Cons: Expensive vehicles means we still don’t have Medicare for All.

Cons:

Trading with “the enemy” used to be considered treasonous.

Cons:

It HAS to be made out of prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire titanium.

Not a rocket scientist so I can’t say.

But I’m betting a room full of them and NASA engineers thought through all of their options based on the criteria and current tech.

Ok, buddy, if you say so.

That’s like other drug dealers cheering the biggest drug dealer getting gutted.

Like I said a broken clock is correct twice a day.

Yea, thwarting DOGE/Muck and Trump feels good, but then end result of them taking down USAID and VOA is actually better for the world and ultimately American citizens.

No more propaganda. No more easy coverups for the CIA influencing and attempting coups.

Mea culpa, you’re right. I was misremembering.

So with the original titanium heat shield the Columbia crew wouldn’t have died such gruesome deaths. All because Congress was cheap.

Agreed. Blue MAGA liberals will never understand they are the guard dogs for fascism because they will never let go of Capitalism.

Edit: Don’t let the truth get you so riled up Blue MAGA. lol

Again, completely agree.

But like the A10, sometimes tech just passes you by.

And swing wings are like biplanes. Old obsolete tech.

Except the US doesn’t have a cheap, easily available source of titanium.

The stuff we used for the SR-71 and F-14 had to be gotten surreptitiously from the Russians.

That’s why the Space Shuttle didn’t have the titanium heat shield it was designed with and had to rely on the newly invented, much more delicate, ceramic heat shields. Which, it can be argued, resulted in the all of the deaths of the Challenger crew.

Absolutely. Though I suspect that it’s more they want to create their own specific fascist leaning messaging.

While I agree they look cool, they’re an engineering nightmare and absolutely require titanium to build and that shit is too expensive for very little benefit.

The point of a variable wing was to increase the effective flight envelope and there’s no point now that the same thing can be done with modern avionics and materials.

Sorry.

Sometimes a broken clock can be correct.

VOA is a CIA Imperialist propaganda tool, like USAID, and deserves to be removed. But don’t take my word for it, read the CIA’s own files about it before this administration hides that info as well.

Edit: Downvote all you want. That doesn’t change facts. So if you’re defending the removal of VOA and USAID you’re basically defending American Imperial propganda and the vile tactics of the CIA.

Good luck with those ethical gymnastics.

It’s just the “if those kids could read they’d be so mad” meme in another format.