Recovered!

SpaceX was ecstatic about the landing of the upper stage of Starship after its 13th test flight last month. It was on target in the Indian Ocean, it landed upright, and it was floating in the sea--rather than exploding or sinking, which had happened in all 12 previous test flights. That meant engineers at SpaceX could view and study it for valuable data after its flight.

It kept right on floating for days, and then for weeks. They had not expected this potential bounty of information and were unprepared to bring it back to Starbase TX. Rough seas made recovery difficult, but eventually they managed to bring it into a port about 24 days after it landed. SpaceX engineers will go there to inspect it.

Why was recovery both difficult and expensive for SpaceX? Watch below.

from USA Today

Test flight #12

Starship is still being improved. The latest, brand new iteration (V3) of SpaceX's space transport vehicle took off on its virgin flight last Friday evening, a mostly successful trial.

Ship itself (upper stage) is bigger, and the launch pad (Pad 2) is safer and more durable. The Raptor engine is completely redesigned--with less mass but more thrust, a beautiful re-engineering (on the right in the photo). Find the details of these improvements and many more here.

All of this is to enable human travel in our solar system and beyond. Soon, Starship will have to achieve the ability to re-fuel while in orbit, and then achieve rapid reusability.

As one engineer put it, "A lot of people worked really hard to make it look easy." Of course, passing the test was actually anything but easy. You saw engineers talking about that a couple of weeks ago.

Here is the live launch and flight narrated by SpaceX engineers. Actual launch takes place at about 28 minutes into the video.

Poverty 54% to 28%

Two years ago, over half of Argentina's population lived in poverty. Today that's been cut in half. In just two years the poverty rate dropped from 54% to 28%. 

President Milei has held office since December of 2023, a little over two years ago--the same two years. How has Milei accomplished this tremendous turn-around? 

As a former economist, he understood something important: socialism produces poverty. His country had been under socialism for almost a century. Part of his strategy has been to reduce the size of the government. State subsidies along with public sector payrolls were slashed.

Inflation declined from 200% when he took office to 33% two months ago. For the first time in about a century, Argentina had a fiscal surplus in 2025.

A chainsaw is the symbol of his attack on overspending and socialism.

from Washington Post

(cont'd tomorrow)

Home to Earth

NASA, America and most of the world joyfully welcomed the astronauts safely back to their home planet last Friday evening. I joined with many who thanked God for their safe return. 

Artemis II was a stunning success for NASA, achieving precise goals per that wonderful descriptor, "Nominal." The term means: as planned, right on target, just as it should be.  (Splashdown is at 3:40 in video.)

Pilot Victor Glover did the last message before they went behind the dark side of the Moon: "As we prepare to go out of radio communication, we're still going to feel your love from Earth. And to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you, from the Moon. We will see you on the other side."

It was a relief to resume communication with them as they completed their 6 hours on the dark side. Mission Specialist Cristina Koch shared aspirational words as they came back in view of Earth: 

“We will explore. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will build scientific outposts, drive rovers, do radio astronomy and found companies. We will strengthen industry and inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”

Note: If you were intrigued by "A Great Awakening," here's an interview with the young star

Elon interview

Big thinker Elon Musk goes after exciting goals. No, that's an understatement. Make that "impossible" or "near-impossible" goals. 

He wants to be inspired. As he's said before, "life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another." He chuckles a bit as he mentions that he and staff acknowledge a "giggle factor" when they talk about these ideas that make you excited to get up in the morning.

Catching the "biggest flying object ever made" out of the air was one of those goals. Enabling space travel for colonization of Mars will be another (assuming that one is not actually impossible). Starship will need to be fully and rapidly reusable, able to be refueled in space at an orbital re-filling depot.

But there's much more than space. He sees a huge future for Tesla's robotaxi service, Optimus robots, Neuralink, Grok AI. 

Big ideas, all addressed in this video.

 

Good vibrations

You've heard of molecular machines? Molecules within the living cell operate like machines to perform different functions that the cell needs. 

Now a certain molecule may be used to destroy cancer cells. At the Tour Lab of Rice University in Texas, a research scientist (photo) has found that these certain molecules can be made to resonate in unison. When stimulated by near-infrared light, their resonance causes the cell membrane of cancerous cells to rupture.

Nanoscientist James Tour, whose lab is doing amazing things, says “It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers.”

