I have two stacks on my desk. The left stack is financial disclosure forms from members of Congress. The right stack is waivers for members who filed their financial disclosures late.
— Peter Girnus 🦅 (@gothburz) April 24, 2026
The right stack is always taller.
On Wednesday morning, I watched a soldier get arrested on…
Category Archives: Business
Better Late Than Never
No more Pell Grants for crap degrees. But the loan program still needs a massive overhaul, if not obliterated entirely.
The Latest From Jared
I understand some in the community have an affinity for specific hardware, but the focus should be on outcomes. With respect to SLS, the desired outcome is launching crewed Orion spacecraft at a reasonable cadence, rebuilding muscle memory, and buying down risk so we can land…
— Jared Isaacman (@rookisaacman) April 17, 2026
[Mid-morning update]
An interesting interview with him.
[Noon update]
ICYMI, from Jared’s X post: “I do not want to throw away billions of taxpayer dollars, and time we do not have, on a flavor of a rocket that is not necessary to return astronauts to the moon.”
[Thursday-afternoon update]
Bob Zimmerman has thoughts on his Congressional hearing.
[Bumped]
Launch Industry Woes
The only company currently performing is SpaceX.
And then we have the suit problem (that I talked about in my Reason study last year). But Eric Berger seems sanguine about it:
People often say there's no difference between "new" space and "traditional" space. Not true, and we've seen that play out with this spacesuit contract. Axiom has no guarantees it will ultimately profit on its fixed price suit contract with NASA. It could lose big time. But the…
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) April 21, 2026
[Afternoon update]
I left Rockwell a third of a century ago when it became very clear that, despite being the prime contractor on the Shuttle, they didn't see themselves as being in the space business. They were in the government-contracting business.
— Rand Simberg (@Simberg_Space) April 21, 2026
On The Iran War
Future Scarcity
An interesting discussion on the implications of AI and robots. Read the whole thread.
Maybe unpopular opinion? I think an age of abundance via AI might cause more war instead of less, because the value of land on earth will trend toward infinity (there is finite land on earth), while the cost of creating robot armies to fight over it will trend toward zero.
— Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) April 18, 2026
Jeff Greason
I haven’t listened yet (it’s a two-hour interview), but I’m sure it’s interesting:
This has gone live now. Wide ranging; how I got in the field, what worthy goals are for the space enterprise, some of what we need, and of course, advanced propulsion. Gets a little emotional in spots. And 2 hours long ….https://t.co/CyO6dZPone
— Jeff Greason (@JeffGreason) April 16, 2026
Thanks to @tmro https://t.co/iIdePreSGP
Intelligence Versus Wisdom
Interesting thoughts. One of the purposes of the Senate was to be the wise house, to tamp down the impetuosity of the People’s House. We lost a lot of that with the 17th Amendment.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: “An AI trained on engagement will optimize for engagement. An AI trained on profit will optimize for profit. An AI trained on wisdom would optimize for something else entirely, but we would have to know what wisdom looks like before we could train for it. And we have spent the last century systematically dismantling every institution that once tried to answer that question.”
ULA’s Woes
I’m starting to wonder how long they’ll survive. With Blue Origin finally flying (if still at low rates) and other providers coming on line, maybe it doesn’t matter.
Project Hail Mary
We saw it a week ago and, while it was a good movie, I wasn’t as blown away by it as many seem to have been. But Matt Shapiro thought it was great.