Not true. First off, sulfuric acid is a major resource. It's 70-85% concentration, so first off through heating you get 15-30% of its mass back in H2O, then more when you decompose the H2SO4 to H2O + SO3. Further heating in the presence of a catalyst converts SO3 to SO2 + O2. So right there that's your two most important resources. And Venus's acid mists and anhydrous acidic compounds are highly hygroscopic, and thus about as easy to collect as gases / mists can get. Indeed, we have plenty of experience here on Earth extracting acids from flue gases in industry.
These form the core of your in-situ production - it's basically everything needed for both a plastics industry (when you're living in a plastic envelope, that's what matters;) ) and agriculture except for nitric acid, which is one of the more straightforward industrial acids to produce (Haber Process + Ostwald process). But it's worth noting that iron has been directly detected in Venus's atmosphere as well by the Venera probes. Namely, it's in the form of iron chlorides and is thought to make up in the ballpark of around 1% of the mass of every sulfuric acid droplet. Process 100 tonnes of H2SO4, get 1 tonne of iron; it's not a trivial amount.
While the atmosphere has been confirmed to / is suspected of containing many things that we don't think of as being in an atmosphere here on Earth (antimony, indium, mercury, etc), there are also many things that you won't find in the atmosphere. As they're not needed in large quantities, import from Earth remains a possibility (a likely export product would be deuterium, if you can get the round-trip cost down to a few hundred dollars per kilogram; Venus is incredibly enriched in it (150-250x Earth) and you can further enrich it for export via the fuel cell cascade you need for storing nighttime power regardless). Contrarily, while the surface is hostile, it is not inaccessible. There are even plastics which survive at those temperatures, like PBO, as well as graphite-based and metal envelopes. The two main ways to bring things up from the surface to the middle cloud deck are phase change balloons and bellows balloons - the former relying on keeping a substance as a liquid via pressure in a pressure vessel until you're ready to ascend, while the latter relies on mechanical compression of a metal bellows. Both have been prototyped and had varying degrees of testing. As for mining, while a lot of work has gone into various approaches for breaking rock on the surface for sampling, the easiest route for bulk is just dredging; Venus's dense atmosphere makes it almost like working in a liquid.
Re, sulfuric acid: note that this only exists in the middle and upper cloud layer (and in a transient form in the lower cloud layer); further down it's decomposed to SO2 and various polysulfides. But as far as environments go, Venus's isn't that bad for plastics (it's much worse for metals). Plastics tend to be much more vulnerable to organic solvents than to inorganic acids (a chemical mixture like Titan's would be much harsher). Fluoropolymers in particular (but not exclusively) are particularly resistant to harsh acidic environments. Venus isn't an unusually high UV environment (we're still not sure what the "mystery UV absorber is", although it's most likely either iron chlorides or elemental sulfur), which is a good thing as far as plastics go. However, these aren't the only factors you have to take into account; your envelope also needs tensile strength, its creep behavior has to match that of its reinforcement and ideally be limited, and it needs to have low gas permeability. The best fabric as a result tends to be a multilayer laminate.
Do note that you're responding to a troll; he's a regular in these threads, just ignore him;)
As for Venus: you want to check out Landis's work for the basics (although the concept has been developed since then). No, not on the surface - in the middle cloud layer, ideally somewhere around 53-56km, ideally in the higher latitudes. It's the most earthlike environment in the solar system outside of Earth - gravity, temperature, pressure, sunlight, etc, plus the overhead radiation shielding equivalent of about 5 meters of water. And normal earth air is a lifting gas.
There's also been work on the HAVOC proposal, but IMHO it's not as interesting as Landis's work.
They get quotes from many different experts - an engineer working on NASA's Mars 2020 rover, a Mars researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, a former chief technologist of NASA, the head of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a space policy expert at George Washington University. All have little doubt that SpaceX can do it, although they feel the timeline is too ambitious.
But clearly "Sir 110010001000 The Sarcastic" knows more than puny "experts". Dumb experts! We should listen to Slashdot trolls instead!
