vimeo.com/1192785015 Animation crossfading between a canal map of Mars, and a modern CGI map, so you can see how the "canals" line up with real features. By me. 2 views, above North and South poles of Mars.

Awards of up to $1.5M to complete some administrative tasks that would be required prerequisites for any normal research proposal. This is a list of things that scientists and universities typically do on spec, i.e. for free, to apply for a ~10-20% chance of getting <30% of this amount of funding.

I haven't found any justification for the enthusiasm around the idea that cheap launch solves a bunch of problems. It's basically 1.5 pages of speculation in "Reducing Space Mission Cost" by Wertz and Larson. That book is responsible for a lot of problems. (Note that Shotwell worked for Wertz.)

There's a big US electricity shortage exacerbated by the Iran War, tariffs, and the admin pulling permits from renewable projects, but even despite all this the scale of the solar & battery boom is just historic www.apricitas.io/p/americas-e...

Orbital data centers are bullshit. Everybody knows it. Anybody who claims otherwise is willfully stupid or lying.

NASA confirmed *some* Artemis III mission plans today, namely that the SLS rocket won't have a propulsive upper stage but a "spacer" instead. But we still don't much about what's going to happen when Orion docks with SpaceX and/or Blue Origin's landers www.nasa.gov/missions/art...

Solar has already won. Solar beats hydrocarbons on cost. It wins on fundamental economics. The U.S. already gets more power from the sun than from coal, and 17% of our power is from wind and solar. Do we want to be the only country not getting free power from the sky? I guess some people want that.

"It gives you the illusion of productivity and expertise but at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before.” www.404media.co/software-dev...

$1.2T to (maybe) intercept 10 missiles. And I suspect that $1.2T is probably 4-10x low. Golden Dome would easily be the largest and most complicated megaproject ever, which means throw everything you think you know about cost and budget estimates directly in the trash. What a scam.

Data centers in space are bullshit. Everybody knows it.

Even if launch were a free, data centers in space would still be bullshit. The case for cheap launch heralding a total paradigm shift, generally, is very thin. Only ~5-20% of mission costs are attributable to launch. The rest is the expense of making the damned things work in space.

A big problem with space data centers that they are 100% bullshit, everybody knows it, and anybody who claims otherwise is willfully stupid or lying.

🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪

Since everyone loved my last post on this topic, NASA just dropped a new coloring book about the sun: “Journey Through the Heliosphere: The Sun-Earth system in Color” #nasa #color science.nasa.gov/learning-res...

New Boards of Canada! Boards of Canada got me through undergrad. The opening of "Music Has the Right to Children" still triggers in me an intense foreboding / desire to stay up all night working on a problem set.

I'm SUPER excited about this event. It's at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in DC on June 3rd in the evening. It's open to the public and free, but you have to register beforehand. airandspace.si.edu/whats-on/eve...

My former colleagues at Space Scout have put together an excellent piece talking about Jared Isaacman’s destructive actions within the agency. www.spacescout.info/2026/05/op-e...

🎉 JOSS turns 10 today! Ten years, 3,500+ papers, 11,000+ authors, 4000+ reviewers, and a community that built something remarkable together. Thank you to everyone who's reviewed, edited, authored, or cheered us on along the way 💚 joss.theoj.org #openscience #opensource

Almost done with the third rewrite of my US PyCon tutorial, "Python for Absolute Beginners". I'm really pleased with the workbook/slides/practice format I have. If you've been meaning to learn to code, you should sign up! us.pycon.org/2026/schedul...

Last week, one of the worst plane crashes in American history occurred a few miles from my home. People died. Debris and ash fell in my neighborhood. It felt like just one more disaster in a blur of disasters. I needed to write down what I experienced so that I don't forget. Might as well share. 🧵

NEW from me: The US is building a record amount of power infrastructure, especially solar & batteries, and has broken out of a 15-year period of grid stagnation Yet this hasn’t been enough, and America has a widening electricity shortage that’s driving up prices 🧵 www.apricitas.io/p/americas-e...

I would not be surprised if Starship costs are being accounted into other buckets to make this bottom line project budget look smaller. That's a game that Tesla plays. It's a game that NASA cannot play. SpaceX needs Starship to seem cheap enough to develop that it can ever possibly be profitable.

