Among the highlights was that they had absolutely nothing to justify going after the Trump campaign on Russia collusion. They had no information that the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian officials. They could not corroborate anything claimed in the Steele Dossier. Peter Strzok was essentially telling a London FBI employee that “there’s nothing to this.”

“Again, the FBI’s failure to critically analyze information that ran counter to the narrative of a Trump/Russia collusive relationship exhibited throughout Crossfire Hurricane is extremely troublesome,” the report said.

On top of that, the Report then took on who knew what when in pushing this story against the Trump team. It notes that the Clinton campaign plan to link Trump to Russia was known to the CIA and was briefed by CIA Director John Brennan to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, AG Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey. //

Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee
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🧵 1. The gravity of the misconduct uncovered by Mr. Durham cannot be overstated.
washingtonpost.com
Durham report sharply criticizes FBI’s 2016 probe of Trump campaign

2. The LEAST one can say of it is that it involved a malicious use of federal law-enforcement officers to conduct a contrived investigation utterly lacking any valid, factual foundation from the very beginning. That is itself incredibly troubling—and also unconstitutional.

3. But this was SO MUCH WORSE than that. It was an effort to use use a powerful, long-respected, federal law-enforcement agency to render a presidential candidate unelectable—entirely in the absence of any valid, good-faith basis for doing so.

4. So make no mistake—this can’t be dismissed as mere carelessness or even a severe example of garden-variety misconduct. No—this is as corrupt and as subversive of the Constitution as it gets.

5. Regardless of your political leanings or your feelings about Donald Trump, you should find this terrifying.

6. When federal law-enforcement agencies can undertake such a brazen effort to frame someone they don’t like to throw the outcome of an election—and then remain largely protected for seven years thereafter—popular sovereignty in America is under serious attack. //

The top line of the Durham report is incredibly simple. Namely, there was zero evidentiary basis for the FBI to pursue what would become Crossfire Hurricane, the infamous Trump-Russia investigation that was headed up by disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok. There was no hook, no justification, and no excuse for continuing to hound Trump throughout not only his 2016 candidacy but years into his presidency as well.

Despite knowing there was nothing to investigate, he FBI continued to push forward anyway until eventually, former FBI Director James Comey and the rest of his underlings got what they wanted: The Robert Mueller special counsel.

That was always the end goal. To ensure that Trump, even after he was elected and it became obvious no evidence of collusion existed, would be hobbled by an intrusive, headline-producing special counsel. In the end, the FBI succeeded in its quest. //

this was always about electoral interference. That was the goal from the word go, to diminish the Trump administration to the point that winning re-election in 2020 would be nearly impossible.

What exactly is a full-flow closed cycle staged rocket engine like the SpaceX Raptor?

Well, this gets a bit complex, since to understand what the sentence means you have to understand how a rocket engine works. I’m going to try to go from the basics up…

I mean, it’s not like it’s rocket science, right? //

In case you’re wondering, it’s only the third one ever built — really, only the second full engine since the “full-flow power-head demonstrator” never actually had a combustion chamber attached. The other is the Russian RD-270 engine.

It’s also the first full-flow, closed-cycle, dual-shaft, staged-combustion rocket to ever fly. So far, it’s only 20 meters or so, but it did fly. (Update: 12.5 kilometres now…)

So there’s your answer.

Elon Musk

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May 13
@elonmusk
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Replying to @elonmusk @NASASpaceflight and @SpaceX
Raptor chamber wall might have the highest heat flux of anything ever made
Chris Bergin - NSF
@NASASpaceflight
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Can Raptor 3 can be a drop-in replacement for Raptor 2, or will the vehicles require changes to cater for Raptor 3 engines?

Here's the full firing from the raw pull out of http://nsf.live/mcgregor
1:14 / 1:14
7:29 AM · May 13, 2023 //

Also, Super Heavy is getting very very close to a SRB in terms of thrust density (~1388 vs ~1367kN/m²). Fascinating.

With ~30% higher ISP… meaning ~69% higher power density.

There really is no one close to SX now at making rocket engines. //

I don't want to knock down the SpX engineers working on this thing, if anything, it reminds me of the SSME development. That engine program had its fair share of failures, but, in the end they produced (in my humble opinion) the finest and most reliable rocket engine ever developed (and LH2 powered at that, no small feat), a true pinnacle of U.S. aerospace engineering. Hopefully SpX can rise to that level, because their architecture really needs it. //

Merlin has now exceeded RS-25 in reliability in terms of consecutive successful engines on orbital launch (by about half an order of magnitude). RS-25 had an engine-out on STS-51F on the 19th Shuttle launch, and SpaceX has had more Falcon launches since then without any engines out than the rest of the Shuttle program combined plus had at least 3 times as many engines. (Rs-25 had other hiccups, but I think that’s the only full engine-out? Can’t remember.)

A lot of that Merlin reliability is just the sheer number of engines and number of launches, making more of a difference than any particular feature of the engine, allowing tweaking to improve engine reliability and large manufacturing and test volume that allows quickly achieving really good engine statistics. RS-25 had both clustering and a fairly decent flightrate in its favor, but not as much as Merlin.

"SpaceX has moved very quickly on development," Kirasich said about Raptor. "We've seen them manufacture what was called Raptor 1.0. They have since upgraded to Raptor 2.0 that first of all increases performance and thrust and secondly reduces the amount of parts, reducing the amount of time to manufacture and test. They build these things very fast. Their goal was seven engines a week, and they hit that about a quarter ago. So they are now building seven engines a week."

To put this into perspective, the Raptor 2 rocket engine produces approximately 510,000 pounds of thrust. This is almost identical to the amount of thrust produced by the RS-25 engine that will be used to power NASA's Space Launch System rocket. This engine was designed and developed by Rocketdyne in the 1970s for the space shuttle program, and the company has decades of experience manufacturing them. //

In 2015, NASA gave Aerojet Rocketdyne a contract worth $1.16 billion to "restart the production line" for the RS-25 engine. Again, that was money just to reestablish manufacturing facilities, not actually build the engines. NASA is paying more than $100 million for each of those. With this startup funding, the goal was for Aerojet Rocketdyne to produce four of these engines per year.

Kirasich said that as it builds and tests Raptors, SpaceX is rapidly iterating on these processes and producing higher-quality engines.

V2 has less visible plumbing and wiring, both sea-level versions have the same nozzle exit diameter and similar dimensions, however, V1 has a mass of 2,000 kilograms (kg) and V2 1,600 kg. Raptor V1 generated around 185 tons of thrust and the current V2 generates around 230 tons of thrust. //

This week, the third version of the Raptor engine (V3) reached a new thrust record. “Raptor V3 just achieved 350 bar chamber pressure (269 tons of thrust). Congrats to SpaceX propulsion team!” announced SpaceX founder Elon Musk via Twitter. “Starship Super Heavy Booster has 33 Raptors, so total thrust of 8877 tons or 19.5 million pounds,” he said on May 13. //

As of November 2022, SpaceX completed manufacturing over 200 Raptor engines (and counting) at an average rate of one engine per day. The company manufactures and tests the engines at the McGregor factory. SpaceX officials recently said that they has more engines than they could fly at the moment. SpaceX aims for the cost-per-tonne of thrust of each Raptor to be under $1,000 USD, so a bit over $250,000 at the 260 tons of thrust that each Raptor V3 is capable of generating. Musk said recently that he expects to spend approximately $2 Billion on Starship's development this year