I am generally bullish on SpaceX, and I'm quick to forgive mistakes in flight - engines, avionics, control systems, etc - that shit is difficult.
But the pad failing is indefensible. Any engineer on staff should have been able to see that as a problem, and if they were over ruled by executives then they have serious problems ahead.
Yes they know the problem, we for sure know Elon himself did know the problem, they went ahead with it anyway. They don't care if they damage some wetlands or create large dust clouds or similar, they simply write it off as a fine which they expect to not affect them in a major way.
I wonder whether there' a reason behind all of this that they absolutely cannot share, perhaps related to the challanges and delays they experienced with the environmental assessment in '22? Maybe that they calculated they'd be better overall taking the hit on the pad in the short term and just getting that (already superceded) rocket launched, rather than opting for yet more bureaucratic delays?
That's what I believe too. They knew it wouldn't be great, and instead of waiting to get it perfect they decide to test the rocket anyway. I doubt they expected the damage they had, but that's why you test, so you know.
I'm not sure how "bad" it was if it also had the noise suppression system (read: a crapload amount of water being pumped into it) and a flame deflection system maybe
They're working without precedent and I don't blame them for wanting to go for it in a full scale test. I don't know if you read the article, but the author, a civil engineer, makes the case that SpaceX deliberately went without a real pad just to see how bad the damage would be. They're planning to use a radically different pad for the next launch: a steel plate upsidedown showerhead with water spraying out.
That will push water directly opposite of the thrust. I expect the water to be pushed backwards, the plate to melt and the exaust to be pushed into the water tank and maybe we will see a steam explosion.
There is a reason flame diverters are diverters instead of blockers. It's much much easier to just throw the exaust to the side instead of trying to fight it head on. Don't try to use force to block it, put a 45 degree angle and use geometry and physics to your advantage.
If they really want to experiment with unconventional solutions they could make a small scale test with a spent F9 and see if the idea is feasible. For what it's worth, even the F9 uses a flame diverter trench.
I get why they don't want to. It probably means modifying the tower too, probably to make it taller. But I foresee this shower head plate going badly.
AFAIK flame diverters at Boca Chica would be technologically very challenging because of high ground water level, that is why they try other solutions.
You don't need to dig to make the diverter. You can also build upwards. And I don't think you even have to make it of concrete. But from the tiny (Electron) to the super heavy (Saturn, N1, SLS) they all used some form of diverter. It doesn't have to be over engineered like the ones built by NASA. Even the Relativity Terran 1 which only ever launched once had a diverter.
Since the Super Heavy and the Starship are lifted into place by the tower instead of being rolled already assembled or rolled and erected from horizontal, it would be far easier for Super Heavy to have an above ground diverter compared to other rocket systems because it is no longer necessary to build the artificial hill and ramp on which to roll it. But the diverter is still needed.
But why would you ever put the plate at 0° when you can put it at 45°. Yes you need some height, but is that so onerous?
I am not saying they have to build something equivalent to the SLS/SST/Satun/Soyuz/Proton concrete pad infrastructure. Just put a 45° angle. Wedge, cone, pyramid, whatever shape works. Make everything out of steel if it works and is cheaper. Even RocketLab with their tiny Electron have a diverter. You can see it here: https://youtu.be/P_tGKxL6CLI?t=31
That paragraph was hyperbolic sarcasm which I hoped would have been made clear by suggesting the tank would explode.
Note that even in the test you linked the plate was angled. This is not done just to redirect heat but in order too redirect the sound: https://physics.byu.edu/docs/publication/4678
Reflecting that towards the engines is probably suboptimal.
It's not "without precedent" - they want to ignore the precedent and the entire concept of careful engineering for the sake of going fast (i.e. less money spent on step-by-step experiments). I think this is as irresponsible as the Titanic submarine. Hardware is not software.
The problem with this argument, when talking about space, is that precedent is often so extremely conservative and over-engineered that there's likely to be a huge middle ground between "good enough" and what NASA did in the 60s.
