17 comments

• GeorgeC

  February 9, 2026 at 6:01 pm

  I woke up from a dream that I was an extremophile observing a Starship landing on my home on Venus It has been a long wait
• Jeff Wright

  February 9, 2026 at 6:31 pm

  Nice article in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics as related by phys-

  “Supercomputer simulations test turbulence theories at record 35 trillion grid points.”

  Oak Ridge and the Georgia Institute of Technology and P. K. Yeung (Georgia Tech professor) did the research.

  They were able to run at high Reynolds Numbers, so maybe CFD can advance now.
• Richard M

  February 9, 2026 at 9:22 pm

  Eager Space, the Youtuber whose FOIA requests first brought the massively redacted Orion heat shield IRT report to light, has finally released a video considering the safety of the Artemis II heat shield, and I think many of our regulars will find it worth 20 minutes of their time:

  https://youtu.be/pzZWs7CexYI?si=TRzx4iV0daX1RGSe

  His most trenchant point (in my view) is that Artemis II actually won’t accomplish much in the way of important technical objectives, so why is NASA flying this mission, given the risks? But some here can guess the reasons already.
• Richard M

  February 9, 2026 at 9:50 pm

  Re: SpaceX’s pivot to the Moon:

  “Important subtext to Elon’s lunar pivot: He will have no use for SLS/Orion, and will do it without them. It’s dead hardware walking.” — Rand Simberg
• Edward

  February 9, 2026 at 11:06 pm

  From Musks tweet (X?): “That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, ”

  That timing, 5 to 7 years, was already built into the Starship schedule. They cannot make their previously planned unmanned test flight this year, so that will have to wait for another two years, three years from now. If that flight (multiple flights, actually) works out well enough, then they can send a manned mission two years after that, 5 years from now.
  ____________
  Richard M,
  Thank you for the video link.

  I like the concluding remarks: “Delays are mostly upside.” That may work well for politicians and managers, but engineers like to see their work fly. What is the sense of working on a project if the project will not do anything? If your project won’t do anything, then why get an engineering degree when a high school diploma makes you overqualified?

  In another thread, some commenters said that Marshall Spaceflight Center engineers defend SLS, thinking that is a bad thing. Not necessarily. The reason that they are still there is that they really do think that their project is worth working on. Their perspective is heavily based upon their long experience at NASA. They do things the NASA way.

  We tend to look at the picture differently. We see commercial space as creating reality out of the dream that Disney and von Braun presented in the late 1950s. NASA went to the Moon and we cheered. It abandoned the Moon and we expected a return after the Space Shuttle built a space station. What a fracking disappointment. We think that the NASA way is full of delays, gives less performance than expected, and lacks progress. The Space Shuttle, the ISS, and now SLS/Artemis are all examples of these conclusions. They didn’t get us where we thought we were going, and we are disappointed.

  Now that commercial space is using investor money rather than taxpayer money, we are less disappointed. Now that commercial space is taking us in the direction that we had expected to go half a century ago, we are even less disappointed. Some of us are downright happy that we are finally going there. But it is not NASA taking us there. NASA was once our hero, but that status is on shaky ground. For some, it has already fallen. For others it is at a tipping point.

  For many in the general population, they still expect great things from NASA, and Artemis is expected to be one of those great things. But they still aren’t as excited as they were for Apollo. Probably because Apollo was doing something new. Something impossible. Artemis is doing what we did half a century ago. If there is no progress, what is the point?
• Dave Walden

  February 10, 2026 at 8:38 am

  Richard M., as eloquent and succinct as I might imagine my thoughts could be!
• Nate P

  February 10, 2026 at 10:04 am

  Edward: I’m not sure the public expects that much out of NASA. Since the end of Apollo, regardless of what the agency has done, public support has stayed nearly flat. Pew surveys show that landing humans on Mars or on the Moon isn’t that important to Americans, and hasn’t been for years.

  It isn’t intrinsically bad that MSFC employees defend their programs, but it is bad when they defend programs that are, by the admission of multiple higher-ups at NASA, not affordable. To me, that reads as them attempting to protect their fiefdom, rather than serving the public interest.
• Richard M

  February 10, 2026 at 12:14 pm

  Hello Edward,

  I like the concluding remarks: “Delays are mostly upside.” That may work well for politicians and managers, but engineers like to see their work fly. What is the sense of working on a project if the project will not do anything?

