Elon Musk: the Wisdom in His Vision

(Citrin-Safadi/WSJ image)

Elon Musk has so many irons in the fire--Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink (part of SpaceX), and DOGE--that it's fair to wonder of he's one of those serial inventors (maybe the most brilliant and successful in history) who gets an idea and tries to make a business out of it.

What makes more sense is that everything that Elon Musk has done is directed toward establishing a human colony on Mars during his lifetime.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the mission of taking humanity to other planets. The company infused its culture with that long-term goal and completed a successful launch of its first rocket in 2008. It eventually developed the Falcon 9 rocket, which could be partially reused, lowering the cost of launches and taking market share from incumbent rocket operators.

Musk’s other businesses have contributed to the Mars goal. Musk has described Starlink, a SpaceX division that uses thousands of satellites to provide high-speed internet connections, as a cash machine for a future Mars mission. After Tesla, his electric-car company, gave Musk a stock award in 2018 valued at up to $55.8 billion, he later said it would be used for his space project. “It’s a way to get humanity to Mars,” he said in court in 2022.

Elon Musk has already stated that the goal of colonizing Mars is to preserve the human race when the earth inevitably experiences an extinction-level event. In that light Tesla and Starlink are "cash machines" to fund SpaceX, and DOGE will reduce concerns about the national debt and help the American government fund NASA.

For those who support DOGE and the space program, however, there is a legitimate disagreement with Elon Musk whether Mars should be a higher priority than colonizing the moon:

The White House plans to propose killing a powerful Boeing-built rocket designed for NASA to launch astronauts to the moon and beyond in a coming budget plan, according to people briefed on the plans. Canceling the vehicle, called the Space Launch System or SLS, would potentially free up billions for Mars efforts and set up a clash with members of Congress who support it...

NASA’s program known as Artemis, its long-range plan to explore the moon and eventually Mars, is being rethought to make Mars a priority. One idea: Musk and government officials have discussed a scenario in which SpaceX would give up its moon-focused Artemis contracts worth more than $4 billion to free up funds for Mars-related projects, a person briefed on the discussions said.

NASA’s long-range plan to explore the moon and eventually Mars is under the microscope. NASA has been working on the Artemis program and its predecessors for years. The cost from the government’s fiscal years 2012 through 2025 is estimated at $93 billion, according to the agency’s inspector general.

In January, Musk called the moon program a distraction in a post on X. Days earlier he had criticized Artemis, saying “Something entirely new is needed.”

SpaceX, Boeing and others have billions in contracts to build rockets, ships and lunar landing vehicles, among other technologies, for the program.

Musk has discussed with officials the idea that SpaceX’s moon-focused contracts, valued at more than $4 billion, could be dropped in favor of Mars plans.

Your humble blogger bows to the genius of Elon Musk but believes that the priority should be the moon, not Mars. It does the U.S. no good to be focused on Martian settlements if, say, the Chinese became the dominant lunar power. The latter could well jeopardize the former, just as Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal had to be taken before going after the real, distant objective of the Japanese homeland.

Elon Musk probably believes that Mars needs to be done while he's alive because the project could be abandoned without him, just as NASA lost its mojo after the Apollo program. He needs to have faith that the American people will see the wisdom in his long-term vision after we win the new moon race.

NASA’s role regarding the moon must be reimagined. As we are starting to see in LEO [Low Earth Orbit], Congress must shift funding and priorities so that the centerpiece of U.S. lunar policy becomes enabling private efforts. These pioneering initiatives cannot remain sideshows to the Artemis-Apollo rerun. It’s time to move American enterprise to center stage and let people lead...

Meanwhile, NASA can turn its central focus to putting the first people on Mars. Even if the first mission is a relative sprint, we’ll be learning skills on the moon we’ll need to go further.

Global Warming: It's Now About Time

(Planet Observer/Getty/Chronicle)

Anthropogenic global warming, insist its believers, is nearly all-powerful in its ability to influence nature, but the following assertion sounds extreme:

Climate change is literally impacting time itself

The Earth’s spinning, however, has recently begun to speed up and the length of the day has started getting shorter, for reasons not fully understood. In fact, research by a geophysicist in California finds that it’s only a matter of years before an extra second will need to be subtracted from universal time, rather than added to it.

This possibility is raising concern because many computers, which have been programmed to handle an additional second, aren’t designed to lose a second, threatening to create glitches in systems governing aviation, financial markets, healthcare and more. It’s reminiscent of Y2K, when widespread bugs were feared when the calendar flipped to 2000.

