And they're not funded by fossil fuel money, except at two or three steps removed. GWPF is still not receiving funding from oil companies. They are receiving money from people who might ALSO be invested in fossil fuels or who might have vested interests in the results that the GWPF puts out. The larger question would be whether they received those funds before or after their first published white papers. In other words, did they write the white papers because of the money, or did they get more funding because of the content of the white papers?

But it was clearly the point I was trying to make about how you can claim 2nd and 3rd hand funding for both sides that **WHOOSH** went right over your head.

Many Climate Change Think Tanks receive funds from individuals with vested interests in Carbon Trading companies, alternative energy sources, and solar power. Some donations even came from institutions or individuals that receive GRANTS to do Climate Change studies! One person who inherited money from their great grandfather even donated sums while working at a SOLAR PANEL company!

Look, I can write this click-bait with either side of the debate!

Next, you'll tell me that people donate money to the causes they agree with! WHAT A SCANDAL!

The problem of corrosion was figured out at the MSRE at ORNL in the 60's using Hatealloy piping for the salt flow.

The real issue with not building them in the U.S. has been the utter fear-mongering around the word "nuclear" and the fact that molten salt reactors can't breed plutonium for nuclear weapons.

They were testing gimbal control, for one thing, to show that the rocket and the flight controller could adjust to engine-out conditions. Secondly, their TFR did not include a super-sonic tag, meaning that they would have been heavily fined if the booster created a sonic boom, so they had to shut down the engines as the starship got lighter, and the air got thinner, or they would have accelerated past Mach 1.

Also, by shutting down one engine and adjusting thrust through the center of gravity, the rocket tips slightly, moving it off shore in case of any need to terminate the flight. Remember that SN4 exploded *after* the engine shut down from the static fire. Yes, SN4 was due to a ground service equipment leak, but still, there's no proof that Raptors don't have hard shutdowns. Even Elon said he was happy they made it to apogee without blowing up, so its clear that they're still not 100% confident in the Raptors.

Finally, the engines relit at touchdown (well, at least two of them did) so it's not like there was an actual fatal problem with the engine as it wouldn't have restarted.

I admit, that when I saw the first raptor cut out, I had a moment of, "oh no," but it rapidly passed when I realized what they must be doing to both manage acceleration and to direct the Starship out over the water.

You do know that, barring a lucky accident tracking down the software bug that caused them to fail to get into orbit, they discovered another software bug that would have resulted in the catastrophic loss of the vehicle on reentry?

Between no end-to-end test of the software, no unified test of the systems, loss of communication because of poorly located and designed antennas, burn out of at least one RCS cluster, reading the wrong clock when initializing the system, burning nearly all of their consumables in the first fifty minutes of flight, and a potentially fatal collision avoided only by uploading a software patch less than 60 minutes before reentry, I don't know how you consider this anything but a near complete failure on the part of Boeing.

This was meant to be a "final dress rehearsal" before NASA put crew on board. If the crew had been on board, as they kept saying during the post-launch briefing, it's likely they would have compensated for the incorrect mission clock, which means Boeing would never have debugged the software, and they would never have caught the second software error and it's very likely that we would have had a Soyuz 1 scenario with three dead astronauts. The fact that NASA even considered not making Boeing do an OFT-2 shows that Boeing's inclusion in the commercial crew program, even after blackmailing NASA into paying an additional $600M above their "fixed price contract" that was already double what SpaceX was paid, was purely politically motivated.

Actually, for two years I rode the #30 bus through downtown Milwaukee. Several times, I was next to or across from a guy who later turned out to be Jeffery Dahmer. So, at least in my case, Elon Musk is right.

Yes, but if the eyewitness reports of animal handlers coated in bat urine, blood, and feces are correct, then cross-contamination becomes highly likely. We keep hearing that this is a "world-class" institution, but at the same time the U.S. State Department is sending urgent memos back to Washington about the poor conditions and improper safety precautions going on there. If you read the article, you'll find out that multiple special teams were sent to the lab to try to force them to take better precautions for the last two years.

That's not what I'd call, "world-class."

I disagree.

This is more like a fireman, hearing the announcement of a major fire in the city, asking themselves if it was one of their workers who is an arsonist.

That's the equivalent comparison.

