I bet he’d quickly become less busy if he was the supreme commander of the US armed forces

The ISS has enough spacecraft docked to take everyone home at a moments notice, always. Nobody needs to launch anything.

They broke that rule briefly when the Boeing capsule was deemed unfit for use, but they quickly fixed that.

I’ve heard it’s actually really difficult, because a good translator doesn’t do it literally.

They’re supposed to say something which gets the same meaning across, which often isnt what you’d get just by translating each word.

That leaves people translating trump with a problem: you can’t generally turn his long rambling speeches into something with a clearly understandable meaning without putting words into his mouth, or summarising so aggressively that you’d only say a couple of sentences for every few minutes of speech

There certainly was a lot of scepticism early on in SpaceX’s history. They had to fight political pressure just to take part in the commercial launch program, and had to take NASA to court and argue (successfully) that they hadn’t followed their own rules when they rejected SpaceX’s bid.

They seem to have gotten over that now. Presumably it’s difficult for anyone to argue they can’t do the job when they launch more rockets than the whole rest of the world combined, and they (eventually) delivered on the commercial crew program while the “safe” (and much better paid) pick, Boeing, seems to be very publicly failing and considering cutting their losses.

As for Soyuz, I’m not sure how much those rockets and capsules actually cost so I can’t perform a direct comparison. It must be cheaper though, because they stole all the business for commercial launches from Roscosmos and left them with a serious budget problem. They charge about $60 million for a basic Falcon 9 launch, and they’re making huge profit at that price. We won’t really see the real cost of the rocket until someone builds something which can compete with them for business, because they’re really the only player worth mentioning in their weight class for anyone who doesn’t have ulterior motives (such as governments who want to support their own launch industry)

What I can say for sure is they never came even close to the launch rate of Falcon 9. I think it took something like 8 years, off the top of my head, for total Falcon 9 launches to exceed the number of Soyuz launches and the number of launches per year is still increasing.

Because sending an entire rocket up to collect them would be very expensive, so NASA would prefer to leave them up there until the next routine flight so that they can send other things up and down with them on schedule.

There might also be limited space on the space station to dock a capsule. There are only so many docking ports, and I think they’re often full

No, that’s a different and largely unrelated rocket.

The one which will be bringing back the astronauts is literally the rocket with the best track record in history, and usually flies at least once a week.

This explosion was a prototype for a new rocket, which has only been sent to space a handful of times

I’ve moved no goalposts.

You claimed they were floundering, and I responded with an argument that the rockets exploding isn’t evidence of floundering, it’s an engineering choice to find the limits of their design by pushing a real rocket until it reaches those limits (rather than spending a decade analysing the problem to oblivion).

It’s quite instructive to compare spacex to blue origin in that regard, actually. Both companies are about the same age, but blue origin spent that time designing while spacex spent it flying. The result is that blue origin reached orbit for the first time just this week, after about a decade of effort, but their first launch went pretty well (although not perfectly, since the booster crashed rather than landing the way it was supposed to). Spacex, meanwhile, blew up their first few rockets trying to reach space (I’m referring to the early falcons now, not starship), and blew up quite a few more trying to master landing them again, but they spent most of that decade developing experience in actual flight as a result (not to mention having a sustainable income, and totally dominating the launch industry).

I think it’s difficult to make a good argument that spacex blowing up rockets means that what they’re working on isn’t going to work

The space shuttle flew, that wasn’t the problem. It was supposed to be a fast and cheap way to launch things into low earth orbit. They were talking about flying once a week. In reality all the complexity made it very expensive to build and maintain, and very prone to failures.

Starship is also attempting to be cheap and fast. They haven’t achieved that yet, but they’ve come a long way and can pretty convincingly claim to have achieved several of the things they’ll need to do. Only time will tell if they actually accomplish what they’ve set out to do

Dynamic load on the plumbing connections, where loads will be dominated by hydrostatic pressure, leading to a failure near the end of a burn when there weren’t any engines starting or stopping to generate transient pressures? Not likely.

And they really aren’t foundering. They’re trying to do something very difficult, which nobody has ever achieved before, and losing the some of the first handful of rockets each time they try to crack a major new milestone is entirely within expectations. They’ve been deliberately weakening parts of the vehicle specifically to push it to the very limit, which doesn’t sound like the strategy of a team which is worried about blowing a few of them up.

Since someone is likely to point out the space shuttle, I’ll point out in return that people at the time were proudly proclaiming that it was the most complex machine ever to fly (by which they meant, “most distinct parts”) as if that were an achievement rather than a monumental failure of engineering. It tried to do what Starship is trying to do, and it failed.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Musk. Bashing spacex’s safety isn’t one of them, because falcon 9 has the best safety record in the history of orbital launchers. They launch astronauts all the time, and have never had a single mishap in a manned flight. They’re even the people who are going to rescue the astronauts stranded by Boeing’s screw-up, which I suspect makes them the only spaceflight organisation which is going to have safely landed more people than they launched.

Also, a fuel leak doesn’t imply something wasn’t fastened correctly. If that were the case it would have been leaking on the launch pad. Much more likely something was damaged by vibration or heat during the flight

True, that should have occurred to me. That’s what I get for not touching a compiler since the Christmas holidays started

That’s easy. The 2038 problem is fixed by using 64-bit processors running 64-bit applications. Just about everything built in the last 15 years has already got the fix

Using that fix, the problem doesn’t come up again for about 300 billion years

You understand that they were at war for a long time before they managed to sweep Assad and his forces away, right?

The final sudden advance may have come virtually overnight, but they’ve been fighting since the Arab spring in 2011

Stories about events we can identify in the archeological record, probably. Forest fires, major battles, geological events, things like that which can be used to line the stories up with specific real-world events

Really? They don’t use TLS at all? That sounds hilariously insecure

your certificate request must come from an authorized email address at bank.com

That isn’t true in general. In fact, it can’t be.

It might be policy for most cases from the well-known certificate authorities, but it’s not part of the protocol or anything like that.

If it were, then it would be impossible to set up your mailserver to begin with because you could never get a certificate for mail.bank.com

I’m pretty sure their concern is their own birth rate dropping, actually. Have you seen the demographics graph for Russia? They’re facing a complete collapse of their working-age population in a decade or two

No, it would have been detected by various systems pretty much immediately. Those systems are military though, and probably wouldn’t tell the general public about the movement of military satellites

It’s also conceivable that it was detected in that orbit but not recognised, so it was treated as a mystery object

They will have some kind of pressure relief valve, to let steam out and prevent an explosion. They only become dangerous if that valve isn’t working (assuming that whatever keeps the lid on is intact and still strong).

Look for damage around the seal between the pot and the lid, and look for damage to the clamp or latch which holds the lid down against that seal.

Then look at the valve. It’ll probably be a heavy object (such as a lump of metal) which sits on top of a hole of some sort, or it could possibly be something spring loaded. Either way, check that it moves freely.

After that the only additional thing you could do is a pressure test, where you basically deliberately overpressurise it and see if it explodes, but if you had the means to do that safely then you wouldn’t be asking for advice here so I don’t recommend it.

It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps