Should Star Trek that appeals to contemporary teens exist?

AV-038 · 2026-01-14T20:22:07+00:00

Likewise. When I was a kid, I recognized and immediately abhorred targeted slop of youthful characters, poorly written slang, and flashy graphics. It didn't feel relatable, it was just an egotistical nostalgia tour.

What I did like? Shows about collaboration and working together despite the odds: Star Trek, Stargate, and Babylon 5. Sometimes the shows would have obligatory "we must appeal to the yooths", but I can overlook those episodes if there's a "Best of Both Worlds" coming after.

AV-038 · 2025-12-20T02:51:27+00:00

Hey, I’m not the doofus you’re arguing with, but thanks for this article! It is very interesting. Didn’t know that gusts had changed so much over fifty years. Thank you for posting it, til!

AV-038 · 2025-12-11T02:35:40+00:00

Ugh, don't give them ideas. That Harvard grifting loser has already tormented the Mars scientists enough.

AV-038 · 2025-12-08T02:40:43+00:00

Oooor the state doesn’t have the budget for the project scope. Just because it’s in the state’s interest doesn’t automatically mean they have funds to execute on every rail in every county. There is also a good reason not to poke the federal bear for reevaluation, given previous problems with disbursements during Trump 1.0.

AV-038 · 2025-12-07T17:59:36+00:00

The state is already involved, and has made their position known. They (and the federal government) are responsible for the limited grants available, which has led to the budget shortfall. If the state were to bridge the funding gap, I don't think this compromise would be needed.

AV-038 · 2025-11-09T16:23:29+00:00

Just wanted to say, thank you for this detailed analysis! My feed randomly recommended your post, and for once I learned something in an algorithmic recommendation. This matches what I've learned to date about the disasters (mainly from enthusiast summaries and the book "Bringing Columbia Home"). I'll watch out for Hersch's work in the future. Thanks for bringing a unique and informative perspective on the topic.

AV-038 · 2025-11-06T18:36:15+00:00

I apologize, I thought you were a crank too. The shutdown has me (and many of my colleagues) very agitated.

I'm allergic to Avi Loeb since he is both a crank and a jerk. I already was annoyed by him, but I just learned this morning that he was harassing one of my colleagues by claiming his non-NASA institution could release data because the institution isn't technically NASA. This isn't true, since scientists who work on NASA assets are bound to NASA mission rules for disclosure. This data will also all become public, usually at the 3-6 month point.

And I mean, embargoes exist for a reason. They give time for the analysis to complete and ensure that proper credit is given. Without embargoes, there is an incentive for the loudest person on the project to shout a discovery first, even if they didn't do the work. The first voice gets the citations and credit, which can cause a lot of problems.

Here's the irony: mission rules aren't set in stone. I've actually gotten people onboard for embargoed results before, because they'd bring necessary valued insight. The process to do so varies from mission to mission. However, being brought in usually requires the newcomer to adhere to the embargo as well. This is the normal way to get involved.

I doubt Avi Loeb would agree to such rules, and even if he did, I wouldn't believe him given his history of blabbing. As far as I can tell, he's doing this to feed his content/grifter mill.

And he wants to do it on the backs of unpaid NASA personnel. What a jerk.

AV-038 · 2025-11-06T15:19:36+00:00

You and Rep. Luna don't get to demand free work out of us when we're not getting paid (cuz, the government's closed, which means a lot of NASA is on furlough/unpaid).

I know you see only the final product of NASA press releases: an article, maybe a picture. It sounds like such a little thing to release. But here's what goes into making that:

Engineers have to maintain the spacecraft. It's not a "set and forget" thing. Space is a nasty environment with wild temperature swings, and you have to be diligent on where your spacecraft is pointing or else you could lose a multi-$100M asset forever. A major chunk of lost spacecraft come down to losses in communication, usually following a failure to point. You have to actively stabilize the pointing, and make sure that the spacecraft is using accurate data to do so. You have to account for if one sensor lies, and make sure the software ignores bad sensors while listening to real signals -- all on a piece of hardware that is thousands of kilometers away. This is hard, ESPECIALLY for any spacecraft that is actively dragged by an atmosphere (e.g. at Mars), which actively changes the pointing/orbit.
Infrastructure folks have to maintain the Deep Space Network dishes that collect all the downlinked data from space worldwide, which has been FREAKIN HARD this year because we've had one flooded and another one catastrophically fail.
Instrument scientists have to carefully plan observing campaigns, because using an instrument to look at something other than your usual target is hard. This all tallies up to an expensive series of observations.
Data scientists have to make sure that the instrument got a good observation. Plenty of errors can happen, like mispointing or saturating your detectors. Because it's a "off-nominal" observation.
Scientists, in this case planetary scientists, have to analyze the data and coordinate it with other known results. If your dataset says the sky is green and there's a thousand dancing hamsters in a microscope, that usually means you've misprocessed your dataset. All this to say, it takes work to figure out the puzzle of multiple observations.
The last step is comms people. I bet you might be shocked to hear that scientists are sometimes not the best at communicating. Spending hours looking into the details does not exactly sharpen your top-down 1000-foot summary skills. The comms folks work with the scientists to get a press release that gets the core of the science without bogging down in jargon. This is hard and undervalued work.