The pangolins confiscated in 2019 were Malayan pangolins which specifically do not carry the virus found in the Gabonese giant pangolin. After extreme over-hunting in 2013 by Chinese medicinal poachers (the Gabonese pangolin was mostly sought for its scales, not its meat) both China and Gabon cracked down violently on the pangolin trade, and it is believed that it more or less ended in 2014, especially with the non-protected, non-endangered pangolins coming into China from Malaysia without any risk from customs officials. The only crackdown on those pangolins occurred after China began investigating wet markets under pressure from the U.N.

So, no, my mileage is not incorrect, your strain of pangolins is.

I don't actually _want_ this to be a lab release. I _want_ to believe this is a wild occurrence, but every shred of evidence keeps screaming that it's not.

Actually, that's specifically not true. While 29 of the 30 coded genes share a 99.7% consistency with a Yunan province (900+ km from Wuhan) Common Horseshoe Bat SARS sample from 2 years prior, the final coding gene, for the S (spike) protein has less than a 77% match to that sample, with a 99.9% match to the S protein from a Gabonese (10,000km from Wuhan) pangolin coronavirus.

Almost every epidemiologist working on the virus has agreed this is a chimeric combination of the two viruses, which can only happen "en vivo" -- in other words, in a single organism infected simultaneously by both viral strains.

There was, of course, one known location where both of these strains were found in close proximity, and we know this because both strains had already been gene sequenced at that location. Namely, the Wuhan Virology Institute, which specializes in corona virus infections. In fact their lead scientist is literally known world-wide as "Bat Woman" -- Shi Zhengli -- for all her work finding corona virus in bats and other species. In the linked article, she even admits that her very first thought on hearing of a new infectious corona virus in Wuhan was, "Did it come from our lab?"

The clinic itself was working with live bats and live strains of viruses in a study injecting immune compromised bats (basically given a "bat" form of AIDS) to determine whether the compromised immune system caused dangerous changes in the corona virus itself, namely an enhanced bonding site on the surface of the lipid viral sheath which is extremely common in HIV infections and causes enhanced infectiousness in other viral strains. The lab, and Shi Zhengli, literally published a paper on just this research in late 2018.

Several visitors to the lab have published reports saying that, during this time, the workers dealing with the live bats were often covered in the urine and feces of the bats they were working with, and that they regularly took inadequate care to prevent infections. One visitor even claimed that his visit in late October of 2019, "sounded like I was in a hospital ward, with nearly every single worker coughing violently." US officials repeatedly warned that the lab was not following proper safety procedures.

So, am I saying this was released from the virology clinic? Not with any certainty, no.

But Occam and his Gillette Mach3 are warming up and asking the question of which is more likely:
- A seafood wet market, which did not have bats in it, is the source of the disease that came mostly from bats, with one contribution from a second virus that's only found 10,000 km away, and, which has now been determined to not be the source for nearly 1/3rd of the earliest cases, or...

- A clinic where live animals with compromised immune systems were repeatedly infected with live viruses in studies through at least early 2019, suddenly got a chimeric combination of two virus strains known to be stored and studied at the lab, which then somehow infected one of the workers known to take inadequate precautions, and then that worker walked the disease out into the city.

I remain amazed, given the above situation, that scientists with no access or history with the Wuhan lab are willing to write stories like the original article, claiming there is no chance it came from the Wuhan lab -- when even the lead scientist's first thought was, "Did it come from my lab?"

Except neither the WHO or the UN have been able to find even a single instance of bat (or pangolin) being for sale in the Seafood market. (Hint -- there's a clue in the name of the market as to why you might not find bat or pangolin there.)

And basically all the pangolin consumed for meat in China comes from the Malaysian Pangolin, which doesn't have the same S protein in its coronavirus strain. Gabon and China cracked down on the Pangolin trade in 2013 after the animal was rapidly hunted to near extinction -- for it's SCALES, not for its meat.

Like I said, it's a case of Occam's razor. On the one hand there's the one in 10 billion chance of this happening by accident, on the other, a lab dealing with the exact strains of virus in question, with an exact study, and now it turns out, during the correct date range, they were advertising specifically to hire a specialist in a highly virulent form of coronavirus they'd developed in their lab, before Patient Zero even entered the hospital.

Of course, Occam's razor also says the government of China would happily blame a Seafood Market rather than admit a screw up by one of its own labs.

