The Twitter account for the book Safe Is Not An Option: How a Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive is Killing Our Expansion into Space.
Jackson, WY
Joined March 2013
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cc: @nflnetwork @NFL
Wouldn't you rather I gave the money to you than to the bartender?
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Incredible as it may seem, this one building will likely produce as much value as a member of the G20.
And that's just a single facet of the megacorp that will one day (soon?) rise from the amalgamation of SpaceX and Tesla.
Who knows, maybe NVIDIA will end up in there too.
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16.5 years ago, one-sixth of a century, I was a prospective student here at the Berkeley School of Physics. Now it's Sunday and the doors are locked. No one's around. Are we going to make it?
Maybe the centaurs are working from home.
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While it's an overgeneralization, physicists tend to be better at telling you why something won't work than they are at figuring out how to make it work.
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Wendell Barry has passed, at age 92. He was virulently opposed to space settlements. Here is an exchange he had on the topic with Steward Brand in the 1970s: nss.org/settlement/nasa/CoEv…
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Hmmm...probably Michael Mann. He owes me half a million bucks after his lawsuit against me.
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Your occasional reminder that physics PhDs are not engineers. The physics PhDs told us that we couldn't do missile defense.
Gavin Baker says the physics PhDs calling orbital data centers impossible on X have not out-thought the 10,000 SpaceX engineers who treat it as solved
"It's very hard for me to engage. There are all these people on X and they're like, I am a physics PhD and this is impossible."
"There's a friend, another investor, who actually is a physics PhD, who I had many arguments about it with him, and he's like, I am a PhD and this is impossible. And then he goes to the SpaceX day and talks to the SpaceX engineers, and he's like, well, I was wrong."
"So let's say you're an astrophysics PhD. You are brilliant, you're hanging 100 IQ points on me. Have you thought about this for an hour? Have you thought about it for 10 hours?"
"Because you have 10,000 of the world's smartest engineers at SpaceX who've thought about this each for hundreds if not thousands of hours. And the sum of that, working with very sophisticated engineering tools, is it's a solved problem."
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For more on Gavin Baker: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
Stop wasting money on this, and just cancel SLS already.
Earlier today, a paper was released talking about two potential solutions to adapting the Centaur V to SLS.
The proposal that caught my eye the most is “Suspended Centaur,” which allows NASA to fly with the same acceleration because the adapter would bear the load instead of the Centaur V. This could also potentially come from the same assembly line as the LVSAs. However, there are disadvantages, such as added weight and likely more work needed for ML-1 modifications.
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Me on why this is a BFD: "When China figures out how to reuse them, that is going to drop the launch of cost for them tremendously and then they could use it as part of their soft power outreach to launch things for potential allies very cheaply." techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/ch…
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Because an entire generation was told that any degree was your ticket to big money, rather than specific degrees in specific areas. The result was every kid applied game theory and worked on the easiest possible degree to get the biggest gain, which was useless.
"Why recruiters can’t find workers and new grads can’t find jobs (it’s not AI)"
washingtonpost.com/education…
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Actually incredible how close Flight 12 was to shitting itself on ascent but the hand of fate felt bad about the 2025 V2 saga so SpaceX caught a lucky break for once
With SpaceX aiming to launch the Starship Flight 13 mission from Starbase later this week, the @FAANews said the following regarding the closure of the Starship Flight 12, SpaceX-led mishap investigation.
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The electric vehicle transition is not going as planned
youtube.com/watch?v=_6r9XWUn…
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Last time I asked SpaceX, the goal was forty. Looks like they can exceed that, except they want to retire Falcon ASAP.
The King has returned! SpaceX flight leader Booster 1067 just returned from its 36th mission to space. Carrying 29 Starlink satellites it landed on the drone ship & returned to Port Canaveral this morning. Originally boosters were hoped to have at least 5 reuses & 10 was considered the goal, reuse is now the standard.
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That's stupid. It advanced because it largely gave up on socialism in the 80s and allowed the market to work.
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And not just that expendables were better, but that reusables would never be practical. It held us back decades. One of the stupidest lessons of X-33 was that it "proved" reusables won't work.
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People don't appreciate the degree to which Apollo and Shuttle screwed everything up by convincing them that expendables were better.
