Thread by @mcrs987

Bunking? Debunking? What would you call this? I dunno, but this image is real, and here's a thread as to why;

Right so obviously there has been a TON of discussion on this image, when it is, if it's even real, where it's from, ect. Here's all the details I've noticed; 🧵

A quick little note here, as both a 3D artist and a photographer, I think my opinion here is pretty credible, I'm well versed in literally just how light works and interacts with things, how one could edit a photo, how things that may not be immediately obvious to others get missed. It's a slightly complex interaction but there's certain telltale signatures and attention to detail on super small things that make it impossible or near impossible to fabricate entirely, or to fabricate in a believable manner.

But I do ask that you do NOT take anything in here as absolute fact. This is my take on this and I HIGHLY advise looking at the evidence yourself.

Starting off by how it's taken; If we look at the bottom right you can see a square frame. Also, the image is very clearly warped in perspective. Very much looks like it's a photo taken of a monitor with the video playing on said monitor

A little context on what these cameras are. They are 360° cameras, two lenses, two sensors, 180° apart. On an unmanned buoy near the landing site. So there's going to be some weird distortions anyway.
(photos by @CosmicalChief & Mike Ryan on LinkedIn respectively)

With these two lenses there will be some weird distortions where they overlap. Also, this is at sea, there is a number of water droplets on these lenses (They aren't exactly small). This is why the descent footage is warped, due to water droplets, and then the seam between two lenses is visible here in the wider frame. It wouldn't be awfully difficult to fake that but that is certainly some good attention to detail if it were to be faked.

Next up, the way the light from the explosion diffuses through the signal light of the buoy.

This one might be harder to spot if you don't have much of an understanding of how light distributes through materials. But, that's why this note hasn't really been mentioned anywhere. If it looks correct and matches the rest of the image people tend to not notice it and so it doesn't get called out, if the image was fake. Again it is not impossible to fake such a thing but it would be quite challenging to blend it correctly. If one were to fake this, going to extreme lengths like this would just be absolute dedication just to fool a bunch of people.
(note, slightly orange, diffused in the center and absent from the edges, also the blending between the explosion and the buoy is like, virtually perfect, very hard to replicate, the signal light casing is probably made of plastic 1/4" or 1/8" thick or so to produce such lighting, which is roughly what one would expect)

Next up, a big bargaining point I've seen, the clouds. Virtually identical between both shots. Now, this is a strong contender for photoshop/tampering/editing in the eyes of many who believe the image is fake. (alignment by @_starmango_ )

But, it's also a strong suggestion that the explosion happened mere seconds after touchdown. Which lines up with roughly what we are expecting. More on that momentarily.

Additionally there is a very visible reflection and glow on the clouds. From experience such lighting is stupidly difficult to replicate on an already existing image.

Also fun bonus, I can roughly match the same cloud structures. It appears mirrored because one is above the clouds and one is below.

And finally of course, the explosion itself. Seen lots of people say things like "it wouldn't produce a mushroom cloud" or "it's too large"

To them, I say go read the 2nd EPA rev, post Flight 2, located here; faa.gov/media/76836

Albeit all of the figures stated there are for the upper stage Starship. It's a good reference point for the scales that we are dealing with here.

The Starship upper stage in the current configuration has propellant residuals of exactly 14,850kg (or about 15 tons) Albeit, this was the suborbital SN9 design but the tank sizes and capacities has not changed, yet.

For context, Superheavy has propellant residuals of around 20 tons. Considerably more potential energy.

Adding to this, more statements in the document describe the manner in which a Starship would detonate purely from propellant igniting after impacting the ocean. I am by far not an explosion or pyrotechnic expert so do with this information what you will. There is infact no uniform shockwave and the fact that the explosion has formed a mushroom cloud proves that it is lower pressure than the ambient atmosphere, so the explosion characteristics are virtually identical.