The research, published last year in the science journal Nature, also finds that such a negative leap second and its potential problems are being delayed, perhaps surprisingly, by climate change. Ice that is melting around the Earth’s poles is sending water – and mass – toward the equator and consequently slowing the planet’s rotation, counteracting the faster spin.

“A second doesn’t sound like much,” said Duncan Agnew, author of the recent research and a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a communication to the Chronicle. But, as he explained online: “In today's interconnected world, getting the time wrong could lead to huge problems.”

Agnew’s head-scratching projections are based on the complex and still largely unexplained physics of Earth’s rotation.

As we all know, the planet takes about 24 hours to fully spin around. But because of several factors, this timing varies ever so slightly. It’s also hard to predict. The variation was basically irrelevant until the age of computers, when milliseconds became make or break for things like stock trades and rocket launches.

Earth’s rotation, for thousands of years, has mostly slowed, the biggest driver being the changing tides that come with the gravitational tug of the moon. Currents in the planet’s outer core, which scientists are still trying to figure out, also have slowed the spin. But the core can speed up the spin, too, which may be what’s been happening recently. Additional leap seconds have become a lot less frequent the past two decades.

Since about 1990, Agnew says, the warming climate has become an additional factor, working to slow Earth’s rotation and increase the length of the day. He likens the effect of melting polar ice and the spreading meltwater on the planet’s spin to the inertia of a spinning skater: When the skater spins with her hands over her head, she rotates faster than when she extends her arms to the sides.

“Global warming has proceeded to the point that its effects are showing up in how fast the whole Earth rotates,” Agnew said. “This change in rotation has never been seen before, and this re-emphasizes that we are living in a time when unprecedented changes are happening.”

By extrapolating trends for Earth’s core and other factors affecting rotation, Agnew finds that without the melting ice, a leap second would need to be subtracted from universal time as soon as next year to account for the faster spinning planet. Now, a second won’t have to be removed until 2029, he says.

To summarize: the earth's rotation has slowed over millennia because of the moon's gravitational pull; however, the rotation has recently sped up due to (poorly understood) actions by the earth's core. Now melting ice caps are slowing the spin again. Changes in the earth's rotation add or subtract "leap"-seconds, lengthening or shortening the 24-hour day, respectively.

Even if we accept that ice sheets are melting, a strong faith in the accuracy of computer models is required to believe that the effect on the oceans will slow earth's rotation. Nevertheless, it would not be surprising if the alarmists have taken the hypothesis as proven, and that they're already trying to find a scientist who will claim that slowing earth's rotation by a second every few years is a bad thing.

Changing Our View

Eclipsing our differences (WSJ image)

For time immemorial our species has stood in awe of nature. And that emotion, psychologists aver, affects behavior toward others:

A new paper in the journal Psychological Science, by Sean Goldy, Nickolas Jones and Paul Piff at the University of California, Irvine, suggests there is at least one psychological way that celestial events can indeed influence us. When people gaze up at an awesome sight like an eclipse, the researchers conclude, they become more humble and caring when they look down at their Twitter feed.

The researchers took off from earlier studies that Dr. Piff did with Dacher Keltner and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. In one study, people were shown videos of earthbound awe-inspiring sights like a towering tree, a sublime landscape or an erupting volcano. Afterwards they felt less significant themselves and more caring toward others.

In another study, researchers placed students in front of either the majestic Berkeley Eucalyptus Grove or a tall but boring campus building. A confederate then came by and dropped a bunch of pens on the ground, apparently by accident. The awe-struck students in the grove put more effort into helpfully collecting the dropped pens than did the students by the mundane building.

December, 1972: Apollo 17's "Blue Marble"

Additional support for the Awe => Humility => Caring connection came from a comparison of millions of tweets from those who were in the path of an eclipse and those who were not.

they also used more words expressing social connection, like “care” “love” and “thanks,” and they expressed more humility and tentativeness, saying “maybe” or “perhaps.”

The second age of space travel does not seem to be as marred with criticism as space travel was during the Sixties. As mankind slips the surly bonds of earth and explores the wondrous, dangerous, and awe-ful universe, perhaps human beings will be prompted to set aside their differences and be more aware of how much they have in common with each other.

Happy New Year

(Illustration from Yale-China)

Today is the beginning of the lunar new year, the Year of the Tiger according to the Chinese Zodiac.

Ever since I was a toddler in Territorial Hawaii, adult relatives would give me red envelopes on Chinese New Year. Finding a dime inside was pretty good, and when I got a quarter--you could buy two DC comics plus five Bazooka bubble gums--I was rolling in it like Scrooge McDuck. A rich grand-uncle on my mother's side would give out one dollar bills, but I didn't get to go to his house often.

