In a certain sense the Russians are already beaten in that their goals are unattainable. Ethnic Russians are a small minority out side Crimea. Just as it is a fantasy Ukraine could take back Crimea seeing as Ukrainians represent only 15% of the Crimean population. The Russians are just as ill equipped to hold the rest of Ukraine where they are just 15% of the population.....I predict Russia will keep Crimea and possibly a small sliver of the Donbas region, but nothing more and they will continue to take 9 or 10 thousand casualties a month until they accept this reality.
Worse still if Russia will be left with their military in taters. So weak Finnish and Swedish entry into NATO is now all, but certain.
Sadly the true cost of SLS is likely far worse.... $23 billion ignores the tens of billions spent on the Orion capsule and Ares V. All in SLS likely cost more like 60 to 95 billion......If that's not bad enough the $2.2 billion per launch figure is also out of date...I believe NASA's Inspector General now says SLS's current cost (excluding development cost) is $4.1 billion dollars per launch.
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I agree Musk may be intentionally tanking the Twitter deal, but I think his motivations may be more expansive than you think. The only thing Musk truly cares about is his Starship rocket. On a scale from 1 to 10 of what Musk cares about his children are maybe a 9, Starship is an 11. IMO the Twitter buyout may have been a ploy to force the democrats to stop obstructing Starship.
The Biden administration has grounded Musk's rocket for an entire year with a seemingly never ending FAA review...Or at least it was never ending until the Twitter buyout started looking shaky. Now it looks like he will receive his clearance to resume testing in the next few days.
Here's the thing about Twitter, it's a massively powerful tool the People In Charge have for years used to manipulate elections and political movements around the globe, along with overthrow governments across Africa and the Middle East. Even Ukraine...Would the Euromaidan revolution that led to the current Russia/Ukraine war have ever happened without Twitter as it's organisation tool?
I think your assessment about what Musk is doing is mostly correct, but I think his main goal was to force the democrats to stop obstructing SpaceX. All the other stuff is just fringe benefits cuz Musk is playing chess, not checkers. Even Musk's recently declaring himself a Republican makes the most sense it he's trying to scare the hell out of democrats by making them think their Twitter will soon be in hands of the GOP.
Any road in a few days we'll see if I'm right. If the FAA's PEA comes through granting SpaceX permission to operate out of Texas. Then Musk officially scuttles the Twitter deal then it's good bet it was really all about Starship the whole time.
I hate to show off my fancy tinfoil helmet here, but....If the military didn't know what the "UFOs" they were seeing are they would never admit they're real cuz they would represent a threat to national security they had no answer for. The most plausible explanation is these are US military spy aircraft, maybe drones and they're LARPing the UFO angle to fool foreign governments into thinking they aren't seeing Americans spying on them.
Seriously It's not the first time. If you look at the sightings from the 1950s when the UFO craze started about 90% of the credible ones can be explained today by then classified aircraft test programs. Most of the other 10% by likely still classified aircraft. Back then the government simultaneously pushed UFO conspiracies and labeled anyone who saw their classified aircraft as UFO wackos.
Good list. Glock 19 is a excellent service pistol for law enforcement and pretty good gun for many other use cases, but hardly the bestest ever for everything like cultist insist it is.....Oh and only way I'd ever pay 3k for an AR is if it included a night with the seller's really hot wife. Even then I probably still call the whole experience overrated.
No way, sorry!....Danica didn't have the option staying in Formula racing. She crashed constantly there too and those cars cost millions of dollars. Whereas Stockcars cost few hundred grand and you can usually fix them after a crash....No, she moved over to Nascar cuz the sponsors wanted to keep funding an attractive young female driver, but nobody could afford to keep replacing several million dollars worth of formula cars every time she got behind the wheel. They sent her to Nascar thinking how hard could it be she just has to turn left and we can hammer out the dents when she F's up. Of course there's a little more to Nascar than that, but the cost of her crashing was cheaper and the female driver thing played to a wider domestic audience with her driving for Nascar than Indycar.
