“Pigs in space?” – What you can supposedly see in the SpaceX videos.

Rats in space?

Even if it was supposedly a rat that was said to have walked over the engine of the Falcon 9 rocket in the live broadcast of a SpaceX rocket launch in space, the claim is so absurd that the author feels the comparison with that from the Muppet Show well-known sketch series. A common sense check.

Space travel is an exciting story. Starting with the invention of the first engines, which initially naturally exploded more than they propelled, through the first people in space, the moon landing, the construction of the first space stations, right up to humanity's uninterrupted presence in space on the ISS since November 2000. They are technical achievements, milestones, setbacks, a lot of research and, with ever-improving media technology, ever-better live images of launches, landings or maneuvers in space.

SpaceX in particular has long been pampering the space-loving public with interesting pre-flight reports and a multi-camera live broadcast with telemetry data displayed and a timeline where all maneuvers (boostback burn, etc.) are described. Many may still remember the picture-perfect synchronized landing of the Falcon Heavy's two boosters in February 2018. We were always as close as possible. With each failure, affectionately called “unscheduled rapid disassembly,” where the reusable boosters were guaranteed not to be able to be reused. SpaceX even released a great compilation with matching music . They always had a sense of humor.

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Today we practically have “hands-on space travel”. We have virtual tours of the ISS and can look at exciting visualizations of orbital and docking maneuvers, which are informatively commented on by experts. Thanks to ISS spotting apps, we always know where we can observe the space station moving slowly across the sky with our naked eyes as a bright point of light in the dark. We can read everything we want to know about SpaceX's technology on websites. There are even fan groups on Facebook where space enthusiasts exchange ideas, and sometimes SpaceX employees also comment and discuss. It really couldn't be more transparent.

And then there were…

... people who claim that this is all nonsense, that no one flew into space at all, that all the recordings were recreated in the studio anyway. Or at least SpaceX didn't fly into space. The transmissions sometimes break off, it would never look like that if the recordings were real, and so on. And anyway, now you would see proof: In a video of a Falcon 9 launch, you would later see a mouse or rat running over the engine during the burning phase of the second stage.

Here is the video:

A rat.

Well, ignoring the exorbitant absurdity of this claim: There are a few arguments that speak against the presence of a rodent on the outer hull of a spaceship.

However, you have to differentiate here:

On the one hand, there are arguments that are based on the assumption that space travel is real, that the images were taken in orbit, and that there is no global conspiracy trying to hide from us the fact that we supposedly cannot fly into space at all. These would not be accepted at all by the people who really claim that a rat can be seen, since they argue that that is exactly the point: we would never have been in space, and the argument that a rat was there not being able to breathe wouldn't work because it wasn't space at all. Well, difficult...

On the other hand, there are also arguments that speak against the presence of a real rat, although one hypothetically assumes that this alleged “space conspiracy” exists and space travel does not exist.

Rats in space

The video shows the CRS-19 mission, a resupply mission with an unmanned Dragon capsule to the ISS. During the combustion phase of the second stage, the “rat” runs over the upper part of the vacuum nozzle, which is larger than the atmospheric version of the Merlin 1D engine.

Now one can rationally argue that the flight altitude at that point is over 190 km and the speed is already well over 10,000 km/h. This would have to be an extraordinarily resilient rat, also when it comes to the temperatures that prevail on the surface of the outer cladding - on the one hand, the glowing engine nozzle, and on the other hand, the temperatures of space, close to absolute zero.

You can also consider how big the engine actually is. The nozzle of the vacuum version of a Merlin engine is several meters long, the turbo pump is almost 2 m high, and the opening has the area of ​​a smaller room. If you compare the length of the segments of the cooling line on the outside of the engine with the length of the alleged rat, it would have to be extremely genetically modified to reach a length of almost half a meter. While there have been reports of "Rodents of Unusual Size", also known as ROUS (Rodents Of Unusual Size), these refer to mythical creatures from the novel "The Princess Bride" and the film adaptation of the same name. Other oversized rodents can be found in the 2017 film of the same name, a documentary about nutrias in Louisiana. However, no oversized rodents are usually found on rocket engines in low Earth orbit. The “super mice” brought aboard the ISS by SpaceX for the Rodent Research-19 experiment were also on board and not offboard.

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One can also argue irrationally by assuming that there really is such a conspiracy, no space travel, etc. It would follow that all recordings that are presented to us as a live stream would have been produced in the studio or on the computer. To further conclude, one would be able to remove inappropriate or unpleasant scenes that the general public should not see in advance or to manipulate the image material differently so that exactly this situation does not apply: the whole world can see the rat running over the engine , and all decades of global cover-up measures are destroyed with these few seconds of film.

Guys, let's be serious: Just like if you want to cart secret goods around, you definitely don't stick a big fat sign on the wagons , after hundreds or even thousands of hours of successful, fake shots, you wouldn't leave any footage with a rat on-line. If there really were a conspiracy that just wanted to deceive us into thinking that space travel was real, it would have to be planned and carried out with incredible precision so that it wouldn't be exposed. It would have to be a generational cover-up. This definitely wouldn't come to light through a rat. Where would this actually come from? Or rather, who modeled these on the computer if it is true that all space shots are just CGI?

What is it then?

The explanation is surprisingly simple: it is condensate that separates from the engine lines when it vibrates and also travels along the exhaust gas cooling line on the surface of the upper nozzle due to vibrations. It's just a coincidence that the camera is mounted in such a way that it looks as if the ice is moving "downwards". Similar phenomena have already been observed on other missions (for example on CRS-14 or CRS-16 ). The vibrations cause frozen condensate to dissolve due to the extreme temperature differences at the cooling nozzles ( here is an interesting video ).

The fact that we always try to recognize unknown forms as something familiar is part of the nature of human vision and recognition. This phenomenon is called pareidolia and is responsible for the fact that we can see animal figures in clouds, for example, or that a blurry image of a mountain ridge on Mars initially looked like a face.

Conclusion

Actually, the claim in itself is so absurd that it doesn't really need to be discussed: What can be seen on the video can be technically explained quite easily and plausibly, and it's not the first time that something like this has been seen . This should be clear to rational people relatively quickly.

However, if you first have to convince people that the Earth isn't flat, that we can really fly into space and then that this isn't a real rat, then it's a little trickier.

However, when it comes to animals in space, I personally am still in favor of pigs:

Author: Rüdiger, mimikama.org