The Orbital Mirror Craze (Or: When Venture Capital Discovers Ray-Tracing)

Every few years Silicon Valley rediscovers a concept that sounds brilliant in a pitch deck, photographs beautifully in a rendering, and collapses the moment you introduce it to the laws of physics. This season’s entry is the orbital mirror. This past week, the FCC apparently started seriously considering if a startup company should be allowed […]

The HOPIUM IPO

Alright, Space Cynics… a small programming note from your friendly neighborhood anti-Kool-Aid department. Over the last few weeks I’ve watched a certain narrative congeal in real time: SpaceX is worth $1.75T because (pick your flavor) Starlink is inevitable, xAI is “strategic,” and orbital data centers are the next logical step in human civilization. Which is a very […]

Congrats to The “LYFT” of Space launch

Sorry, it was too good a pun to pass up. Congratulations to Blue Origin on the successful launch and landing of the New Glenn! While some may say “but SpaceX has already done this”, I’ll simply share this classy tweet from Gwen Shotwell: Yes, they have a lot of catching up to do to SpaceX, […]

Why Space Data Centers are Bullshit

There’s a pattern we’ve seen before: with fusion vaporware, blockchain-for-everything, “Uber for X,” metaverse land grabs… people never seem to fail to fall for the latest breathless sci-fi sounding bullshit. And now? Orbital hyperscale data centers running on fairy-dust thermal physics. And what makes it maddening is this – it seems the people eating up […]

Old NEW Spacers and senility

Apparently some of the “old guard” of the alt-space community never put down the pitcher of kool-aid. Unfortunately, science shows that repeated gulping of the hopium punch results in an inability to handle even the most basic reading comprehension exercises and the afflicted old guy will do the space equivalent of yelling “get off my […]

Records were made to be broken…

It’s getting to the point that i should probably just rename the Space Cynic blog the “SpaceX is Awesome” blog…. SpaceX has done it again. Actually, according to this article today from Gizmodo, they’ve done it 4 times in one flight. Specifically, the latest Falcon 9 launch set these records: Falcon 9 rocket re-flown THREE […]

(Space) Economics 101

It’s a basic rule of economics that the intersection of the supply and demand curves for a product or service will give you the “market clearing” price. It’s therefore no surprise that if the cost of an item goes down, then the demand for it should increase, assuming normal economic curve profiles. (quick lesson on […]

Still waiting for Zarquon…

It’s been 11 years since this post first went up. Hopefully George and the team at Virgin Galactic can crack the code before 2020… i’m still looking forward to buying my ticket (seriously). UPDATE: According to this just published article on Gizmodo, Sir Richard appears to be strongly expecting that White Knight 2 will fly […]

Space Panties in a Bunch

Et tu, NASA? Have you succumbed to the political correctness run amok in the halls of our government? Apparently, the answer is a sad “yes”. This week’s Atlantic has a great essay on the latest lack of leadership chapter at NASA – the “we must dig into the leadership and culture at SpaceX” because, you […]

Congrats Blue Origin!

This bit of news came through my email today: We took our first 12 commercial payload customers to space on Mission 7 last week. Whoa. So now we have two officially active commercial players in the RLV industry. Headstones for the old guard are being carved as we speak. #innovation #crrats

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