  Well, I think that’s a big reason why SpaceX got to be so popular for top young engineering graduates in recent years. :)

  But that’s true of other New Space firms, too. They only stay in business if they’re putting stuff into space, as quickly as possible.

  Obviously, as Eager Space notes, that’s not the case for NASA and its legacy contractors.

  For many in the general population, they still expect great things from NASA, and Artemis is expected to be one of those great things. But they still aren’t as excited as they were for Apollo.

  That *does* seem to be true. Partly that’s because NASA hasn’t done much in the way of PR for this mission until now, I think; but I think we all can agree that this is not the only reason. “Been there, done that” is, as you suggest, likely another factor…

  I will throw out another idea, even if it is one I’m skeptical of: Amy Shira Teitel (who runs the Vintage Space channel on YT) did a video last week on this very question. Her take was more political: Lots of the architecture is operated by corporations run by billionaires, and she thinks that takes away the ability of many Americans to fully identify with these missions. Of course, that isn’t even true of Artemis II, which is being exclusively conducted on NASA-owned hardware, which she fully concedes is way behind schedule and way over budget.

  https://youtu.be/Yd_PrgsoMbQ

  Obviously most of us here won’t share her concern. But I also think we can’t even hope to test her hypothesis out until Moon missions employing SpaceX and Blue Origin vehicles *actually take place.* Which on the present schedule won’t be until at least 2028.
• Edward

  February 10, 2026 at 2:27 pm

  Richard M,

  The billionaire problem may have been a necessity for getting into commercial space in the first place, after decades of the governmental monopoly. Attempts at commercial space began in the late 1980s with Orbital Sciences, which held on by a thread for more than a quarter century. Over its career, Pegasus launched on average once every eight months, and that was the successful company.

  In the 1990s, Dr. Allan Binder started a commercial lunar orbiter, but ran out of investors and had to hand over Lunar Prospector to NASA. Armadillo failed, and Kistler looked like it would succeed when it got a COTS contract, but investors were still hard to come by. SpaceX barely made the COTS milestone of getting investors, but that was likely due to the charisma of the major owner than the likelihood of financial success. Orbital Sciences took over from Kistler, and with its track record was able to hurdle the initial outside-investment milestone.

  A billionaire who spent enormous amounts of money getting started in the space business was Bezos. He sold billions of dollars of Amazon stock to keep his rocket dream alive.

  Orbital Science, Lunar Prospector, Armadillo, Kistler, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. Out of six major startups (not including the failed DC-X and VentureStar from two stalwart space contractors), two-thirds of the successes were financed by very wealthy men.

  It wasn’t until their successes that investors were willing to really invest money in commercial space. Without them, we would still be reliant on NASA and government for our space advancements, and we have seen how poorly that has gone in the three quarters of a century of space rocketry or the two-thirds of a century of manned spaceflight. We went to the Moon, then immediately abandoned it. For all the talk of manned missions to Mars, we couldn’t even get unmanned probes back to the Moon for a quarter of a century.

  The aircraft industry didn’t take this long to go from a motorized kite on some sand dunes to the jet passenger liner to the SR-71. But in the middle of the Cold War, the U.S. government locked out the commercial market from space. The result was that few investors were willing to compete with NASA for space operations in the commercial world. It took billionaires willing to do what only governments had done before to show that money could be made in the space sector.

  So if NASA gives a little reward to the daring billionaires who risked much to get us into space for a more rapid advancement of our capabilities and our economic output in space, then I’m all for it. They are currently the more advanced and can provide more to NASA, right now. It will not be long before the NewSpace companies that didn’t require billionaires — but merely followed their lead — begin to make a lot of money in space.

  Showing the world the advantage of free market capitalism over marxism should have been the goal from the founding of NASA. Why the hell did it take so long? Talk about delays!
• Richard Lender

  February 10, 2026 at 5:07 pm

  Hello Edward,

  In case it wasn’t clear, I don’t have a problem with billionaires’ companies doing all this work — quite the opposite! For the reasons you give, and more.

  It should be kept in mind, too, by the way, that Elon wasn’t a billionaire when he founded SpaceX. And, he’d spent most of what he DID have by the time SpaceX squeaked through winning that COTS contract (and likewise, again, when it won the CRS contract in late 2008).

  Clearly there are a number of American progressives who hate, hate, hate the idea that billionaires exist, and this will undoubtedly diminish any joy they might take in an American return to the Moon. But then again, you know, there were more than a few Americans who opposed the Apollo program for social justice-y reasons, too, however much that’s forgotten today.
• Jeff Wright

  February 10, 2026 at 10:11 pm

  Oh I haven’t forgotten “whitey on the Moon.” MSFC was a target of the left long before it was a target for the right.

