His blog's comparison of NASA's SLS based Artemis architecture versus a Lunar program based on Starship makes the point.
This is a phase change difference in access to space akin from the X-Atlantic air travel jump from Charles Lindberg to the wide body jet in 5-years. 2/
For the logistical types, these are your current price points:
$100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo
$1,000,000/kg(+) for deep space exploration.
Starship will do 100 ton (+) chunks for <$10m per launch.
It will be launching several hundred times a year w/in 5-years. 3/
Starship will be doing 1,000(+) flights a year in about seven to 10 years.
And no one in the NASA or the incumbent space industries world wide are doing jack to prepare for that reality. 4/
Casey Handmer's point is how will...
"NASA and industry will have to find a way to produce 100x as much stuff for 1/10th the price. Rovers will have to be $1000/kg and we will need 100 tons of them every year."
5/
That isn't where NASA is
Nor Boeing,
Nor Lockheed Martin,
Nor Aerojet etc. etc.
They are all pretending the SpaceX's Falcon & Falcon Heavy rockets don't exist 6/
Another of Handmer's point's --
"History is littered with the wreckage of former industrial titans that underestimated the impact of new technology and overestimated their ability to adapt. Blockbuster, Motorola, Kodak, Nokia, RIM, Xerox, Yahoo, IBM, Atari, Sears, Hitachi, 7/
What we are seeing here is an industrial/institutional version of Thomas Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions. People invested in the old ways 8/ amazon.com/Structure-Scie…
...will be displaced by those who believe in the new, relevant, scientific & technological paradigms.
And politics will follow this shift.
9/
Starship's success, and it is looking increasingly successful, will be akin to a seed crystal dropped into a supersaturated solution.
The first fully successful Starship orbital launch & return will kill stock values of every other space launcher firm overnight. 10/
And the NASA SLS architecture - long nicknamed the "Senatorial Launch System" for its major supporters - will not survive past the 3rd launch.
What there will be left of NASA after Starship enters regular daily service is conjecture. I too, like Handmer, hope it can adapt. 11/
But whatever comes after...it won't include the Senatorial Launch System.
/End
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Grok focused on Ukrainian drone capabilities to the exclusion of actual fielded Chinese drone capability and literally eight decades old aviation technology like conformal fuel tanks which have also been applied to cruise missiles in the Chinese technological base for 20 years 2/
The Chinese Sunflower-200 is it's clone of the Iranian Shahed-136. It appeared at Russia's Armiya-2023 show and in 2025 combat in Sudan.
The China Defense website says it has a 3.2-meter length, 2.5-meter wingspan, a flight speed of 160-220 km per hour with a maximum take-off weight of 175 kilograms, a combat payload of 40 kilograms and can fly up to 2000 kilometers. x.com/clashreport/st…
3/
The M109A6 Paladin 155mm/L39 caliber self-propelled gun is the T-62MV obr. 2022 of the artillery world.
The gun is inferior to every other major power's fielded SPG world wide.
2/
The computerized fire direction system of the US Army Artillery is a overly centralized, decades old Star/mini-computer architecture, which has an electromagnetic signature so bright that it can be detected bouncing off the surface of the moon
I cannot begin to tell you all how fishy this passage from that article is:
"In addition to the F-35 production line at Ft. Worth, Texas, the commingling of the two types of bolts was also discovered at the Italian F-35
2/
... Final Assembly and Check-Out (FACO) facility, but not the one in Japan, the DCMA reported."
Spot checking of aircraft production and depot level maintenance facilities fastener bins is a standard operating procedure for DCMA everywhere it has quality personnel.
Why the West, and particularly the US Army, is in deep denial over that reality is rooted in the US Army's denial that the FPV anti-tank drone is replacing the ATGM for cost/performance reasons.
The Ukrainian missile crews salvaging brand new $20K Stugna ATGM to make more FPV drones underlines the battlefield kinematic superiority of multi-copter drones to boost-glide ATGM.