An interesting new discovery by LRO:
“If this hypothesis is true, only the first few hundred meters of the moon’s surface possesses little iron and titanium oxides, according to NASA. ‘But below the surface, there’s a steady increase to a rich and unexpected bonanza,’ it said.”
At the Space Settlement Summit last fall in Pasadena, a Canadian mining engineer berated the assembled for lack of seriousness when it comes to lunar resources. “You have no idea what’s under that dust,” he said, “and you won’t until you get up there and start drilling.” I thanked him for the comment, noting that for people who claim to want to develop the solar system, we think really small, likely from hanging out with NASA too much.
Category Archives: Business
Space Settlements
Robin Hanson says we will colonize the sun first.
Restaurants
Who is ready to go back to them?
The notion of wearing a mask in a restaurant is absurd. You can’t eat with a mask on. This is another area in which the pandemic hasn’t affected me much, because I’ve never liked going out to eat at restaurants, other than for social reasons. It’s both expensive and unhealthy to pay someone else to cook for you, and I don’t like having people serve me.
Launch Failure
Rocketlab didn’t go to space today, or at least not to orbit.
[Sunday-morning update]
Here’s the story from Eric Berger.
Tucker
The Left-Wing Crack Up
A great essay on the current culture war.
Quantum Computing
This could be an interesting salon on Thursday.
The Feckless Republicans
In the face of both the pandemic and the lawlessness, Bob Zimmerman isn’t happy with either the party or Trump.
Crew Dragon
Its solar panels are generating much more power than expected.
Well, that’s nice.
[Tuesday-morning update]
NASA is very happy with the Crew Dragon performance so far.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is moving from stage-production mode to fleet-management mode.
Only four cores doesn’t seem like enough to me. One of the reasons we retired Shuttle was that we had too small a fleet with only three. But SpaceX can build more.
[Bumped]
So Much For “The Content Of Their Character”
The demented legislature in Sacramento just voted to strip the California constitution of its requirements for non-discrimination. It’s up to the voters now.