With the latest spectacular launch failure, I had the passing thought that what if SpaceX is secretly sabotaging Bezos's space ambitions? It would be an not unexpected dick move in 21st century corporate warfare.

Is there a cold corporate war that some day could turn hot given the corruption that is now visibly endemic in the US and FBI "leadership" that might be open to turning a blind eye to the highest bidder?

Can we expect similarly spectacular failure at SpaceX? If injuries and even fatalities occur, would the feds even investigate?

Just my speculation, which I would write off as paranoia if we were not living in such crazy times.

Also of interest--it appears steel loves to soak in methane:

I mentioned this on a libertarian-biased space-site, and mentioning a scientific fact got me a down-vote....most likely from an individual who is trying to silence me forever from the Secret Projects Forum.

Steve Mould is of course talking about me the bubbles within steel due to nitrogen fertilizer production. Steel tanks on the ground filled with methane don't look to be a problem...but they don't re-enter either, so...

Here's another inconvenient truth--methane doesn't like being sloshed:

I wonder if Falcon kerosene tanks have just pure nitrogen. Falcons seem to have better luck with violent maneuvers needed to Return To Launch Site (RTLS) than SuperHeavy.

Hydrogen doesn't like slosh either, which is why SLS doesn't fail in that it burns to near depletion from ground level all the way to space as a good stage-and-a-half-to-orbit type vehicle it is. The high volume LH2 vanishes quickly. That is a feature, not a bug, when it comes to converting it to a wet workshop...an easier task than making Starship work, seeing that wet workshops need no fins or heat-shields.

By having mass stay in space rather than re-entering all the time, you can keep the skies a bit cleaner too. Fill metal with hydrogen only once, and it won't fell embrittlement as much.

Not big on UFOs, but Angry is correct on the Alpaca lander:

Why do they love methane so much these days? It wasn't even a thing before, just a few experimental companies like XCOR working with it.

The reason I like SLS isn’t just because I am a MSFC fan.

Solids were foisted on NASA by the USAF and “their” Titans. Saturn IB should have been kept.

Preach. Ending Saturn was one of the biggest technological travesties the US has ever made. I remember someone saying how nice it was that there was a Saturn V on display at Johnson. I told them it was a fucking tragedy. That thing had been ready to fly people to the moon.

Remember when they looked into using F-1? and then realized they couldn't rebuild it, they'd almost have to go back through the design process all over again because they had lost the ability? I think they brought it up again when Ares IV became SLS. No joy.

And so Starship flies N-1 style with a bazllion motors underneath it. Which one day in production will have a catastrophic cascade failure, like the N-1. And people will decide something detonating with the force of a nuclear weapon or an LNG tanker on the pad may be a bad thing. I wouldn't want to get on a jetliner with 27 engines all tied together and capable of causing a detonation chain. Even if the owner of the company that build the plane pointed out that making many more of these engines was cheaper than building a few big ones. This is true. This is why we move cargo ships with thousands of cheap Evinrude outboard motors with the fuel lines all tied in together to one enormous blatter of methane. Or not.

But here we are.

If NASA had been given enough money for the LFBB , all this would be moot now. We'd already have a heavy launch vehicle actively flying, Shuttle-C or whatever they wanted to call the SideMount SDLV at the end because the arguement about the solids would be tabled. But there has be be work keeping America number one in making solid rockets because we have ICBMS that can loiter in ways Russia and China simply can't. In a nuclear exchange, we have first strike capability assurance. Keeping a few people busy redisigning the SLS boosters extended that job base a little longer, so we don't get in the situation we got in 26 years ago when resurrecting the F1 seemed like a great idea.

Remember when they looked into using F-1? and then realized they couldn't rebuild it, they'd almost have to go back through the design process all over again because they had lost the ability? I

Pyrios was more recent than Jarvis:

That should have been Vulcan.

In other news…China’s LM-9/CZ-9 is expected to have…a 16 meter fairing:

ye gods