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I finally found enough public information to understand what the heat shield tiles on Starship really are. They are a less expensive and more producible variant of TUFROC tiles used on X-37B. A lot of the savings comes from the fact that the same size and shape tile covers most of the ship, unlike the Shuttle or the X-37B.
These are a modified carbon-carbon composite type outer material, which has some sort of ceramic materials incorporated, which is tougher and higher temperature-capable than alumino-silicate ceramics. It is higher thermal conductivity than low-density aluminosilicates. The lower layer is low-density fibrous (in some way) alumino-silicate ceramic, which has the low thermal conductivity needed to keep the backside temperature down in a thin two-layer title.
I do NOT know exactly how these materials are made. But I have seen the black upper layer atop the white lower layer in photos of these tiles being installed on the pins, over a thin layer of some "ablative" that is a backup for lost tiles.
What they learned from flights 10 and 11 was that the alternative "metallic" tiles (whatever they were) were not reliable because of unexpectedly-high oxidation, and that they needed some sort of gap filler between the tiles. So they are going with this two-layer carbonaceous ceramic atop low density alumino-silicate (a variation on the TUFROC notion).
The gap filler has turned out to be some sort of crushable paper wrapping around each tile. I am only presuming that the excess paper sticking out of the gaps gets trimmed off during the installation process.
It is also my impression that the tiles are redundantly attached, with both adhesives and those pins. The pins may (or may not) stick up into the outer layer.
Sorry, but I am unable to pin it down any better that that! Not privy to internal specifications and data!
GW
Follow-up to post 60. I found another article that gave more information. There were two sets of hydrogen leaks during the wet dress rehearsal. The first was in the connections between the rocket and the infrastructure around it, very similar to the leaks seen during the Artemis-1 wet dress rehearsal. These were fixed the same way as Artemis-1. Then a second set of leaks appeared. I had the impression that these were inside the vehicle. The article said they "did not understand" those leaks, and shut it down at that point.
This is a Boeing-built first stage core having propellant leak problems. So did the Starliner capsule that stranded 2 astronauts on ISS. I think I might see a pattern here: being too cheap damages quality, causing unreliability. Same corporate management mistake as what caused the 737MAX disasters. If I am right, the odds of killing the crew while riding the SLS just got higher.
GW
Follow-up to post 59. I see also that Artemis-2 will now not launch until March at the earliest, since the propellant load rehearsal found hydrogen leaks. Reportedly, these were in the connections between the rocket and the launch pad structure, not the rocket itself. As I recall, the last SLS launch was delayed for the very same reason. So it looks like the leak problem might be chronic.
Meanwhile, I ran across this about severe solar flare activity:
From Space.com via AIAA’s Daily Launch email newsletter for 3 Feb 2026. Note that the “flare” is the burst of electromagnetic radiation that travels at the speed of light. The coronal mass ejection “CME”, if any, is the slower-moving mass of particles that constitutes the actual radiation exposure hazard. The bigger those are, and the more direct the impact upon “something”, the higher the radiation exposure that “something” receives. With big CME’s around, this might not be a good time to put crews out past Earth’s magnetic field in a spacecraft. Quote:
Sun unleashes extraordinary solar flare barrage as new volatile sunspot turns toward Earth
News
By Daisy Dobrijevic published yesterday
A rapidly growing sunspot has fired off at least 18 M-class and three X-class flares in just 24 hours, including an intense X8.3 eruption.
The sun has erupted in a relentless barrage of powerful solar flares over the past 24 hours, firing off at least 18 M-class flares and three X-class flares, including an X8.3 eruption — the strongest solar flare of 2026 so far. Solar flares are ranked by strength from A, B and C up to M and X, with each letter representing a tenfold increase in energy — meaning X-class flares are the most powerful explosions the sun can produce.
The culprit is sunspot region 4366, a volatile active region that has grown rapidly in just a few days. The flurry of activity began late Feb. 1 and has continued into Feb. 2, with multiple M-class and X-class flares erupting in quick succession. The prolific region appears to be far from finished. Spaceweather.com described the region as a "solar flare factory", warning that its rapid growth and magnetic complexity make further eruptions highly likely.
The X8.3 solar flare peaked at 6:57 p.m. EST (2357 GMT) on Feb. 1, unleashing a blast of extreme ultraviolet and X-ray radiation that ionized Earth's upper atmosphere. The flare triggered strong R3 radio blackouts across parts of the South Pacific, with shortwave radio disruptions reported across eastern Australia and New Zealand, according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.
Scientists are closely watching for signs of any coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that could follow these powerful flares. Early analysis of a CME linked to the recent X8.3 eruption suggests that most of the solar material is likely to pass north and east of Earth, with only a possible glancing blow expected around Feb. 5, according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.
If those glancing impacts materialize, they could briefly elevate geomagnetic activity and increase the chances of auroras at high latitudes. However, forecasters stress that it is too early to know whether conditions will be favorable, as much depends on the CME's speed, direction and magnetic orientation.
