But here is an artist.

For those anxiously awaiting it: the NSF GRFP solicitation is out, with a November 14 deadline for Geoscience applicants: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

I worked with Lauren at USGS Astrogeology in Flagstaff. She was one of the scientists I could count on when I organized scientist talks for big school group visits. She could be the second USGS Astrogeology astronaut on the Moon; the first was Jack Schmitt in 1972. Gene Shoemaker would be proud.

"in the largest sample of medical advances for which we have good data...we found extensive connections between medical advances and research that was funded by grants that would have been cut if the NIH budget was sharply reduced."

Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do?

As far as I can tell, the NASA workforce will still be gutted and assets squandered in the event of a CR or shutdown. It is of course hard to know anything for sure right now. But Duffy's last public statement was that the PBR is the budget guidance. Congress didn't act. And Vought wants to RIF.

At the end here, I actually disagree with @kerryhowley.bsky.social a bit. I don't think this is going anywhere meaningful. This is the rise of a scam economy, not an incomprehensible transhuman future. This crap won't work, but it will lead to an even more toxic startup culture in tech.

New from #SCIMaP - analysis of the White House’s Proposed FY 2026 National Science Foundation Budget. Take-home: Slashing NSF by >50% will lead to ~$11 billion in economic loss and extensive job loss and reduced training opportunities in communities nationwide. Report: osf.io/e8rnc a 🧵

🚀 New tool alert: Track NASA science mission funding month by month. The White House proposed deep cuts, but Congress hasn’t decided yet — leaving missions in limbo. Compare this year’s spending to last year’s and spot early drops that could mean trouble. www.planetary.org/mission-spen...

@edzitron.com is joined in studio by astrophysicist @adambecker.bsky.social to talk about his new book More Everything Forever, the BS AGI story, why Eliezer Yudkowsky should never be taken seriously, and why billionaires love LLMs. www.iheart.com/podcast/1119...

Science thrives on honest discussions of uncertainties, unknowns, biases, and alternative explanations. This is exploited by dishonest people who only speak in absolutes.

Yep. Anything to keep it going. Andreessen said that "any deceleration of AI will cost lives," and called slowing down AI "a form of murder." These billionaires are so entitled — and so terrified of their own inevitable deaths — that they frame any limits on their own power in apocalyptic terms.

By my early 20's, I was very confident that people I knew would become astronauts. But I was very bad at predicting who!

Your astonishing artifact this week is a bronze statuette of a Roman actor pretending to fart. 🎭💨🏺

An excellent thread on a paper (from OpenAI!) showing that LLMs are always going to make factual errors, no matter their size or the size of their training data set. This is my surprised face. 😐

if you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game

This should surprise no one who's been paying attention. spacenews.com/nasa-safety-...

Successful mitigation is often indistinguishable from an overreaction. If you cannot recreate the circumstances precisely, to run the experiment again, then you cannot prove otherwise. This asymmetry will be strategically exploited by people who want you to stop responding to risks and threats.

Keep sciencing. We are living through a time when looking at a rock and wondering how old it is qualifies as an act of resistance.

If a CR passes without language to protect NASA assets, then the PBR will go into effect. This will abruptly shut down healthy, productive missions. Once they are turned off, they can never been turned back on. This would be an unforgivable waste of national resources. Write to Congress.

I want to make this simple: If your rep voted Yay on this, they voted to end dozens of currently working missions at Mars, Jupiter, Earth, elsewhere. OMB Director Vought explicitly said that with a CR, he will force NASA to follow the President's budget request that cuts NASA science funding 47%.

Read this book if you want much greater insight into our present moment.

This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

A small fraction of 0.37% of the Federal budget for this.

[BREAKING] The Planetary Society and 14 partner organizations released a joint letter calling for explicit NASA science protections in Congress's stopgap spending bill. Read it here: www.planetary.org/press-releas...

In the latest season of Wednesday, Gomez Addams eats mice on toast. There is no chance that this is not a Museum of Jurassic Technology reference, IMHO. [Not a meaningful spoiler in any sense.]