"According to the study published in Nature Chemistry, the method had a 99 percent efficiency against lab cultures of human melanoma cells, and half of the mice with melanoma tumors became cancer-free after treatment."

Exploding cancer cells--a great discovery.

from Rice University

$4/hour to CEO

Lowe's CEO and Chairman, Marvin Ellison, has quite a story. His experience should be an inspiration to everybody.

As a $4/hour part-time employee when he began working at Target, an entry level job, he drew attention to himself by taking tough assignments that no one else wanted. He learned how to make himself valuable to his employer and rose through the ranks to the position of Director.

Results - not prestigious education - got him to the executive level at Lowe's. 

His advice: be a problem solver, think through your path to success, and take every opportunity to educate yourself.

No saddles

Thomas Jefferson was the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence, that document which told the world that the American people intended to cut their bonds to England and take their place among the sovereign nations. 

An invitation to Washington D.C. to celebrate the signing of that document was sent to him fifty years later, in 1826, but he couldn't go because of ill health. 

It's clear how passionate he still was about the people's liberty and rights in his reply to the invitation, and he's still right about this: human beings are not born with saddles on their backs so that some elites can ride them with spurs and reins.

Tesla did it

Tesla is celebrating something else in addition to the Fourth of July this week: its first delivery of a new car driven to the purchaser entirely by what they call "full self-driving," meaning no driver even in the car. 

It certainly drove itself completely and you can see it below. (Just not completely sure I understand their definition of FSD yet.)  

This weekend my son rented one, and it took the family home from church unaided by a driver. Looks like we're in a new car era, all right.

Congratulations to Team Tesla!  

Polyface farm 2

(cont'd from yesterdays post)

Re-post from 2017 

Polyface Farm has not applied a chemical since the family bought it in 1961, says Joel Salatin. They don't run things like a "normal" farm does today. Mimicking the pattern of nature, fertilizer and sanitation are supplied by the animals instead of by chemicals and antibiotics. 

The farm is open to visitors and cameras every day, and he claims they have no disease problems like those that plague industrial farms. Cows are moved to fresh pasture every day, chickens follow cows by 3 days, then turkeys. Pasture receives the time it needs to re-grow.

"It’s all a symbiotic, multi-speciated synergistic relationship-dense production model that yields far more per acre than industrial models. And it’s all aromatically and aesthetically romantic." That means it smells good and looks good. We were there last summer, and it's beautiful.

"On our farm we have cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, lambs, fruit, honeybees, forests--it's breathtaking choreography, always dancing," p. 119 of The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs.

DOGE staff

Six young men, quirky computer wizards, may have started this endeavor to make our government more financially sound, but DOGE staff is now professional. Their credentials from the private sector are impressive. Seven of them were interviewed with leader Elon Musk regarding their mission and their methods. 

They are working to take a trillion dollars out of the government's spending this year by eliminating fraud and abuse. Here's an example of fraud: over $300 million in loans was given to people under the age of eleven by the Small Business Administration, and another $300 million to people over the age of 120. 

The loans would have been questioned if the computer systems "talked to each other," that is, if the SBA system had been able to access the ages of those loan applicants in the social security system. It's clear to these DOGE staff what needs to be done: link up the computer systems.

One of these professionals was running his five businesses in Houston when he left to come help. Another is a CEO. Another is a co-founder of Airbnb. They're implementing, in Elon's words, "elementary financial controls." 

Test flight #7

Yesterday was the seventh test flight of Starship and its booster Super Heavy rocket. A lot of modifications were tried (including a 25% increase in propellant volume and an additional 6.5' of length for "Ship") with some success and some failure.

Super Heavy performed beautifully, the megazilla "chopsticks" catching it out of the air just as they did in flight test #5. A thrilling success.

Starship ("Ship") didn't fare as well. There was a rapid unplanned disassembly (SpaceX term for explosion) over the Atlantic ocean, and a beautiful sky show as the debris streaked to earth.

There may be as many as 25 test flights of Starship this calendar year, every one being an opportunity to get more things right.

Chopsticks

How big are those SpaceX "chopsticks" that caught a descending 250-ton rocket in mid-air? 

This big (photo):

The catch

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

To remind yourself why they would try to do something as monumentally difficult as catching a rocket in mid-air, go here. 

What a moment that turned out to be. After boosting "Starship" through the thickest part of the atmosphere, seven minutes after launch "Super Heavy" disengaged from it and came hurtling back to earth. 