It's also possible that more eruptions are still to come. Sunspot AR4366 remains highly active and continues to rotate into an Earth-facing position, raising the chance that future eruptions could launch CMEs more directly toward our planet. NOAA forecasters say they expect more exciting space weather activity from this region in the coming days.
Solar flares are powerful explosions from the sun that emit intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. They are ranked in ascending strength from A, B, C and M up to X, with each letter representing a tenfold increase in intensity. X-class flares are the strongest eruptions and the number following the X indicates how powerful the event is. Today's flare was measured at X8.3, putting it high in the upper tier of solar outbursts.
--- end quote
GW
Cosmic ray exposures in the inner solar system more-or-less in the vicinity of Earth vary between 24 and 60 REM per year, varying more-or-less sinusoidally with the nominally-11-year sunspot cycle. High solar activity is the lower value of cosmic ray exposure. Exceeding slightly the 50 REM/year exposure standard (twice that of Earthly workers in nuclear plants) increases the risk of cancer late in life beyond about 3%. 60 REM/year in a peak year is just not that much a risk!
The killer is solar flare events, not cosmic rays! Those occur erratically, though more often during high sunspot years, and they comprise an enormously-larger huge flood of much less energetic particles than cosmic rays. They can vary from 1 REM per hour to 10,000 or more REM per hour. Such exposures are a few to several hours long. Not the whole trip!
The older astronaut high-exposure limits are no more than 25 REM accumulated in any single month, and no more than 50 REM accumulated in a single short event. Somewhere near 200-300 REM accumulated in a short event is about a 50% chance of dying quickly from severe radiation sickness, and 500 REM accumulated in a short event is pretty much a 100% chance of dying quickly.
The outdoor fallout after a nearby fission bomb explosion is somewhere near 5000-50,000 REM per hour, for a few days after the event. That stuff requires feet of lead or yards of earth (and concrete) for adequate shielding.
However, solar flare radiation, being far less energetic particles than cosmic rays, is far easier to shield! It only takes about 15-20 gram/cm^2 worth of shielding on your craft's hull to adequately protect from a high-end solar flare event, such as what occurred in 1972 between two Apollo missions to the moon.
Cosmic rays are not impacted very much by any shielding we might use, but it is known that the lower the molecular weight of the atoms in the shielding materials, the lower the secondary radiation shower intensity produced by scattering events hitting atoms in the shielding. That's why you do not want metal shielding for cosmic rays!
Cosmic rays are just NOT the fatal problem! Anyone who points to that as a show-stopper is lying! The solar wind, and especially solar flare events, are! That exposure really does build up over time toward some kind of career exposure limit. The old one was 400 REM max lifetime accumulation, reduced by age and gender. There was a formula for that. NASA published this stuff, decades ago.
I do hear that those older astronaut exposure limits have recently been reduced some, but that is small change compared to what I am talking about! And the truly high-exposure limits have been known since the atmospheric atomic tests in Nevada in the 1950's, not to mention the two Japanese cities that were A-bombed in 1945. Only the really low-dose exposure limits were found in the decades since.
GW
The Artemis-II mission was delayed because of cold at Cape Canaveral. I don't know any details about the delay, but the reason (cold, just below freezing soak-out) is comparable to what killed Challenger back in 1986. That decision on NASA's part is unsurprising, since the SRB's on this launch vehicle are basically a 5-segment form of the Shuttle 4-segment SRB's. It would be incredibly stupid to make the Challenger mistake twice!
I am not sure how accurate this is, but one posting I saw on LinkedIn had an animation of the orbit Artemis-II is "going to use" (supposedly, anyway). It launches into an ellipse that apogees somewhere in or between the two Van Allen belts, then figure-8's around the moon (like Apollo, but further out from the moon), before making a free return and entry. There has to be a perigee burn to get from the ellipse onto the lunar transfer trajectory, but no other burns, other than course corrections.
If true, these astronauts will spend more time (twice or more) exposed to Van Allen belt radiation than the Apollo astronauts ever did. This is a high solar activity year. From what I read, that increases the radiation exposures from the Van Allen belts (it does decrease cosmic ray exposure outside Earth's magnetic field).
Notice also that I said nothing about the Orion heat shield risk. That is well covered in other postings. Peak convective heating occurs at about half the entry interface speed, which is near escape in a free return from the moon. Convective heating rate varies roughly as speed cubed. Plasma radiation heating rate varies by an exponent of 6 or more with speed. The effective plasma temperature in degrees K is crudely numerically equal to speed in m/s. You decide if flying a known-to-be-defective heat shield with a human crew was a "good risk to take".
GW
So we have a revised airframe and a new engine, neither of which have flown before. Remember, this is still experimental flight test. Very experimental indeed!
I hope it goes well. The risk is rather high that it will not. There's a lot of changes between this and the earlier version that last flew.
GW
Some of these reporters and press release writers are abysmally ignorant. The phrase "moon's immense gravity" in paragraph 5 of the second article quotation is proof enough of that.
