— Michelle L.D. Hanlon (@hanlonesq) August 12, 2026
This may be the most visionary and sensible NASA administrator ever.
[Update a while later]
Jared’s post was presumably in response to this:
Reading this is incredibly radicalizing. I want to do the exact opposite after reading this. It also oozes with AI-written prose. Fitting, as it’s anti-human and is intended to stop settlement of Mars. https://t.co/tHunJ5UX6s
— Robotbeat🗽 ➐ (@Robotbeat) August 12, 2026
Planets suck. Dismantle Mars! Build a Dyson Swarm! Giant Space Habitats for Humanity!
You’ve got my vote.
IIRC you’ve been voting that way for 30 years.
I say do the opposite whatever the planetary protection snob Carolyn Porco wants to do.
Somewhere, I have a spicy email exchange where I mentioned Starship would democratize access to the outer planets and she lost her marbles.
She was spicy, I was polite and I think that set her off worse. She may be good at what she did for a living but her mindset is one of a swamp creature for sure.
Those Columbian drugs are something. Heck, I don’t even agree with:
“Laying the groundwork for the first human mission to Mars” rightly argues that integrating engineering, human health, science and planetary protection from “day one” is non-negotiable for a successful Mars mission.
The author claims it is missing ethics. Heck, protecting the planet is one goal too many. My intentions would be to concur the planet. The rest is a pretense that the planet is a lifeform that needs protection.
The ethics we need is that any marxist be sent out the airlock naked. Nip it in the bud, before it results in millions more deaths.
I have no doubt Musk let the president and NASA know that their timeline and his were not the same. If they choose to wait around for Artemis SLS that’s their business. However SpaceX is in fact going to the moon soon. When NASA gets around to cutting their losses they’ll be glad to book them on a moon flight as soon as possible. Which means a company not a government will already be establishing a presence there. Let the ethisist gather and come to some conclusions, then make a plan. That should take a couple of decades. ALSO Seems to me Spin Launch has a great project on the wrong celestial body.
The UN has never accomplished anything in space. The Europoors have accomplished relatively little, aside from the Russians who haven’t accomplished much in the last 3 decades.
We have a paper about the rats voting to bell the cat. The Cat (those who can actually accomplish things) should not allow this to happen.
The UN has never accomplished anything. FIFY.
Nothing positive, anyway…they’ve caused a lot of death and ruin
I think Isaacman’s common sense approach to everything shows the difference in approach between a person coming into government from private business, and rising through the government bureaucracy as an unimaginative drone.
Starship 40 recovery aborted and flooded.
Oh well. I’m sure they got lots of data. Let’s hope for a good catch on the next one.
Are we sure? Last I saw that was an nsf.com forum speculation, not verified, and they just changed tow-boats. They’re not nuclear, they have to gas-up.
“as I read their urgent call for NASA to charter internal workshops and launch new imagers, a profound and unsettling silence was felt”
Dear God. It “was felt”, was it?
I think this proves it wasn’t written by an AI, unless it was an AI trained on Ms. Uría’s overwrought prose.
SpaceNews. OK. I got a post deleted a month or so ago as “not meeting their community guidelines”.
The story was about sea based launch and was about some git saying “Our coasts deserve better” and denigrating the profit motive. I called these people BANANAS (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) and said the author must be a communist for denigrating the profit motive.
Tells me all I need to know about space.com
Space News isn’t Space.com.
Yeah, space dot com is so full of pop-up ads it’s basically unusable.
Thanks, my bad but the sentiment is the same.
I read that article and it could be a great satirical pisstake. The best satire is nearly indistinguishable from reality.
For me, it started with a lifetime ban from NASA Spaceflight sixteen years ago, and efforts to silence me have included direct threats from various USG employees. I think the problem is, people think my 35 books have given me a louder, more dangerous voice than in actuality.
I still think SpaceX should build a Starship launch complex at Jackass Flats. If it’s good enough for nuclear explosions, surely…
If at all possible, never let anyone whose sole contribution to your project is to add requirements, costs, delays, and meetings (but never funding) into a position of power. When considering letting someone into your project, be very specific about what capabilities they add to the team. The UN has zero positive capabilities.