Re, aerocapture: actually backwards - for non-manned missions aerocapture is generally lower velocity at Mars (~6km/s) than simple Earth entry (7,8km/s); it's only higher for manned missions to Mars (~8-10km/s), which generally take faster trajectories.
Hmm, anything else that hasn't been covered? Comms, SpaceX has a no cost deal to use the DSN in exchange for landing data. Anything else?
Indeed. As a Venus fan, I would think it a travesty if one designed such a craft to only suit Mars, when delta-V for a Venus transfer orbit is almost identical to that of Mars, transit times are shorter, power more abundant, and aerocapture easier. By any standard any craft good for transport to Mars should also be good for transport to Venus. However, if not planned for that upfront (for example, taking into account thermal management due to the higher solar constant) it might inadvertently be rendered Mars-only.
It's an active topic of research. Magnetic shielding and advanced shielding materials have both been research, but the results haven't turned out as good as was hoped. Right about now, it looks like there's just two main options:
1) Go big (lots of water and other mass = lots of shielding) 2) Go fast (shorter time in space = less radiation hazard)
AFAIK MCT/ITS was always designed to be big, although just how big hasn't been disclosed yet. Who knows how fast it's supposed to reach Mars.
Despite their general success I don't see SpaceX being able to fund it themselves any time soon
Actually that is indeed the plan. As far as Red Dragon goes, it's not much harder to get to Mars than it is to GEO. And Dragon has been designed all along to do automated powered landings, which are necessary on Mars - even though the design purpose was for landings on Earth. The reentry heating is higher, but that's largely just a matter of a thicker ablative coating.
Now, MCT/ITS is much further in the future, and much harder. But again, that is indeed Musk's goal, to self-fund it. It's actually caused some turf wars with some at NASA, who've argued that Mars is their turf and that SpaceX should stay focused on Earth while they go beyond. Rather silly, IMHO.
Obviously, every time there's an incident with the Falcon 9, that sets SpaceX's plans back. Not just for the length of the downtime for the investigation repairs, but also for the time to cover the huge launch backlog that accumulates while they're down. A lot of the reason for Falcon Heavy's delay was the backlog after the CRS-7 accident. Now we've got this new one. Who knows at this point what the cause is and how long it will take to remedy.
1) Concerning the crash in China, it's not even known if autopilot was on. Most of these "Autopilot did it!" stories have turned out to be people just trying to find someone/something else to blame for their accidents.
2) Musk did not "blame a possible UFO", that was part of the media's silly season about the disaster. He simply tweeted that they're not ruling anything out in the investigation, and reporters put two and two together and got negative six hundred twenty three. On the same note, Musk did not ask twitter to "solve the accident for them" as also was reported; SpaceX put out a request for footage of the event from anyone who may have filmed it. The context was in relation to a sound heard before the incident, so it sounds like the motive is to triangulate the sound to see if it was near the pad or not.
You act like this discussion comes out of the blue, like it's something Musk just came up with after AMOS-6. Discussion of MCT (now ITS) was something Musk was scheduled to unveil already, long in advance of the AMOS-6 accident.
I agree that AMOS-6 has taken a lot of the focus away from such "lofty" goals, but let's not act like this wasn't something that was already planned.
(I of course am a lot more interested in hearing the results of their AMOS-6 investigation right now than about their ITS plans... as are I think most people)
I have one. And I just love it. I can't believe I had to put up with that cartridge BS for so long. Given how long a tank lasts and how cheap it is to refill it, the ink is now basically free. You don't even have to think about it - you think more about the cost of the paper than the ink.
If you think you want something, you print it - it's that simple. There's no stopping to "second guess" yourself about "is it worth the cost / hassle"?
The only negative I'd add is that you have to be careful during the initial filling - there's not really anything to stop you from spilling ink. But I haven't even gone through the tiniest fraction of one tank, it's not something that one deals with often.
They are interesting, IMHO, and do warrant a proper explanation.
The statement that "Pluto does not have a magnetic field", I'm not sure how definitively one can say that. It's long been assumed that it doesn't.... which is part of the reason why the magnetometer was cut from New Horizons. So we got no magnetic field measurements during the flyby.
