Codraroll

Again we have to ask: are you consciously aware of the repeatedly shown evidence that prove this to be nothing but a bunch of baloney? Are you unable or unwilling to address it?

It is clear and evident you do not understand the arguments that prove this assumption to be false. You keep bringing it up as fact despite repeated, thorough, and well-researched posts that show it to be a falsehood. Do you even acknowledge that those arguments were written? Are you capable of addressing even one of those points? If not, it should be time to re-evaluate your assumption. Or are you just unwilling? If so, what differentiates your endless harping on the subject from outright trolling?

Ars Technica stops just short of calling the statement "utterly (expletive) stupid". https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/why-did-elon-musk-just-say-trump-wants-to-bring-two-stranded-astronauts-home/ Never mind that the whole decision process and remedying strategy has already been done and worked out. Sending Crew-9 home before Crew-10 goes up, leaves only one US astronaut on the station. That's too little for regular stationkeeping, and would require the cancellation of a planned spacewalk. It would also apparently risk leaving the station unmanned, if Crew-10 slips, because the Russian crew (with the last remaining US astronaut riding along) have to take their Soyuz home by April 20. So yeah, the comment section goes far in suggesting that drug use is taking its toll.

You have yet to show an ounce of that willingness, or for that matter, capability. Literally every comma, every fart, every movement in the shadows has only resulted in, how do you put it ... If this isn't trolling at this point, it's something medical.

And as literally everybody else in this thread note constantly, all this could also be laid to rest if you didn't see bogus indications of poor Raptor reliability in every shadow, lens flare, and grain of sand out there, then jumped in here to tell us that this time, your wild guess is bulletproof evidence that SpaceX is hiding this very specific thing from all of us you in particular.

Isn't "We've had a problem" the autentic, historic phrasing?

The ultimate insulation would be a material with closed pores that are too small to hold anything but a vacuum. A vacuum insulation panel that can be cut on site, because the vacuum is maintained by the material itself and not by a sealing bag around it. However, such a material is essentially sci-fi, because it's essentially impossible to make closed pore walls for pores too small to fit individual molecules inside. A closed-pore material that holds partial vacuum by itself would be an amazing breakthrough, though. Thermal insulation materials are porous, which gives the solid material a very low thermal conductivity (if I recall correctly, and my memory is a bit hazy at this exact point, it's because the path travelled by heat through the material is very long with all the pores in the way, making the material behave equivalent to a much thicker massive slab where the heat can travel in a straight line). However, the gas that permeates the pores also conducts heat. If the porous material is of sufficiently low conductivity, the total thermal conductivity value will be dominated by that of the gas. Hence, to create a material that insulates better than air, you have to fill its pores with a gas that insulates better than air. The thermal conductivity of a gas is dependent on how much energy is transfered in collisions between its molecules. Lower the gas pressure, and there will be fewer molecules floating around, hence fewer collisions and less energy transfered, and the thermal conductivity goes down. That's the logic behind vacuum insulation panels (VIPs for short). They are essentially porous materials with very low thermal conductivity, sealed in an airtight bag at a very low pressure. This gives them a thermal conductivity 5-10 times lower than conventional insulation (~0.004 W/mK, for those who like to keep track. A typical value for mineral wool is 0.037 W/mK, extruded polystyrene [XPS] around 0.032 W/mK). Entirely stagnant air [no convection] is around 0.020 W/mK). Currently, vacuum insulation panels provide amazing insulation performance, but using them is a bit like building something out of balloons (only the pressure is on the outside, rather than the inside), with all the disadvantages balloons have as a building material. You can't cut them to fit tricky corners or on-site modifications, but have to order them cut to size from the factory; you have to ensure not to puncture them; there will be gaps between them even if you put them very close together; and leakage will become an issue over time. A punctured vacuum insulation panel is a bit more useful than a punctured balloon, it still insulates better than the equivalent thickness of XPS, but you're down to one-fifth of the intended insulation value, which is a massive drop in performance. Hence, vacuum insulation panels remain reserved for niche applications (where just using 8x the thickness with XPS, which would be vastly cheaper, is not an option), holding back their mass adoption, hence production volumes are rather low, hence the cost stays high. Everyone is waiting for that breakthrough in materials science. Arguably, vacuum insulation panels represent a bit of a breakthrough already (8x better than XPS is pretty dang good), but it has to compete against the "primitive" solution, which is more cost efficient for mass industrial adoption. Aerogel is somewhere in the middle. Better performance than XPS, though not amazingly so, because its thermal conductivity is capped at that of the air that permeates it, and still quite expensive. So that too is reserved for niche applications, like translucent walls. However, there is a sort of compromise way to get lower thermal conductivity, cheaper, and more flexible. Air is a good insulator, but heavier gases insulate even better. If you manage to entrap such a gas in a porous material, it will work better than a porous material filled with air. If those pores are sufficiently small, there will be no significant convection between the pores, lowering the exchange of heat between the gas molecules (and between the gas molecules and the pore walls). This is already done with gas-filled insulation materials, but they too use that sealing bag that makes vacuum insulation panels so vulnerable. But if you manage to find a manufacturing process that entraps this gas in closed pores (i.e., no convection between the pores at all), and then manage to scale that process to reap cost benefits, you'd make one heck of a splash in the building materials market. Just imagine the potential benefit of making walls 10 cm thinner in a high-end property market, how many more square meters of sellable space you'll get for each building then. It's been a while since I checked up on former colleagues researching this sort of thing, but I hope they manage to achieve that breakthrough before retirement.