...And I'm not hating on her cuz she's a woman. IMO she was a skilled driver, but she was just too aggressive. You don't win races by being fastest, you win by being first on the last lap. You get to be first on the last lap by still having a car when you get to last lap. To me she seemed like she just pushed as hard as she could every second.
I strongly disagree with your estimation of the damage Starship could do. IMO the force of Starship exploding on or near the pad would likely be way less than 1 kiloton. Probably mostly a large fireball..... Fuel cannot burn without oxidizer. The idea you could get 75% of Starships fuel to combined with an oxidizer prior to ignition while the Starship was anywhere near the launch pad is near zero.
In order to get anything near an even a 1 kiloton explosion you would need an large amount of the liquid methane to combine with LOX and there is no physical mechanism where that could happen while Starship is sitting on the pad. If a Starship breaks up after launch it's forward velocity could bring it's fuel and oxidizer together well enough and fast enough for an explosion, but in that case the Starship would be high above the ground traveling away from Boca at hundreds if not thousands of MPH.
There are also issues with comparing a possible Starship explosion with the Russian N1 disaster(s). First the Russians did not then and I believe to this day do not use self destruct charges on their rockets. Moreover the N1 was designed to shut all it's engines down in the event of an anomaly. Which is how the N1 was able launch, have all of it engines shut down, then fall back down and crash into the launchpad with enough velocity to cause a large explosion.
A Starship in trouble would continue to accelerate away from the pad then be destroyed by it's self destruct charges which would hopefully insure either it was far enough away from the ground when it broke up that any explosion would be too far away to cause harm or at least that it did not breakup by hitting the ground with enough velocity to effectively mix it's fuel and oxidize on impact.
In a certain sense the Russians are already beaten in that their goals are unattainable. Ethnic Russians are a small minority out side Crimea. Just as it is a fantasy Ukraine could take back Crimea seeing as Ukrainians represent only 15% of the Crimean population. The Russians are just as ill equipped to hold the rest of Ukraine where they are just 15% of the population.....I predict Russia will keep Crimea and possibly a small sliver of the Donbas region, but nothing more and they will continue to take 9 or 10 thousand casualties a month until they accept this reality.
Worse still if Russia will be left with their military in taters. So weak Finnish and Swedish entry into NATO is now all, but certain.
Which one can survive grenades dropped from a DJI phantom? 🤣
I'd bet that throughout history unintuitive theories that fail to explain observations were pretty much always eventually proved wrong 🙄
I wonder if SpaceX colonialist will travel to the landing site to greet NASA's first Astronaut to set foot on MARS 🤣
Sadly the true cost of SLS is likely far worse.... $23 billion ignores the tens of billions spent on the Orion capsule and Ares V. All in SLS likely cost more like 60 to 95 billion......If that's not bad enough the $2.2 billion per launch figure is also out of date...I believe NASA's Inspector General now says SLS's current cost (excluding development cost) is $4.1 billion dollars per launch.
I agree Musk may be intentionally tanking the Twitter deal, but I think his motivations may be more expansive than you think. The only thing Musk truly cares about is his Starship rocket. On a scale from 1 to 10 of what Musk cares about his children are maybe a 9, Starship is an 11. IMO the Twitter buyout may have been a ploy to force the democrats to stop obstructing Starship.
The Biden administration has grounded Musk's rocket for an entire year with a seemingly never ending FAA review...Or at least it was never ending until the Twitter buyout started looking shaky. Now it looks like he will receive his clearance to resume testing in the next few days.
Here's the thing about Twitter, it's a massively powerful tool the People In Charge have for years used to manipulate elections and political movements around the globe, along with overthrow governments across Africa and the Middle East. Even Ukraine...Would the Euromaidan revolution that led to the current Russia/Ukraine war have ever happened without Twitter as it's organisation tool?