Semi-regular reminder that launch costs have probably not come down at all for NASA missions, and have possibly gone up marginally. They are certainly not down by an order of magnitude.

Orbital data centers are bullshit. This is bullshit. Everybody knows it.

Nearly everything is secret, which makes it impossible to analyze or criticize directly. But Golden Dome, in every formulation I have seen described or posited, has all of the indications of being complete horseshit. Like SDI but way stupider. A bigger scam than orbital data centers. Prove me wrong.

This is very similar to the 2026 cycle. House sets NASA Science at $6B, not great, but much better than the $3.9B proposed. Sets the floor going forward, Senate will likely come in higher.

Just reposting this essay I wrote about learning more about the universe and adjusting my language accordingly for no particular reason today. (PS if Pluto is a planet then so are Eris and Makemake and Haumea and Ceres and and and... More planets! More!!) 🔭🧪 www.narratively.com/p/pluto-tran...

www.science.org/content/arti... House budget is out. 17% cut to NASA science 😭 🧪 🪐

For the first time in 100 years, #RenewableEnergy has overtaken #coal as a main energy source (33.8% vs 33%). Bonus points if you can name the main renewable power source that outperformed coal 100+ years ago. #Energy

The precise definition of "planet" doesn't matter.

Orbital data centers are bullshit, and everybody knows it.

There is a systemic schizophrenia in the stated objectives of many space industry leaders where they claim to want to take and accept more risks but they also want everything to be extremely efficient and never fail. Apparently nobody knows what "risk" means.

Isaacman keeps describing investments of funds into ambitious projects that didn't pan out as "wasted." If he is serious about the "Ignition" plan and "doing the nearly impossible" then a lot of funds will be "wasted" by his own definition. That is the nature of investments in moonshots.

Semi-regular reminder that launch costs have probably not come down at all for NASA missions, and have possibly gone up marginally. They are certainly not down by an order of magnitude.

Epic bullshit.

As astronauts, we didn't ask about political parties in space. The only thing we asked was what the mission required. But now we have a new mission to preserve our democracy—which requires us to defend constitutional values.

Somehow, it's been a year since my most recent book launched. Happy birthday to MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER—on Earth Day, appropriately. This is our home. Let's make it a loving place for everyone, not a resource for the ultra-wealthy to exploit. 🌍📘🎂

Token-based billing on large tasks feels to a lot of us like pulling the lever on a slot machine that has your credit card info. This will drive many normie developers to smaller open-weight models on infrastructure that they control, with predictable costs, even with marginally less performance.

Isaacman keeps describing investments of funds into ambitious projects that didn't pan out as "wasted." If he is serious about the "Ignition" plan and "doing the nearly impossible" then a lot of funds will be "wasted" by his own definition. That is the nature of investments in moonshots.

Only Congress can cancel Gateway. KSP isn't real life engineering. The timeline is ludicrous. The TRLs are too low. No Mars scientists were consulted about Skyfall. Instruments have _not_ been solicited. CLPS won't lower costs long term. Missions are not dice rolls. This will be bad for science.

"May not be" is doing a whole lot of work here. Data-centers-in-space is complete bullshit and everybody knows it.

What a fantastic Day of Action! 130 Planetary Society members came from 34 states and held over 200 meetings in Congress to #SaveNASAScience from the draconian cuts proposed in FY 2027. Between the two of us, Bill Nye and I did 13 TV interviews, from 6am to 6pm, local to national stations.

NASA has extended the response deadlines for several of the RFIs announced at "Ignition" by two weeks.

It won't fail because of me.

An onion will do well for such a shift

I attended an industry event early this year at which nearly every speaker, one-after-another, declared with confidence that everything in the future will be FFP. The brain parasite that makes everyone think FFP is a magic hammer has cause immeasurable harm and needs to die real soon.

Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know it is true what I guessed at;

Put science back in the driver’s seat Science at NASA is becoming a hitchhiker. After decades in the driver’s seat, where dedicated science missions made historic discoveries such as alien oceans, the accelerating universe and potential biosignatures on Mars, the agency now asks science to stand…

Here’s this week’s Better Offline. I’m joined by @adambecker.bsky.social to talk about introspection-free venture capital, the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse effect of LLMs, and trying to find a better future to focus on. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline