Now they will start using metal zip ties.

How is this any different from paying with a credit card? Americans have been carrying significant credit card debt for decades.

I'm sure they'll go on to point out all the damage to the heat shield, and the leaks etc that occurred in the last test. And they'll carefully gloss over the fact that the heat shield had tiles missing deliberately to find out what happens if you lose tiles in all kinds of places.

Okay... are Blue Origin returning second stages back to earth and reusing them? ...

Didn't think so.

The thing is, Blue isnâ(TM)t learning lessons from SpaceX on how to do it. Theyâ(TM)re not building an incredibly cheep rocket thats fast to build and lets spacex innovate for them. Theyâ(TM)re building the lightest, most expensive possible rocket with intricate machining steps that require an age, and a ton of money to produce. No big sheet steel parts welded together, instead complex aluminium isogrid..

What part do you think they will not achieve? Theyâ(TM)ve got to the point where they can achieve orbital velocity, they can recover the booster, they can fire the engines in space to reenter, and they can deploy payloads. Thatâ(TM)s at least as good as New Glenn.

No. 96 767s, 71 757s, 45 A300s, and 40 747s. No ATRs or Caravans.

No assumption needed, theres video of the planes gear tearing through power lines, causing arcing all over the place.

On the contrary, MD11 pilots have the most to learn about the automated systems. Just because its automated, doesnt mean you dint need to know how it works, when it works, what it looks like when itâ(TM)s not working, what you still get when it doesnt work, what you dont get when it doesnt work,â¦

Some of the worst Airbus crashes for example have been caused when the automation has suddenly degraded from normal law to either alternate of direct law, and the pilot has not understood that they now dont have the protections that they normally get, or have straight up lost control of the aircraft in the degraded state.

Yes, but these planes can fly, and even climb with an engine entirely missing, even with a fire stalling part of the wing. The commenter is discussing what might have ultimately caused it to fail to climb at all. A compressor stall in a second engine because of FOD ingestion would do it.

Even without the direct path (which there is) theres easily enough energy to go straight theough the fuselage.

Itâ(TM)s happened before. There absolutely are such scenarios.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that this is what happened?

I think it's pretty hard to argue they haven't demonstrated rapid reuse. They've demonstrated that they can land, and reuse their booster, in later cases with very minimal refurbishment. They've demonstrated that they can land their ship. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be able to reuse the ship. There's still an open question about the quality of the heat shield, but it's clear that it is improving rapidly with each flight, and is likely very close to being "good enough". The most recent ships haven't seemed to have (m?)any tiles fall off. They've had gaps when they've landed, but that's because they've had gaps when they took off, to test whether the ship can survive missing tiles during reentry.

As far as mass to orbit, yes, it's reasonably clear that they have a problem with the dry mass at the moment. That said, it's become reasonably clear that they understand how much of a dry mass problem they have, and therefore figured out how much larger the ship needs to be to solve that problem. Version 3 is clearly designed to solve the dry mass problem in two ways. 1) Adding a bunch of fuel. 2) Making the engines more powerful.

As you say, for Starlink, they're fine at this point, they can launch a bunch of satellites, they can reuse the booster. That's at least as good as Falcon 9. As far as tankering, it's clear that they're planning on starting tankering next year, again, with version 3. It's clear to me that that indicates that they think they have enough mass margin to be useful at that point.

The point I'm making is that his "pfft, obviously Ukraine should have given up its nukes" stance is a Russio centric view that is biased towards treating one state more fairly than another. Not that it wasn't obvious that Russia treated the other soviet socialist republics that way before.