I had a plotter that took these pens. I couldn't afford to buy new pens, so I sawed one in half and soldered a threaded insert in to make a cap, so I could refill it. Refilling worked, though wasn't as reliable as a new pen.
The X-37 is tiny, it’s only 5 tonnes itself. But one of the uses is probably to bring back smaller satellites to determine how long term exposure in space has affected them.
For Australia, at least, the rail lines are shown in red and major roads are shown in maroon. The lines for the roads are mostly thinner than for the rail, but not consistently so. At first glance, it's difficult to determine which lines are road and rail, unless you already know which is which.
Usually it is interpreted as a loss of confidence in the government, resulting in the formation of a new government or the calling of an election. Potential loss of power is a pretty good incentive for a government to find a sensible solution.
There's a convenience store in Sydney, which has a full blown A320 flight simulator in the back, behind all the shelves of snacks. The owner of the store is a migrant to Australia, who is (was?) waiting for his overseas aircraft maintenance engineer qualifications to be locally recognised. He's turned the simulator into part of his business.
Edit: Based on the street address, it might have moved out of the convenience store into its own premises since the article was written?
Further edit: Sadly, it seems as if the owner, Ahmed Abdelwahed, might have been deported. Hopefully the deportation never went ahead, or he made it back into Australia on another try.
The exporter may sell less to the US, but typically they will then sell the difference into non-US markets, reducing the impost. This is exactly what happened in a lot of (not all) markets a few years ago, when China tried to intimidate Australia with trade restrictions [1]. When Chine dropped the restrictions, they found that they were now competing with more buyers and so paying higher prices.
Realistically, the accomplishment will be a resource grab. It's not scientific. The moon will eventually be carved up by (disputed) territorial claims, like Antarctica. Countries will need to maintain bases to back their territorial claims. Eventually the claims will turn into mining rights. The resources are valuable for being in a reduced gravity zone. All those juicy water containing craters at the Lunar poles... [1]
My feeling is that the response was the thing that kicked off the decline. At the time of the attack, the US had quite a bit of goodwill around the world. The US could have surgically gone after the people responsible, with minimum civilian deaths, and most of the world would have backed them to the hilt, and the US would have come out stronger. Instead we had spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, the coalition of the "willing" going into Iraq with jackboots on, over the widespread objections of their own populations, and abuses in Guantanamo Bay. That response burned an awful lot of goodwill around the world: which kicked off the decline.
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