No, NASA has the budget. They already spent $50 billion on the development of SLS and Orion, Starship development cost is estimated to be around $10 billion.

So in theory with the money they spent on SLS they could have built 5 starship program.

The problem is that NASA has to follow political interests, sometimes the political interests align with technical interest and we get great things like the Apollo program.

Imagine you want to build a cabin in a very remote place in Alaska.

Getting there is quite difficult, you did it a few times in the 60’s but the path is so bad that you had to throw the truck away each time (around $45,000 per trip, for the truck + gas)

You are still planning to build your cabin but having to buy a new truck for each trip is not great, plus the fact that only one company can make this SLS truck so you can’t get more than once a year.

Building a cabin in these circumstances is close to impossible.

Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused. The trip from the hardware store to the build site now only costs you around $100 for the gas plus truck expenses AND you can now do the trip to the hardware store multiple times a day !

Now building the cabin becomes way more accessible.

Replace the Alaskan cabin with a scientific base on the moon or Mars and multiply the amounts by 100,000 and you have an approximation of the situation

In the meantime Arianespace divided by 3 their number of rocket launches

It reached the altitude of 96km, not space but not far either.

Easy, just compress all your collection into 24kbps mp3.

Caramelized apple ice cream is amazing !

Don’t forget Serge Gainsbourg

The government could listen to people, this is what protests are, people who want to be heard.

But instead of listening to people the president decided to appoint a far right government despite the fact that the left for the majority during the last election.

https://store.ifixit.fr/products/p5-pentalobe-screwdriver-retina-macbook-pro-and-air

Astronomer hate this simple trick to ruin all observations.

Fairphone is minimum 8 years.

More specifically SpaceX got a contract to bulls the moon lander for NASA.

So SpaceX is going to land in the moon.

I would look into the Surfaces, you can find a cheap second hand one and install Linux on it.

This is not what I’ve read.

Boeing engineers tested the thrusters and managed to replicate the issue. They found that there issue was caused by a bulging of a Teflon valve.

However they don’t understand the root cause of why the Teflon is bulging.

So Boeing said it’s safe for the astronauts to return on Starliner but they also said that they fixed the thruster issues they had on the previous flight.

Not all NASA is confident that the Starliner is safe enough.

Palm leaves ?

Yep, I think we pictures are becoming a valuable as text and it is fine, we just need to get used to it.

Before photography became mainstream the only source of information was written, it is extremely simple to make a fake story so people had to rely on trusted sources. Then for a short period of history photography became a (kinda) reliable sources of information by itself and this trust system lost its importance.

In most cases seeing a photo means that we were seeing a true reflection of what happened, especially if we were song multiple photos of the same event.

Now we are arriving at the end of this period, we cannot trust a photo by itself anymore, tampering a photo is becoming as easy as writing a fake story. This is a great opportunity for journalists I believe.

I really don’t have much knowledge on it but it sound like it’s would be an actual good application of blockchain.

Couldn’t a blockchain be used to certify that pictures are original and have not been tampered with ?

On the other hand if it was possible I’m certain someone either have already started it, it is the prefect investor magnet “Using blockchain to counter AI”

I think a fork happening in a few years would be great, right now the app still need a bit of polishing but they are quickly improving it.

Yes, having a purely non-profit foundation from the start would have been better.

But, for me, it is still a better option than Signal or Matrix for messaging.

Signal is great but they need 10s of millions every year of donations. It means that they rely on the generosity of wealthy individuals to keep going. I’m worried it is not sustainable.

Matrix is better on this aspect since everything is open source, but the UC is not great on my opinion and I don’t fell comfortable switching to it for regular contract with family and friends. To be fair it’s been a while I haven’t used it so I downloaded Element but I am blocked on the account creation (the verification email is not arriving).

To compare I tried creating a new account with SimpleX and in less than a minute I was ready to chat. They rely on investors for now and don’t have a clear business model which is worrying but they are developping fast this way and being fully open source anyone could fork it at any time. The UX is great despite being heavily focused on privacy and security and have features that no other app have, you don’t need an email or phone to chat and if they ever start to enshitify someone can fork it.

Do pragmatically I think it is the best alternative right now and I am curious to see how they evolve.

FAQ SimpleX funding and business model

https://simplex.chat/blog/20240814-simplex-chat-vision-funding-v6-private-routing-new-user-experience.html

Right now it is investors and donations.