NASA built a launch pad with a flame diverter and water quenching system - and it worked! But now they have it, they're unlikely to test launches without it. Space X clearly think that there's a middle ground - something which is simpler, quicker and cheaper than the status quo, but which is good enough.
Clearly they failed - and arguably they were irresponsible not to do more tests. Given the environmental repercussions of failing, they probably should have started with something closer to precedent and worked iteratively to simplify it. But when you're talking about this sort of very low volume system (how many launch pads, total, are there in the world?), precedent is only worth so much. (It's also the reason so little progress was made in re-usable launchers until SpaceX came along).
Hardware is not software - I completely agree. But you can only make progress by testing hardware. Assumptions are rarely correct.
Broadly speaking, any individual or organisation working in a regulated industry is directly incentivised to either maintain the current status quo of conservatism, or increase it further.
Maintaining existing conservative approaches brings a huge amount of 'CYA' with little direct downside. Trying to even slightly roll back from a conservative position places all of the risk on the individual or individuals responsible, with a huge downside versus a small incremental upside that few will likely appreciate. It's mostly a thankless endeavour
I see this regularly in a different industry (with FDA, EMA) and it's what SpaceX are dealing with here. While I'm not arguing that their decision to launch with the existing stage 0 was correct, their decision to do something differently has introduced that much larger downside - further delays and potential censure from the FAA, and opprobrium from commentators and internet forums alike.
The alternative is the SLS, how many billions down the drain is that?
The true issue with the launch was the flight termination system taking 15-30s to trigger, which they have had to requalify since that is what protects the public from harm.
Have you looked at what SpaceX promised NASA for HLS? They need to be able to launch it and rapidly refuel it with 13 tankers. They’ve already spent a few billion, by the time they can reliably launch 13 refueling tankers in rapid succession and not destroy their stage 0, we could be taking $10-15 billion in dev costs putting Starship firmly in SLS territory.
Nasa over engineered pad 39A and now they have a pad that can probably launch anything. But SpaceX with stage 0 did absolutely nothing even though most rockets in history used a diverter of some kind. A simpler and cheaper solution is welcome, but ignoring physics and doing nothing is just baffling (especially for the largest rocket ever). Even RocketLab with their tiny Electron have a diverter. You can see it here: https://youtu.be/P_tGKxL6CLI?t=31
And yet, the SLS has flied one successful mission and put something in lunar orbit without a hitch, while Starship failed in so many ways:
- it destroyed its pad
- it went off course as soon as it left the pad
- 8 out of 33 engines failed - one of which immediately after firing (causing it to go off course)
We'll see what the future brings, but for now its clearly SLS 1 - Starhsip 0. Given the amount of failures in the Starship exepriment, my bet is that we'll see at least 1 more successful SLS launch before the first Starship launch to reach orbit and back.
Down the drain? The money has been used to pay people's labor and sourcing materials. That was demand attended to by highly sophisticated supply chains. SLS isn't some stone monument in the desert. It's a huge engineering undertaking.
Yes, a huge portion of the money was down the drain because of the significant waste. It enabled bloated, inefficient companies to stay alive supporting this one massive project.
SLS could have been done differently. Instead it was loaded with political favors demanding specific parts/suppliers.
We can only know what was a dead end, waste or bloat in a complex systems pathways in retrospect. I would prefer for humanity's sake to see more avenues of technological advancement pursued rather then only those conforming to some(one's) definition of efficient/correct. SpaceX might be construed to be blowing private investment in some guy's grand vision of space exploration that might turn out to be simply vain. Time will tell. Deriding people exploring the edge of human progress because they don't fit with your values is presumptuous.
Someone's cost is another's value. Money didn't get burned. It moved along in the economy. It moving in ways you disapprove of is no basis to call it wrong. Unless you wanna parse the whole economy and veto things you don't agree with. Let me know how that turns out.