That said, it's not likely. After all, Pluto did have SWAP and PEPSSI to study particles interacting with / leaving Pluto, and as far as I'm aware they didn't show anything out of the ordinary that would suggest a magnetic field. But I haven't followed their results that closely.
Sort of. As the ship's robot, there's actually good reason for him to be intelligent. They just gave him more intellectual capacity than was necessary. Versus a sentient toaster or de-icer;)
Then again... didn't Marvin once claim that the best conversation he ever had was with a coffee maker? The coffee maker might count - unless he was meaning to imply that it said nothing.
(This thread actually got me wondering if the concept of GLaDOS was inspired in part by Talkie Toaster.... very different genres, but still, a sentient AI designed for a device that is grossly disproportionate to the level of intelligence that such a device actually needs. Do any earlier instances of this trope come to mind?)
What's the fatality rate in South Carolina for luxury sports sedans? How do South Carolina's collision rates compare to others were Tesla's are (or are you suggesting that all Teslas are in South Carolina)?
Or not. I love the weasely " In January of this year in China, a Tesla ploughed into the back of a stationary truck at speed, killing the driver. Should that incident prove to be related to Autopilot...". Well, yes, in the same way that if a train were to crash tomorrow you could write "Should that incident be related to the Galaxy 7..." without any evidence that it was involved at all.
Here's a Google Transmangle of the original article in Chinese:
Basically, the evidence that autopilot was in use was... um... his dad thinks it must have been because his son is a good driver and wouldn't have hit that truck. And he wants to "prove" it by... showing that the car's speed wasn't changing.
Whether the autopilot was on or off in a given situation is logged and easy to recover. Any reporter who suggests that an incident was "due to autopilot" without at first finding out whether the system was even on is being grossly irresponsible.
Here, I'll put it quite simply: airplanes are vastly more reusable than Falcons are designed to be. Boeing still does quite good business.
You're assuming a market similar to SpaceX's current market where they launch 6-9 rockets a year. I - and they - are looking forward to a market where they're launching hundreds per year. I'll repeat: Reusability will mainly just keep SpaceX from having to expand their production too greatly, if they can make it reliable and affordable.
Full reusability is going to slow down that build rate a ton, though.
Not necessarily. Contrary to your statement that there's a "glut of launch systems", there's actually a serious shortage right now in launch vehicle production. There are far more companies with payloads than launch providers can manage for now. Additionally:
* The cheaper launch prices get, the higher that number will get.
* Not all first stages will be recovered
* None of the second stages will be recovered
* Even recovered launch stages don't have an infinite life, they're only targeted for a few dozen launches
* You have to ramp up inventory no matter what as the market grows.
* Falcon Heavy has four large cores
And so on. There still will be ample need for production. Reusability will mainly just keep SpaceX from having to expand their production too greatly, if they can make it reliable and affordable.
I don't doubt that someone brought it up. I also don't doubt that someone said something to the effect of, "That won't be a problem because of ((reason that now looks debatable))"
I think it's too soon to say that. In the video we have a frame that looks just fine, then a flame with the whole area whited out. True, the flash is centered on the right-hand side, around where the rocket meets the strongback. But that doesn't mean that's actually where it started. Or that the strongback/fuel system was to blame. Or even that the source of the blast wasn't right in the center of the stage, with the stage just happening to breakout on the strongback side first.
The tactical mistake Musk has made is thinking that people care more about launch cost than about getting their payload successfully to orbit.
In many cases that is correct. AMOS-6 happened not to be one of those, but....
If you have a hyperexpensive multi-hundred million sat as most of them are you will happily pay an extra few tens of millions for ULA-like reliability rather than cheap out and end up on a launcher like Falcon with a 5% chance of desrtoying your payload.
Failure probabilities don't work that way. Every rocket family, and every individual model, tends to get safer as time goes along as problems are remedied and fixed. The cost for innovating (needed to bring costs down) is that you have to start over on that curve. But the more you launch, the more potential problems you fix and the lower the odds of a future failure. There's always a high degree of randomness, of course, but in general you find a problem, you fix the problem, and the rocket is a safer vehicle for it.
