Boeing

Stranded Starliner Instructions

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Boeing botched the first crewed flight of the Starliner to the International Space Station, but at least they didn’t blow up Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore in the process. The two have been stuck on the ISS months after what was supposed to be a brief stay as part of the test flight.

The empty Starliner will come splashing (or crashing) down to Earth soon without them on board because of a bunch of problems that should’ve been sorted out long before launch.

NASA’s decades-long habit of contracting out operations to sketchy lowest-bidder companies have made them reliant on white supremacist Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Russia’s Soyuz program. Boeing becoming their only other option wasn’t great even before their planes started disintegrating mid-flight.

There should be a NASA owned and operated crewed space vehicle, but that money went to the military’s not-so-secret space drone, the X-37.

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Boeing’s Blueprints for Success

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Almost five years after Boeing’s cost-cutting grounded 737 Maxes, a plugged door failed on one on its way out of Portland. They nearly avoided charges for the first round of negligence, but this latest incident reset the clock.

These disasters, or near-disasters, happen because passengers aren’t Boeing’s or the airlines’ customers. Their shareholders are. It’s the same reason why only masochists fly Southwest. Extracting profit from us rubes to churn out dividends or worsening the product to claim write-offs isn’t unique to aviation; it’s a symptom of late-stage capitalism.

Can’t think of a clever segue to carbon offsets, so I’ll just say they’re a scam. Unless investments in true transit alternatives are made, our reliance on air travel remains bad news for the climate. No one, not even me, a bike-riding transit pinko, would opt to take Amtrak instead of a plane to anywhere further from Boston than DC. And that’s before even taking costs into consideration.

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Declassified UFOs Identified!

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I took a cue from the White House and both houses of Congress and didn’t do any work about the pandemic this week. The Pentagon officially declassified some UFO videos and they were a welcome distraction from all the bad news.

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