The government can only spend so much money without things breaking down. When some of that money goes to bloat, that is waste. Despite it still being in the economy. And it's not about some kind of personal approval factor. If the government pays 2x what it could have paid for the same level of quality, that's entirely objective.
If you're being objective with numerical measurements, care to provide source?
Bloat = waste, that is just circular logic. You're defining what you want to call waste as a synonym of waste. Nasa gets a budget and spend it on space missions, propulsion technology and launch vehicles. That money employs engineers and scientists and generates demand for high specs engineering firms and supply chains. The bang for the buck is this impact on the economy, stimulating education, R&D etc. Not the rocket that fits your definition of efficiency. Having more then one actively used propulsion vehicle with different technological approaches is a national investment in resilience.
Calling it bloat and inefficient because it takes more money per launch then another 100% experimental and unproven platform is incredibly myopic.
I do not have a source for the generic example number.
If you want sources for government spending too much on things, those exist all over.
> Calling it bloat and inefficient because it takes more money per launch then another 100% experimental and unproven platform is incredibly myopic.
No, that's not what people are saying. The problem is that the main companies NASA contracts to are running in an extremely inefficient way and they get paid more when they waste money.
This is a problem that would exist even if SpaceX never became a company.
> That money employs engineers and scientists and generates demand for high specs engineering firms and supply chains. The bang for the buck is this impact on the economy, stimulating education, R&D etc.
The problem is the dollars that aren't going to engineering and R&D.
Dollars that just stimulate the economy are bloat when they're going to some big company out of a budget that's supposed to be doing things like exploring space. If you want to just send out dollars to stimulate the economy, send them out to people with low incomes and they'll have a much bigger impact.
And the Super Heavy will never go to Mars. Starship might. But how it launches from Mars is entirely speculation. For something like Starship to launch you need plenty of pad infrastructure anyway: fueling, chilling, etc.. If you can build that you can build a diverter no problem.
Also on Mars you need to dig anyway to create any kind of habitable environment due to radiation and you have no issues digging caused by the water table. So digging a diverter on Mars might even be easier then digging one at Boca Chica.
If that is true, it's dangerously irresponsible, both to the protected environment they make their base in, and to themselves in terms of regulatory risks they are exposing themselves to.
It's quite likely that the launch will mean they have to litigate for their right to even keep using the Boca Chica site, given that both locals and environmental protection organizations are now aiming for their guts.
That's why you can't just "move fast and break things" when dealing with rockets. SpaceX is not allowed to launch a rocket that they don't have confidence will not explode on the pad. If one ever does, they will surely have to dismantle the site and move somewhere that is not a protected wildlife reservation.
In fact, they were also not really supposed to launch a rocket they didn't have confidence they could detonate if it veered off course - which they did (remember, the FTS failed to detonate the rocket on demand, and we were lucky that it was far enough away from anything after the attempt that it didn't put anyone in danger before structural forces destroyed it). The FAA investigation will determine whether they did their due diligence and simply made a mistake, or whether they acted irresponsibly on that front as well.
You're completely missing the point: if the rocket fired up its engines and immediately went off course from the pad, they would have to trigger the flight termination system at ground level which would cause the near fully loaded to rocket to explode on the pad.
If an area of a launch site is so valuable as to not be allowed to ever be at risk of mishap from the rocket launch, then the launch site should not be there.
However, the launch site is there and has already passed review for launch operations from that location. The occurrence of a launch failure or damage to the site does not suddenly mean re-evaluation on that basis: the default state of all rocket launches is that the rocket may explode upon ignition.
The environmental suit is motivated by people who have had an axe to grind with Elon Musk specifically (as opposed to SpaceX) unifying up with the regular environmentalist opposition, but neither has a valid claim here: a rocket failure resulting in destruction of the rocket and the facility is part and parcel of having any area performing launch operations.