Plus I noticed the real reason they will not orbit the moon was NOT given: SLS block 1 with Orion does not have the delta-vee capability to enter lunar orbit and get back out of it! Block 1B might, but that's not what this SLS is.
As for the heat shield, I have previously posted how they are making the same kinds of bad management decisions as killed 2 shuttle crews. It's been 2 years since Artemis 1 flew. They have had the time to have replaced the heat shield, despite the article claiming there was not enough time. They spent that 2 years trying to analytically show changing entry trajectory was enough safety margin, and not everybody inside (or outside) NASA agrees with that.
Once again we see schedules and budgets prioritized above crew safety, while either/or thinking and "not invented here" attitude prevented looking for a third alternative besides flying flawed or doing it with the expensive Apollo method.
GW
Based on the color in Spacenut's photo, the resin in the hex may be phenolic. The fiber definitely looks like glass, but could be a mineral fiber like fire curtain cloth, although that's not likely due to the high costs compared to glass.
I've never seen anything definitive about those material choices, so I do not know.
But look at Spacenut's photo once again! That's a chunk of the hex held in the hand, to show how the gun nozzle fits the hex cell, for hand-gunning the heat shield. It also shows almost EXACTLY my alternative!
Put a bottomless mold around that chunk of hex, and attach it to the outlet of a plastic extrusion press. Use the press to fill all the cells in the hex at once, plus the border between hex and mold wall. Trowel off the excess on the bottom, install the mold bottom, take the mold off the press, trowel some of that excess onto the top, and install the mold top. Then go cure the thing.
You have to think outside the either/or trap! They've spent 2 years now trying to justify-with-analysis flying a defective heat shield with a crew! They could have replaced that heat shield with a hand-gunned one in that 2 years, or they could have tried my idea and proven it worked in that 2 years, with the hand-gunned option as a backup.
THEY DID NEITHER!
They did not want to pay the labor to hand-gun any more heat shields, and I cannot fault that aversion. But they did NOT value crew safety high enough to NOT fly a known defective heat shield! And, they were too bound up in their either/or thinking to consider any other options! Not to mention "not invented here" thinking, since my idea came from outside their organization. (I had to use a friend at NASA just to get it inside!)
Either/or thinking and "not invented here" attitude. Not prioritizing crew safety above cost and schedule! THAT is the fault here! And it has NOT changed since Challenger and Columbia! The real lessons of those disasters were quite apparently NEVER learned!
Those shuttle loss inquests were around a billion dollars, and 18 months or more, each! There really is nothing as expensive as a dead crew! Especially crews dead from bad management decisions! Just like my by-line says!
GW
Well, NASA managers are "playing the odds". Yes, the Artemis-2 heat shield is going to spall out chunks, maybe more of them since it was built less permeable, or so the story says. The Artemis-1 heat shield was mostly identical, and spalled out chunks. But those ugly and alarming craters left behind were not enough to cause a burn through.
Less likely would be two craters close enough together to be one big crater, at the bottom of which another chunk happens to spall out! That would penetrate most of the way through the heat shield, leading to a burn-through, in turn very likely fatal for the crew.
You have to understand what Avcoat really is. It is a cycolac polymer loaded with little microballoons to lower its density and increase its ablation rate. Denser is lower ablation rate. Too dense, and gas has more difficulty getting out of the less permeable char. But the more filled with microballoons, the more viscous it is, and hard to mold into where you want it to go. Artemis 2 has fewer microballoons in more of the tiles they made, according to the story. That's denser, with a slower ablation rate, but a less permeable char, increasing the risk of the gas not getting out, and so causing chunks to spall off.
Their theory is that gas unable to get out fast enough blows off chinks of char, exposing virgin material beneath too soon. That’s probably right. Probably.
Have you ever handled real charcoal? Not the pressed crap they sell for your grill, but an actual charred piece of wood? Depending upon the species, it can be quite weak. The more fibrous and stronger the virgin wood, if the charred fibers hold together, the physically tougher a charred piece of it is. Think of oak as strong char (good coals in the fireplace), versus mesquite as weak (doesn't even form coals, just burns immediately to soft ash).
The fundamental mistake NASA made with the Orion heat shield has NEVER BEEN ADDRESSED! That was deleting the fiberglass hex from the Avcoat! They continue to think of that as an either/or decision. Either we build it like Apollo, or we make tiles. That is just plain BS !!!!
You can put the hex back into every tile you make, where as the hex chars and melts, but at a rate slower than the cycolac, its fibrous structure ties the cycolac char together, as a sort of composite material. THAT is why the heat shields built Apollo-style did not spall chunks! THAT is the real difference! Not piddling around with more or less microballoon content in the cycolac polymer!
Here is where you have to see beyond the either/or thinking, in order to put the hex back into the Avcoat. Apollo (and EFT-1 Orion) had the hex bonded to the capsule structure. Into each and every hex cell, you had to manually gun viscously-stiff cycolac with a high microballoon content, to make sure its ablation rate was faster than the fiberglass hex (likely epoxy or vinyl ester resin on glass fiber, I don't know such details). There were 300,000-ish cells on Apollo, and nearly 400,000 such cells on Orion EFT-1. That's a LOT of manual labor to be paid!
