Is Musk Still an Asset, or is He Becoming a Liability?

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Earlier SN10 Starship prototype bursting into flames and exploding soon after landing. (NASASpaceflight)

Last week, The Wall Street Journal had a good story on Elon Musk titled “Elon Musk’s Latest Antics Have Some Asking: Is He Out of Touch?” It discuses his frat-like behavior challenging Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to a fight, his strange behavior at Twitter, and the shrinking set of friends and colleagues able to keep him from going adrift in his own bubble. The story notes:

Such antics are leading some Musk supporters to worry aloud that he has lost touch, saying he is ensconced in a distorted reality that is warping his perspective and threatening his businesses at a time when he is trying to oversee multiple companies in different industries.

Of course, one of those companies is SpaceX, which has become the backbone of NASA and the US satellite industry. SpaceX also runs Starlink, which is now a key part of the battle against Russia as it supplies Internet services to the Ukrainian military.

Musk has styled himself as the Trump of Technology – breaking established rules, failing to pay his bills, attacking critics (in-house, as well), and generally seeing what he can get away with before it all collapses.

Can one distracted man manage all of these companies? Should one distracted man manage all of these companies? And should our government be so reliant on him in the space and defense arenas? Or is SpaceX becoming the next Wagner Group, a government-funded satellite that is starting to think it is smarter than its paymaster? We all know how that ended.

You can hear more about this reliance on one man in a recent On With Kara Swisher podcast, Why We Can’t Quit Elon with Ronan Farrow & William Cohan. Here are the podcast notes:

We’re talking about Elon – again – but this time we’re looking at the big picture: the tech titan’s “unprecedented power” over our the federal government and national security, as encapsulated in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ronan Farrow’s latest New Yorker profile. William Cohan, a financial journalist and founding partner of Puck News, also joins to break down the varying fortunes of SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, and the sustainability of those companies under a leader that is ambitious, but capricious. Stay til the end to hear Kara tell Nayeema why, despite his shenanigans, she still has empathy for Elon Musk.

You should also check out Ronan Farrow’s The New Yorker article, “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule.” While acknowledging that some industrialists have had inordinate influence over US politics in the past, the piece notes:

But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. 

This really doesn’t sound all that sustainable, or wise. I hope Uncle Sam has a Plan B should Musk run it all into the ground or walks away with all of his marbles (assuming has has any left).

Space Stories: New Horizon Questions, A Dark Spot on Neptune, and Prioritizing Exoplanets

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Space.com : “NASA’s New Horizons Mission Faces an Uncertain Future (op-ed)“

With its budget being trimmed for 2024, NASA is making some weighty decisions… and one includes drastically trimming New Horizons funds by replacing the current science staff with a new team in an effort to save about $3 million—a rounding error in terms of the planetary science budget...As it stands, New Horizons will exit the Kuiper Belt around 2028 and should continue operating until 2050.

—ScienceDaily : “Mysterious Neptune Dark Spot Detected from Earth for the First Time“

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have observed a large dark spot in Neptune’s atmosphere, with an unexpected smaller bright spot adjacent to it. This is the first time a dark spot on the planet has ever been observed with a telescope on Earth. These occasional features in the blue background of Neptune’s atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers, and the new results provide further clues as to their nature and origin.

—Universe Today : “TESS has Found Thousands of Possible Exoplanets: Which Ones Should JWST Study?“

We will soon have more than 10,000 worlds where life might be able to survive. It’s an amazing idea, but with so many exoplanets we don’t have the resources to search for life on all of them. So how do we prioritize our search? That’s the focus of a recent paper on the pre-print server arxiv. In it, the team strives to identify the “best in class” candidates for exoplanets that could be further studied by the spectroscopic cameras of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Their list could not only help astronomers find evidence of life but also help us understand the range of atmospheres exoplanets have.

Space Quote: The Changing Competition in Space and Elsewhere

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): 3D view of a crater on the Moon generated from images captured by Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s Terrain Mapping Camera in 2019. (ISRO)

“…a comparison with India is illuminating: India’s economy was about half the size of Russia’s when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Today, India’s economy is 50 percent bigger than Russia’s. Forget about keeping pace with the United States: Russia can’t keep up with India.”

-Editorial in The Washington Post by David Von Drehle titled “India’s Brilliant Moon Landing Illuminates Russia’s Drastic Decline.” India’s steady progress on space missions, including Chandrayaan 2 back in 2019 (shown above), has occurred during Russia’s slow decline and current situation. This cannot be lost on Russia as its cosmonaut traveled to the International Space Station this weekend aboard an American rocket. Around the world, space programs are moving on without Russia, which was the leading nation at the start of the Space Age.

A New Crew Departs for the ISS

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): ISS crew preparing for August 26, 2023 launch. (Terry Renna/AP Photo)

A new crew departed Earth for the International Space Station (ISS) at 3:27am ET today from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The crew includes:

  • NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli,
  • ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen,
  • JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and
  • Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov.

The new crew should be onboard the ISS tomorrow morning, bringing the number of occupants at the station to 11 until 4 crew members return to Earth in a few days.

Russia is probably happy to have attention back on the ISS rather than the Moon for the moment. It has not been a good week for the Russian space program.

You can read more about the new crew members at this NASA site.

A Day in Astronomy: Launch of the Spitzer Space Telescope

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the Spitzer Space Telescope. (NASA/JPL)

On this day in 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope to conduct infrared astronomy. Spitzer continued to operate until January of 2020.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noted some of the triumphs of the space telescope, including:

  • revealing a system of seven Earth-size planets around a star 40 light-years away;
  • creating an unprecedented map of the Milky Way;
  • directly observing light from a planet outside our solar system;
  • directly identifying molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets; and
  • revealing Saturn’s largest ring.

An impressive list of accomplishments for any telescope.

You can read more about Spitzer at this NASA mission website as well as this JPL website.