Free Republic

On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium. Once the deal is finalized, the buyer — which will likely be the highest bidder, the industrial gas company Messer — will claim some 425 miles of pipelines spanning Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, plus about 1 billion cubic feet of the only element on Earth cold enough to make an MRI machine work. Regulatory and logistical issues with the facility threaten a temporary shutdown as it passes from public to private ownership, and...

The time an F-22 flew right under an F-4 from Iran: The American-made F-22 Raptor recently made headlines for shooting down multiple objects this February, including one Chinese balloon over U.S. airspace. Back in 2013, an Iranian fighter pilot was approaching an American drone in international airspace when a pair of F-22 Raptors flew right beside him. The words uttered by the Raptor pilot was enough to make the Phantom swiftly turn around. Iranian fighters shot at U.S. drones before One year prior to the Raptor incident, a U.S. Air Force MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was intercepted by...

We guess Ford didn’t have the budget to hire Dylan Mulvaney to step out of the driver’s seat of its rainbow-flag Raptor. See, you have two trucks so covered in mud you can’t tell the difference … until the mud washes off and one is revealed to be a Pride-themed truck. In case you didn’t get it, Ford lights up the word “tough” in rainbow lights. Ford doesn’t have any Clydesdales handy to whip out a new ad as Anheuser-Busch did.

Small pico balloons typically range between $12 and $180 while an F-22 Raptor is estimated to be around $200 million ... Sen. Ted Cruz took to Twitter Thursday to criticize Joe Biden for ordering an F-22 fighter jet to shoot down what may have been a hobby club’s science project off the coast of Alaska earlier last week. Cruz, R-Texas, joked that Biden’s decision to authorize the $200 million fighter jet to use a $400,000 missile to shoot down what may have been a $12 balloon serves as a "powerful deterrence" to high school students interested in creating their own...

The rush to build wind farms to combat climate change is colliding with preservation of one of the U.S. West's most spectacular predators—the golden eagle—as the species teeters on the edge of decline. Ground zero in the conflict is Wyoming, a stronghold for golden eagles that soar on 7-foot (2-meter) wings and a favored location for wind farms. As wind turbines proliferate, scientists say deaths from collisions could drive down golden eagle numbers considered stable at best. Yet climate change looms as a potentially greater threat: Rising temperatures are projected to reduce golden eagle breeding ranges by more than 40%...

Need Manly Information. A family member is selling his big diesel truck and thinking of purchasing a Raptor. Two people disparaged the Raptor and said it was a "kids truck". Manly Freepers? Your opinions? Freeperettes with hairy chests welcome to comment.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold a massive stake in his company over the past several weeks. And yet he owns 564,000 more shares than he did at the start of the selling spree...That's because at the same time he is selling shares, he's also exercising options to buy additional stock. And he's doing so at a bargain exercise price of $6.24 a share, well below 1% of Tesla (TSLA)'s current share price. Since Musk's Twitter poll on November 6, he has exercised options to buy 10.7 million shares of Tesla. To be clear, he would have done so with or...

SAN ANTONIO — SpaceX is having engine trouble. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk warned employees of a “Raptor production crisis” for the engines needed to launch the massive Starship spacecraft from South Texas. SpaceX is aiming to launch Starship into orbit for the first time in early 2022 and then run a series of test flights as steps toward carrying cargo and humans to the moon and Mars. But Musk on Friday warned that delays in production of Raptor engines could hamper that progress and lead to significant financial problems. “We face genuine risk of...

I thought at one time that the F22 Raptor was 'history' thanks our 'criminal' president Bill Clinton. I saw that there is a source for spare parts (under Trump). Having 'multiple platforms' means that our enemies must defend against multiple platforms. Can someone comment on the F22 situation? (without revealing Classified Info)

The Raptor, SpaceX's engine used to power the upcoming Starship, has been reaching new levels of power during its development. On Monday, CEO Elon Musk announced that the engine reached 330 bar of chamber pressure without exploding. That's 31 bar higher than what the engine achieved back in February 2019, when it beat the previous record-holder for an operational engine, Russia's RD-180. Teslarati noted that the engine beat the Soviet Union's RD-701 engine, which at 300 bar, previously held the public record for the highest combustion chamber pressure for an orbital-class rocket.