Managers do not like to spend money. The good ones will spend what it takes to protect lives. The bad ones will not. There are more bad ones than good ones, we’ve already seen that during 2 shuttle-loss inquests. In fact, the good ones might well now be extinct, near as I can tell.
Here is how you do it OUTSIDE their either/or thinking:
Put a hex core into a tile mold with no bottom. Instead of pouring your cycolac /microballoon mix into an empty mold with a bottom, put that hex-containing bottomless mold on the outlet of an extrusion press (such are very common in the molded plastics industry). Load your cycolac / microballoon mix into the press, and extrude it through the cells in the hex inside that bottomless mold. Use a trowel to scrape most but not all of the extruded strings of mix off the bottom of the hex, and install the bottom of the mold. Then remove the mold from the press, add a bit more mix on top with the trowel, and install the top of the mold. Go cure the thing.
Result: hex-reinforced tiles that will not spall, because they are fiber-reinforced AND you used the correct high-microballoon mix ratio to get the correct ablation-rate ratio! AND you did it with low labor, saving scads of money! The labor relates to a few dozen tiles, not a third of a million cells. But you filled a third of a million cells doing it this way!
I gave that notion free of charge to NASA long ago. I was able to confirm that their heat shield group in Houston actually got it, and that some folks in that group thought very well of it. Then I never heard another word from anybody at NASA about it.
Meanwhile, NASA has had the 2 years necessary to make tiles that way and confirm that the process actually works. But they DID NOT DO THAT! They instead spent all their time and money trying to make unreinforced tiles look OK by analysis, while ONLY considering the hand-gunned Apollo process as the alternative!
Either/or thinking among top managers. The very same as what killed 2 shuttle crews! They so very clearly do NOT listen to their own engineers, much less engineers from outside the agency!
And THAT, sadly, is my assessment of NASA, regardless of who leads it!
GW
Spacenut:
I have a pretty good idea why it happened. These things are made by owned subsidiaries of Northrup-Grumman and one other company. The leaders of these corporations know nothing and care less about high-quality engineering of anything. We just saw that with the Boeing MAX disaster. They fire experienced hands and hire kids fresh out of school they can under-pay. Typical corporate thinking. But aerospace energetics in general, and rockets in particular, ESPECIALLY SOLIDS, do not do well in that environment!
Why? Because rocket "science" is not science, the science being what was actually written down for others to use. In production work, rocket "science" is only about 40% science. It is about 50% art, that being the also-essential knowledge passed on from oldsters to newbies, one-on-one, on-the-job. Why? Because no manager wanted to pay for writing it down!
But this gets done ONLY if those oldsters are still there to do that! And today's corporate "wisdom" specifies getting rid of anybody older than about 45-50 years old as "too expensive".
The other 10% is just plain old blind dumb luck!
This has been going on for decades, and is almost universal among today's gigantic (and almost totally unaccountable) corporations. Competition was once a brake on that evil behavior, but no longer. We only have monopolies or oligopolies now, in government contracting, and other arenas, too.
It's actually worse with development items: the art and luck percentages are higher, and the "science" written down is very much lower!
High-level managers ignoring or being unaware of these truths are EXACTLTY why bad management decisions killed two shuttle crews and 2 sets of MAX passengers. That plus a completely unwarranted arrogance that they know better than their engineers, when in truth they do not!
You don't take shortcuts with solids! You will blow them up if you do! And if it's a big solid, that can be quite the spectacular (and expensive and possibly lethal) event. Effective managers for such dangerous things (and there are many besides solid rockets, such as heat shields) will prioritize success over money and schedule. It is possible to get 1/million failure rate reliability out of solids (I once worked in a plant that did exactly that and was profitable)! But, such effective managers are now rare, if not totally extinct!
GW
Once you get gas flow and it warms up a bit, you are probably "thermal choking" somewhere in the heater tube. That leads to a sonic or very low supersonic speed at the exit, which really does produce a thrust. You need either less massflow or a much larger flow cross-section area to avoid that thermal choking. It does raise the pressures inside the heater tube. Although, maybe you really want the thermal choking. I honestly dunno. -- GW
Those old pictures of S-4 are priceless. She was lost, you know. Collision with a ship. They could not raise her in time to save a few survivors.
GW
It was 3.7 psi pure oxygen in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo (and X-15) suits. The cabin of the spacecraft would have been similar with a pure oxygen system. Biggest problem on Apollo was scrubbing out the CO2 from the exhalations. Stupidly enough, different shaped canisters of CO2 absorbent were used in the capsule from those used in the LM. This nearly cost the Apollo-13 crew their lives, until a contrived work-around adapter could be built from scrap and tape.
