Month: March 2017

SpaceX

Elon Musk had himself a day Thursday. For the first time in history, his company launched a fully reusable first stage of an orbital rocket. Then, for good measure, SpaceX landed that rocket for a second time on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Finally—because why not, when you're on a roll—he attempted to safely return the $6 million payload fairing at the top of the rocket. Even that met with at least partial success. "This is a huge day," he commented later. "My mind's blown, frankly."

Many minds were blown on Thursday as the 10-story tall first stage launched for the second time, hefting a 4,300kg payload on its way to a geostationary orbit about 36,000km above the Earth, and then returning to the planet. Blue Origin has done this with the much smaller, suborbital New Shepard rocket. NASA's space shuttle was mostly reusable—but also the product of a multibillion government program. On Thursday a private company, having invested more than $1 billion of its own funds, reused a large, complicated rocket.

Enlarge (credit: Jinx McCombs)

Even as the federal government did its best to pretend that climate change didn't exist, the push against it expanded out into the school system this week. The state legislature in Idaho removed mention of climate change from its science education standards, even as a "think" tank sent school teachers copies of a text that promotes a plethora of non-scientific ideas about climate change.

On the federal level, it has been a bad couple of weeks for science, as the Trump administration released a budget outline that would dramatically slash spending on research and science-based policies. That was followed by an executive order that blocked the US government's first attempt to come to grips with the problem of climate change. Capping things off was a bizarre hearing held by the House Science Committee, in which the chair of the committee accused the entire climate science community of abandoning the scientific method. The new head of the EPA also decided to reject the advice of the agency's scientists, just for good measure.

Do not speak of it!

You might think that science would deserve a breather after all that, but it's not to be. Yesterday, Politico reported that the staff of the Department of Energy's Office of International Climate and Clean Energy have been told to avoid using the term "climate change" at all. While a DOE spokesman denied that this was a formal policy, the directive allegedly was handed down in a meeting. Staff was told that the term would cause a "visceral reaction" among the new senior staff, including Department head Rick Perry.

Enlarge / Frankie Adams as Bobbie Draper. (credit: Rafy/Syfy)

One of our favorite things about The Expanse is the way that—unlike many an epic TV show—it doesn't string out the plot needlessly. Season two is drawing to a conclusion, and things are moving along. On Earth, Gunny Draper is in trouble with her Martian higher ups, and the feeling is probably mutual following the way Private Travis was offered up as a scapegoat for the battle of Ganymede. But she wants to see the ocean before they send her home in disgrace; she breaks out of the Martian embassy and finds that life for Earth's dispossessed masses isn't quite as groovy as she'd been led to believe.

She's not the only one in trouble. Errinwright owns up to his role in Jules-Pierre Mao's rogue protomolecule experiments once he realized that Mao may be in cahoots with Mars now.

Ganymede is in quite a mess. Three of the agriculture domes are gone, and while searching for his missing daughter, Prax notices that the artificial environment on the colony is dying. The problem is too little biodiversity; once a pathway gets damaged there aren't enough others to compensate. Or, as he explained to Amos, "the station's dead already, they just don't know it yet."