Terra will be atomized by our expanding sun in the end stages of its life, WAY before the heat death of the universe.

"your mom is unavailable for comment"

UK government is kind of the template for the ethnic version of "Fuck you, I got mine".

Turns out the convict meat shields were even too much of a liability for Wagner. Being "out of troops" doesn't mean you can't raise/train more, it just means that the current force you're deploying is no longer combat effective for any number of reasons. The winter operational pause was enough time for them to at least plug the gaps.

Problem is, if he wants to mobilize more conscripts, sooner or later he's going to have to start dipping into manpower from the Moscow region, which is where his political alliances are. They've been avoiding conscripting from those regions like the plague.

Aw that's cute. Meanwhile, nuclear war games involving NATO use TENS of thousands of soldiers. We can literally train more soldiers to be vaporized than Russia can come up with in the first place.

ah yes, exactly what we want, a proliferation of millions of orphan sources of enriched uranium. Small scale nuclear is probably the way forward, but RTG's in grandma's basement aren't it, chief.

Efficiency isn't really the thing...the actual plutonium oxide pellet they use for RTG's only gives off a total of about 40-60 watts. Doesn't matter how good your collection is, they'll only run the equivalent of a single 60w incandescent bulb assuming absolutely perfect conversion.

Even if you had theoretically perfect insulation, you're just going to make the the alpha decay happen faster.

By that logic, every kid born before 2000 wouldn't have touched the cigarette lighter in their parents car.

...we all did.

As someone in the industry, have you seen the quality of materials fall at the same time? Sure feels like it from here.

someone even told me there's a dragon at the center....

Ah yes, i forgot that that a bunch of senators can assemble and fly a rocket.

I don't think you understand what "no, if you want to use items we retired for safety reasons to launch humans into space in order to line your own pockets, build it yourself" means. They can't force NASA to do shit, or they're going to find themselves with a lack of rocket scientists as they all flee to private companies.

This is actually the way to go, as the US government and by extension NASA have proven themselves completely incapable.

Let em shoot themselves in the foot, rather than lining their pockets with unlimited blank checks.

"sorry, those parts are not functional for a space mission, we've been waiting to scrap them".

You think the senate is going to go and put them together themselves?

Congress has a 3rd grade understanding of space. They could have literally said "no, that stuff is proven to be unsafe"

Instead we got the senate launch system.

But they sure were right there to provide a bunch of stuff we said we'd never use again due to safety concerns, huh?

frankly, as it should. If you give them a blank check, you end up with SLS.