The pre-breathe criterion: oxygen suit pressure must equal or exceed the hab atmosphere nitrogen partial pressure divided by a factor of 1.2. Higher hab pressures near 1 atm are driving the push toward 8+ psi suits to avoid pre-breathe! The science supporting that is bad! Their blood oxygen model mis-predicts what mountain climbers experience above about 2500 meters elevation! Which is not very high at all (2500 m = 8200 feet). There is a distinct shift in body metabolism at elevations above 2500 m, not reflected in the model (or the input data to that model) being used for blood oxygen.
3-5-8 (37.5% oxygen 62.5% nitrogen for 8.00 psia hab pressure) is not the only gas mixture that would work! I have one even better, and just as easy to remember!
"Rule of 43" (2.72 psia oxygen, 3.60 psia nitrogen, for 6.32 psia hab pressure, or 43% by volume oxygen at 43% of an atmosphere pressure) also works and allows a low enough oxygen suit pressure (only 3.00 psi, or anything higher) to use far-easier-to-develop MCP suits at only 3-4 psia. Webb did his MCP work at 3.3 to 3.7 psia in the oxygen MCP suit. All without any pre-breathe time! Tested way above the vacuum death point in a altitude chamber at a simulated 87,000 feet, for 30+ minute exposures, with the test subject pedalling a bicycle ergonometer. That was long enough to see any effects of not-perfectly-distributed compression upon the body.
3-5-8 requires a higher suit pressure to avoid pre-breathe time: 5 psi nitrogen/1.2 factor = min suit pressure 4.17 psia or higher). The higher the min suit pressure, the more difficult it is to design MCP suits! But you don't want to go below about 3.00 psia, because of drying out lung and nasal tissues with work shift-long exposures. Although for short-term survival and rescue purposes, even 2 psia oxygen works!
"Rule of 43" has a higher oxygen partial pressure than Earthly air at 2500 meters, below which elevation there are no differences in rates of pregnancy and birthing issues compared to those at sea level. People actually live all the way up to 4500 meters, but experience higher pregnancy difficulty rates and chronic hypoxia diseases up there. Yet the oxygen mass concentration with "rule of 43" is less than that of 77 F air at sea level pressure, restricting the fire danger to only that of warm sea level air, despite the over-40% by volume oxygen! It's the less-than-1-atm [pressure that lets you get away with that! You can even leak down significantly more than 10% before you even start getting close to any troubles.
GW
This Stoke Space vehicle is a very interesting 2-stage cargo launcher to low Earth orbit. Their liquid-cooled metal heat shield is an interesting design, unlike anything ever flown before. Something similar was to have been tested aboard the X-20 "Dyna-Soar", but that project was cancelled somewhere close to 1960 with the first prototype test vehicles coming off the assembly line at Boeing. Memory may not serve, but I think it had to do with USAF's manned space program being terminated in favor of NASA' civilian manned space program. Point is, it never flew.
I hope this thing works. The second stage returns like a space capsule, heat shield first. I rather doubt it could return without the payload shroud, as that would expose the inner workings of the stage to the very hot gases in the separated wake behind the vehicle. Those are not moving as fast, but they are at the same effective temperature as the gases smashing against the heat shield.
You have to fire the deceleration engines around the periphery during entry, because it is one of the propellants they are using for the coolant. That vaporizes the propellant, and you have to do something with it.
That technique requires a small area compared to the size of the vehicle, which matches up well with an end-mounted shield. I doubt it would be practical for SpaceX’s Starship, because their lateral-surface heat shield is so very much larger compared to the vehicle size. That would be an enormous quantity of coolant liquid required.
I've seen something somewhere else that suggests one possible application of the Stoke Space vehicle might be "refueling satellites". Most of the things I see about that topic are aimed at delivering more xenon for the electric thrusters that maneuver such satellites. Attitude thruster gas is another possible refueling item.
There is the possibility of using this to deliver modest quantities of real combustion rocket propellants to LEO, in containers inside that payload shroud. The containers could be delivered and the shroud closed back up for the return. Or the containers could be designed for delivery of the propellant itself in zero gee. That's easy with room temperature storables, you just build a bladdered tank and use gas pressure to squeeze the bladder, "extruding" the propellant out.
There are no bladder materials that work at cryogenic temperatures, so cryogenic propellants require "something else" for direct propellant delivery in zero gee. I think I know how to do that without spinning or accelerating any vehicles. It's patent-pending right now.
GW
Kbd512:
Don't attribute things to me that I did not say. In post 26, only the first quote is something I actually said. The implication, deserved or not, is that I said the other 2. And I did not.
In post 25, the plot is a government office-supplied piece of data. It says Trump amped-up aid, with a lot more to come. If you believe the chart in the first place. Which I do not. That chart does NOT match what Ukraine received. Which since a year ago, is mostly only from the Europeans.
As for current government office-supplied information, I believe NOTHING anymore, precisely because of the exposed lies of Trump appointees heading the various agencies. RFK Jr is only 1 example who is totally notorious now. Noem is another. Trump himself is another. There are many more. Liars all. As are all politicians, left or right wing.
