I don’t think loss of tiles was the problem, actually. There were vapor trails in various places which I thought at the time were something venting, but Scott Manley pointed out that they actually look like hot air seeping through the gaps in the hinges. That would have exposed unshielded metal to hot gas, bypassing the heat shield entirely

The problem is that their point is nonsense.

This isn’t a long-standing problem being persistently ignored, this is a test flight designed specifically to discover such problems. They were so keen to test how the system handled problems like this that they deliberately damaged the heat shield before the flight (somewhere other than where this particular problem occurred).

The implication that this partial failure of the heat shield is damning evidence of negligence is either ignorant or deliberately deceptive

Also, it’s probably possible to fix the partition so that it’s as big as it used to be. It’s likely that some of your data is corrupted already, but the repartitioning won’t have erased the old data except here or there where it’s written things like new file tables in space it now considers unused

What they’re suggesting is to back up the whole disk, rather than any single partition. Anything you do to the partition to try and recover it has the potential to make a rescuable situation hopeless. If you have a copy of the exact state of every single bit on the drive, then you can try and fix it safe in the knowledge that you can always get back to exactly where you are now if you make it worse

One hopes that there’s more than a single button involved. Hopefully several, with flip-up plastic covers, and at least one manual valve.

This is not something we want to happen by accident

I’m pretty sure comments get sent back to your instance, so comments from instance B will work just fine.

I have no idea whether instance B will propogate things which have been federated to it though.

It’s also not obvious that an instance you’re not federated with can’t do their half of the federating, if they’re so inclined, and show content from instances which choose to defederate. At the end of the day you’d have to trust all involved to put in some effort to respect the decision to defederate

Fluid handling in free-fall is a nontrivial task. While it’s true that linking tanks in two different vessels is also a technical challenge, there’s plenty of value in demonstrating that you can pump the fluids around at all

It was different for the upper stage. That was a fast rotation messing things up, but in this case the hot staging seems to have pushed harder on the booster than they expected and lifted the fuel away from the bottom of the tank.

They’ve solved one sloshing issue, but the solution for this one will be different

They seem to have calculated km/h/s, and labelled it km/s/s

First stage worked beautifully, but engines started failing after stage separation and it self-destructed.

Second stage also looked like it was going perfectly, but a few seconds before its burn ended it also self-destructed for no immediately apparent reason. It was literally seconds away from achieving orbit

The rocket is very careful to keep the oxygen and methane separate. To make the tanks explode they’d need to spend a lot of time mixing them, which isn’t good enough for a self-destruct. It would also behave differently in different parts of the flight. The equipment to do it would be big and heavy as well.

Instead, they use explosive charges because they’re lightweight, reliable, and quick to detonate (last launch notwithstanding, because of a design problem)

If by “left in space” you mean the payload, then mostly Starlink satellites. A considerable number of other people’s satellites as well. Those stick around until the end of their service life, then they re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

If you’re asking if any part of the rocket gets left up there, then the answer is no