Water scouring the surface? Or was it thousands years of wind-blown sand / dust? Dunes have ripples.
There is no water on Mars (not to be confused with liquid CO2) until somebody goes there and drinks some. Anything else is hoping for water to justify the $100billion price tag.
Thing is, I don’t think NASA and SpaceX compete. NASA is not a for-profit company and was happy to see successful private companies in the sector. They’ll happily be a SpaceX client so that they can focus on actual research and do things that are not profitable (yet)
But in terms of “I wanna cut waste, and make the government lean! So I am gonna delete the space part of the government and replace it with my own!”
Just sounds bad, like really bad. Even worse than the armored Teslas. I can’t imagine NASA is the top of people’s lists of “utter wastes of time” It’s not a regulator, it’s not in the “known enemies” list unless you’re a flat earther. I dunno how you spin it to be palatable.
I think that is probably the actual reason. Musk probably fired most of NASA, and then realized that the absolute carnage would in this case impact him personally, and it suddenly became an important issue and he needs to have them all rehired so that they can keep paying him his contracts. He still doesn’t give a shit about other people’s contracts / medications / intelligence operations / statutorily enforced payments / whatever.
I do my best to block any news regarding the new administration, so this comes at quite a surprise that it was even considered. Always thought NASA was one of the great prides of the country, but it seems like those days are long gone.
In the mass firing they lake of the people who maintain nuclear weapons and the people working on bird flu. Once they realized they need those people they started trying to rehire them.
Yeah, shit idea. And exactly why NASA gets shit on for consuming money with less to show for it.
Spend billions on a program set up by one administration, then some tool comes along and wants to cut costs because they want to look effective and cuts NASA’s programs. Program never completes, now it’s just a waste. NASA, being by default a scientific endeavor thar doesn’t need to return an profit other than exportation and research data, is an easy target. Billions invested and nothing to show for it. WhY iS NaSA So iNeFfeCtIve!?! Repeat for another program later.
I’m so looking forward to what JUICE uncovers! Europa has been centre stage and is getting its own dedicated mission, but the more we find out about those outer moons, the more fascinating they get. Ganymede is the largest in the solar system and has its own magnetic field. And Callisto being an ocean world? It wouldn’t surprise me if Ganymede is also.
They found that Callisto’s ionosphere alone cannot explain all existing observations, but that a subsurface ocean in combination with the ionosphere can. Further exploring which scenarios best fit the data, the researchers predicted that the ocean is likely at least tens of kilometers thick, as measured from the top of the liquid ocean to its seafloor, and encased beneath a solid ice shell that itself could range from tens to hundreds of kilometers thick.
Life on Callisto would have a worldview not unlike that of the Krikkiters.
Efficiency is when the government abandons all its investments, lets everything fall apart, and drives all scientists to take jobs abroad before the next uncontrolled pandemic paralyzes the country.
It’ll most likely be avian flu, which is pretty bad. The Trump people are trying to ban MRNA vaccines and cut the vaccine research that might have helped with it.
Elon is probably mad it launched on an Ariane 5 and it went so perfectly, we’ll get an extra decade of science out of it.
The Ariane 5 really was a reliable rocket. It had some failures early on, like basically all rockets, but then it had 82 successful launches in a row and then one partial failure before having another long perfect streak.
Obviously, more expensive than modern reusable rockets but JWST was important enough of a payload, that I’m glad NASA/ESA chose Ariane. (Plus, given JWST’s delays, I imagine when that decision was made, SpaceX was still iterating and having occasional explosions.)
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