I'm amazed that their wings are able to not stall out at that altitude. That's mind boggling.

Yes, if you can get far enough away from urban areas, haze, and light pollution.

When I was younger I used to get away to extremely rural areas in the summer and lay in the middle of a back road on the warm asphalt, staring at the sky for hours. After my eyes adjusted, I could see the Milky Way and various gaseous formations. I haven't seen them in years now, it makes me really sad.

Eh, fair. Time will tell what they do.

I don't think a company known for designing engines for automotive, marine, and aeronautic applications deciding to develop engines for interplanetary applications is nearly as farfetched as you believe it to be.

And making bad arguments while doing it.

>Reminder, DoD still owns GPS, is half of SpaceX’s launch demand (which helps pays for the other half); SpaceX would go under without DoD demand), and NASA utilizes DoD’s TDRSS (communication). Among other things.

Ok, you're right. You brought up the DoD at all, and several unrelated projects, none of which had anything to do with his comment on a single project of a single branch of the armed forces that falls under the DoD. I'm still right, you changed the scope of his comment which isn't how this works.

>Furthermore as much or as little as Europe allocates to defense, the same is true for ESA, when compared to NASA.

You brought up the entire EUROPEAN defense budget, which is even more off-base. Forgive my confusion. In completely missing his point, you created a whole marsh of "wtf is he going on about" that let details overlap in my head. Sucks to suck, I guess.

Real cute trying to imply I'm a sock puppet account, though. Bonus points for pulling an easily disproved deflection out of your ass.

No, it's just not relevant. You're bringing up the entire Department of Defense budget, he's talking about a single project from a single arm of the DoD. You're changing the scope of his comment well beyond what it actually said.

That didn't even address the substance of my comment, let alone his. You're changing the scope of his comment to make your argument. That's not how it works.

How is your comment more relevant, or relevant at all, to the post or his comment? He didn't say anything about the DoD or its entire budget. He said the U.S. Navy (only one part of the Department of Defense) spends more money maintaining decommissioned ships from WWII, than NASA's entire budget. Of course the entire DoD budget will be higher than NASA's, that's a no-brainer. But more is spent maintaining obsolete warships that do not, and very likely never will again, see active service, than on NASA.

China is fully capable of making the finest quality of pretty much anything. The reason so much product from China is shit is because the buyers don't want to pay for the top quality. They want to pay the absolute least they can for product that is as close to the mark of "passable and marketable" as they can. It doesn't have to be good, just good enough to sell.

They are nowhere near the maximum amount of time a person has spent in space. They're not in any life-threatening danger at this point.

It's not friction that creates the massive heat, it's compression. Entering the atmosphere at the speeds that stellar objects and orbiting vehicles do turns the object into essentially a large diesel piston. The air in front of the object can't move around it fast enough and instead stacks up and compresses, which causes the molecules to gain heat. By the time the object slows enough, the heat is immense.

That being said, I want people to think about what effect compression intense enough to burn up meteorites would have on a squishy human body. The cosmonauts' bodies would be utterly destroyed long before they could burn up, like stepping on a tomato.

Why would the wait time kill the cosmonauts?

So your issue is also localized to a single location?