Blue MAGA baby, they can’t help it.

I mean, sure hindsight is 20/20.

But Columbia would have never happened if Congress hadn’t pulled funding for the titanium heat shield they wanted.

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.

Correct.

It’s just southern racists. It’s all just southern racists.

You’re not wrong, but post WWII Republicans were more than willing to play along so long as big business got theirs.

IMO, it was when the CRA, the EPA and other “anti-business” initiatives came into existence that “small government” because a buzz word for them.

They made a completely wrong turn when they teamed up with Evangelicals in the 80’s and let them into positions of power in the party in the 90’s culminating in the bat-shit-crazies we have now.

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

To answer your question, it’s not.

The Republicans, as proxies for the 1% and Evangelicals, have been trying to break the Federal government at least since Reagan, if not longer.

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.