If you can accurately describe any system in your organization with the phrase "mass processing function requires [...] personnel to manually compile Excel spreadsheets," then please get in touch with me and we will fix that.

In 2017, author and programmer Leonard Richardson wrote a zine called "Tool Safety" about what he learned from writing Beautiful Soup, one of the most impactful Python libraries ever. I think often about "the best use of the power we have as computer programmers." www.crummy.com/software/Bea...

This is from the latest Senate markup of the NASA Authorization Act. I am concerned that the LTVI teams will be told to build instruments that simultaneously work for two rovers, inside of already tight budgets. I have spoken to all 3 LTV provider finalists, and the approaches are wildly different.

No. This is bullshit. The thing holding back space-based data centers is that they make no technical or economic sense at all. The concept has no value except as a grift designed to inflate valuations of companies and individuals who have over-leveraged in crypto, space, and AI.

a rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs

It is really important for the proponents of commercial deep space to understand that there are no "customers" other than scientists. None. And if you drive all of the scientists out by starving them of opportunities, then there will be no deep space economy. None. It's a telecom orbiter to nowhere.

For people who still care about this sort of thing, here's James Madison writing from 1793 (6 years after the delegates in Philadelphia signed the Constitution) about why the power to make war was vested in the legislature. press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/doc...

I find it difficult to believe that the second paragraph of this constituent response---which is in a different typeface, wildly different tone, and confuses "detainer" with "retainer"---was actually written or approved by Senator McConnell.

President Trump's approach to Iran is reckless, the editorial board writes. "He started this war without explaining to the American people and the world why he was doing so. Nor has he involved Congress, which the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war." nyti.ms/4rLzhbh

Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface.

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets: The administration has not yet released funding Congress allocated to multiple research agencies, so they cannot provide it to funded entities/people - including NIH and NASA. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Private money cannot replace public funding of science" Thank you @naomioreskes.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪 🌊 ⚒️ #scipol

You know the speech at Rice where Kennedy says we're going to the Moon, and the crowd is cheering like crazy? They were cheering for the football team. Didn't give a shit about space. Anyway, @astrolisa.bsky.social is brilliant. And I am also "having a hard time accessing that sentiment right now."

I finally got my Mars mission posters from @chopshopstore.bsky.social framed and hung up in my office.

The history of spaceflight is one example after another of missions that were doomed by a software bug or saved by a software update. Once a spacecraft launches, all interactions with it are mediated through software. Yet software is still generally unappreciated as a tool to manage mission risk.

Is there life on Mars? For decades, America was in pole position to find out with its multi-mission Mars Sample Return program. But MSR is now officially dead. And in the race to find alien life on Mars, it’s now China’s to lose. Me @technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/26/1...

Job Postings For Software Engineers Are Rapidly Rising. Citadel @indeed

800,000 in one night! This is wild! It feels like only a few years ago that I had to preface every talk with a slide explaining "the sky really does change rapidly on very short time scales, all over the place, all the time." Calling this a fire hose of data understates it. It's a supernova of data.

These first alerts use early, pre-survey observations while Rubin finishes preparations to begin its decade-long survey. 🔭🧪☄️ This is just the start for a system that is expected to produce up to ~7 million of these alerts per night! ✨ 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/first-a...

This is true, but it’s also true that NASA since Apollo has delivered two Voyagers, five Mars rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, a fleet of Earth-observing satellites, near-earth asteroid detection, and continuously inhabited the International Space Station for 25 years. Among other things.

Mission operations and research support software written by me and the amazing research software engineers at Million Concepts contributed to this very important result.

The biggest barriers to solving the climate crisis are political, not technological. We don't need an AI to help us because we already know what we need to do. We just lack the political will to do it. (And one of those things we need to do is turn off AI data centers that run on fossil fuels.)

I love reading SCOTUS opinions probably more than a software engineering / planetary scientist has any right to. If scientists wrote and argued like this more often, it would make me so happy.

Looking for an internship opportunity and interested in the impact of open science? Come work with us to investigate the impact of NASA’s open science activities! stemgateway.nasa.gov/s/course-off...