Reps. Chu, Bacon Lead Colleagues in Urging House Appropriators to Explicitly Protect NASA Funding in Upcoming Continuing Resolution chu.house.gov/media-center... #NASA

During a visit to NASA’s Johnson Space Center last March, I was confronted with an environment of fear, uncertainty and discrimination which struck me as a troubling moral issue that also raises serious safety concerns. Read all about it here: www.thespacereview.com/article/5060/1

I know that there is a lot going on in the world that is dire and immediate. But NASA is worth protecting.

This is amazing: A direct image of the shadow of a black hole. A direct image of the hot, swirling gas circling and falling into it. And brand-new images showing an apparent magnetic flip around the black hole, a sign of turbulent, tumultuous changes. 🧪🔭 eventhorizontelescope.org/new-eht-imag...

"It’s a study in the perils of relying on the ultrarich to fund science: when the guy with the billions is ready to move on, the whole project is off." Remember Breakthrough Starshot, which was supposed to send a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri? By @sarahscoles.bsky.social in SciAm 🧪🛰️

JUST IN! Congress is considering a stopgap bill to keep the government open through Nov. 20. OMB is planning to cut billions from NASA during this, risking paid-for missions and thousands of jobs. Tell Congress to protect NASA science and prevent these cuts: www.planetary.org/advocacy-act...

In a blistering decision on Friday, a federal judge ruled that the Trump Administration and the OPM acted illegally when it fired tens of thousands of probationary federal employees at NOAA, NSF, and other agencies “for cause” in February. buff.ly/adxZ0IE

chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events

NASA personnel must follow EOs and treat the President's Budget Request as a mandate. Regardless of their personal feelings. Remember this when HQ people try to say the PBR isn't catastrophic for NASA science. No space people I talk to outside of the agency think NASA is ok.

In my latest piece for The Planetary Report, I argue that we’ve largely lost the rhetorical ability to defend the unquantifiable values of space exploration—beauty, curiosity, discovery—in the face of an unrelenting focus on utilitarian pragmatism. www.planetary.org/articles/a-c...

the American government is effectively ending its space program.

An upshot of this paper for me is that if we find water in the PSRs, then it might be water that we brought with us aboard spacecraft with poor planetary protection and environmental controls. "[...] PITMS observed abundant outgassing products from the Peregrine lander, including water [...]"

PRJ is going to be a BFD

To support Riccardo's wife and son in this unimaginably difficult time, his friends and colleagues at the University of Padova have set up a donation fund: www.europlanet.org/in-memory-of...

NASA has a proposal to re-commission the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft for the exact purpose. It's healthy, & up for a 2029 mission—total cost $200 Million, $50 Million already spent. President Trump wants to kill it. Here's more on the OSIRIS-APEX mission - osirisrex.arizona.edu/osiris-apex

Duffy says today's announcement is consistent with "the president's vision and mission of continuing science to support human exploration beyond Earth." Fact check: this administration has proposed canceling Mars sample return.

The President's Budget Request for NASA was not the outcome of careful analysis about costs, benefits, and objectives. Science and engineering experts were not engaged in any conversations about how to optimize and refocus funds or effort. We would have welcomed that. The PBR was issued by dictat.

There's a NASA presser happening now in which acting admin Duffy said "This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars." That doesn't mean it is a sign of life. We covered this cool rock in 2024, paper in Nature is out today: 🧪🔭 www.sciencenews.org/article/nasa...

Here's what I hope to see answered in today's Mars discovery announcement: - Perseverance is facing a 23% budget cut next year — will this be reconsidered? - Will this reignite the effort to pursue MSR? - If not, are humans expected to return these samples? When? Can humans land at Jezero?

This will be an exciting announcement. But Perseverance is facing a 23% budget cut to operations in FY 2026 that will directly impact the ability to make more discoveries like this going forward. www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Yesterday, I reposted this with a bit of sarcasm, but the gross ignorance of Duffy with regards to the very basics of how we do space exploration keeps gnawing at me. JFK in starting Apollo said, "...landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" in a single sentence. (continued)

Nature cannot be fooled.

The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer is my guest on this month’s Space Policy Edition podcast. We discuss his feature article, “How NASA Engineered its Own Decline”, and much more. Don’t miss this one! www.planetary.org/planetary-ra...