The video highlights just how much fly-by-wire automation is needed to make the Raptor's super maneuverability a reality. Lt. Col. Randy "Laz" Gordon is an accomplished test pilot, engineer, and F-22 Raptor squadron commander who lent his expertise about all things aviation, and especially about the F-22's incredible fly-by-wire flight control system, to students taking MIT's Private Pilot Ground School in 2019. His lecture is astonishingly accessible considering the complexities of the systems and concepts he describes and will give anyone a remarkable appreciation for just how incredible the super-maneuverable Raptor'sflight control system really is. Gordon covers so much ground...

A hurricane that struck Florida in late 2018 damaged and displaced so many of the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 Raptor stealth fighters that the flying branch resorted to desperate measures to ensure it could fly enough F-22 sorties. It underscores how few Raptors the Air Force possesses, and how fragile the fleet could be if it ever sustains major losses in wartime.

SpaceX's latest Starship prototype exploded just after an engine test Friday, erupting in a dramatic fireball at the spaceflight company's South Texas proving grounds. The Starship SN4 prototype exploded shortly before 2 p.m. CDT (3 p.m. EDT) at SpaceX's test facility near Boca Chica, Texas according to a video provided by the South Padre Island tourism site SPadre.com. The explosion occurred about a minute after a short test of its Raptor rocket engine, but it was unclear what caused the conflagration.

Heh. With NBA stars like Lebron James and James Harden firmly in the oppression corner, a group of Toronto Raptors fans have decided to join the freedom team. They will distribute pro-Hong Kong t-shirts at the opening game of the Raptors 2019-20 season: The saga of Hong Kong vs. China vs. the NBA continues in Toronto next week with the distribution of more than 7,000 fan-made “The North Stand with Hong Kong” t-shirts on opening night of the Toronto Raptors 2019-2020 season. A group of local basketball fans who support Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement raised more than $32,000 to produce...

The test was done in Boca Chica, TX. The rocket body was built by a company that builds water towers. The rocket engine was built by SpaceX and is the most advanced in the world. SpaceX is building two Starship orbital prototypes, one in Boca Chica, and the other in Cocoa, FL. They should fly by the end of the year.

The Raptor engine is designed to power the spaceship currently known as Starship as part of the rocket assembly currently known as Super Heavy (previously dubbed the BFR). The first Raptor test fire took place in September 2016, when the company was targeting an uncrewed Mars launch in 2018. Three Raptor engines like this one are built in to the Starship Hopper, which has been under construction in Texas and which SpaceX will use to begin testing the rocket technology in real life. SpaceX plans to assemble 31 Raptor engines into the Super Heavy rockets, with another seven Raptors on...

This is NYC, not rural NJ. This is what makes this so weird. While my neighbor's 18 month old and 3 year old daughters were happily splashing around in a little pool in the yard, a red tailed hawk landed on the porch railing not 10' from the little girls. My neighbor shot several pics with her cell phone. She would have called me over, knowing I'm an avid birder, but I had just left in my car on an errand. Scared that the raptor might hurt her kids, she grabbed them and took them inside. I guess Mr. Hawk...

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, posted a picture Sunday of what what he described as the “main body tool” for his company’s BFR interplanetary spaceship. BFR—which reportedly stands for “Big F---ing Rocket,” will be designed to withstand planetary entry on Earth, "Mars and beyond,” TechCrunch reported. Space.com reported that BFR's “chief aim” is to make colonizing Mars economically feasible. "We're actually building that ship right now," he said in an interview last month. "I think we'll probably be able to do short flights, short sort of up-and-down flights, probably sometime in the first half of next year." Shortly...

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk told an audience at South by Southwest that his timeline for sending a space vehicle to Mars could mark its first milestone early next year. The privately-funded venture, announced in September 2017, aims to send a cargo mission to the Red Planet by 2022. SpaceX's ultimate objective is to plant the seeds to put a human colony on Mars. Musk held a surprise question and answer session at the annual technology and culture festival in Austin, Texas on Sunday. The billionaire told attendees that "we are building the first Mars, or interplanetary ship, and...