Don’t forget insanely lucky and well off enough to afford a masters degree before you’re in your 30s.

Starliner also lands on land, and I believe Dragon has that option or at least was gong to at some point in its design.

I get what you are saying, but the Saturn V was never intended to be an ICBM. Depending on what numbers you look at too, they weren’t actually that well funded. Some of the largest estimates that I’ve seen place NASA’s inflation adjusted budget between 1960 and 1973 at just under $600 billion. Or roughly half of what we’re spending in one year on the military currently.

To put it another way, at its absolute peak budget NASA received roughly 4.6% of the current military budget.

But a picture is worth a thousand words!

There are others still, like Slackware and SUSE.

They would do everything a normal bank does. Here is an article that talks about the idea.

AFAIK a lot of European countries have an equivalent of the USPS. Though in doing a quick search for this post I learned that Germany doesn’t have a state owned mail service anymore which is weird. Maybe it’s time for the EU to take on that role?

Letting the post office become a bank. Which is an idea that’s been floated for like a century.

IIRC the original Shuttle design called for an ejection mechanism around the entire cockpit. During STS-1 and I believe STS-2, which was also Colombia, there were extra emergency mechanisms present, but I don’t think the seats themselves ejected through the roof like a fighter pilot’s would. For the most part though these were useless as they could not be used above 30,000 feet or something like that so it could only be used during the first minute or two of the flight.

Several of the safety mechanisms and other things that were going to be part of the original design that had not already been scrapped for weight (like jet engines for powered decent) were scrapped for weight when the DOD stepped in and offered NASA extra money for the Shuttle if the Shuttle could hit very specific, higher and less fuel efficient, orbits. This came from an offhand comment that Jimmy Carter made, and then had to make good on the threats and implications of.

Fun fact: Columbia, pictured with the white tank, was the heaviest shuttle and was not modified to have the airlock necessary to dock with the ISS because the performance losses compared to the other shuttles made it difficult to use for ISS operations.

I am confused, do you think niche rhymes with bitch?