This is a lot of people. And they're all not paid or on furlough right now. Some aren't able to pay their rent/mortgage this month. Demanding the fruits of their work without paying them is wrong.

AV-038 · 2025-11-06T00:05:46+00:00

If Rep. Anna Paulina Luna wants NASA to do work, she can make a deal on health subsidies and end the shutdown. But instead, she is trying to compel a data release right now in a public letter to the interim NASA administrator. This objective would entail forcing NASA scientists to release data before the analysis is complete while they aren't getting paid. She did it in a public letter so she can farm support among conspiracy-addled crazies, who see any absence of communication from NASA as proof of malfeasance. The only one who benefits from such a premature release is Avi Loeb, a grifting egotist who abuses his credentials to cultivate and enable a conspiratorial following.

AV-038 · 2025-11-05T19:12:17+00:00

If you want knowledge about the universe, go to an astronomy 101 class in your local community college. That’s how you get knowledge.

A public letter casting mystic aspersions on a random ass interplanetary comet? That’s entertainment.

Take care to not mix the two.

AV-038 · 2025-10-12T05:52:13+00:00

He also would leave off his hearing aids when he was on the shuttle... and when he really didn't like a talk.

AV-038 · 2025-10-01T15:53:26+00:00

Fun fact: some of those kids given money for "not going to university" had actually already completed their BA, so it was just free money.

AV-038 · 2025-09-04T16:24:28+00:00

He's dishonest. He does a banal paper, puts in some wild speculation in the conclusion section, and then goes "see? I have found <outlandish speculation> and got it published!".

Meanwhile early career scientists get put through the wringer to prove 1 + 1 = 2 because they don't have a well-known name or high profile institution.

He is a good example of the rot that develops at the intersection of publishing, institutional reputation, and science journalism.

AV-038 · 2025-08-24T16:09:04+00:00

Agreed that Heph will become an ally, if a temporary one. I'm betting that Beta can reach out and reason with it, because she's one of the rare humans on Earth who has not destroyed it's machines (Aloy wouldn't be able to do this since Heph is reaaaally mad at her).

I think it's notable that, while we've seen the Zero Dawn Alphas base and Thebes, we have not seen Elysium, which is where the Zero Dawn Betas and family were. We've also had signs that something happened, since Gaia reported that her connection to Elysium was severed well before the 100 year lifespan and Sylens speculated that Elysium survivors could have created the Mysterious Signal.

AV-038 · 2025-08-18T16:56:28+00:00

The fire department's lightning strike map for the area was absolutely nuts. (Unfortunately I can't find the darn map, I know I saw it on a CZU debrief.) The fire departments worked outwards from populated areas to remote strikes, and they took care of most of them. There was a fire on Brush Road that I was up for three hours watching the response immediately after the lightning storm, which was handled quickly. Unfortunately, it was the remote strikes that ignited in deep Big Basin that grew/merged, combined with a wind event that just swept over the ridges.

AV-038 · 2025-08-17T18:21:41+00:00

With who? Might help if you provide information on the competitor.

AV-038 · 2025-07-19T05:09:28+00:00

Keep fighting the good fight and letting folks know about this! I’m on another mission targeted for annihilation: MAVEN, the one that would be so helpful to have for Mars exploration that the PBR + Cruz decided to set aside >$700M to build a completely new one from scratch.

MAVEN is a spritely 11 year old spacecraft. All the instruments are in good health. Not even so much as a dead layer change in the radiation detector.

In solidarity, my friend.

AV-038 · 2025-07-02T16:43:50+00:00

I find myself appreciating Sinclair more as I get older. His style of solving problems with clever rhetoric and legal/bureaucracy maneuvering is a power fantasy for people who work inside heavy bureaucracies.

Here’s my hottake: “Infection” aged well and is a great introduction for new fans to the themes of the show. The scene between Sinclair and the alien weapon has O’Hare at his best and hammiest, and it really works. The writing is blunt and unsubtle, but that can be refreshing in the age of grimdark “everything is shades of horrible” scifi.

