Windows was never oriented around “just works”. That was Mac. Windows’s main selling point is that it never becomes incompatible, and that has largely stayed true. You can still to this day insert the disk for some proprietary application from Windows 2.0 and it will still install and run. Try that with another operating system!

Those other European countries may not be able to re-export spare parts if the licenses get yanked.

At ISS altitude, it’s probably not decades to decay, but a few years instead.

Rockets do not aim straight up when they are leaving. They go straight up for a few seconds, and then they tilt over in the desired direction to pickup speed.

They don’t burn up on the launch because they time the tilt over maneuver so that they get above nearly all of the atmosphere before they start picking up serious speed.

The energy that makes you burn up is your own kinetic energy. The “small” deorbit burn slows you down just enough to touch the atmosphere, but you’re still going nearly full speed: 7200 m/s. Around 30,000 km/hr.

If you slow down more in space, so that you enter the atmosphere at low speed, you don’t burn up. But you need a whole lot more backpacks to handle the full speed. It’s cheaper and burns less gas if you use the air to slow down.

It seems difficult to have enough bottled oxygen to deorbit yourself, but maybe doable.

The MMU backpack units on the space shuttle had a total delta v of ~30 m/s. You need about three times that amount to deorbit from ISS. So imagine you need 3 MMUs give it take worth of expendable propellant oxygen, and you can do it. (The MMUs used nitrogen, but for this purpose oxygen is pretty much the same.)

After you deorbit, you will of course burn up on re-entry with no heat shield. But it might be conceivable to design a personal heat shield surfboard.

You could also avoid the whole burning up things by braking a lot more during the deorbit maneuver. But instead of 100 m/s, you need to slow down by more than 7000 m/s. That’s quite a few more MMUs worth of gas. But if you do that, then you’re essentially making a free fall jump from space, which has more or less already been demonstrated.

Edit:

To address the linked article in some way: each astronaut on the station has a dedicated seat on a capsule to come back down in an emergency. Usually, it’s the same space capsule you came up on, but not always. Those are maintained ready to go at all times, and the astronauts can be back on the ground in 60 minutes whenever they need to. These spacecraft can be operated to splashdown by astronauts alone with no ground assistance, if needed.

If this is what I think it is, the US called Russia on the hotline and received assurances that no Russians were in the area. So that’s the way it must have been. Surely Russia wouldn’t lie on the hotline??

I checked the NOAA chart viewer yesterday, and it hadn’t changed there

Can we get a Red Dawn reboot set in this timeline, please?

Traditionally, the PG-13 rating allows for one f-bomb. I don’t remember if these films were PG-13 or not.

But why haven’t you explained to me why this is a bullpup?

Don’t forget Star Trek.

The ghost movement is not random. They go in memorizable patterns. So it is possible to simply rote memorize the solution to all 256 levels or something.

The true legacy of Alfred Nobel lives on.

In the United States, at least, it’s not illegal* for regular citizens to publish leaked documents of whatever status. It is illegal for security clearance holders to access information they’re not cleared for, regardless of where that info is. If an Internet forum allows classified leaks, that would make it difficult for security clearance holders to safely browse that forum.

• There are statutes on the books that would punish this type of behavior, but they are usually considered to be unenforceable because of the first amendment to the Constitution. Julian Assange was a notable example of a non security clearance holder non-US citizen who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act. (Or at least an attempted prosecution that never quite cleared extradition…)

Switzerland also very, very heavily regulates the civilian possession of ammunition.

And we’re also saving a bunch on disposal costs for the old stuff.

Even if you do have an MMU, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get a segmentation fault from a memory bug. You can still just get the weird side effects, if you fail to access the incorrect memory.

Undefined behaviour means exactly that. You have no idea what you could get.

Well, they ain’t starting from scratch, cause they designed a bunch of nukes for the USSR.

They almost certainly have workable designs in a file drawer, and the old facilities are all in Ukraine too. It’s a question of how much decommissioning those got in the nineties, and how long it takes to enrich the uranium.

I just think they’re neat.