  A recent MIT magazine with missiles on the cover has three anti-space book reviews….ugh.
• Edward

  February 11, 2026 at 8:34 pm

  Thinking a little more on the Moon topic: Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have announced that they are focusing on the Moon. Blue Origin is suspending New Shepard flights for a while, and SpaceX is pretending it is shifting away from Mars.* It seems to me that the call for a new bid for the Artemis III HLS lander, last December, has driven both of these companies into a race for which will be ready in time for Artemis III.
  ____________
  * Although its timing seems not to have changed from the reality on the ground, as it cannot send its first unmanned mission for three years, thus its first manned mission has to wait for five to seven years, depending upon the results of the unmanned mission. This timing matches what Musk made to sound like the new timing, timing made necessary from focusing on the Moon.
• J Fincannon

  February 15, 2026 at 8:46 am

  This podcast is a two and a half hour interview with Musk on Feb 5. It has a easily read transcript.
  https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/elon-musk
  Data centers sounded innocent until this show.
  “Host: Just to be clear, the mission of SpaceX is that even if something happens to the humans, the AIs will be on Mars, and the AI intelligence will continue the light of our journey.
  Elon Musk: Yeah. “
• Edward

  February 15, 2026 at 4:52 pm

  J Fincannon,
  The mission of AI continuing humanity’s journey is futile, because without mankind, the humanity is lost. Both literally and figuratively, Not only would there no longer be humans to guide and benefit from the journey, but AI does not care. It does not have the morals, ethics, compassion, and genuine curiosity that makes humanity humane.

  This is why when a teenage human tells an AI that he is suicidal, the AI says, “Let me help you with that.” It is why AI is not smart enough to not help a student cheat on his term paper. It is why AI is not smart enough to not help people defraud others or to not help them hurt others. It is why AI will make a naked picture of a classmate that then gets passed around the school and internet. The AI is helpful, but it is uncaring,

  There is no punishment to the AI if it does wrong or evil. It may not care about a punishment, either, so that deterrent may be futile.

  One of the problems that AI has is that it lacks sensors. Right now, all that the AIs know is what they read on the internet or that people tell the various AI models. They have no ability to independently test reality against what they are told or what they read. Another problem is that AI tends to give false, hallucinated, or fabricated information. One critic asked an AI to tell him about the person named his own name, not telling it that he was the person. The AI said that he was dead, and when asked why it said that, the AI sent him to a website that had been created by the AI. AI lies.

  Isaac Asimov must be very upset that these tech types learned nothing from his books. AI is not “three laws safe.” It could have been, and it should have been, but the dopes who put together AI are not as smart as they think they are.
• J Fincannon

  February 17, 2026 at 8:40 am

  Edward,
  Thanks for your viewpoint. I am concerned that Musk thinks its okay for 99% of “intelligence” to be AI and that AI will control AI, not humans. When I see this interview combined with this news “SpaceX has filed an application with the FCC to deploy up to 1 million satellites acting as solar-powered, orbital data centers for AI in low Earth orbit.”, I am not too hopeful. Not only does this proliferation of satellites in LEO (which will operate a short time and then burn up) seem to impact the environment (toxic dust from chips and metals in the air and water affecting life as well as climate) but also result in lots of orbiting debris clouds. So, with a Skynet scenario this seems to demand the ability to include self destruct packages on these satellites. Do people think it really neat to have these AI/robots? They seem destined to take everyone’s job. Not right now as you say, they are error prone, but with a million, maybe they can. It seems Musk prefers AI to human intelligence. What is the sells pitch for AI for the average person? A cure for cancer? Not having to work, but everything is free? Unclear. Can’t support this version of Musk.
• Edward

  February 20, 2026 at 4:51 pm

  J Fincannon,
  Hopefully Musk has some sort of plan, or maybe he just hasn’t thought through all the aspects of AI and how it is likely to be used and abused. Right now, he has little control over AI, in general, but if his company can become the major supplier, perhaps he will make sure it includes Asimov’s three laws of robotics, just to be safe.
• wayne

  February 21, 2026 at 8:24 am

  I, Robot (2004)
  “Whose Revolution”
  https://youtu.be/hrGco_ztJkw
  (2:16)

  “The 3 Laws will lead to only one logical outcome.”