Do recall how terrible the Atlas and Delta families used to be in terms of reliability. Things blew up, they learned, and were remedied. Heck, in terms of families, Falcon 9 is almost like a whole family rather than a single rocket thusfar... some of the changes, like switching to densified LOX, are pretty dramatic changes. They're trying to evolve and optimize it very, very quickly. But of course, that faces the learning curve reset problems above.
(Also, on that note, I think it's a bit premature to talk about the spotless record of the Delta-IV heavy, given that it's only ever had 9 launches, vs. Falcon 9's 29 (if you count AMOS-6... which if you're going to count it in the failure category, you should count it toward the total as well).
Some aspects of the Falcon design were designed to speed up the learning curve - and seem to have worked. Namely, the engines seem to have become quite reliable; part of the reason for going with so many engines was not just so that you can keep going after an engine failure, but also so that you're mass producing the engines and going through ten per flight; you're going to retire the risk a lot faster when using something in such large numbers. On the other hand, there's only two stages/pairs of tanks per flight, two COPVs, etc, so the learning curve is going to be - and has been - slower. . Falcon Heavy will help speed it up, of course, since there's four separate cores, all built similarly.
For a totally new (and frequently evolved) branch, Falcon 9's reliability is quite high; there are mature systems in use today with reliability records no better. But everyone wants you to approach 100%. At some point, SpaceX is going to have to stop with working on the "development branch" and offer up a "stable release" - that is, get the same identical cores with a long safe launch record, and stop changing them. And I'm sure they know that. But they seem to have a higher priority that they want to get to first: evolving their rockets to the point where they feel they can change the world. Not just "cheaper than everyone else", but "immensely cheaper than everyone else".
It's a tall order. But I fully sympathize with it.
On the upside from a stability perspective, there's really not much more need for evolution on the F9 production side, now that they're regularly landing cores. Getting multi-mission reliability, however, that's going to be a new challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. First off, sulfuric acid is a major resource. It's 70-85% concentration, so first off through heating you get 15-30% of its mass back in H2O, then more when you decompose the H2SO4 to H2O + SO3. Further heating in the presence of a catalyst converts SO3 to SO2 + O2. So right there that's your two most important resources. And Venus's acid mists and anhydrous acidic compounds are highly hygroscopic, and thus about as easy to collect as gases / mists can get. Indeed, we have plenty of experience here on Earth extracting acids from flue gases in industry.
These form the core of your in-situ production - it's basically everything needed for both a plastics industry (when you're living in a plastic envelope, that's what matters ;) ) and agriculture except for nitric acid, which is one of the more straightforward industrial acids to produce (Haber Process + Ostwald process). But it's worth noting that iron has been directly detected in Venus's atmosphere as well by the Venera probes. Namely, it's in the form of iron chlorides and is thought to make up in the ballpark of around 1% of the mass of every sulfuric acid droplet. Process 100 tonnes of H2SO4, get 1 tonne of iron; it's not a trivial amount.
While the atmosphere has been confirmed to / is suspected of containing many things that we don't think of as being in an atmosphere here on Earth (antimony, indium, mercury, etc), there are also many things that you won't find in the atmosphere. As they're not needed in large quantities, import from Earth remains a possibility (a likely export product would be deuterium, if you can get the round-trip cost down to a few hundred dollars per kilogram; Venus is incredibly enriched in it (150-250x Earth) and you can further enrich it for export via the fuel cell cascade you need for storing nighttime power regardless). Contrarily, while the surface is hostile, it is not inaccessible. There are even plastics which survive at those temperatures, like PBO, as well as graphite-based and metal envelopes. The two main ways to bring things up from the surface to the middle cloud deck are phase change balloons and bellows balloons - the former relying on keeping a substance as a liquid via pressure in a pressure vessel until you're ready to ascend, while the latter relies on mechanical compression of a metal bellows. Both have been prototyped and had varying degrees of testing. As for mining, while a lot of work has gone into various approaches for breaking rock on the surface for sampling, the easiest route for bulk is just dredging; Venus's dense atmosphere makes it almost like working in a liquid.
