True. But the most common Starlink version in orbit (1.5) weighs ~650 lbs. A CT weighs ~6500 lbs, 10x as much.
It’d just be fun to watch. More fun for sure than watching the rest of Elon’s antics.
If you shake it hard it’s down to 6,000 pounds taking into account all the parts that will be falling off.
Good news!
On Monday, Congress made good on those promises, releasing a $24.4 billion budget plan for NASA as part of the conferencing process, when House and Senate lawmakers convene to hammer out a final budget. The result is a budget that calls for just a 1 percent cut in NASA’s science funding, to $7.25 billion, for fiscal year 2026.
Trump had wanted to cut it in half.
And get to the moon before he dies.
More likely Richard Vought wanted to cut it in half; Trump just went along with it. Now if they can do the same for the NSF, CDC, and NIH research budgets, there won’t be the destruction of US science that we’re facing.
Nitpick: Russell Vought.
Oops, right. Thanks for the correction.
What a splendid idea. Let’s put him on the SLS.
Here’s some sad news. If it pans out. Which we almost certainly won’t know for a long time and only after many dollars, Euros, or Yuan are spent.
Bummer.
But this made me laugh:
A new study led by Paul Byrne, an associate professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences, throws cold water on the idea that Europa could support life at the seafloor.
I’m sure the English Lit major working in WashU’s PR department enjoyed tossing that in there. Writing puff pieces about recently completed research papers must get real tiresome.
It’s nice when you can make a splash with your writing.
Those sort of headlines are normally written by the sub editor. Get it? Sub? Submarine?
…I’ll get my coat.
You’re all wet.
Dammit, we can’t know until we have some actual evidence. Only way to get that is have instruments in place for observations.
The only form of life we know so far is on Earth… and it ALL seems to use the same biochemical machinery, suggesting a single origin? But those molecules might not be the only way life could arise: carbon chemistry seems to have the potential for many possible combinations?
Single cell life occurred almost immediately on Earth but it took another 3 billion years for multicellular life to emerge and that breakthrough appears to have happened only once. The scant evidence we have suggests that complex lifeforms may be exceptionally rare.
We have quite a good thread on all aspects of Drake, etc. Perhaps best not to launch that convo in here.
This was started in 2022, revived in 2024, then again a couple months ago. This ref is to the first Oct 2025 revival post:
Interesting; do you mean a civilization that lives in the bottom of a deep gravity well (like in close orbit around a black hole) so that time passes for them at about the same rate as it does for explorers accelerating to a high fraction of C in flat space; so the people who launched an expedition and those who went on it can stay in close synchronization? My only quibble is how much extra dilation would be involved in climbing out of the gravity well before being able to embark on a voyage to other solar systems. I had envisioned “slow” civilizations that used hibernation at home to effect the same thing, waiting centuries to hear back from explorers.
Did it? One hypothesis related to the abiogenesis and Fermi Paradox questions is that before complete self-reproducing cells emerged they were preceded by billions of years of molecular evolution in interstellar space; so that it was only after 9 billion years following the Big Bang that chemical complexes had finally emerged that could make the leap to full cellular self-reproduction.
I won’t disagree, it’s a somewhat different discussion, Though we are starting to approach the point where we have some technology that could become relevent.