Who's a little fear demon?

no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor

You know how a weird little restaurant will pop up that makes you go "I have no idea how that can be successful. But they sure sunk a lot into it, so maybe someone knows something I don't." And then it fails in a year, because your instincts were right.

This is also how the space industry works.

The image has text that has a statement from the AAS followed by a quote from the President's 2027 Budget Request: The budget request also adopts a policy prohibiting the use of federal funds to pay for journal subscriptions and the publication of research results unless required or pre-approved: “In accordance with administration policy announced in the budget, NASA will follow new governmentwide grants guidance prohibiting the use of federal funds to pay for subscriptions to academic journals, as well as for the publication of research results that are not specifically required by federal statute or approved in advance by a federal agency. This policy preserves funds to support actual research by ensuring that the American taxpayer does not pay for the research, publication, and access to that research, essentially triple charging the public for the same product.”

I missed that the President's 2027 Budget Request includes a statement about not paying for the publication of science results. 🤦‍♂️

That's some serious Orwellian pretzel logic. Somehow publication costs are double-dipping and an extra expense to taxpayers? 🤦‍♂️

Screenshot from: aas.org/posts/news/2...

The FY 2027 NASA budget request hides its science cuts by omitting mission names instead of explicitly zeroing them out.

We did the work and found 54 missions cancelled in this proposal.

This is another extinction-level event for NASA science.

Full list: planetary.org/save-nasa-science

This landed in my inbox from AWS this morning.

Orbital data centers are bullshit and everybody knows it.

Fun fact that Queen's monster lead guitarist Brian May is also an astrophysicist and planetary scientist. Including being a member of Perseverance rover's Mastcam-Z camera team.

mastcamz.asu.edu/the-stereosc...

Dreaming Against The Machine Exploring ideas about how to envision better, realistic, equitable futures with astrophysicist and journalist, Dr. Adam Becker.

Follow the show at www.dreamingagainstthemachine.com, or here on Bluesky at @dreamingagainstthemachine.com

The first-ever ‘Earthset’ image marks another Artemis II milestone As NASA’s Orion spacecraft slipped behind the farside of the moon, the astronauts captured the crescent of Earth setting over the moon’s horizon.

On the Earthset image, by @astrolisa.bsky.social for Science News. Lisa is onsite at Johnson for the Artemis II mission www.sciencenews.org/article/firs...

I'm incredibly excited to announce that my new podcast, Dreaming Against the Machine, is launching next week with @multitude.productions! Join me for conversations about what a better future could look like. Available wherever you get your podcasts! Here's the trailer for the show:

Moon's haunted.

One of the great things is that NASA makes so much of its data open and available.

This allows people to build their own tools and creatively join in to NASA’s mission of exploration.

As stated in the Space Act, NASA is for the benefit of all mankind!

Nice work @chadohman.ca !

Old enough to remember when the satellite imagery startups in the 2010s pretended they could eschew being defense contractors and claimed their markets were news and hedge funds

Fusion power unlikely to become competitive - Nature Energy While nuclear fusion power is often hailed as a future source of abundant, clean energy, current dominant fusion designs, magnetic and laser inertial, are unlikely to become competitive due to their e...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

FY 2027 NASA PBR: 23% cut to NASA, 47% cut to NASA science: www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

The OMB learned nothing; they are needlessly and wastefully attempting to gut NASA and NASA science despite overwhelming public and congressional opposition. They will fail.

The FY2027 President's Budget Request (PBR) for NASA is another big cut, like last year. $18.8 billion, a 23% decrease.
www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

That's home. That's us.

This image of home just came down from the Artemis II crew.

Taken after their translunar injection burn, there are aurorae at top right and lower left, and zodiacal light at lower right.

Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman

Detailed deliverables are a mistake. Extensive lists of requirements provide agencies with an illusion of certainty. But they're just tying their own hands.

Blog entry: It's a mistake to include a detailed list of deliverables when procuring custom software.

Correct.

Amazing work. File this under H for "toy."

arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29964

Thanks to the passive investment flows from unsuspecting 401k & IRA investors who default to index funds, the vast majority of investors will ultimately get screwed while the uber-wealthy insiders cash out. Thank you, Elon. $TSLA

Also, was this article written by AI? Because it reads exactly like raw AI output.

Orbital data centers are bullshit, and everybody knows it.

I don't know what science-as-a-service means, nor what NASA-funded "science" admits a sustainable "as-a-service" model. (As specifically distinct from e.g. data-as-a-service or hardware-as-a-service aka "renting.") What is the product? Who are the customers? It has never been explained.

I don't know what science-as-a-service means, nor what NASA-funded "science" admits a sustainable "as-a-service" model. (As specifically distinct from e.g. data-as-a-service or hardware-as-a-service aka "renting.") What is the product? Who are the customers? It has never been explained.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities More Everything Forever AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity Talk by Adam Becker Author and Astrophysicist Click for Details Tuesday March 31, 2026 5:30 PM HQ LO1 320 York Street Co-sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism

If you're anywhere near New Haven, come see me speak at Yale on Tuesday night! It'll be a particularly fun one, I think. Also they made a great poster for it! frankeprogram.yale.edu/event/more-e...

The precise definition of "planet" doesn't matter.

The time-to-science and cost-per-science of a failed mission are infinity.

I'm not sure that's the case, actually. It needs long distances to accelerate, and we don't really want a nuclear reactor floating around in cis-lunar space.

The breakdown of the analogy is that trebuchets are a real thing that exists, and we could definitely build one in 18 months.

There is some logic to not strapping an expensive mission (that needs to be built quickly, which makes it costlier) to a tech demo that is very likely to fail or never fly.