Seriously, when a government happily admits customs failures, import treaty violations, violations of multiple endangered species treaties, and poor management of their own hygiene and law enforcement... you have to ask yourself what they'd be willing to cover up to admit to all that.

Except to get a Gabonese Pangolin to market, it has to be dead for nearly 3 weeks, far longer than the virus survives without a host. On top of that, Gabonese pangolin is mostly sought after for its "scales", not its meat. Additionally, China and Gabon cracked down on the pangolin trade way back in 2013, bringing it basically to a complete halt.

Finally, all the pangolin consumed in China is the Malaysian pangolin, whose "S" protein spike has a less than 77% match genetically with the S protein in SARS-CoV-2.

I've read about a dozen papers now on the chimeric origin of the virus, and even looked at the sequenced genome side-by-side. It's 100% clear that this is a chimeric organism. It's also about 99% clear that there's no way it happened without human intervention.

Is there an outside possibility that one seafood market merchant, earning about $10 a day equivalent, suddenly decided to take a trip to Africa, and come back via a thousand mile road-trip to a market that, so far, neither the UN or the WHO has been able to confirm ever sold bat meat. Sure. There's always a ten billion to one chance that happened.

On the other hand, we have a lab that was locked down in the late 90's when the scientists were found to be supplementing their income by selling infected lab animals at the food markets.

But, yeah, there's no doubt which one you find more likely.

The problem is not just that the bats that carry it (the common horseshoe bat) are only found 1000 km away in a different province of western China, but that the spike or "S" protein that makes it so infectious is only found in the Gabonese Giant Pangolin, an animal that lives over 10,000 km away. The final SARS-CoV-2 virus is a 99% plus match to the bat SARS virus on every RNA marker except the S protein, while the Pangolin caronavirus RNA is a 99.7% match to the S protein.

The only way this happens in nature is if one carrier organism was infected with both coronavirus variants simultaneously, a near impossibility for two species separated by half a planet. But both coronavirus samples were known to be present in the Wuhan lab, which was doing research on coronavirus in immune-compromised systems (the HIV inserts mentioned in the parent comment above.)

So, you have to use Occam's razor and ask yourself the following question:

Which is more likely?

• Two species separated by 10,000 km somehow infected the same host animal, forming a chimeric combination of Coronovirus that then made the jump to humans in another location 1000 km from the nearest animal that carried the initial virus.
• Someone in a lab, where both viruses were present and used for research infected an organism that was immune compromised with both viruses, and then became infected themselves, carrying the pathogen out of the lab and perhaps stopping at the food market, 200 meters from the front door of the virology lab, for a bite to eat on the way home.

I know which one my money is on.

You do understand that SpaceX performed that particular test *ABOVE AND BEYOND* the safety requirements of NASA. In fact, NASA wanted to retire that capsule and put it in their museum at Cape Canaveral rather than do any further tests on it.

SpaceX actually was worried about issues and thus did further extensive testing on the capsule above and beyond what NASA required, and, "lo and behold," a system that NASA engineers had already signed off on three times exploded under those circumstances.

The exact same one-way valves have flown on over 50 spacecraft, and were actually used on the Starliner as well. Until SpaceX exposed this problem, NASA had no idea there was a risk of explosion from solid oxygen contacting titanium, because they had literally forgotten about a 1994 study that they had done that showed exactly this problem.

SpaceX also immediately issued a notice about the problem and worked non-stop with NASA over the next four months to identify the problem and find the solution which is now integrated into the latest Crew Dragon.

Meanwhile, we only found out that Boeing had blown up their own capsule 8 months earlier in a similar test because someone on the NASA ASAP (Safety Panel) admitted that Boeing had that failure in the footnotes of the SpaceX anomaly report. The difference is, SpaceX tests basically in public, while Boeing has done all of their Starliner tests 30 miles from the closest civilian eyes in the middle of the White Sands Missile Proving range where you basically need top secret clearance to get past the gate.

If that's your basis for hating SpaceX, you need a new baseline. Boeing had a parachute failure on their abort test, and three major failures (two in software and one in hardware) on their test mission, while SpaceX's DM1 mission has been called, "absolutely flawless" by the NASA review panel whose sole job was to find any issue in the entire flight.

Then again, for some reason, Elon Musk brings out some sort of visceral hatred in a group of people that I simply can't understand.