And here is the problem: you're so bad at social interaction that you can't tell the difference between a rebuttal and "rage". You have some sort of fantasy about someone on the other side of the world smashing their keyboard and stewing over your words all day.

I hate it to break it to you, but that's just your pathetic imagination.

I take it you believe the Apollo program shouldn't have happened

What did you pull that out of? The technology was nowhere near mature enough back then. That doesn't change the economic picture of throwing away your entire rocket every flight.

(We can argue whether "flags and footsteps" were worth spending an amount of money best measured in a percentage of your GDP, but that has nothing to do with the reuse question)

Next up

Lol, "next up"? You clearly think you hit your straw man out of the park ;)

since return is paramount - are you in agreement that only launch envelopes that allow return hold be allowed

"Be allowed"? Do you do anything other than straw men, or is that literally the only way you know how to carry out conversations on the internet?

SpaceX "allows" anyone to choose a disposable mission. Almost nobody chooses that because reuse is cheaper. In general, the only times when disposal is chosen is when there is literally no option but disposal in order to meet the spacecraft's performance needs.

Again: if you were given a choice when buying a plane ticket, either it can be cheap, or it can be expensive because they're going to wreck the plane specifically on your behalf, unless you had some really pressing need to wreck the plane, you're not choosing that option.

As a smart person who understands orbit mechanics

As an internet asshole, do you know that you actually have the option to not be an asshole online?

you do know that only very specific launch envelopes allow return.

First off, it's not even clear what you're referring to with "return". Boosters don't even reach orbit, so bringing up the concept of launch envelopes and return from them related to "orbital mechanics" is ill-formed. Booster return is entirely contingent on whether the payload needs an extreme level of performance beyond that which the system can meet with reuse, e.g. whether they absolutely have to remove the landing legs and grid fins to lighten the booster and burn every last drop of propellant. Only an extremely small fraction of launches fit into this category. Falcon 9 - the vehicle in question - only does booster return, so this conversation ends there.

If we want to talk about something other than F9, like, say, Starship, saying "only very specific launch envelopes allow return" is also wrong - again, unless your payload needs so much performance that the upper stage will not reenter the atmosphere (or you deliberately designed a trajectory to specifically make the stage come in hard). Their TPS design goal is to be able to burn off the heat of even mars transfer orbits. Now, one can argue that they'll fail in that goal, but you need to list your assumption of failure as a premise. Regardless, though, unless the entire project is a failure, the upper stage will handle return all "normal" Earth orbits. It has on-orbit reignition and can target its entry trajectory.

If a falcon 9 or heavy needs to go to a different orbit, it has to be abandoned

Again, this makes no sense. Are you positing launches where they change their mind partway through ascent or after it reaches orbit? "Nah, we don't REALLY want it in that trajectory, let's do a different one!"?

In the real world, again, the only times they expend a booster is when the performance needs of the payload are beyond what they can deliver in reusable mode, even with Falcon Heavy (or occasionally for testing, etc). And the upper stage of F9/FH never returns, because it can't, so it's not part of the discussion (they've done some work on trying to make it recoverable, but in each cases it was a "better to put the effort toward Starship" situation... which is IMHO kind of a shame, in that I'd love to see the maturation of e.g. inflatable entry systems, one of the possibilities they were considering).

He'll just come back in disguise as Bowsette ;)

Payload is absolutely not the most important thing in rocketry. *Payload per unit cost* is.

Exactly how cheap do you think air travel would be if, after every flight, they threw the plane away?

A contract is not a subsidy. They get contracts because they easily undercut their competitors.

NASA and the DoD want a service. SpaceX sells that service to them. It's not complicated. The government has saved massive amounts of money with SpaceX relative to ULA.

Also, for the record, most of SpaceX's work is internal (Starlink), and the nextmost is commercial. Government is in third place

Private companies aren't funding "exploration" to any meaningful degree, and nor do they want to.

SpaceX's goal is to be "the bus" for getting to space and Mars. Not to be launching expeditions into remote areas and conducting basic science.

Your argument isn't entirely wrong, but there's a big piece of nuance in there :)

New, growing forests: *capture* carbon
Mature forests in equilibrium: *hold* carbon
Deforestation: *releases* carbon

So you're correct (with another further caveat, in a bit) that mature forests aren't sequestering carbon. But they hold mind-bogglingly massive amounts of carbon. And if you convert them to, say, pastureland, that holds far less carbon (both above and belowground), and the difference is released to the atmosphere (slowly through rot, or rapidly through fire). And you can throw those emissions into reverse via reforestation.