US real fixed investment in wind, solar, & other "alternative" electricity sources inched up to another record high in GDP data released today, reaching roughly $80B annualized, up 10% over the last year

I was at a space industry workshop last week, and speaker after speaker confidently proclaimed that the future was firm-fixed cost and that cost-plus was dead. And I could not help but think those proclamations were premature and naive about the tradeoffs between those approaches... and well... 👇

The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a 2022 law creating a public funding mechanism for charter schools violated the state constitution. #kyga26

Has anyone else noticed that the icon for Anthropic's Claude is somewhere between Vonnegut's asshole doodle and the Symbol of Chaos?

Planetary Research: A diamond open-access journal for planetary science https://blog.planetary-research.org/2025/11/28/planetary-research-a-diamond-open-access-journal-for-planetary-science/

A 1551 print of Ptolemy’s Almagest annotated by Galileo Galilei has been newly discovered in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze! 🌙🔭🪐 #HistSci

Mission operations and research support software written by me and the amazing research software engineers at Million Concepts contributed to this very important result.

Spacecraft engineering is esoteric, complicated, and difficult. It is cloaked by the "rocket science" aura of infallible genius and technical miracles. The potential for baffling with bullshit is high. Most people can't be expected to see through it. In 2018, even most space industry people didn't.

Fun science trivia: The editor of _Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon_, who was nominated for an Oscar for this work (and also _Life of Pi_), is Tim Squyres. He is the brother of Steve Squyres, who was the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers and is now Chief Scientist at Blue Origin.

Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see

Did you know that solar is more cost effective than coal, today, without any subsidies? And it keeps getting cheaper, quickly. What if we let the free market do its thing this time. Let coal try to compete on an even playing field.

Did you know that solar is more cost effective than coal, today, without any subsidies? And it keeps getting cheaper, quickly. What if we let the free market do its thing this time. Let coal try to compete on an even playing field.

Today, Administrator Zeldin took a chainsaw to the Endangerment Finding, undoing this long-standing, science-based finding on bogus grounds at the expense of our health.

The FAA urged aircraft operators to ensure they have enough fuel in case they are put in a holding pattern due to a rocket explosion. We found that several planes ran low on fuel after the Jan. 2025 Starship incident. At least one declared a mayday and crossed the no-fly zone to reach an airport.

This is basically gibberish. However, I think that it points to one of the failback strategies for the orbital data center push. Which is to use Starlink as comm relays for ground-based data processing and then claim that it is basically equivalent to, or on the direct path to, orbital data centers.

This is basically gibberish. However, I think that it points to one of the failback strategies for the orbital data center push. Which is to use Starlink as comm relays for ground-based data processing and then claim that it is basically equivalent to, or on the direct path to, orbital data centers.

Identifying off-nominal behavior during pre-flight and then pausing to correct those problems is what a serious organization does. Hitting the big red Leeroy Jenkins button while you yeet a guaranteed-to-fail, vibe-coded tube of stainless steel shit over busy Caribbean airspace is what SpaceX does.

Exodus: The shrinking federal space workforce In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who…

I don't hate this. It notably contradicts some things in Project Athena. My hope was that Isaacman would be willing to listen and learn, and this certainly gives me hope.

Much of the analysis / discussion of the about the SpaceX + xAI merger asserts, as though it is well-established fact, that SpaceX is profitable. As far as I know, there is no proof of this in the public record. There is some evidence in favor of the hypothesis and also a lot to the contrary.

WSJ: SpaceX trying to push the bag onto index investors ASAP. Can’t describe how predatory this is and if index providers carve out an exception for them or other large IPOs it’ll be a huge hit to their credibility IMO.

Not crazy. Just incredibly stupid.

Every single discussion of Lunar ice as an in-situ resource needs to include the caveats: "if it exists in quantities that matter and can be accessed in a manner that is cheaper than acquiring comparable resources or capabilities in other ways."

Identifying off-nominal behavior during pre-flight and then pausing to correct those problems is what a serious organization does. Hitting the big red Leeroy Jenkins button while you yeet a guaranteed-to-fail, vibe-coded tube of stainless steel shit over busy Caribbean airspace is what SpaceX does.

"Data centers in space" is a stupid idea. "Drunk asshole at the bar is suddenly an expert in everything" kind of stupid. It is VC hype train mad libs, intended to buoy the stock of deeply broken and unprofitable businesses in crypto, AI, and space technology.

Putting a nuclear reactor on the Moon permits you to define a safety exclusion zone. It is a way to claim territory where territory cannot normally be "claimed" in the usual sense. A crewed presence would do the same but won't happen in time. It is "I licked it so it's mine." but for Moon bases.