Precision firing of its raptor engines slowed the 250-ton rocket down til it hovered right over its target. It slowly descended into the "chopstick" arms of the "mechazilla" launch tower, back into the position where in the future it will be readied for the next flight in as little as one hour. 

This process will help attain the goal of the rapid reuse of Starship, essential to Elon's vision. He posted on X: "Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today."

Test flight 5

After telling SpaceX that approval of their next Starship test flight would probably not be granted until late November, the government (FAA) suddenly approved it last Saturday afternoon, three days ago.

SpaceX was ready, and the flight took place just 19 hours later on Sunday morning. To my complete surprise, I saw the tweet on X as we drove home from church (which explains why this post didn't appear yesterday 😐).

As planned, the spectacular accomplishment of the day was the amazing catch of the returning first stage booster in mid-air for the first time ever. In the words of one of the engineer/narrators, history was made. 

Here is the flight video. To see SpaceX's full video at sunrise with more information and more excitement, go here.

Test #5 next

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Both stages survived re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and made a successful splashdown: that was the biggest achievement of Starship's fourth test flight in June. 

SpaceX says they're ready for the next test flight, just waiting for the launch license from the FAA.

New on test flight #5 will be the spectacular catch of stage one Super Heavy booster by the new "chopstick" arms in mid-air when it returns to Earth. 

Here's an animation showing what that will (hopefully) look like:

Test flight #4

Starship's test flight #4 took place this summer already on June 6, advancing toward the goals of safe, rapidly reusable human transport to the moon and beyond.

A new summary video of its fourth test flight is out. It includes SpaceX team's live reaction to the safe splashdown of Starship's booster (Super Heavy) and the independent flight of "Ship" itself (Starship spacecraft) powered by its own six Raptor engines.

Terminology reminder: "Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, consists of two fully reusable elements — a huge first stage called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship."

Tomorrow: ready for test flight #5

from Space

Compensate

Elon Musk is one of the richest people on earth, having been wealthy since he was young. So when it looked like Tesla was going to pay him up to $56 billion, some people were outraged.

Yes, it's a huge sum, and it would go to someone who's already rich. A judge struck down that payout agreement between Musk and Tesla shareholders, agreeing with the critics. 

But there's more to the story. 

His personal wealth helped make Tesla possible in this way: Elon took no compensation from Tesla until 2019, apparently living on his own resources until he could somehow make Tesla a success. He worked extraordinarily hard, to the point of sleeping on a mattress in the factory at times.

Shareholders voluntarily chose to make this agreement to pay him that sum if he could multiply the company's value by ten times, from $60 billion to $650 billion--and he did that. After the judge's ruling, in fact, they reinstated the plan.

Before judging a story, it's good to get all the relevant information. You might have heard only the "bias framing" version of the story.

Starship test 4

SpaceX staff were thrilled last week with the results of another test flight: Starship, consisting of the space craft itself ("Ship") and its booster ("Super Heavy"), flew into space and returned separately to a soft splashdown. No RUD, rapid unplanned disassembly, this time.

Super Heavy was powered by 32 of its 33 Raptor engines, which you can see as lighted circles in the video below. When it makes its soft landing at about 7 1/2 minutes after liftoff, you can hear the SpaceX crowd explode with joy and relief.

They like to say that "the data is the payload" for this flight. Live, visual data is recorded by cameras and transmitted by Starlink, the network of internet-service satellites owned by SpaceX.

Ship flew further and faster into space (up to ~26,000 KM/H) powered by its own engines after Super Heavy separated. Surviving re-entry, it executed its "flip" and landing burn, and achieved its own soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Just one mom 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Did this mom have economic or political power? No. But she was the mom of the house. She had the power to make good choices in her own home, and what she could do, she did do. Those decisions probably seemed small then, but this woman changed her family's lives--and many others--with her choices. She was not powerless to change things.

Her son, Dr. Ben Carson, earned his place in history. After graduating from Yale University, he became a famous neurosurgeon and eventually the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He influenced and blessed a whole lot of lives.

photo

His mom was no doubt tempted to take it easy watching television in the evenings after a hard day's work. But she had the quiet courage to make a better choice, even though it was not convenient and good results were not guaranteed.

"[H]istory is never a given. It is shaped by the courage or cowardice of people who can always make a choice...

(cont'd tomorrow . . because Dr. Carson has ideas for the reform of education)