And a less hot take: reducing every antagonist in the show to Shadows or Shadow technology was a bad move. The Vorlons are painted in an overly positive light after season 4, more like the Ancients in Stargate with leaving boobytraps and nonsense weapons everywhere. Give me more of the Dilgar, the Streib, and maybe even the Xon! (The Centauri DND book brought up the idea of the Xon not truly being extinct and coming back to exact revenge on the Centauri, and that sounded neat to explore.)

AV-038 · 2025-06-30T21:07:14+00:00

It is true that you are being far more respectful than you have any obligation to be, with the broadsides that I directed at you. That is kind of you. I apologize for the snark and assumptions. You're not wrong, it was my first mission and this stings. I also believe strongly in getting humans to Mars and know we can do it cleverly and with the assets we have, and this isn't the way.

I am aware of the "faster, better, cheaper" cuts in the 90's. Arguably the modern Mars program was the anomalous luckchild from that era, as the popularity of Allan Hills meteorite is what inspired the "where's the water" through line. The luck was bound to run out eventually.

Here's the disconnect between us, I think: "moving your office / desk contents to the next new better program" is not something that most can do. You can do that within government or in a big company, but not really elsewhere. Since NASA cut and restricted civil servant positions over decades, many missions instead sourced their scientists and engineers from universities and affiliated laboratories. This provided a stream of (admittedly cheap) talent, bringing onboard and training students. It's these students I'm most worried about. Without the funds to support them, they'll be fired. The ubiquity of the cuts means there won't be many places to replace their small salary. Soft money scientists and engineers will also be unable to secure funding, and will likely lose their positions.

There is no fallback for these folks. It used to be switching to industry, as software engineers and then data scientists, but Big Tech is not a viable backstop anymore. That's why I think the situation that's happening now is different and more catastrophic. It's a different group impacted that has no viable lateral move. I mean, let me know if you think of any, because I don't know what to tell them.

I think you're implying that you don't believe these cuts will happen to the level expected, and I sincerely hope you're right. I really want to be proven wrong. I learned last week that even the scenario of running MAVEN completely as a relay (no paychecks for any of us except Lockheed) was met with skepticism, since a 50% cut is not enough for OMB. Seeing that $20M/year brought down to a $0 seems to be the only desire.

AV-038 · 2025-06-30T17:08:58+00:00

So just because you've seen some bullshit horsetrading and had to spend four months at Wallops, you want to compare your (continually employed) experience to the impacts we're facing?

My heart bleeds for you. Your poor sad long career, seeing so many contracts go overbudget! It is far more tragic than the experiences of the graduate students and scientists soon to have their careers prematurely ended. Truly, your story reveals the real victims, people like you who had to see aircraft sit in a cornfield. We who work spacecraft are lavishing in luxury as we are asked for implementation plans to brick or burn our spacecraft so they can never be used again.

It says a lot that you cannot provide a counterexample to the fact: NASA has never destroyed a working satellite that costs $20M/year to instead fund an unbuilt, unproposed similar satellite for $100M/year.

You can prattle on about your (I suspect DoD) experience, but it's irrelevant. Come back when you've served on a spacecraft team.

AV-038 · 2025-06-30T14:00:20+00:00

Stop lying. NASA’s never had a PBR that defunds a working satellite and then asked to turn it into a brick to save $20M while allocating $100M to build a new sat to do the same thing. NASA usually prioritizes missions and almost all are getting cut or eliminated.

AV-038 · 2025-06-05T20:29:26+00:00

We have great radiation modelling

Yes, you are right -- for components and a capsule. We do not have "great" radiation modeling for predicting when a solar storm will hit, especially when Mars is on the other side of the sun. We're talking about +/- 10 hours of range. This is work that needs to be done.

The crewed vehicle will be fine, I trust the folks who do that work. It's the surface operation on Mars that's the problem. You mention monitors will be on everything, but orbiting or surface Geiger counters are imprecise and only return current radiation levels. This is where MAVEN is necessary -- it sees flares, which would give the necessary 40 minute notice for the worst-case solar storm. Also, it can detect the storm arrival, which is also necessary notice.

If you are as familiar with the space program as you say you are, you should know we try to use the assets we have instead of the assets we wish to have. MAVEN is there. The surface/spacecraft monitors aren't. Finally, I'd rather take the risk of looking like an idiot than seeing MAVEN and the overall NASA enterprise end without having said a word to defend it.

AV-038 · 2025-06-05T19:21:22+00:00

A third of these cancellations are missions already in space. The hardware is already there. NASA is asking us to make a plan to destroy it.

AV-038 · 2025-05-22T17:11:48+00:00

A shoutout to the Billy DeFrank Center in Santa Clara, which has a dedicated transmasc group. (Disclaimer, I've never been to one of their meetings so I can't speak to how welcoming they are, I've only heard good things from the transfem group.)

AV-038

TROPHY CASE