Tom Bryan

I give you a momentary reprieve from the madness: The Vera Rubin Observatory has taken its first images of the sky, and they are *extraordinary*. Mind blowing detail, jaw dropping beauty. badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/rubin-open... 🔭 🧪

This is a good point, and I need to think about the fallout from these two pissy babies tantruming at each other. It's funny, certainly, but the ramifications could be very serious for a lot of reasons. Those faces are getting eaten by leopards pretty voraciously right now.

If you burn down a forest, you don't miss out on lumber for just that season. You have to replant all the trees, nurture them, and wait for them to grow. The science and research budget cuts happening now are wanton, senseless arson. Recovery, if it ever happens, will take generations.

This is from my newsletter today.

Drafting xkcd.com/3093/

You probably won't believe how desperate Starliner's flight to the space station got last summer ... arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

Who else is great?! Linktr.ee/theawkwardyeti

After falsely being described as being "stuck" in space, Boeing's Starliner crewmates Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have returned to Earth, splashing down with Crew-9 members Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov on SpaceX's Crew Dragon "Freedom."

The only thing abandoned is the truth. I spent years at NASA, where facts ruled—you can’t fake physics or negotiate with gravity. So why are some so willing to deny truth? When history gets rewritten and facts twisted to serve power, we all lose. open.substack.com/pub/amikokel...

The SpaceX Crew-10 zero-g indicator was chosen to represent the four astronauts' common traits and symbolize their shared hope for continued cooperation.

Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke, Artemis II crewmates Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Tom Hanks took to the stage at Space Center Houston to discuss the past and future exploration of the moon.

🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦 🪿

As of 2:34 a.m. CST (0834 GMT) on Sunday (March 2), the moon is home to a new spacecraft. Firefly Aerospace successfully landed its first Blue Ghost, becoming just the second company in history to safely reach the lunar surface.

Hurricane forecasting has never been better. The NHC just had their most successful year of forecasting. But we sit at a perilous moment, and it's important to understand the ramifications of what may be coming from the Trump Administration. Here, we offer an economic argument to proceed cautiously.

At the moment, mansion-sized Asteroid 2024-YR4 has a one-in-fifty chance of hitting Earth in the next eight years. Now might be a bad time to reduce spending on Science. Just sayin’.

It'll be more than six weeks #groundhogday #news

January 24, 2025