Re, sulfuric acid: note that this only exists in the middle and upper cloud layer (and in a transient form in the lower cloud layer); further down it's decomposed to SO2 and various polysulfides. But as far as environments go, Venus's isn't that bad for plastics (it's much worse for metals). Plastics tend to be much more vulnerable to organic solvents than to inorganic acids (a chemical mixture like Titan's would be much harsher). Fluoropolymers in particular (but not exclusively) are particularly resistant to harsh acidic environments. Venus isn't an unusually high UV environment (we're still not sure what the "mystery UV absorber is", although it's most likely either iron chlorides or elemental sulfur), which is a good thing as far as plastics go. However, these aren't the only factors you have to take into account; your envelope also needs tensile strength, its creep behavior has to match that of its reinforcement and ideally be limited, and it needs to have low gas permeability. The best fabric as a result tends to be a multilayer laminate.
Please, quick, no time for sarcasm! I'm turning blue! Hurry, hurry!
Do note that you're responding to a troll; he's a regular in these threads, just ignore him ;)
As for Venus: you want to check out Landis's work for the basics (although the concept has been developed since then). No, not on the surface - in the middle cloud layer, ideally somewhere around 53-56km, ideally in the higher latitudes. It's the most earthlike environment in the solar system outside of Earth - gravity, temperature, pressure, sunlight, etc, plus the overhead radiation shielding equivalent of about 5 meters of water. And normal earth air is a lifting gas.
There's also been work on the HAVOC proposal, but IMHO it's not as interesting as Landis's work.
If you think the delta-V figures are wrong, cite a counter-reference. I'll be sitting here holding my breath. Really. No sarcasm here, nope.
They get quotes from many different experts - an engineer working on NASA's Mars 2020 rover, a Mars researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, a former chief technologist of NASA, the head of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a space policy expert at George Washington University. All have little doubt that SpaceX can do it, although they feel the timeline is too ambitious.
But clearly "Sir 110010001000 The Sarcastic" knows more than puny "experts". Dumb experts! We should listen to Slashdot trolls instead!
Re, aerocapture: actually backwards - for non-manned missions aerocapture is generally lower velocity at Mars (~6km/s) than simple Earth entry (7,8km/s); it's only higher for manned missions to Mars (~8-10km/s), which generally take faster trajectories.
Hmm, anything else that hasn't been covered? Comms, SpaceX has a no cost deal to use the DSN in exchange for landing data. Anything else?
Re: energy to transfer:
Re:
Indeed. As a Venus fan, I would think it a travesty if one designed such a craft to only suit Mars, when delta-V for a Venus transfer orbit is almost identical to that of Mars, transit times are shorter, power more abundant, and aerocapture easier. By any standard any craft good for transport to Mars should also be good for transport to Venus. However, if not planned for that upfront (for example, taking into account thermal management due to the higher solar constant) it might inadvertently be rendered Mars-only.
It's good that they're thinking beyond just Mars.
In the teens?
It's an active topic of research. Magnetic shielding and advanced shielding materials have both been research, but the results haven't turned out as good as was hoped. Right about now, it looks like there's just two main options:
1) Go big (lots of water and other mass = lots of shielding)
2) Go fast (shorter time in space = less radiation hazard)
AFAIK MCT/ITS was always designed to be big, although just how big hasn't been disclosed yet. Who knows how fast it's supposed to reach Mars.
Actually that is indeed the plan. As far as Red Dragon goes, it's not much harder to get to Mars than it is to GEO. And Dragon has been designed all along to do automated powered landings, which are necessary on Mars - even though the design purpose was for landings on Earth. The reentry heating is higher, but that's largely just a matter of a thicker ablative coating.
Now, MCT/ITS is much further in the future, and much harder. But again, that is indeed Musk's goal, to self-fund it. It's actually caused some turf wars with some at NASA, who've argued that Mars is their turf and that SpaceX should stay focused on Earth while they go beyond. Rather silly, IMHO.
