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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Form input - by Günter Born

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Why do the presentations of Starship launches come across like an episode of "The Price is Right"?

I just watched the complete Starship 10 mission presentation, and what struck me, was how it didn't really come across as a news broadcast, at all. What came across was a kind of advertisement, a focused and artificial cheerfulness that reminded me of the TV gameshow "The Price is Right", where gameshow participants are selected for their mindless enthusiasm, and their greed. Everyone in the TV audience was dancing and clapping and cheering and smiling just like the game show contestants on The Price is Right. When pieces of the Starship were torn off, the commentator used the term "liberated", as if this were a very good thing, and not a bad thing at all. There were smiling pretty young women interviewed who said how incredibly exciting the mission was, and how fabulously successful it was, and what an incredible job SpaceX was doing. The commentator regularly said how magnificently everything was going. What was particularly striking to me, was, that when the Starship second stage exploded into flames at the end of the mission, the commentator didn't even bat an eyelash, or respond in any way whatsoever. A huge fireball exploded right behind him on the screen, and, it seemed like he didn't even notice it at all, or that it never happened. I found that truly fascinating. I think what we have here is typical Elon Musk, which is to say, pure disinformation. It's quite clear that Elon Musk is making money just by repeatedly blowing the Starship up over and over again. He wants to cut costs by 99.9% on mega-rockets like the Saturn V or the more recent SLS, and is claiming that the fact that he cut costs on medium sized rockets by 30% through partial reusability means that he can do it. Apparently, such a pathetic sales line is compelling to rich investors, since it's working. The rich are hoping they can cash in on space, or visit it on the cheap, and will believe any lie Elon tells them. I don't know if the Starship will ever actually be used for anything, or, it's simply the most recent incarnation of Howard Hughe's Spruce Goose, on steroids, however, I do know that it's quite impossible for Elon Musk to make colonization of space practical with liquid fueled rockets. They simply aren't efficient enough -- too expensive, too unstable, too dangerous. However, at a billion dollars a pop, launching Starships as billion dollar firecrackers is very profitable indeed. So, by God, The Price is Right!

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