I’m working on a lunar skycrane project, and doing a trade on how/when to unreel/reel the tether, but I’m thinking about simplifying by simply making it fixed length.
What was the most important transition in human history, the thing that most drastically altered our species' way of life? David Reich's lab has found evidence pointing to a new answer.
There are two standard candidates: 1. The shift from hunting and gathering to farming, around… pic.twitter.com/649RdS9Bl4
I’ve been waiting for this for years. I’m about to do an implant, but I’m wondering if I should just wait. I wonder how much it will cost. It sounds like it shouldn’t cost much.
With its Fujairah pipeline bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, UAE can now ramp up freely potentially adding around 2 million extra barrels a day and helping break the high-price grip..
I understand some in the community have an affinity for specific hardware, but the focus should be on outcomes. With respect to SLS, the desired outcome is launching crewed Orion spacecraft at a reasonable cadence, rebuilding muscle memory, and buying down risk so we can land…
ICYMI, from Jared’s X post: “I do not want to throw away billions of taxpayer dollars, and time we do not have, on a flavor of a rocket that is not necessary to return astronauts to the moon.”
[Thursday-afternoon update]
Bob Zimmerman has thoughts on his Congressional hearing.
And then we have the suit problem (that I talked about in my Reason study last year). But Eric Berger seems sanguine about it:
People often say there's no difference between "new" space and "traditional" space. Not true, and we've seen that play out with this spacesuit contract. Axiom has no guarantees it will ultimately profit on its fixed price suit contract with NASA. It could lose big time. But the…
I left Rockwell a third of a century ago when it became very clear that, despite being the prime contractor on the Shuttle, they didn't see themselves as being in the space business. They were in the government-contracting business.
An interesting discussion on the implications of AI and robots. Read the whole thread.
Maybe unpopular opinion? I think an age of abundance via AI might cause more war instead of less, because the value of land on earth will trend toward infinity (there is finite land on earth), while the cost of creating robot armies to fight over it will trend toward zero.