You can tell when they lie: their lips are moving! Look ONLY at what they really do (and not what some internet news source tells you they do). Events cannot be hidden as easily as comments can be lies! Talk is cheap. Hiding actions is not.
How are their lies different from the lies of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler? Or any of their minions? Not in any discernable way! Which is a part of why I am alarmed for American democracy, and why I oppose them the way that I do. Only 1 part, though. Only one out of my 10 hallmarks of dictatorships. At least 7 of which I see as fully in place now.
I do not know what Trump might have put back in place regarding sanctions against Russia after his little disillusionment episode with Putin, not responding to his "peace effort". Which episode seems to have passed quickly, and Trump reverted to form, as near as I have observed. Before that episode, Trump did remove all the sanctions Biden had in place. I have seen NONE put back in place that I can verify, excepting perhaps denying Venezuelan oil to Russia.
However, the Venezuelan tankers are small change compared to what Trump removed in the way of sanctions. Your post ignores that little fact.
As I said, BELIEVE NO WORDS of anybody, on either side! Look only at what people in positions of authority actually do!
And THAT is what I do! As I have repeatedly told you! And I have repeatedly recommended that you should do, too!
"Flaming" me for believing other than you, will NOT EVER change my mind! All it can do is induce me not to bother looking at this thread anymore. Is THAT what you really want?
GW
Kbd512, some of your arguments fall apart because you believe and quote the far-right-wing lies instead of the facts. For example: fact -- Biden funded and shipped weapons to Ukraine. Fact -- Trump did not. Fact -- Biden maintained sanctions upon Russia. Fact -- Trump did not. As I keep telling you, but you keep failing to understand, I do not listen to what ANY public figures say! I ONLY look at what they actually do! It is easy to lie. It is hard to conceal actions.
Void:
I lived up there for a year and a half and got to know what kind of people Minnesotans are, generally. At the outset of this, nearly all the violence was done by ICE agents violently arresting people that largely should not have been arrested. There are some illegals, and some who do violence, yes, but they are a minority. And the very same things have been happening in other cities, too, including right down here, near me, in Waco, Texas. Actions speak far more truthfully than any words.
As this spectacle wore on, the protestors got more enraged by the evils they see being committed right in front of them. That provokes them to increasing amounts of rage and violence. Perfectly understandable and quite predictable. And it is actually Trump's plan to cause enough trouble with his ICE agents, so that enough violence will erupt to justify sending active duty army troops to Minneapolis under the Insurrection Act. Those would be to occupy and intimidate what is usually a mostly-Dem-voting opposition city. If you scare them bad enough, they will not risk going out to vote. We saw that movie before, in Nazi-occupied Europe, and in the Bolshevik takeover of Russia.
This stuff in Minneapolis is NOT about illegal immigrants at all! This is about using ICE as a secret police force and as an agitation agent to justify occupying an American city (and maybe an American state) with regular army troops, so that resistance to the dictatorship Trump is imposing will be less. (And he is a traitor of the aid and comfort type, on at least two counts, by the way.)
You may be half an hour from downtown Minneapolis, but you are not safe there. And it would appear to me that you do not even recognize the danger. You do seem to quote far-right wing lies about some things.
GW
I did not say Trump was a Russian agent. I said it appears to me he is a Putin lapdog. And I said he is a traitor of the "aid and comfort" type. On at least 2 counts.
However, I think we all can agree that we have seen him cozy up to multiple dictators: Putin, Xi, Kim in N Korea, and a couple of autocrats in Europe. All while trashing or dismissing the leaders of multiple democratic countries.
What that says to me is Trump cozies up to dictators, because he and they are alike in their basic personalities. Trump wants to be a dictator. And I said when he came down the escalator in 2015 that he did not want to be President, he wanted to be king. No one listened to me then, and still too few now.
King, autocrat, dictator, absolute ruler, all those are synonyms in this context. And my other contention is that he nearly is, now. 7 of my 10 hallmarks of dictatorship are now fully in place in America. The other 3 are partly in place.
As for Trump being an idiot in terms of diplomacy, statesmanship, or politics-wise, we certainly agree there.
But for the Russian interference in the 2016 election, I think we disagree. That was quite real. So was the connection between Russia and the Trump team then. That is well-documented now. Although today the weaponized DOJ will deny it. As will the political party that Trump has hijacked and turned into a cult of personality.
Where have we seen that cult of personality thing before? Maybe Russia 1917? Italy 1922? Germany 1933? Need I go on?
GW
And by the way, either Putin will succeed against Ukraine, or this thing will continue to drag on. Either way, it will look like to Xi in China that the US and Europe and our Pacific allies will not effectively oppose him invading Taiwan and annexing the South China Sea. Indeed, the longer Ukraine has dragged on, the more aggressive the moves Xi's China has been making in that region. Once he does move WW3 starts in the Pacific. If Putin "wins" anything over Ukraine, he will start WW3 in Europe.