I think your assessment about what Musk is doing is mostly correct, but I think his main goal was to force the democrats to stop obstructing SpaceX. All the other stuff is just fringe benefits cuz Musk is playing chess, not checkers. Even Musk's recently declaring himself a Republican makes the most sense it he's trying to scare the hell out of democrats by making them think their Twitter will soon be in hands of the GOP.
Any road in a few days we'll see if I'm right. If the FAA's PEA comes through granting SpaceX permission to operate out of Texas. Then Musk officially scuttles the Twitter deal then it's good bet it was really all about Starship the whole time.
I hate to show off my fancy tinfoil helmet here, but....If the military didn't know what the "UFOs" they were seeing are they would never admit they're real cuz they would represent a threat to national security they had no answer for. The most plausible explanation is these are US military spy aircraft, maybe drones and they're LARPing the UFO angle to fool foreign governments into thinking they aren't seeing Americans spying on them.
Seriously It's not the first time. If you look at the sightings from the 1950s when the UFO craze started about 90% of the credible ones can be explained today by then classified aircraft test programs. Most of the other 10% by likely still classified aircraft. Back then the government simultaneously pushed UFO conspiracies and labeled anyone who saw their classified aircraft as UFO wackos.
Good list. Glock 19 is a excellent service pistol for law enforcement and pretty good gun for many other use cases, but hardly the bestest ever for everything like cultist insist it is.....Oh and only way I'd ever pay 3k for an AR is if it included a night with the seller's really hot wife. Even then I probably still call the whole experience overrated.
No way, sorry!....Danica didn't have the option staying in Formula racing. She crashed constantly there too and those cars cost millions of dollars. Whereas Stockcars cost few hundred grand and you can usually fix them after a crash....No, she moved over to Nascar cuz the sponsors wanted to keep funding an attractive young female driver, but nobody could afford to keep replacing several million dollars worth of formula cars every time she got behind the wheel. They sent her to Nascar thinking how hard could it be she just has to turn left and we can hammer out the dents when she F's up. Of course there's a little more to Nascar than that, but the cost of her crashing was cheaper and the female driver thing played to a wider domestic audience with her driving for Nascar than Indycar.
...And I'm not hating on her cuz she's a woman. IMO she was a skilled driver, but she was just too aggressive. You don't win races by being fastest, you win by being first on the last lap. You get to be first on the last lap by still having a car when you get to last lap. To me she seemed like she just pushed as hard as she could every second.
I strongly disagree with your estimation of the damage Starship could do. IMO the force of Starship exploding on or near the pad would likely be way less than 1 kiloton. Probably mostly a large fireball..... Fuel cannot burn without oxidizer. The idea you could get 75% of Starships fuel to combined with an oxidizer prior to ignition while the Starship was anywhere near the launch pad is near zero.
In order to get anything near an even a 1 kiloton explosion you would need an large amount of the liquid methane to combine with LOX and there is no physical mechanism where that could happen while Starship is sitting on the pad. If a Starship breaks up after launch it's forward velocity could bring it's fuel and oxidizer together well enough and fast enough for an explosion, but in that case the Starship would be high above the ground traveling away from Boca at hundreds if not thousands of MPH.
There are also issues with comparing a possible Starship explosion with the Russian N1 disaster(s). First the Russians did not then and I believe to this day do not use self destruct charges on their rockets. Moreover the N1 was designed to shut all it's engines down in the event of an anomaly. Which is how the N1 was able launch, have all of it engines shut down, then fall back down and crash into the launchpad with enough velocity to cause a large explosion.
A Starship in trouble would continue to accelerate away from the pad then be destroyed by it's self destruct charges which would hopefully insure either it was far enough away from the ground when it broke up that any explosion would be too far away to cause harm or at least that it did not breakup by hitting the ground with enough velocity to effectively mix it's fuel and oxidize on impact.