Talking about "confidence" is irrelevant because that's not how you do a safety assessment: the assessment is "what happens when a failure happens, not if". You can only factor in "confidence" if your mitigations would depend strongly on an expected rate of failure being achieved.
Welcome to anything Musk? Like the newly uncovered “gas” pedal issues affecting all Teslas, that were repeatedly shrugged off as user error, until an independent group found the issue for them?
> drivers might step on the accelerator for too long, increasing the risk of a crash
Wow, ok. So there's no actual issue with the accelerator pedal, it's just that people are too stupid to not correctly operate a vehicle and the need to be guarded from making mistakes by adding a warning to the software.
There's a lot of stuff objectively wrong in Teslas (see phantom braking, for example), but this isn't one of those things.
Yes, this is the serious issue. Not that people step on the wrong pedal.
The issue is with the inverter design. All Tesla cars on the roads use the 12V system as a voltage reference for the accelerator pedal position. If you turn the wheel while the car isn't not moving, it sources over 100 amps from the 12V system which causes a voltage drop to near 0V for hundreds of milliseconds. If the computer initiates a recalibration of the ADC during that time period, max throttle will be close to 0V until a later recalibration, which will immediately launch the car at very high speed. It also explains why Tesla says the pedal was pushed. It wasn't, but the software thought it was.
> What is the fuck you list?
Simply put, it’s what you tell Billy Bob to get him to shut the fuck up, and as someone who hates you, still make him think what you are doing actually makes sense.
> The fuck you list are 3-5 key points about why your business is amazing and you are going to win. They are the important points you would feel annoyed for having not conveyed when you leave that big meeting with the investor you really want to close.
If you're the owner of your company, the company won't fire you. You can still harm your company (and thereby yourself) by attacking your biggest customers on social media.
On his private twitter? While NOT posting about the company at all?
It was a customer of the company that got offended. Should he know every customer of the company? If the company has 1000s of customers, are they all off limits? Are you supposed to know who they are?
If you work for AT&T and an AT&T customer (of the millions it has) is a jerk or you have some political disagreement with their views, do you get to tweet about it on your personal twitter account? Should they be able to complain and get you fired?
I don't think anyone is debating VMWare's legal right to fire her, just the wisdom of such a decision.
If I was a big tech company especially one trying to find people interested in working lower down the stack, I wouldn't go around pissing off leftist furries.
Bullshit. Bringing someone from outside a business to a conversation that "slightly livetweets" what is being said is totally not acceptable. I invite you to bring an outside party to your next business meeting, standup or all hands meeting and have them "slightly livetweet" it. You will find the door before the meeting ends.
Businesses have every right to some level of obscurity on what happens internally. There is a very clear difference between using a tape recorder or your smartphone to record a conversation (after clearly stating that you will do so!) and having someone without any relation to the company present and blurbing everything into the ether.
Those meetings are not disciplinary meetings where your performance is being discussed. Everything in a disciplinary meeting is workplace conditions, full stop.
And if hr disagreed, they could have asked the guest to leave.
How does it being a disciplinary meeting effect the validity of bringing in an external party that isn't professionally tied to any party and which "slightly livetweets" events to the general public?
Were they not livetweeting: fine, you can bring a family member or friend to these meetings.
There's a difference between speaking publicly about workplace conditions and livetweeting the details of an individual conversation in a (likely) mocking tone. At that point, the only thing standing between you and being fired is whatever legal defense you can muster, because no reasonable person is going to want to work with you after that.
I'm in slightly overlapping social circles with Liz and have never felt remotely insulted the times we've chatted. I don't follow her on Twitter anymore and haven't been around her since the pandemic started, but I'd be shocked if she insulted people indiscriminately.
For all I know she might insult people when she sees them say things she thinks are shitty, but I haven't experienced that and I think we've disagreed on things in the past.
Someone you brought in is doing something disrespectful and indicative of the central problem to the conversation.
If you come to my house and draw on my walls - I ask you to stop and let's have a conversation about it, so you bring a friend who starts drawing on my walls while we're talking about you drawing on my walls.
