“Some may focus on the lows, but behind the efforts of Starship – and other programs like New Glenn, Neutron, Vulcan, Terran, Stoke, etc – is a massive space economy taking shape: tens of thousands of jobs, billions in private investment, all aimed at truly opening the last great frontier.

When these capabilities arrive, they will spearhead a new era of exploration and discovery – and the lows will become a chapter in a much longer story.”

– Jared Isaacman, Trump NASA Administrator Nominee,
05.28.2025

I saw the news of the latest SpaceX Starship explosion with a complete lack of surprise a few days ago, and it had me somehow flashing back to Musk’s performance at that post-Inaugural shindig, and his bluster about putting boots on Mars… and a joyful, iconic moment on the Moon, waaayyyy back when I was an awestruck kid of 15.

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Continue reading "Making Life Multiplanetary" »

“Not a single Roman work of art — sculpture, coinage, or painting — displays a salute of the kind that is found in Fascism, Nazism, and related ideologies… It is also unknown to Roman literature and is never mentioned by ancient historians of either republican or imperial Rome. The gesture of the raised right arm or hand in Roman and other ancient cultures that is attested in surviving art and literature had a significantly different function and is never identical with the modern straight-arm salute.”
— Martin Winkler, in “The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology”

…just in case you run into any fashy apologists or Musk symps trying to explain it away by saying it’s a “Roman Salute”.

So just cut the crap already, ‘cos all the wide-open fash are wide-open loving it and — like the original — the Early 21st sequel also features craven-ass collaborators, in the form of the Democratic Party.

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Continue reading "Fashionably Fashy" »

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship. Thank you to our customers, Cameron County, and the wider community for the continued support and encouragement. And congratulations to the entire Space team on an exciting first flight test of Starship!”
— SpaceX statement 04.20.2023

“Where’s the KABOOM?
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!”
— Marvin The Martian

So, I was hitting some sativa bud and banging my head on the table the other day trying to shake loose a decent France uprising cartoon, and THIS weirdness fell out. I’d given up on a France cartoon at the moment and was just doing my daily space geekery, reading about the spectacular SpaceX launch failure and the attendant “hah, I MEANT to do that” spin from SpaceX, when I found my train of thought wandering to the Twitter valuation crash and the Paid Blue Check shitshow and was suddenly, like…

…like, yeah; Musk was really laughing off the Twitter valuation and the hot mess about the paid Blue Check accounts that’s been all over the news lately, and then a day or two later another one of his goddamn Starship tests goes sideways on him and the SpaceX PAO flacks are babbling a bunch of balloon juice about how much they learned today, and it was one of those moments of inspiration and serendipity that screamed “quit twisting your panties trying to think of a France cartoon for a moment and jump on THIS shit, man! Here it is!” Like, yeah — crashing and burning, in metaphor and reality.

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Continue reading "A Successful Launch" »

So, Jeff Bezos thinks he can tug at my old Boomer heartstrings by sending up 90 year-old William Shatner (and his toupee) on Blue Origin’s latest suborbital joyride, while continuing to shit on his workers and dodge taxes. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has opened new vistas in whiny excuses for not paying taxes on his obscene wealth by puking up a bunch of balloon juice about Mars and “the light of consciousness”. Nice try, guys — but, no. Also a big “no” to these guys at the Space Review trying to spin it as an important insight into the effects of microgravity on old rich and famous people.

My plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2021

And elsewhere in the Space Review, one of their regulars can’t shut up about the “normalization of space tourism” — for anyone who’s so goddamn rich they have the price of a long weekend at the ISS lying around under their sofa cushions.

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Continue reading "For All Pigkind no.2: To Oligarchy, And Beyond!" »