Want to stop the UK government doing this to your feed whenever someone posts a video that they don’t like?

It’s important now more than ever that power be held to account, and to not accept their control over what information people see.

Here is what to do… 🧵 (1/4) First, sign the petition today and share it with as many people as you can (2/4)

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7229…

We could have had the stars.

The NASA budget in 2024 was $24.88bn - or £18.42bn at current exchange rates.

I'm going to break down what the UK government spends in increments of the annual spending of the worlds biggest space agency.... 🧵 My sources are the OBR forecast:
obr.uk/forecasts-in-d…

and where I can't get information there, slightly older figures from IFS: ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-…

I know I shouldn't. I know its bait. But you have to engage with critics. Even if its abundantly obvious, from even the thumbnail, that these guys I've never seen before will likely be dishonest idiots. He's "calling BS" on... oh no, wait, he is selling a book. Maybe I should review it to save others from giving the guy money

I alluded to the NHS experience being shocking, here is what happened. This is "the envy of the world"

My wife has been ill so tried to get a GP appointment. Normal process of phoning at 8:30am and staying on hold for an hour to speak to someone. She gets through, tells them her symptoms, and they promise a call back. She then heads into work late - I suspect the 8:30 call thing is a way of rationing care in favour of the elderly who don't need to take a morning off.

Finally, late in the afternoon she gets a call back.

I’ve been pushing for some time now for the UK to do more in space, including launching payloads from our country. People with a bit of knowledge of the physics of spaceflight object on the basis that the UK is too far north to host a spaceport. This isn’t really true… 🧵 A launch site close to the equator gives you an eastward boost from the earths rotation, and lets you easily access a wide range of inclinations. This is why Kennedy Space Center is in Florida and not Maine, for instance.

But for polar orbits, this doesn’t help you.

So after @elonmusk laid out the plan for 5 Starships to Mars in 2026, I went to crunch the numbers. Happily I was already working on this, but now I’ve got a specific number to work with. So 🧵 time…

Here are the three upcoming Mars windows. 2026, 2028/29 and 2031. Each window presents a chance to go to Mars on a reasonably quick transfer for a delta-v of about 4km/s from Earth orbit. Starship can easily handle this, if it has enough propellant. But because it reaches orbit with its tanks nearly dry, orbital refilling is needed.

So @AlbertBurneko has rather brazenly tossed us hat into the ring as a critic of Mars colonisation. Let’s see if he does any better than others… 🧵 Dripping with snark, he brings up the old magnetosphere chestnut as if it’s obvious and advocates are stupid for not knowing it. He clearly does not understand space radiation, and makes a fool of himself.

Earths magnetic field is not what protects us from GCRs, it is our atmosphere. This is basic knowledge one should have before strutting into the argument with what you falsely believe is a mic drop.

Mars has very little atmosphere, but even there at shallow angles there is some shielding. Most of the risk comes from near zenith, and piling sandbags on your roof mitigates this, without a magnetic field.

When he says “solar radiation” he is either talking about intense UV radiation or solar proton events - both of which are easier to shield against than cosmic rays.

So actually, contrary to the imagine interlocutor stumped by his clever question, it is fairly easy to design a habitat that protects against radiation indefinitely - and many studies have done just that. Albert has not read any of them.

SpaceX can't fly Starship until November at least.

This is nuts. How are 60 month delays to satisfy these requirements even remotely justifiable? I've always resisted the idea that federal agencies are intentionally sabotaging SpaceX, but given how much good faith engagement the company had with state and federal agencies prior to getting rug pulled like this, things do look a bit sus.

spacex.com/updates/#stars…

So now Mars is back on the menu, lets think about getting people there. Musk targetted 100 people per Starship, but lets be conservative and say even with a stretched version coming its more like 50.

If you were able to send 5 Starships towards Mars, that means 250 people get to go.

In order to minimise the risk of one ship going wrong, the ships may be docked together for the journey. If one of them isn't in a fit state to land, the crew can spread among the others. You want a bit of spare capacity for this reason. But here is a thought - where is the crew limit of each Starship coming from? Its from the fact that you have to live in this thing for 5-6 months.

You also take off and land in the same vehicle, hence why they all have control surfaces and a heat shield. Is this really necesssary though?

You could have one ship that all 250 people pile into, basically an economy-class Starship, and have the others designed only for space. The mass savings on the heat shield etc give more payload for the journey over.

(I've used a cropped version of the HLS render here to represent that because I'm lazy)

This does reduce how much surface cargo goes with the crew, but maybe you send that separately on slower trajectories so you can take more of it.

The Guardian have done a puff piece on degrowth, cited by Caroline Lucas, so it’s time to address this idea. I’ll try to avoid dunking on it, but critique it as a serious proposal. First off, the idea that growth is “bad economics and anti-scientific” is a way for Hickel, the guy at the centre of this piece, to claim his degrowth ideas simply follow from science, and thus to dispute them is to be no better than a flat Earther. This is a common trope but typically collapses on examination. People simply assert that they have trivially solved is-ought in favour of their ideology, and it’s not true.

The extreme example of £1m of teargas vs £1m of affordable housing somewhat misses the point of GDP. It’s a measure of capacity not goodness. It is also worth noting that if you buy weapons you employ people and put money into the real economy.

If you don’t think money in the economy should be spent on weapons, don’t buy them and vote for parties that want unilateral disarmament. Personally I think that’s mad but each to their own. What I don’t think you can do is use an emotive example of two different types of economic activity to make the claims that follow

This is absolutely damning. I’ve known RationalWiki to be an angry crank site for many years, and I’ve also known that Wikipedia exists to launder the opinions of certain editors, but I hadn’t put the two together.

The fact that journalists read Wikipedia to get up to speed on topics then write about them is a feedback loop that massively amplifies these obsessive fringe voices, and I think it’s played a significant part in dissociating much of the media from the people it supposedly serves and from reality itself.

The pollution of the memetic space is permanent though. I have no idea how we can cleanse our collective corpus of knowledge of the intellectual sewage that @jimmy_wales has dumped into the internet. The Wikipedia project has failed and must somehow be replaced.

tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sou… The game of Wikipedia editors is to project good faith whilst acting in bad faith. This has been going on for years in an attempt to craft an alternate reality where the liberal fringe of US Democrats are always and permanently right about everything.

NASA are scamming you all. This rocket can only put a small payload on suborbital trajectory, despite claiming that they would launch humans on it! NASA's plan to go to the Moon is too complicated. We have no idea how to handle cryogenic fluids in space! Its going to take years of research!

(1/7) Launches become less newsworthy as they become more routine, and this has led to the general population not seeing the revolution in spaceflight. Space technology is going to change the lives of ordinary people in the next decade in the following ways... (2/7) Falcon rockets launched 96 times in 2023, any many of these were Starlink launches. This satellite network is already providing communications pretty much everywhere on Earth. Flights, boats, campsites - and previously unconnected rural villages in the developing world.

A review of the SpaceX letter, and why it got people fired.

Near the start it makes it clear this is a DEI issue they feel isn’t being addressed. Fair enough - but how they want it addressed is significant (1/7) They define the company values as opposed to Elon’s, without stating what these values are, or showing that everyone at SpaceX shares these opposed values. They are trying to define the company culture by describing it (2/7)