The further caveat is that it's not actually true that mature forests are always in equilibrium. Cold climates, water logging, etc can lead to the formation of things like peat and coal, which actually do continually sequester more and more carbon over time, potentially over geological timescales if left undisturbed. Unfortunately, we're kind of screwing that up too, with mining peat, draining wetlands for farming/ranching, etc.

Also, some soil compounds can also bind carbon long term. For example, in Iceland we have a mineral called allophane, which forms in subglacial eruptions and blows across the country. It's really annoying stuff (tightly binds phosphorus and other essential minerals and renders them inaccessible; binds water inaccessible to plants, but makes the ground liquefy easily; etc), but on the plus side, it also binds carbon very tightly and prevents its loss through decay - at least over human timescales, and potentially longer.

Big trees in the Amazon still famously lack chainsaw resistance.

There are uses for it. For example, say Trump decides he's going to impose tariffs on X countries, and you expect those countries to reroute their sales to the US (e.g. as knockdown kits, etc) through Y countries. For each of X, you can use AI tools to help find candidate stocks that would be most hurt by this event to short, and for each of Y, candidate stocks that would most benefit by this event to go long. You then manually investigate from the candidates to decide what you want your actual position to be. But it helps filter down the immense number of global stocks to a manageable list of "likely" candidates.

Best aptronym ever :)

Nazism isn't an internet insult. It was an actual, real thing that happened in this world, with an actual, real ideology, and the core of this ideology was racial-based social Darwinism.

BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids. You sure as hell better know how to swim if you want to do that.

Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal, just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.

SIGH.

There were 10 people chosen and people with dark skin in the USA make up about 1 out of 8 Americans.

1 in 8 is 12,5%.

African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is again a diverse group with mixed skin tones (for example, the Indian subcontinent)
In 2023, there were 1,6M people (0,49%) of pacific island ancestry and 3,3M native Americans - again, mixed skin tones.
People of Mediterranean European ancestry often have so-called "olive" complexions.

With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.

The chances of the 10 people to be a perfect representation of the racial demographics of the USA is quite small.

Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":

15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165

Then consider that NASA astronauts are required to pass a swimming test

It is not a test of swimming prowess, just of an ability to not drown. You have to be able to do three lengths of a 25-meter pool without stopping, three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes, and tread water for 10 minutes while wearing a flight suit. This is not some massively imposing task. You don't have to be Michael Phelps to become an astronaut.

and as a general rule those with African ancestry tend to have less stamina in swimming than those with lighter skin

Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.

Think of the different races as just really big families

That is not how genetics work, and is instead the pseudoscience that drove fascist movements, and in particular, Nazism.

There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them. Certain genetic traits tend to have strong correlates - for example dark skin and sickle cell anemia - but that's not because races are some sort of genetic isolates, but rather for very practical reasons (dark skin is an adaptation to not die of skin cancer in the tropics, and sickle cell disease is a consequence of a genetic adaptation to not die of malaria which also happens to be found in such climates). But the vast majority of genes don't have such strong correlates.

The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.

If we are to ignore skin color and just put one big family up against another big family on swimming ability then just due to random mutations, perhaps some Darwinian selection way back in the family tree, one family will swim better than the other

The main "racial difference" in swimming ability in the US is "inherited", that is, parents who don't know how to swim tend to not teach their kids how to swim. As a result, white children are 56% more likely to receive swimming lessons than black children. One can expect that to directly correspond to an advantage in adulthood. But again, the ability to tread water is not out there knocking 90% of astronaut candidates out of the race - especially given that astronaut candidates tend to be athletic and motivated to learn new skills.

People with light skin tend to have ancestors that had to go fishing for their protein

Utter tripe. Fish consumption has no correlation with skin colour. How much fish do you think your average herder or plains horseman ate? And fish is massively important in much of Africa - in coastal areas (Gabon, Ghana, Sierra Leone in particular note), along the Congo (it's literally the world's largest river, people have been fishing it since time immemorial), Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, the Niger Delta, etc etc. What sort of racist stereotype world are you living in where black people don't fish?

Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.

I don't give a shit if some Russian/Kazakh/Malaysian bot farmer wants to take over my phone.

So you do no banking on your phone? Unlikely.

For the 99% of people that do in fact use a phone for banking, protection from lower level criminals is invaluable. For most people there is real financial loss possible from a phone being taken over, at the very least to monitor banking access mechanisms.