THAT is what we face, in addition to a Trump dictatorship here at home!
GW
A second example. Bear in mind that I do not care what ANY politician says, I look only at what they do, when I determine their propensity for good vs bad.
When Trump took office for his second term, he stopped US aid to Ukraine. He also eliminated the sanctions against Russia that had slowed their economy seriously. Ukraine continued getting aid from some European countries, but it was not enough. In the year of delays since, they have run out of weapons and supplies, which forced Zelenskyy to consider surrendering to Putin's demands (which have not changed since before the invasion). To me, it appears that has been the real point of Trump's policy toward Ukraine all along, and certainly of the current "peace process".
Ukraine is our friend and ally, and would have made a good addition to NATO to hold back Putin's ambitions in Europe. Putin's Russia is the clear enemy of us all. Trump is doing what Putin was unable to do in the 4 years since the invasion began: force a US friend and ally to surrender to our enemy (Putin's Russia), which that enemy could not accomplish by himself in 4 years of war. How is that NOT treason of the aid and comfort type?
As for "advocating for violence", that was not my intention. My intention was a warning that violence may be necessary to fend off the dictatorship that is being imposed upon America. It is more than 70% in place now. "Advocating violence" may be a felony, but in times like these, it probably should not be!
The "secret police" operating in Minneapolis and other places is the one committing most of the violence. Not all, but most of it. Exactly like Stalin's KGB and Hitler's Gestapo and SS.
We have concentration camps where those detained by this secret police await deportation to infamous foreign prisons. Mostly without due process, I might add, at EVERY step of the way! This is making people "disappear" for the dictator, just like the predecessors mentioned above did.
We now have lies posted on government websites, about several topics that were before just wrongly politicized. And we have corporate heads of media companies self-censoring to stay on Trump's "good side" (if he has one). Total control of public information is another hallmark of dictatorships.
Need I belabor this? There are 10 such hallmarks of dictatorships, and 7 are fully in place. The other 3 are only partly in place.
It usually takes some sort of violent rebellion (or foreign intervention) to overthrow most dictatorships.
There, I've gone and foretold your future!
GW
There is no rational reason for Trump wanting Greenland. It is the territory of a NATO ally, and we have a base or two there now. We have had many bases there in the past. We could easily put more bases there to project US power into the Arctic, and forestall any Russian or Chinese advances upon Greenland. And that could be easily done without upsetting or angering any of our allies and NATO partners.
Trump considers none of that, he just "wants Greenland", and is apparently willing to use military force to take it. That would be attacking a NATO ally (Denmark) to do it, which under Article 5, is an attack upon all of NATO. And THAT is why Trump using force to take Greenland is the end of NATO, since we are supposed to be part of that treaty.
I'll tell you what all this bluster really is: Trump is trying anything and everything he can, to destroy NATO for Putin. I've seen him as a Putin lap dog ever since he ran for office the first time. Destroying NATO is something Putin would dearly love to do, but he cannot do it. Nor could his Soviet predecessors.
Russia was not an enemy under the two elected leaders before Putin, but it is once again under Putin, just like it was when it was the Soviet Union. Russia is the enemy. NATO is our friend. Destroying NATO for the enemy (Putin's Russia) is very most definitely providing aid to the enemy, and also inherently comfort to that same enemy.
And THAT is one of only two definitions of TREASON under our Constitution! Trump is trying to commit gross treason by tearing apart NATO over Greenland! For Putin!
This is way beyond any possible politics. This is about our country and its safety from its enemies. The GOP majorities in the House and Senate need to get with their Dem colleagues and impeach and convict this ever-so-evident traitor in the White House, to get him out of there ASAP!!! And if they do not, we-the-people should consider them complicit in Trump's treason and get rid of them, too!
If that takes an uprising, then so be it!
GW
I see the US-sent crew of 4 came home early because the unidentified 1 that had an unidentified medical problem. It would appear from news reports they landed in their Dragon capsule safely and were picked up.
I have seen nothing about what the medical problem was, or which 1 was affected.
GW
The odds favor their survival, but the lethal uncertainty is nowhere near zero. Initially, the excuse was eliminating the skip and just going for direct entry. I do not see anything of that plan in the recent stories. This reminds me eerily of Challenger and Columbia.
I am still disappointed seeing the entire debate framed only as "fly what you have" vs "total redesign". Total redesign is NOT required, all they need to do is go back to the labor-intensive hand-gunned heat shield. There is NO REDESIGN associated with that! They already HAVE that design! They already flew it!
Doing that would enable them to work out how to cast those tiles with the hex cores in the them, and fly such a thing, even as a subscale test article, to see it actually work right. I already showed how to do that revised processing with an extrusion press, here on these forums, and I already sent that idea to them via a contact I knew within NASA, who has since retired. I NEVER EVER heard back from their heat shield people, to whom my contact forwarded my materials. "Not invented here" is a real flaw shared by lots of big organizations!