Obviously, every time there's an incident with the Falcon 9, that sets SpaceX's plans back. Not just for the length of the downtime for the investigation repairs, but also for the time to cover the huge launch backlog that accumulates while they're down. A lot of the reason for Falcon Heavy's delay was the backlog after the CRS-7 accident. Now we've got this new one. Who knows at this point what the cause is and how long it will take to remedy.
1) Concerning the crash in China, it's not even known if autopilot was on. Most of these "Autopilot did it!" stories have turned out to be people just trying to find someone/something else to blame for their accidents.
2) Musk did not "blame a possible UFO", that was part of the media's silly season about the disaster. He simply tweeted that they're not ruling anything out in the investigation, and reporters put two and two together and got negative six hundred twenty three. On the same note, Musk did not ask twitter to "solve the accident for them" as also was reported; SpaceX put out a request for footage of the event from anyone who may have filmed it. The context was in relation to a sound heard before the incident, so it sounds like the motive is to triangulate the sound to see if it was near the pad or not.
You act like this discussion comes out of the blue, like it's something Musk just came up with after AMOS-6. Discussion of MCT (now ITS) was something Musk was scheduled to unveil already, long in advance of the AMOS-6 accident.
I agree that AMOS-6 has taken a lot of the focus away from such "lofty" goals, but let's not act like this wasn't something that was already planned.
(I of course am a lot more interested in hearing the results of their AMOS-6 investigation right now than about their ITS plans... as are I think most people)
"Supposedly"? ;)
I have one. And I just love it. I can't believe I had to put up with that cartridge BS for so long. Given how long a tank lasts and how cheap it is to refill it, the ink is now basically free. You don't even have to think about it - you think more about the cost of the paper than the ink.
If you think you want something, you print it - it's that simple. There's no stopping to "second guess" yourself about "is it worth the cost / hassle"?
The only negative I'd add is that you have to be careful during the initial filling - there's not really anything to stop you from spilling ink. But I haven't even gone through the tiniest fraction of one tank, it's not something that one deals with often.
They are interesting, IMHO, and do warrant a proper explanation.
The statement that "Pluto does not have a magnetic field", I'm not sure how definitively one can say that. It's long been assumed that it doesn't.... which is part of the reason why the magnetometer was cut from New Horizons. So we got no magnetic field measurements during the flyby.
That said, it's not likely. After all, Pluto did have SWAP and PEPSSI to study particles interacting with / leaving Pluto, and as far as I'm aware they didn't show anything out of the ordinary that would suggest a magnetic field. But I haven't followed their results that closely.
Sort of. As the ship's robot, there's actually good reason for him to be intelligent. They just gave him more intellectual capacity than was necessary. Versus a sentient toaster or de-icer ;)
Then again... didn't Marvin once claim that the best conversation he ever had was with a coffee maker? The coffee maker might count - unless he was meaning to imply that it said nothing.
Does it have to do with toast?
(This thread actually got me wondering if the concept of GLaDOS was inspired in part by Talkie Toaster.... very different genres, but still, a sentient AI designed for a device that is grossly disproportionate to the level of intelligence that such a device actually needs. Do any earlier instances of this trope come to mind?)
You sound stressed. Maybe you should sit down and relax with a couple slices of hot buttered toast. Wouldn't you like some toast?
What's the fatality rate in South Carolina for luxury sports sedans?
How do South Carolina's collision rates compare to others were Tesla's are (or are you suggesting that all Teslas are in South Carolina)?
Or not. I love the weasely " In January of this year in China, a Tesla ploughed into the back of a stationary truck at speed, killing the driver. Should that incident prove to be related to Autopilot...". Well, yes, in the same way that if a train were to crash tomorrow you could write "Should that incident be related to the Galaxy 7..." without any evidence that it was involved at all.
Here's a Google Transmangle of the original article in Chinese:
https://translate.google.com/t...
Basically, the evidence that autopilot was in use was... um... his dad thinks it must have been because his son is a good driver and wouldn't have hit that truck. And he wants to "prove" it by... showing that the car's speed wasn't changing.