You've lost all goodwill that I was willing to extend to you.
How is it that you think this makes it better? I’m asking in all seriousness. To my mind, I can’t conceive of ever thinking this way, so I’m trying to understand what your thought process is.
Is saying "the blood never washes off" the hands of this DoD employee really a personal attack? I mean, it certainly seems like a consistent and reasonably widely held belief that military industrial complex jobs cost lives.
There's of course the opposite opinion too. I'm not interested in trying to demonstrate that one opinion is right or wrong, just that like, is this really an attack?
Yes. There's a difference between saying "I would like to avoid you because your industry costs lives" and "I'd shake your hand, but, y'know, the blood never washes off". They're both basically statements about the same thing, except one is an attack while the other is merely expressing disapproval.
It's rude, sure, but I still fail to see how that rises to the level of attack? What harm is intended or possible from a comment like that? Are all rude comments attacks?
Accusing someone of having blood on their hands is generally an attack to mean that the accused has caused unjustifiable death. To contrast, if person A saves person B from a mass shooter by killing said shooter, it'd be odd for person B to say to A "You have blood on your hands!" (unless it's literally true).
"You have committed unjustifiable harm." is clearly an attack. People who commit unjustifiable harm are generally supposed to be shunned, penalized, or killed according to how human societies have operated across the world (various things can get in the way of this, but this is the baseline).
So now we're at "My employer's client is someone who should be shunned, penalized, or killed. (and I'm going to post it publicly in a way to make it possible for said client to be able to see it!)".
Finally, a lot of business runs on vibes. Having employees that attack your clients in public sends bad vibes. Even if it's just a 'rude comment', why endanger your business for someone who so deeply fails the vibe check?
Of course it is an attack, and they tagged him in the tweet too. There were plenty of opportunities to keep the job after this point (deleting the tweets, not being a massive douchebag in every interaction with the company) but they gave the company no choice.
Use common sense. "[..] blood on your hands [..]" implies he's indirectly a murderer at least. Calling someone a murderer is in the best case defamation or an insult.
"Fuck you" has so many different tones, and is so ubiquitous. It can be playful, jocular, intense, deadly serious, all over the place. Fuck you is not, by default, a personal attack, imo.
It's also almost certainly culturally different on different coasts, online, in person, etc. A tweet is like, nothing.
It's really, really not. Fuck you has a huge range of meaning. Carlin built several comedy bits around the word Fuck specifically because it was used colloquially so many ways.
Did he took some person, in audience or otherwise public and built entire bit around saying "Fuck you" addressing that person?
Carlin's sketches (at least ones that come to my mind, as I really loved to watch Carlin about 10-7 years ago) is irrelevant. When Carlin said "fuck you" he was speaking about phrase, not to someone in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDqaOLThPg4
There could be different Carlin bits that I don't know about, and I'm sure that he said a lot of fuck yous to all presidents at a time in same way as op did to DoD guy, but no, I don't buy your comment saying that Carlin's fuck you and screenshot from the post are same things. Especially given what followed.
Very rough analogy, just to illustrate the point and how I see your arguing (as, at this time, I'm already believe that you're arguing in bad faith). You cannot say: "this guy is not guilty in a murder, as murders are happening in nature all the time. Dragonflies are killing flies, birds killing dragonflies, humans killing birds, humans killing humans, ergo no one is guilty, those are just facts"
I do believe I'm at least attempting good faith here, I just do not find "fuck you" as a tweet, even levelled against me, to be particularly aggressive. Especially such a short message.
I'm likely more terminally online, more cynical, or more desensitized, but I see the two word "fuck you" to be such low effort that it doesn't even rise to the level of notice.
Like, an insult that specifically called out my behaviors or appearance or something and said fuck you? That feels meaningful, that's personal. But like, autocompleting two words flippantly into a tweet is like... Nothing?
