It’s an age of marvels

Come to the US and drink all the raw milk you like. Note that we don't have universal health care here, so bring lots of cash.

Given we had already achieved that, adding orbital refueling and landing/reuse are both more control issues than materials issues. We had the science to go anywhere.

We just needed to stay focused on the engineering and iterate, instead of going sideways burning money to maintain a completely unmaintainable unreliable faux-reusable less capable design.

A situation so politically intolerable that management ”coped” by operating in denial, and so objectively broken that small issues in a sea of complexity produced deadly disasters.

Normal iterative improvements were sacrificed for decades, to prop up a bad design.

Agreed, you would. Potemkin X is not a russian language word or saying, it is more like a “obscure historical event idiom” that has no attachment to a particular language at this point. And that changes how often you would hear it used every day. I would guess absolutely any native russian speaker would know what “pokazukha” is. But with Potemkin X? Yeah, less likely.

I think I got a perfect analogy with another idiom to describe what’s going on here using an example - Sisyphean task (and its modern english equivalent “beating a dead horse”). If you try to get your point across to a native english speaker, I bet you would also have a much higher success rate using “beating a dead horse”. Try doing it to a native russian or italian speaker, and they would be confused. But if you try “Sisyphean task”, I bet you would have a much higher rate of succes in that specific case.

Not sure about other languages, but “beating a dead horse” idiom doesn’t exist in russian at all, despite it being used way more often than “sisyphean task” in english. While “sisyphean task” actually exists in russian.

Same with Potemkin X and pokazukha, but flip the language to russian. Both are used in russian language, but the native slang word for it (pokazukha) is way more frequently used in daily life. However, Potemkin X is an idiom that, while transcening the languages and international borders, isn’t used as frequently in real life as the original language analogues. But outside of those origin languages, no one would really use or know of those analogues.

Which is why it is kinda funny to see people trying to make “pokazukha” (aka flexing) or “smekalka” (quick-wittiness) into a “real” english word, given none of those are unique words describing something that isn’t already described well in most languages. As opposed to “schadenfreude”, which doesn’t have a perfect analogue in other languages, so it makes sense that it would widely spread and get adopted beyond the origin language.

TLDR: chart with two axi, one is popularity outside of the origin language and the other is usage in everyday life in the origin language. Potemkin X and Sisyphean task max out the first axis and are below average on the second axis. Pokazukha and “beating a dead horse” are very low on the “outside of the origin language” axis, but are high on the “everyday usage in the origin language”.

P.S. I am aware that “beating a dead horse” exists pretty much unchanged in German too, but that’s an edge case that doesn’t really change the overall idea.