But it would definitely work, because the fibrous nature of the charred hex helps tie the otherwise weak carbon char together. It's a composite material that is better than just the carbon char from the polymer alone. I know that because of my experience with ablatives in ramjets and solid rockets. If you cannot reinforce the char, it goes away too quickly, in one fashion or another. Which experience goes way beyond sample testing in an arc jet tunnel, and running CFD codes that usually do not deserve to be believed, without confirmation testing! I'm talking real burn experiences with real motors and engines here!
The Artemis 1 failure already proved that fiber reinforcement contention of mine! The only difference between Artemis 1 and the first Orion that flew was that they deleted the hex to cast the tiles instead of hand-gunning the polymer into a hex core already attached to the capsule, like Apollo. Which is what flew on the first Orion. That's NOT a FULL re-design of anything, it's only a variation on the cast tile processing they now prefer (at the risk of the crew's lives, I might add, if they don't do something to reinforce that char).
GW
We have a lot of experiences in prior decades with oxygen suits in the 3 to 4 psia range. There is no cognitive problem in that range. But, below about 3 psia, you run into lung and nasal tissue dry-out problems, except for very short exposures, measured in minutes.
The main point about suit pressures is that the closer you are to 3-4 psia, the easier it is to do mechanical counterpressure suit design. Which should be as MCP underwear, worn underneath unpressurized garments to provide thermal and mechanical protection. With known material technologies, these start becoming infeasible for suit pressures above 4 psia.
In recent years, I have seen oxygen suit pressures creeping toward, or even exceeding 8 psia. There is no need for this, except to eliminate pre-breathe with something resembling Earthly air at near sea level pressures in the habitat. Synthetic air (oxygen-nitrogen mix) at 1 atm pressure has partial pressures of 3.077 psia oxygen, and 11.619 psia nitrogen.
Using the NASA pre-breathe criterion on a nitrogen pressure that high produces a min oxygen suit pressure of 9.682 psia. See why there has been suit pressure "creep" upwards?
You do NOT need that much habitat pressure, nor do you need oxygen partial pressure at sea level values! Nor do you have to have only 20.94 volume % oxygen in your mix! There are plenty of people doing just fine living and reproducing at higher altitudes. Altitudes to 2500 m (8200 feet) produce pregnancy and birthing trouble rates indistinguishable from those at sea level. So says history dating all the way back to the Spanish colonies in South America.
The only issue you run into when increasing the oxygen % in your mix is fire danger. But that depends upon concentration in units same as density, not just %. If you lower total atm pressures, you lower those concentrations for reducing fire danger.
Try my rule-of-43 atmosphere! 43% by volume oxygen, at 43% of an atmosphere pressure, in the 2-gas mix. 6.319 psia in the hab. The oxygen partial pressure is 2.717 psia, just about the same or a bit higher than that at 2500 m on Earth. The nitrogen partial pressure is 3.602 psia, which divided by the no pre-breathe criterion is a min oxygen suit pressure of 3.001 psia, right in line with the known min limit to avoid drying out tissues too fast. And the oxygen concentration equal to or less than that of room temperature air at sea level, for no worse fire danger than on Earth.
How is that not a good solution to habitat and oxygen suit pressures? On Mars, the moon, out in space, pretty much anywhere! And it makes MCP suits eminently feasible, too boot!
GW
Use the long-known NASA criterion for no pre-breathe time. The partial pressure in the habitat, of the nitrogen, may not exceed the total pressure of the pure oxygen fed to the suit, by more than a factor of 1.2.
If you satisfy that criterion, there is no "pre-breathe" time associated with donning an oxygen suit and going outside immediately, without risking the bends from the nitrogen.
If you do more than about half an atmosphere of 21% O2/ 79% N2 mix in the habitat atmosphere, at more than around 0.5 atm hab atmosphere pressure, this is impossible to do.
But half or a little less than half an atmosphere of oxygen-nitrogen mix in the habitat atmosphere, meets that criterion for donning a pure O2 suit and just going outside with no pre-breathe.
GW
If you have to process tons of regolith to get pounds of water, that is not an easily-recovered or inexpensive resource! Period! We already know about low-concentration resources being bad mining bets, from centuries of prospecting and mining right here on Earth. It's worse in space, where you have to have pressure suits and life support.
An "easily recovered ice resource" would yield a ton of dirty water from only a few to at most only several tons of regolith. That's a buried glacier, not small bits of frost on regolith particles! Maybe there's such a thing on the moon, and maybe not. Nobody yet knows.
There really are very likely buried glacier resources like that on Mars, although we have yet to verify that on the ground. And certainly on some of the icy moons of the outer planets. Plus all the Kuiper belt objects. But maybe not the moon.
Talking about thinly-spread concentrations as if they were cheaply- and easily-recovered items is marketing hype (spelled "marketeering lies"), not technical truth. Don't be taken in by it.
You first go to the moon and prospect to find out what is really there, where exactly it is located, and in what concentrations it exists. Only then can you plan your next steps. It's all about getting real ground truth.
GW