But could you accept that other people can take that differently, especially if those people represent paying customers and getting such message from people who represent a vendor?
I have had a different life from you. I've been homeless, I've been wealthy, I've lived in many cultures and communities from suburbs to communes. I've worked tech I've worked as day labor moving soil by hand. I guarantee you that language (and especially the use of curse words), varies wildly.
I have lived in many countries and had a wide variety of jobs and life situations as well. You are not impressing anyone with your knowledge about cultural nuance, everybody knows that any sentence can be interpreted in many different ways. And everybody that argues in good faith also knows that saying "fuck you" on Twitter, to someone that you don't have any rapport with, is going to be interpreted as an insult.
I disagree, I think of tweets as nothing - air, fluff, someone expressing themselves without thinking. If someone tweets fuck you at me I'm not insulted, it's such a low effort post why would it ever even be parsed by me into anything meaningful?
It's like being insulted because someone farted at the hotel you were staying at. It's of so little consequence it cannot possibly be an insult.
It's incredible to see HN lose their minds because someone sent a two word tweet with a curse word in it, lol. A tweet.
You're not even wrong, but the problem is that when you post on Twitter, any and all context and nuance is immediately lost and all that's left is a string of ASCII spelling out "fuck you".
That's fair, but also, Twitter culture is definitely it's own culture, and I've largely seen quickly slammed out "fuck you"s to be emotionally equivalent to the rolling eyes emoji or the "wanking" hand gesture.
It certainly reads like an attack, and that's to someone who agrees with the sentiment. And as an observation, in professional contexts you can generally be poetic and figurative when talking about good things ("Gary is such a godsent and a genius for showing us the way to restructure our department"), but it's in bad taste to do it to express negative things ("I worked with Gary and he's an absolute mouth-breather and defecated all over our infrastructure").
Oh I get it, I just think it's naive. I've read dune several times over the past 40 years, and the person I was in my youth would have agreed with you.
These days, not so much. I believe in building communities via mutual aid and support, and that if people have their basic needs meet they will produce incredible results. People want to do good, but are often too tired or too afraid or too burnt out to do it.
If you are regularly burning food in steel or iron pans, maybe it's time to understand why? I cook in exclusively iron and steel cookware and I cannot remember the last time something got burned (excepting when I deliberately charred something.)
Please don't take your skill in this for granted. It's a gift. I've been using cast iron pans sporadically for four decades, following all of the common advice, and failing magnificently every time. I still use one occasionally to put a crust on a steak ... and then use a small piece of chainmail[1] to defeat the klingons.
It's not that I don't believe you. It just doesn't work that way in my pan on my stove with my food at my skill level, at all. I gave up and buy nonstick pans and replace them every other year or so.
I don't cook enough (and never steak) for you to assign me much weight, but FWIW I've had a (lighter, spun) cast iron skillet for 8ish years. I followed a seasoning procedure available online that involves (IIRC) 3 rounds of applying thin coats of flaxseed oil and leaving it in an oven at a fairly high temp.
This process went fine, but I always had to baby the pan (had to be very careful cleaning it with said chainmail, very careful with what/how I cooked in it) and had to re-do the initial seasoning several times when it got too troublesome.
This process would leave the pan at a dark brown, and for a while I blamed this on not removing rust well enough before seasoning or not babying it well enough for it to build up to a ~normal black coat.
At some point during the early pandemic I tired of this. I decided to do something similar on the stovetop where I could observe/iterate better. Apply a coat, wait for it to stop smoking, and repeat until it was black. (plus a few for good luck; I didn't keep track; this took maybe dozens of rounds?)
I've had a much better time since then. The most ~babying I've done is applying a few fresh coats if I don't use it for a while or water doesn't bead when I rinse it.
Yeah, when my cast iron skillet starts to act up I'll just lightly scrub it with dish soap and a brillo pad, dry it, then add a very light coating of oil and heat it up on the stove until it smokes. You want some ventilation of course. Then, it's restored to easy fried egg condition.
