Prometheus," in the future arrival at some mystery planet proceeds to immediate landing on visual at some place along the flight trajectory, hopefully flattish.
Way easier.
My fingers get tired in the outer troposphere, though. Need better gloves.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Thank you, Dmitry, for reminding us Americans how untrustworthy you Russians are.
C'mon! You did not figure the AC was joking ( or badly trolling) at the mention of New Zealand?
NZ does not even have a fighter jet, so I'd say Burkina Faso has a better space capability.
So many lies in here, and yet, you neo-cons/tea* will stop at nothing. Not worth even trying to rebute.