Making a virus identical to one which existed in the past isn’t particularly worrying, because the original virus is already in the wild (except for the very few which are extinct, because of vaccination efforts).

The real trick is creating a novel virus, which our immune systems aren’t all accustomed to already, and that’s a whole different challenge. I don’t think our genetic engineering technology is at a point where that’s a realistic concern yet

Technically, perhaps, but it’s far less likely.

It’s also possible to be run over even if you’re following the rules and being careful, but that doesn’t make safe behaviour around roads irrelevant

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.

Actually, alright. Not completely out of nowhere then. That’s what I get for only skimming the actual article.

I think it’s still a bit unfair, since the aliens in question are clearly framed as barbaric and not people who should generally be emulated

I can’t imagine what they’re referring to when they claim his books are sexist. I’m pretty sure as many protagonists are female as male, and a significant fraction of the characters have no gender at all.

Of those who do have gender, it’s not at all unusual for them to have changed genders once or more in their lives, and the only time I remember anyone making a fuss of it is as part of Genar-Hofoen’s character arc in Excession, wherein he is shown to have grown as a person by doing exactly that.

Can anyone point out an example of what the author might be thinking of? I’m genuinely baffled

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

Ironically, cardboard and cardboard derivatives would have safely burned to ash and been scattered in the upper atmosphere. There’s have been no reason to close the airspace if that were the case

Because printers (of the kinds you’re likely to find on the consumer market) don’t make dust in any significant quantity.

They make fumes, which are an entirely different kind of hazard and need different precautions

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

That’s not been my experience. Every time I take a link to share from the app it includes tracking which I need to remove

I disagree. It’s perfectly possible to hold an internally consistent view that it’s wrong to execute a prisoner, both because there’s no reason to do so (the prisoner already being imprisoned) and because courts get the decision wrong too often (and/or because the courts aren’t trustworthy), while also believing that it’s acceptable to kill under other circumstances

The vast majority of people celebrating the death of the United Healthcare CEO would have been perfectly happy with him being stripped of power and imprisoned, but that wasn’t ever an option so the only thing available is death. There’s also some evidence that his death has actually made a difference, in the form of other health insurance companies chickening out of unethical policy changes.

In the case of these prisoners, they’re already safely behind bars. It’s also, broadly speaking, much more likely that they aren’t guilty of what they’ve been convicted of (although I don’t know anything about these particular cases). We also have evidence that the death penalty doesn’t have the effect on crime rates which proponents claim it does, so it’s different in a whole bunch of ways

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

It’s bad because it’s dangerous. If something happens and you can’t pay the mortgage any more, then the idea of a mortgage is that you can always just sell the house to settle the debt instead.

If you get into negative equity though, then even if you sell the house you could owe a huge amount of money and have no way to do anything about it. An under-control debt could turn into a crippling debt overnight.

I suspect the real reason politicians care, though, is because that’s the one scenario in which the lender might lose money. They prefer their customers being able to pay their debts (theoretically)