I would probably give up on cooking if I had to buy a new set of pans every year. That sounds entirely ridiculous. It's seriously not some special gift to be able to cook on a carbon steel, stainless steel, or cast iron pan. I've even trained people who have never cooked before in a single cooking session. Were they perfect right away? Nope. But it isn't that difficult and learned quickly after a few solo attempts
I cook 99 out of 100 of my meals, and 9 out of 10 meals I cook in a small counter-top air-fryer. The whole gadget costs less than a good pan. That 10th meal is probably eggs in a non-stick pan, so that pan lasts years longer now.
I bought a nice new range right before I discovered the air-fryer, and it now functions mostly as a device for holding up the air-fryer.
I've taught people to juggle or even (barely) ride a unicycle after a lesson or two. That doesn't mean those aren't difficult skills to acquire.
Plus, many people who are learning do not have the privilege of an experienced teacher. Relying on instructions, videos, and trial & error takes more time and energy for most people. I agree with you that it's worth the effort though.
Same. it's an art form sometimes, and i've cooked the same dish and had it come out great... and then the next time get charred like a mofo.
I suspect it has to do with electric vs gas and being able to get and maintain a stable temp with gas. But that could just be a poor craftsman blaming his tools.
I have been learning how to season, cook with, and clean cast iron. As someone who did not grow up using it it’s definitely not intuitive. The other challenge is that I either have to lock it away or teach everyone else in the household how to care for it. At various points in my life I’ve had coatings ruined by roommates, partners, guests, and housekeepers who did things that seemed perfectly sensible like letting it soak in soapy water.
It's similar to how my partner has a stainless steel pan that I avoid using because I have not had the bandwidth to internalize the right ratio of heat, time, and oil to cook things on it without burning/sticking, whereas they have no issue with it. It's a good reminder not to take internalized skill for granted.
Soapy water won't break down the molecularly bonded fat and iron on your cast iron. If you mistake leftover grease for seasoning, then sure, soapy water will get rid of it.
The trick to not sticking on steel pan is just preheating it properly. A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick. Just let it get hot enough.
> Soapy water won't break down the molecularly bonded fat and iron on your cast iron.
In that case I'm not sure what the exact mechanism was. But I know that after others have used/cleaned a seemingly well-seasoned pan I've had to deal with chips, flakes, and/or rust and had to go back through the whole annoying seasoning process. And of course it's entirely possible that despite carefully following instructions that I've done the seasoning wrong -- chemistry is the only class I ever flunked.
> A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick.
My partner made a similar recommendation. It sounds trivially easy but for whatever reason I have not managed to make it work. Given that cast iron (generally) works fine for me I've had minimal motivation to learn the idiosyncrasies of another material, though I would like to give it another shot at some point.
It's gaslighting by the cast iron/stainless steel crowd, pure and simple.
I've talked to multiple experienced and home chefs about this disconnect and they've admitted two things:
1) cooking on a screaming hot pan is possible of course. It's how all professional kitchens work. But it's way harder! You have to pay close attention & the timing for error is very small. Cooking at lower heat on Teflon lets you make more adjustments.
2) After doing everything perfectly, and seasoning perfectly, for the same heat you ABSOLUTELY still need more of some oil or butter on a cast iron or stainless steel then you would for an equivalent Teflon pan. This is non-negotiable.
you can season stainless steel just like you season cast iron, it just requires more coats to hold and will need to be repeated more often. I've seasoned my skillets and frying pans. I'd never bother with my sauce pans bc they get acidic stuff like vinegar for poached eggs, tomato sauce, or fruit, but they're steel anyway so I can just scrub them with wire wool.
I guess that it is due to the heat source (ceran cook top) and being used to using too little oil (with a teflon pan I use less than a teaspoon in most cases).
But the pad failing is indefensible. Any engineer on staff should have been able to see that as a problem, and if they were over ruled by executives then they have serious problems ahead.