Narrow minds expected science to begin conforming to their pre-selected conclusions on topics ranging from evolution to vaccines before. Wishing for bias never worked for them either.

By the way, I appreciate seeing new in-depth explanations like this, even if it doesn't sink in with the intended audience, who takes away from i.e. this paragraph ... ... the following message:

I work in building inspection for the local city planning office, and we use a somewhat similar approach. If a building is found to have a flaw beyond the legal tolerance upon inspection (and we see a lot of those), the first step is always to ask the people who built it to clarify what's going on, and present their improvements. After all, they know the project, they know the process, and they are overall the best positioned to find out what went wrong. Our mandate is not to perform any fault analyses, but to mandate that they are performed. Often, it can even be documented that what we saw was within the legal tolerance, after all. But our job is to ask, and if necessary hold back the certificate of completion until we've received a satisfactory answer. I would presume that the logic is the same here. FAA isn't doing the investigation themselves, but they know what an investigation must include to be satisfactory, and they can mandate SpaceX to present those relevant documents. In the meantime, they can hold back launch licenses or impose other sanctions. What would be truly worrying, though, is if the FAA was pressured from above not to follow due procedure in the case of SpaceX. That they were required to grant launch licenses despite serious mishaps, because their CEO is chummy with the President, and also running a Department of Loyalty with the mandate to dissolve governmental bodies believed to be interfering with the whims of the Pepelord, or whatever he calls himself these days.

In this case it's mostly one specific user with a fixation on insisting that every information gap must be filled with his very specific pet theory, regardless of how many times it has previously been debunked, often using the same arguments as before. At what point being honestly mistaken becomes indistinguishable from deliberate malfeasance, I don't know, but we must be close.

How many total times must you havee explained that your probably-pathological fixation on Raptor reliability hinges on absolute bunk, before it sinks in? Each and every one of those arguments have been refuted dozens of times, yet you still appear come back in the earnest belief that repeating them enough times makes them true, and that the counterarguments stop being valid if you never acknowledge them.

Like all the rest of your arguments, this hinges on the bogus presumption that your observational assumptions are universal truths. Who's to say this was "too slow"? Until we know what acceleration they were aiming for, your entire argument has no substance whatsoever. Not for the first time, I might add. You might want to revise your approach to statements like that.

There is no "except" in hokey arguments about Raptor unreliability.

Mechanically speaking, for an object to tip over, the vertical projection of its centre of mass to the surface on which it rests must move beyond the polygon defined by its contact points on that surface. Since an empty landed stage is very bottom-heavy, because all the heavy parts are at the bottom of the rocket, it takes more to tip it over than it might appear. The centre of mass may be approximately at the point of the feather in the blue logo, and then the landing legs may be more than sufficient to keep it upright, even at a tilt.