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The Australian Border Force won’t stop searching me and my personal devices when I visit Australia. Despite being an Australian citizen, under Australian law, I have zero recourse to this continued flagrant invasion of my privacy. After two years of harassment I am publicizing this as a considered next step in an effort to make it stop. This is somewhat different from my usual articles about space, energy, and technology – we will return to that theme shortly. As far as possible, I will relate only facts and keep editorializing to a minimum. I will update this post as the …
[Originally posted on the Terraform blog April 3, 2025.] Three years ago we set out to make cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. At the time I didn’t fully appreciate that we had kicked off the process of recompiling the foundation layer of our entire industrial stack. Last year, we made cheap pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air and expanded our hydrocarbon fuel road map to include methanol, a versatile liquid fuel and chemical precursor for practically every other kind of oil-derived chemical on the market. Unlimited synthetic methane and methanol underpinning global energy supply is a good start, but …
Some ideas on preventing cryogenic propellant boiloff in Starship during long duration cruise or while operating orbital fuel depots. The usual caveats apply! One of the major concerns with using Starship for the Human Landing System is that propellant (cryogenically liquid methane and oxygen) need to a) be transferred in orbit and b) maintained for the duration of the mission, which could be weeks, months, or years. In particular, no astronaut wants to board their Starship after a successful 6 week sortie on the Moon only to find the fuel’s boiled off and they’re stuck. The trick lies in using energy …
California is by far the richest and most powerful polity led by Progressive ideals, and it has taken a beating of late. In this post, I discuss a practical roadmap by which California must reclaim its mantle as the shining city on the hill, an embodiment of the positive attributes of Progressive ideals and material optimism, and once again become a target of aspirational upward mobility. This will not be an easy road. Decades of complacency have squandered enviable resources and potential. But I believe a strength of America is syncretism, with the marketplace of ideas providing robust competition for …
As of today, it is 601 days until October 17, 2026, when the mass-optimal launch window to Mars opens next. While I don’t have any privileged information, it’s fun to speculate about what SpaceX could choose to send on its first Starship flights to Mars. (Spoiler alert: Rods from the gods…) Over the next 600 days, SpaceX has a number of key technologies to demonstrate; orbit, reuse, refill, and chill. It’s hard to make predictions, particularly about the future. I’m optimistic that SpaceX will have multiple fully fueled Starships ready to go in October next year, to be followed by …
More in science
Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ready to study dark matter and dark energy in unprecedented detail. The post The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Some not-actively-discouraging news out of Washington DC yesterday: The Senate appropriations committee is doing its markups of the various funding bills (which all technically originated in the House), and it appears that they have pushed to keep the funding for NASA and NSF (which are bundled in the same bill with the Department of Justice for no obvious reason) at FY24 levels. See here as well. This is not yet a done deal within the Senate, but it's better than many alternatives. If you are a US citizen or permanent resident and one of your senators is on the appropriations committee, please consider calling them to reinforce how devastating massive budget cuts to these agencies would be. I am told that feedback to any other senators is also valuable, but appropriators are particularly important here. The House appropriations committee has not yet met to mark up their versions. They had been scheduled to do so earlier this week but punted it for an unknown time. Their relevant subcommittee membership is here. Again, if you are a constituent of one of these representatives, your calls would be particularly important, though it doesn't hurt for anyone to make their views heard to their representative. If the House version aligns with the presidential budget request, then a compromise between the two might still lead to 30% cuts to NSF and NASA, which would (IMO) still be catastrophic for the agencies and US science and competitiveness. This is a marathon, not a sprint. There are still many looming difficulties - staffing cuts are well underway. Spending of already appropriated funds at agencies like NSF is way down, leading to the possibility that the executive branch may just order (or not-order-but-effectively-order) agencies not to spend and then claw back the funds. This year and in future years they could decide to underspend appropriations knowing that any legal resistance will take years and cost a fortune to work its way through the courts. This appropriations battle is also an annual affair - even if the cuts are forestalled for now (it is unlikely that the executive would veto all the spending bills over science agency cuts), this would have to happen again next year, and so on. Still, right now, there is an opportunity to push against funding cuts. Failing to try would be a surrender. (Obligatory notice: yes, I know that there are large-scale budgetary challenges facing the US; I don't think destroying government investment in science and engineering research is an intelligent set of spending cuts.)
For the first time, solar was the largest source of electricity in the EU last month, supplying a record 22 percent of the bloc's power. Read more on E360 →
Episode two of The Works in Progress Podcast is out now
Calling all the builders
