Good. Like Perseus, I looked at its image as reflected on a shiny surface. That is why I am here to tell of what I saw.
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Not clear what changed, or for how long…
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I half expect a PSYCH! at 1 AM or so.
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SpaceX has their eye on some of them, haven’t had time to evaluate them in detail yet, and don’t want them shattered all over the place and difficult to reach like the guys formerly with the DoE they need to hire.
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Two weeks ago, when Ars first wrote about the asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. NASA’s most recent estimate has the likelihood of a strike increasing to 3.2 percent. Now that’s not particularly high, but it’s also not zero.
Like I said, keeps going up. But not soon enough to save us, gonna have to figure that out on our own. On the other hand, maybe by then we will have reconstituted whatever is left of our science infrastructure to do something if need be?
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Your article included a line that surprised me:
Years ago I saw someone at Caltech give a presentation about risks to earth from asteroid impacts and the guy said that, counterintuitively, an ocean impact would actually tend to be more deadly than an impact on land because it would cause a tsunami that could travel huge distances, and a large fraction of earth’s population lives near coastlines.
But maybe this one just isn’t big enough to cause a major tsunami? That author wrote a book about asteroids so hopefully he knows what he’s talking about.
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He’s already got the contract, but of course he’d have to clear it with Roscosmos first…
[…]
It would also wreck the business plans of multiple US companies working to provide this capability for NASA. Moreover, it would shoulder even more responsibility for the US space enterprise onto a single company, SpaceX.
[…]
The terrible, terrible responsibility of writing ever increasing invoices…
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I haven’t seen Fran in some time; one of those channels that slides into your youtube feed for awhile, and then slides out again. The ways of the algorithm are mysterious.
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[…]
Why Trump cannot cancel ‘Artemis’
However, even if Musk’s team were to recommend aborting the Artemis program, the U.S. president does not have the authority to execute that cancellation. Trump can propose it, but making changes to budgets that are already allocated is a responsibility that falls to Congress; moreover, Congress is always in charge of deciding what funds are allocated to NASA. And it will not be easy for senators and representatives from Republican states like Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Florida — where the manufacture of the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule employs tens of thousands of people — to support any proposed cancellation of Artemis.
[…]
LOL. He’s doing exactly this already with other chunks of the budget.
This simply isn’t even a speed bump anymore at this juncture.
Artemis/SLS is dead. It doesn’t fit into Leon’s plans, and that’s it.
For starters, they won’t have to make Starship-turned-into-HLS compatible. This is one of the reasons why Boeing has started to suck up to Leon lately. They were pondering getting rid of (some, unprofitable) parts of their space related divisions anyway (Starliner is a money pit for them) and hope they can cut their losses, maybe even make a tiny profit when bits of them get assimilated into the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation Collective. Thing is, there isn’t that much the Collective could use. Maybe the big tanks; they haven’t figured out yet how to build the tankers and the depot and make them work.
[…]
If Trump decides to cancel Artemis, he exposes himself to the first major clash with Congress of his second term.
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Again…
[…] Artemis advocates in Washington such as Republican Brian Babin, chairman of the House Science Committee, argue that cancelling the program would mean giving China a chance to beat the U.S. to the Moon; Beijing plans to put astronauts up there in 2030.
Musk sees the project to return to the Moon as a distraction from efforts to reach Mars, which is, of course, what led him to found SpaceX two decades ago. Trump made Musk’s dream his own in his inaugural address a month ago: “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” he said grandly.
[…]
So either Leon sells Trump on the idea that Mars is the cool thing to do and going to the Moon is for losers because the US already won that race in 1969. And arguably this has already happened.
Or he simply tells Trump that his fancy Mars rocket can go to the Moon just as well, and before China does to boot, if it’s necessary.
[…]
But returning to the Moon is compatible with setting foot on Mars, according to Petro, who said last week that the Moon is still a crucial target for the agency. Petro is the first woman to head the space agency, but her position is interim, until Jared Isaacman takes over in the coming months, someone who is not a fan of the Artemis missions.
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Ta-daah!
First, nothing about this is about what makes sense from any technological standpoint, facts, or even laws of nature. This is about rich, megalomaniac bullies used to getting their way doing what they fucking want.
Second, yeah, Trump and Leon and their little friends are totally going to listen to what a competent woman has to say about this. By the way, anyone looking for a nice bridge? I can set you up there, no problem.
[…]
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