With a little bit of measuring pixels, and the known height and width of Superheavy, the explosion appears to be between 210 to 260m in diameter, assuming it's roughly hemispherical. Remember, not an airburst explosion. Which is why this FAA document is so helpful, because that's exactly what it describes.

Now, let me be clear, this is a MASSIVE fireball. Larger than the suborbital mishaps. But to an expected amount. Here's SN9 and SN10 overlayed onto it with the correct scaling.

With this also you can see that the camera exposure levels and the color of the fireball is actually just fine. Visually exactly what one might expect, even based off of previous actually observed ground explosions from the suborbital era.

Remember 14-15 tons versus about 20 tons of residual propellant. Not to mention, autogen/ullage gas isn't even included in that number, which could factor into the apparent size of it.

It's just an estimation but it gives a sense of scale. And that was just at that point in time. There's a fair chance it grew significantly larger. It depends on where you define the explosion end at.

Final notes. What happened to the vehicle itself. I'm 99.99% certain that this is infact real, pretty much no doubt about it.

The same EPA document may give us some insight into this.
The EPA describes a ship bellyflopping into the sea scenario, the original plan for Flight 1, 2, and 3.
It is not entirely the same but the Booster does flop itself into the water into a horizontal orientation. This happens at around 102km/h. Stream telemetry cut around 2 seconds before it hit the ocean's surface horizontally. That last two seconds can be inferred based on the ongoing acceleration to be somewhere around 110km/h by the time of impact.

For reference, the terminal velocity of the ship is 370km/h. Three times faster. So it should be more robust to failure at only 110...right?

The downcomer would fail first in the ship bellyflop scenario. Right up at the connection of the common dome and the downcomer, it would split, also also seen here in the EPA document, a test to failure of a downcomer segment sometime in 2021 at McGregor (Despite the weird nomenclature, no, that's not inside the suborbital prototype SN9)

Of course, that is just the ship. The fun thing is that the Booster sports a very similarly styled Downcomer transfer tube. If anything, it's significantly more fragile and has been known to break, implode, rupture, you name it. It's stupidly long because of how large Superheavy's LOX tank is.

If you are unaware another name for the transfer tubes is the downcomer. I've seen it used interchangeably but technically the correct usage would be the downcomer goes from the header tank and then to the transfer tube or directly to the engine plumbing. On the ship that applies, on the booster it doesn't. Gotta love inconsistent nomenclature

So yeah, working theory here is that after toppling, the downcomer was ruptured, propellant leaked and mixed between tanks. Looks like it was probably sitting there for a few seconds while the propellant mixed & then detonated.

Y'all want to know something funny, this is EXACTLY what occurred on SN10, albeit, much faster. SN10's downcomer was compromised and methane was leaking into the LOX tank over a period of 8 minutes after landing hard and without landing legs. The vehicle subsequently detonated in the same manner. This is like the one time where drawing parallels actually works lol.

Also I beg that we stop suggesting that the FTS went off. They safe it on descent, it was not heard as a callout on the Flight 4 broadcast, but it was on Flight 3, at T+6:22, at 28km. Notably the callout for Falcon's FTS being safed is between 30-35km for RTLS trajectories. Quite close in terms of phase of flight, I expect we'll see that timeline refined on future flights. Just weird that we didn't hear it this time. And no, you cannot "un-safe" the AFTS without the proper ground system connection. Why would you even do that after it's landed

I do have one more piece of evidence that could put the final nail in the coffin, but I'm still waiting on that data to be sent to me. So in the meantime I'll just post this for now and quote later on once I have said data.

Should also be noted that this is the PERFECT explanation for the vehicle just being straight up missing from the estimated landing location, with zero trace. Because it just immediately blew itself to bits and sank.

https://x.com/Harry__Stranger/status/1799060537642537044

If anyone's wondering, this image was originally posted by @BocasBrain, at least on this platform. He runs multiple Facebook groups which is where these images keep coming from.

https://x.com/BocasBrain/status/1809390911782367455