Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Starship exploded. I'd link to some Twitter video but the X posts run from "This is actually a win!" to "Embarrassing disaster, must be investigated now!"
Musk seems to be on X silence, at least as of this writing.Musk posted about it last night:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130
But he's clearly identified a downstream problem there, not yet a root cause.
The booster landing again, in visibly better shape than test 5, was a win. The Starship explosion was grossly embarrassing (worst performance since test 2, and yeah it was a major version update but they obviously weren't expecting this level of new teething problems).
It was also a near-disaster: no reports of injuries, but (unconfirmed) reports of property damage from shrapnel, and aircraft having to do emergency diversions away from the hazard area, are not things that should ever be consequences of a launch failure.
And of course it must be investigated now. Starship is currently launching solely through a narrow keyhole between Cuba and Florida where any disasters can avoid the heaviest population densities, but there are still islands in the danger zone if, as just happened, a launch fails in an unrecoverable way at just the wrong time. More importantly in the medium term, SpaceX wants to start catching ships in addition to boosters, and for that to happen they first need to reenter, from the west, over land. If they can't credibly and correctly assure the safety of that plan, they'll be stuck at the same "partially reusable" design level as Falcon 9 (and hopefully New Glenn sooner or later), and the cost of that would that they're not recouping their multi-billion-dollar investment any time soon, and the harm it would do to flight cadence would make their Artemis plans much harder.
Is adding fire suppression for a rocket fuel leak realistic? It seems like if your rocket is leaking both fuel and oxygen into a compartment you will not be going to space today, and no amount of throwing towels and almond milk on it is going to fix that.
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...what? No- that's the standard precaution of a missile launch (or re-entry) failure. It's literally a 'something my fall through the air in this zipcode we already warned you about.' It's the physical consequence of things that are high up falling down, and the predictability of which is why airspace is routinely categorized with restrictions when missile tests and such are going on. Your 'emergency' diversion is just a standard precaution when different airspace needs overlap, same as how divergences of aircraft to specific airports (whether from mechanical or medical emergency) lead to redirections of aircraft intending to go there. This has literally been going on since the advent of space travel, where failures (and successes!) on the way up or back down leave bits to come back down.
Saying that shrapnel should not fall through airspace or onto property as a consequence of orbital transition failure (going up or down) is either a demand that there should be no failure, or else a demand of inversion of physics (such as that things should not fall due to gravity).
I admit to writing very loosely last night (rushing and not editing as I boarded a plane), but despite wincing at my "never" hyperbole I still could nearly bite this bullet:
Append "above a determined rate" and you get the typical FAA/NASA solution: achieve "no" failure by conservatively predicting failure risk and then not flying until your design has pushed that risk under that rate. This doesn't work well (see: Shuttle), and if overapplied this philosophy would be the death of SpaceX R&D ("If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." - Musk), which is vastly more time- and cost-efficient and more successful than that of it's more hardware-efficient competitors, but selectively applying this philosophy to the cases where it's someone else taking the risks' downsides may not be crazy.
A more outside-the-box alternative would be having better failsafes than "activate hypersonic shotgun mode" for failure. This particular failure wasn't a "now you see the spacecraft, now you don't" thing like Challenger, it was a video-visible bay fire, followed much later by a grossly telemetry-visible propellant leak, slowly followed by gradual failures of one engine after another, all on a stage for which the ability to reenter in one piece and target a landing spot without propellant use is it's whole raison d'etre. Even without trying to make use of that, in this case simply cutting off propellant to delay the explosion could have pushed the debris field further east over empty ocean.
Maybe those are crazy solutions. But we live in a world run by voters full of crazy demands. The attitude of "what do you wanna do, basically quit spaceflight?", in a world where we haven't been back to the moon for half a century, shouldn't be considered as a final argument without always remembering that one man’s modus tollens is another man’s modus ponens. I'm a huge fan of spaceflight, and I'm a huge fan of SpaceX in part because so far they're the only ones in history to take spaceflight at scale seriously. But they've done so at the discretion of regulators who insist that they can be stopped in their tracks if they don't e.g. first get good psych test results from kidnapping a seal and playing it Spotify's Greatest Sonic Boom Hits. This is not a world in which "don't let chunks of your test flight fall on people" is an obviously evadable requirement.
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Yes, I think legally it has to be investigated anyway. Thank you for the link, apparently I am much further delayed in my news stream than I suspected.
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Here are some items I'm looking at this week; discussion & pushback welcome.
Microsoft reveals some details of how an unknown group bypassed their Azure AI API guardrails and created a hacking as a service scheme.
Navy Lookout looks at Russia v. NATO confrontation in the Baltic over the last few months
Mozambique opposition asks help from EU and UN in response to repression by the ruling president
One person dies from Ebola in Sierra Leone.
Finnland seems to have a bit more specific evidence on the internet and power cable cuts, reducing the degree of plausible deniability that Russia and China can claim they have.
Japan panel of experts says probability of "megaquake" in the next 30 years has risen to 80%
"Bomb Iran? Await a Trump Nuclear Deal? Topple the Regime? Israel Weighs Its Options", considers the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Iran reinforces their Natanz nuclear facility.
Dubai sends 68 tonnes of urgent medical supplies to Gaza
Iran is also looking to Russia to bolster its defense, and are now set to sign a 'comprehensive strategic partnership' treaty.
Iran also sent a surveillance ship out to sea, but is also holding nuclear talks with Europeans
Israel tried to embed explosivies within centrifuge components bought by Iran, but got caught.
Saudi Arabia announces plans to enrich and sell uranium
Swedish dockworkers vote to block military shipments to and from Israel
Tehran says 5,000 people working to expand Bushehr nuclear plant
China is developing methods to target Starlink satellites
Chinese Wuhan bat virus researcher continues with gain of function research
US adds Chinese company which develops open source LLMs to the entities list, "because these entities advance the People's Republic of China's military modernization through the development and integration of advanced artificial intelligence research". via @bdsqlsz
From the past: China could attack the US with EMPs.
Ukraine and Russia both had large attack waves.
Trump to meet Putin 'very quickly' after taking office
"You can't put a ship over every nautical mile of pipeline or cable -- it's an impossible task," says NATO commander. "There are approximately 50,000 big ships out there worldwide and they can drop anchors and drag them over infrastructure."
Sudan might fracture
In 2024, 444 terrorist attacks against security forces killed 685 personnel in Pakistan.
H5 Bird Flu confirmed in three additional domestic cats in Los Angeles
CDC telling laboratories to test for H5N1 specifically faster
Sierra Leone declares public health emergency over mpox after two new cases
WHO starts $1.5 billion funding appeal
Bird Flu mutations found in Texas
Study finds certain H5N1 strains in cattle linked to milder human illness
TTP abducts 18 Pakistani nuclear engineers, possibly to mask shipments of uranium to Iran.
This one was funny.
'If we had a hundred militarized satelites in orbit with lasers and EMP we don't have, we could take less than 1500 satellites in 12 hours. Out of a satellite constellation expected to rise to over 42,000. Assuming there were no Americans anti-satellite systems trying to inhibit ours.'
Similarly, if you assume the enemy has no air defense capabilities, you can simulate a lot of bombing runs with your own airforce.
Thanks! Yeah, I may have overestimated the significance, thanks for the correction.
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This post is interesting and good. My response to each one of these is basically "oh shit".
It's pretty much like this every week (or here for the final version). I think reading just one week is unduly alarming, because it doesn't make apparent that there always bad things happening in the world.
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