Whether the autopilot was on or off in a given situation is logged and easy to recover. Any reporter who suggests that an incident was "due to autopilot" without at first finding out whether the system was even on is being grossly irresponsible.
Here, I'll put it quite simply: airplanes are vastly more reusable than Falcons are designed to be. Boeing still does quite good business.
You're assuming a market similar to SpaceX's current market where they launch 6-9 rockets a year. I - and they - are looking forward to a market where they're launching hundreds per year. I'll repeat: Reusability will mainly just keep SpaceX from having to expand their production too greatly, if they can make it reliable and affordable.
Not necessarily. Contrary to your statement that there's a "glut of launch systems", there's actually a serious shortage right now in launch vehicle production. There are far more companies with payloads than launch providers can manage for now. Additionally:
* The cheaper launch prices get, the higher that number will get.
* Not all first stages will be recovered
* None of the second stages will be recovered
* Even recovered launch stages don't have an infinite life, they're only targeted for a few dozen launches
* You have to ramp up inventory no matter what as the market grows.
* Falcon Heavy has four large cores
And so on. There still will be ample need for production. Reusability will mainly just keep SpaceX from having to expand their production too greatly, if they can make it reliable and affordable.
I don't doubt that someone brought it up.
I also don't doubt that someone said something to the effect of, "That won't be a problem because of ((reason that now looks debatable))"
I think it's too soon to say that. In the video we have a frame that looks just fine, then a flame with the whole area whited out. True, the flash is centered on the right-hand side, around where the rocket meets the strongback. But that doesn't mean that's actually where it started. Or that the strongback/fuel system was to blame. Or even that the source of the blast wasn't right in the center of the stage, with the stage just happening to breakout on the strongback side first.
Too early to say. We'll find out in the end.
Huh?
In many cases that is correct. AMOS-6 happened not to be one of those, but....
Failure probabilities don't work that way. Every rocket family, and every individual model, tends to get safer as time goes along as problems are remedied and fixed. The cost for innovating (needed to bring costs down) is that you have to start over on that curve. But the more you launch, the more potential problems you fix and the lower the odds of a future failure. There's always a high degree of randomness, of course, but in general you find a problem, you fix the problem, and the rocket is a safer vehicle for it.
Do recall how terrible the Atlas and Delta families used to be in terms of reliability. Things blew up, they learned, and were remedied. Heck, in terms of families, Falcon 9 is almost like a whole family rather than a single rocket thusfar... some of the changes, like switching to densified LOX, are pretty dramatic changes. They're trying to evolve and optimize it very, very quickly. But of course, that faces the learning curve reset problems above.
(Also, on that note, I think it's a bit premature to talk about the spotless record of the Delta-IV heavy, given that it's only ever had 9 launches, vs. Falcon 9's 29 (if you count AMOS-6... which if you're going to count it in the failure category, you should count it toward the total as well).
Some aspects of the Falcon design were designed to speed up the learning curve - and seem to have worked. Namely, the engines seem to have become quite reliable; part of the reason for going with so many engines was not just so that you can keep going after an engine failure, but also so that you're mass producing the engines and going through ten per flight; you're going to retire the risk a lot faster when using something in such large numbers. On the other hand, there's only two stages/pairs of tanks per flight, two COPVs, etc, so the learning curve is going to be - and has been - slower. . Falcon Heavy will help speed it up, of course, since there's four separate cores, all built similarly.
For a totally new (and frequently evolved) branch, Falcon 9's reliability is quite high; there are mature systems in use today with reliability records no better. But everyone wants you to approach 100%. At some point, SpaceX is going to have to stop with working on the "development branch" and offer up a "stable release" - that is, get the same identical cores with a long safe launch record, and stop changing them. And I'm sure they know that. But they seem to have a higher priority that they want to get to first: evolving their rockets to the point where they feel they can change the world. Not just "cheaper than everyone else", but "immensely cheaper than everyone else".
It's a tall order. But I fully sympathize with it.
On the upside from a stability perspective, there's really not much more need for evolution on the F9 production side, now that they're regularly landing cores. Getting multi-mission reliability, however, that's going to be a new challenge.