Itâ(TM)s about how human beings react to new shiny things. I would ballpark science fiction as being about 50% cautionary tales and 50% hopeful inspiration. If you miss those lessons youâ(TM)re going to focus on the shiny things. Kurt Vonnegut wrote about ice nine because his brother Bernard was helping figure out how to freeze clouds and create weather. A fable about how scientists donâ(TM)t always look at the full effects of what they create. If you want the phasers, but donâ(TM)t want the society it may not go well.

The release speaks of Starship capabilities in the present tense.
They have yet to complete a single orbit.
They have yet to refuel in space.
They have yet to tour a habitable version of Starship.
The Crew Dragon spacewalk was a dog head out the window.
They have yet to land Starship upright tail first on land.
Also sounds like Hadden from Contact - Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
The parallel efforts sounds good, but what happens when resources get scarce?
Does he short his vehicles or NASA vehicles if parts break or the gummint funding shuts down?
I know that advanced planetary species have a permanent presence elsewhere, but those are imaginary species.
The point of science fiction is to understand humanity, not to have the speedy shiny things.

We went from walled gardens like AOL CompuServe, the WELL, Delphi, etc., to open authorship of websites, and now we are back to a lot of walled gardens, we just call them social media - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all with their own revenue generating enclosures.

I was teaching undergrad and graduate level teachers in 1998 through 2000, and they would almost universally come in demanding that they know how to make a webpage and write HTML. I also had to make sure that they knew what a student experience was like, so we were, at that time, still pretty big on LOGO. They were convinced that LOGO was utter nonsense and a useless toy, and that they had to learn HTML or they would be left as the jetsam of the Internet. A week into HTML, where are syntax errors beget digital avalanches, they were ready to tear their hair out. A week into LOGO and they were just as inspired and happy as the kids they would eventually teach it to. You didnâ(TM)t get a syntax error in LOGO, the console simply asks you to teach it how to do the thing you typed that wasnâ(TM)t in its vocabulary.

Even after we had some of the early foolproof web authoring tools, people realized that the hard part was not necessarily coding, it was making sure you knew what you were going to talk about, how to say it, how to present it, how to have it make sense and how to use the hyperlinking that the web was built for.

Of course, revenue has a lot to do with the overall frustrating Web experience today, to read the first story on my local newspaper site. I have to dismiss no less than five ads and pop-up offers. Iâ(TM)ve never been to the Vegas strip, but I imagine the visual assault of the current web means I really donâ(TM)t need to experience it in person in the physical world. And of course, like operating systems, every major provider wants to make sure you stay in theirs. Itâ(TM)s kind of like how CVS is no longer a pharmacy, they build a separate building that has enough stuff so that you donâ(TM)t even try to shop elsewhere when you go in to get your RX. You grab all the other things you need there so that you wonâ(TM)t go elsewhere. META has adopted this model, they want to make sure that everything you need to get through your day is available in their brand. Google as well. Google is an advertising company that happens to be willing to supply you with some serviceable tools to do other things. Kind of like the car Homer Simpson designs. And Iâ(TM)ll stop now because Iâ(TM)m starting to sound like grandpa Simpson with the onions.

This assumes you want a lunar habitat. The original flights to the moon were in an era of exploration, they actually did provide some valid scientific results, and we beat the Russians. Growing up in that era, I cheered space flight like no one else. What was accomplished was nothing short of amazing. We no longer need to beat the Russians, so why? The real value of LEO is earth resource monitoring, possibly some manufacturing. Unmanned space flight is far safer and more reliable than manned. The same goes for Mars. What is the return on investment? We will never colonize any other celestial body to remove any pressure on the Earth. Less than 1000 people have ever flown to space in 60+ years of flights. A quarter of a million people have died in a single day in a disaster, and it never put a dent in the population of the Earth. Both efforts no longer look like breakthroughs, but rather more like flagpole sitting or ego projects. Iâ(TM)m willing to be proven wrong.

Three years of launches, and they have yet to complete an orbit.
Somehow all in the next calendar year, they expect to regularly orbit, AND orbit a propellant target AND complete propellant transfer AND orbit a stable propellant depot AND perform a dozen or more propellant transfers AND land an unmanned Starship HLS on the moon AND launch 5 Starships to the Mars surface AND land a Starship with a working rover on the moon surface.
His delivery of car functions and price targets have slipped by years.
Is there some reasonableness of the space flight schedule that is inherently more reliable?
I get it, yeah, it is rocket science, but it seems like wishful thinking at best.

Arrhenius, 1889. Also re-discovered by anyone trying to put sugar in iced tea.

Cannot happen soon enough. I recently dealt with insurance issues that had the paperwork in the US and the bad scans thereof in the Phillipines. The two locations claimed they could not contact each other. That took a month to resolve.

Runners who strap their fitbit to the dogâ(TM)s tail for an hour each day have less aerobic fitness.

first is high school grades, but it is nearly impossible to equate or handicap different high schools.

If this craft has completed a full orbit. They refer to reaching orbital velocity or altitude, but I cannot find any reference to completing a full orbit of the earth. Ten launches without completing an orbit seems like a lot for something that is supposed to use 3 or 4 of these things rendezvousing in orbit to get to the moon and back in 2027.

Ground truthing (touchy term depending on if you are the ground based or spaced based nerd) is essential in getting a verification on the ground of what the bird sees. Once you have that calibration, the sat data is very reliable. And you cannot be on the ground everywhere, so the sat has greater range. This is an evolution of what the LANDSAT birds have been doing for decades. Source: have been working on earth resource monitoring education / citizen science for 30 years.

an athlete or a celebrity or a politician can stumble 20 times go down the wrong path for years, and somehow come back and win the big one and be elevated to a pedestal beyond compare. The scientist makes a few mistakes along the way and they and they are vilified.

He means money.
A search engine now makes money while almost inadvertently supplying useful search results.
See google results for the past year, shopping is now the top tier of results.
Sponsored results too. Gotta ad-incentivize those results.
Since COVID they have also convinced students that they are an operating system.
Used to be people gave up on a search 3 or 4 clicks deep. I believe that number now approaches 1.
Sorry, usually only this cynical *before* breakfast.

Really? How soon?
Not long. It'll probably happen with our lifetime.

I gave it two prompts this morning on topics in my field, and it gave me 1000 words each.
Mostly accurate with a few small errors. Since it was my field, I caught them.
If I were a student looking for a fast way out of an assignment, I likely would not know enough to catch them.
And if I were a student looking for a fast way out, I probably would also not bother to do the critical thinking needed to vet the results.
It probably makes low effort learners march in place.
It probably does nothing to people who bank on their own originality and abilities to analyze, evaluate and synthesize.
Seems to have some value in asking here is my work, did I miss anything? And further evaluating.
As you might with a colleague or editor.
But take everything with a grain of salt.