Now I'm the one that has to pass out the red paper, so Chinese New Year isn't as much fun. Nevertheless, subscribing to both the Gregorian and lunisolar calendars has its advantages. One gets to enjoy two New Year feasts, but more importantly one gets a chance to start again on resolutions that were already broken in January.

In other words we get a mulligan. Speaking of golf and tigers, it looks like an auspicious year for Tiger Woods to be making a comeback after his excellent showing in the PNC tournament in December.

Happy New Year (again)!

52 Years After Apollo 11

Blue Origin crew: Oliver Daemen, Wally Funk,
Jeff Bezos and Mark Bezos. (CBS)

52 years to the day after the first moon landing Jeff Bezos' company launched four men into space:

Tuesday’s space flight was Blue Origin’s first with passengers on board, a group that included the world’s wealthiest person—Mr. Bezos’ net worth amounts to more than $200 billion, according to Bloomberg—as well the oldest-ever space traveler and the youngest, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old student Oliver Daemen, respectively. Mark Bezos, 50, the co-founder of private-equity firm HighPost Capital and Jeff Bezos’ brother, also was on the trip.

Virgin Galactic Unity 22 July 11 crew: Pilot Dave Mackay,
Op. Engineer Colin Bennett, Astronaut Instructor Beth
Moses, Richard Branson, VP Gov Affairs & Research
Sirisha Bandla, Pilot Michael Masucci. (space.com)

The race by three billionaires to bring space travel to the masses may seem like a "boys and their toys" moment in history, but such dismissiveness belies the seriousness with which each has approached this mission:

Tourism is merely the first rung of the space ladder. Blue Origin has two more manned flights on the schedule for this year, and Mr. Bezos said the company is approaching $100 million in private sales. Virgin Galactic has presold hundreds of tickets for its space plane, which flew its founder, Richard Branson, to weightlessness last week. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has ferried NASA astronauts to orbit, but it has private flights on the calendar, too...

The money paid by wealthy passengers will also help these companies go higher. Blue Origin has other projects in the works, including a New Glenn rocket that will be big enough to put satellites into orbit. Mr. Musk, as everyone knows, is aiming for Mars. The benefits of all this are hard to say precisely, but that’s the nature of exploration and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Several companies are working on constellations of small satellites that could beam fast internet to remote areas that lack it. Novel uses of technology are harder to predict, but surprises happen when smart people are trying to be the first to achieve some milestone. Nobody working on America’s first satellite missions in the 1950s and ’60s could have ever imagined that the Global Positioning System, or GPS, would one day keep millions of people and Uber drivers from getting lost.

Elon Musk wants to set up colonies on Mars but
will go into space himself on Virgin Galactic.

The resources that the billionaires can bring to space travel are tiny compared to what state actors like the U.S., China, Russia, and India have at their disposal. On the other hand, governments are limited to spending money on traditional functions like military and basic scientific research, functions that will be cut when the political winds shift.

My betting is on the entrepreneurs, not the governments, to figure out how to make space travel economically sustainable, to use a fashionable term.

July 20, 2021 will never be as famous as July 20, 1969, but it will be a milestone date nevertheless.

Moon over Foster City

There are high-res close-ups of this morning's super-blood-flower moon, and you won't find them here, dear reader.

I woke at 4:15 a.m. and snapped this photo of the moon over a neighbor's house. He has more lights on than normal. Perhaps he's gazing up, too.

Find My iPhone Will Need to be Updated

(ArtistShot Image)

In case you missed it, Your iPhone will soon work on the moon: (H/T Tyler Cowen) [bold added]

Nokia will build a 4G cellular network on the moon. It’ll allow future astronauts to make voice and video calls, but also transmit data and remotely control equipment.

The goal is to have the wireless network in place on Earth’s largest satellite by 2022. It’s part of NASA’s Artemis program, which has the goal of establishing a sustainable presence on the moon by the end of the decade...

NASA could have skipped 4G and gone straight to the latest standard, but telecoms are only just now rolling out 5G on Earth.

It's wise that they're installing 4G instead of the much-faster-but-unproven 5G.

If you bring a vintage 2014 iPhone 6 (valued at $100) to the multibillion dollar lunar base, you want to be sure it's going to work.

Horns Over Hormuz

"Red devil horns" appeared over the Persian Gulf on December 26th.

The scientific explanation is that it's an unusual conjunction of a sunrise--the bottom quarter of the sun is truncated by the water--with a partial solar eclipse.

Only the superstitious believe that it's a harbinger of events that will unfold in that benighted part of the world. Everything will be fine.

Again, Happy New Year!