No, it couldn’t. That’s pure misinformation.

Kessler syndrome is only a possibility in orbits high enough that atmospheric drag is negligible. Starlink, by design, is at an altitude where the atmosphere is still thick enough to bring any debris or old satellites down to earth in a timely fashion rather than building up like Kessler syndrome requires. (To be clear, the air is still so thin that you’d need sensitive instruments to detect it at all. It’s just enough to produce a tiny amount of drag, which adds up over weeks or months to lower the debris’ orbit so that it meets thicker air)

There are plenty of perfectly legitimate objections you can raise to starlink without resorting to Kessler syndrome

I have at least a little sympathy for SpaceX’s position that the regulations are unfit for purpose if they need a modification to their licence to use a different fuel tank, that seems totally immaterial to the flight

For an emergency ascent, they’d probably have dropped more than two. They also probably wouldn’t have taken the time to type a message to the surface if it were going wrong that quickly.

It seems more likely to me that they were controlling their rare of descent. I’d expect them to lose a little buoyancy as the vessel compresses, so it seems reasonable that they’d drop the occasional weight as they descend.

It’s unlikely to cause anything to outright fail, but it will certainly be creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies

Hey now, some of us have standards.

We have shitty python scripts

In their defense, a judge probably would try and answer basic legal questions to support a defendant who for some reason didn’t have a lawyer to ask, unless that defendant had already gone out of their way to antagonise the judge.

Sadly, I suspect there’s a lot of overlap between people who are representing themselves and people who have annoyed the judge

I would describe it as being in free-fall whenever it’s not in being held up by any interaction with a solid surface, even indirectly. I’m not sure everyone would agree with my definition, but it’s not a term you’ll see used much in serious engineering precisely because it is a bit vague.

For example, an aircraft in flight isn’t in free-fall because it’s being held up by the air, which is in turn held up by the ground. An aircraft (or spacecraft) which has no wings is being slowed down by air resistance, but not actually held up and is therefore in free-fall.

An ascending rocket is generating forces which hold it up, rather than transferring forces to something which won’t move (like the ground), so I would consider it to be in free-fall

No, even when the engines are firing it’s in free-fall. The only forces on the booster or fuel (aside from internal ones like gyroscopic or centrifugal dynamics) are thrust, control thrusters, and depending on the phase of flight drag & aerodynamic control.

Thrust always points roughly along the length of the booster, and drag always acts against the direction of travel, so the external forces acting on the fuel are almost 100% up or down during all phases of flight. The only exceptions are manoeuvres when the attitude control systems is rotating the vehicle, either by grid-fin or thrusters, so any redistribution of the fuel or snow will be entirely driven by those movements, and their own inertia

Excellent video & analysis, as always.

I was highly irritated by the erroneous claim that things would settle to the earth-facing side of the tank though. The damn thing’s in free-fall, the direction of the gravity vector is entirely irrelevant! The conclusions mostly still work, but it has more to do with jostling and slosh causing the snow to move, not gravity

Exactly, that seems like the reasonable reading of the statement to me

While we can all agree Trump is an ass, I think you’ve misunderstood this statement.

He’s not saying “it’s important that republicans don’t vote if we fail to solve the election fraud”, he’s saying “it’s important to solve the fraud, because otherwise next time republicans won’t be allowed to vote”.

He’s claiming that republican votes won’t be counted, or that they won’t be allowed to place a vote at all, because the democrats will have rigged the system and/or deprived them of the right to vote

There’s no need to leave earth, just lift it into a medium earth orbit. There are literally thousands of kilometres in between low earth orbit (where there are lots of communications, spy, navigation and weather satellites) and geosynchronous (where there are lots of communications satellites), and outside of those two there’s virtually nothing there

People keep saying that, but it isn’t true that the leak being in the disposable part of the vehicle means it’s not a safety problem.

It’s the pressurisation system for the thrusters. If that fails, then they won’t be able to control the capsule until it hits the atmosphere. That could mean they get stuck on the ISS, in the most extreme case, or it could mean that they lose thrust mid-manouvre and they re-enter the atmosphere incorrectly. That could be anywhere from inconvenient (they miss their landing spot and someone has to come get them), to dangerous (they land so far away that they’re in danger of sinking or being eaten by bears before anyone reaches them) to outright fatal (they skip off the atmosphere, or tumble their way into reentry and burn up)