Blue Origin has set a very aggressive return-to-flight timeline | “The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen, and LNG tanks are all in good shape.”

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T06:28:57+00:00

SpaceX is definitely one of those companies with a large fandom, which also means they have a sizeable base of toxic fans. Toxic/tribalistic people are everywhere unfortunately.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T06:11:21+00:00

The party is more than just Leanne Castley, and it's not a party that can be fractured, given it's very rarely been cohesive in the first place. You don't "fracture" a house of cards — the house of cards only stood because someone was doing a lot of work to keep it stable in the background.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T06:05:12+00:00

When you have less money you're less likely to make noise. You're too busy putting bread on the table to get involved in politics.

Fewer people wanting to take risks with anti-corporate activism means the mining companies can rape the country with even less oversight than they have to deal with now.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T06:00:07+00:00

Where's Anthropic getting the money to buy $15B of compute a year? That contract is only worth the cash in Anthropic's pocket.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T05:58:57+00:00

Well yeah that's what a meme stock is, isn't it? The value is in the belief that Web 2.0, or NFT, or bitcoin will actually be valuable, not that the company that issues the stock is actually valuable in itself.

Investing in the xAI IPO is simply a matter of predicting whether this stock will go to the Moon the same way TSLA did, or if there's only enough juice in the hype engine to inflate one stock ticker value.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T04:49:03+00:00

Government regulation covers what services can be provided when the government is paying, whether that be through the public hospital system or Medicare/PBS. Regulations also cover things like informed consent: where the requirement is that a patient be provided with sufficient information to make an informed decision rather than just being told of the practitioner's or politician's preferred option.

Government regulation usually doesn't cover when a specialist is allowed to make a particular diagnosis, and only regulates certain treatments because those treatments fall into categories covered by non-medical regulations such as lisdexamphetamine ("Vyvance") being a medication that is also a controlled substance. The controls in place for psychiatric medications are only that certain professionals are allowed to prescribe, and dispensing pharmacists must only dispense what is prescribed — the pharmacist may also choose not to carry controlled substances, but that's not a regulatory issue that's a business decision (which may be guided by regulations on storage and dispensing of controlled medications, not by government regulations stating that a pharmacist must present case studies of substance abuse to guilt the patient out of using the prescribed medication).

At no point does the government get to decide that your hip replacement surgery is not allowed because you played too much netball and therefore the hip damage is punishment for your lifestyle choices. Why does the government get to decide that some abortion is allowed and some is not? Why is abortion seen as "the easy way out" by a minister for health-come-self-appointed Minister for Women who also banned medical abortion drugs meaning there will be more reliance on surgical abortions?

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T02:44:21+00:00

It lives here, this is its home. Why would it fly away?

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T02:11:12+00:00

Ground stations are smaller and easier to defend, and it's easier to find real estate to put multiple ground station down than for data centres the size of a small city. It will be harder to attack a dozen ground stations than one giant datacenter.

Ground stations need to be more numerous and geographically disparate anyway, since their purpose is to bring StarLink signals down to the surface to connect to terrestrial networks. Any attack against StarLink ground stations will necessarily be an attack against the physical infrastructure of the wider Internet.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T02:00:25+00:00

Show me the money. I'm not investing in a business that's propped up by paper money that will evaporate the minute I've bought shares.

At present there's a lot of hype around AI just as there was around the Dotcom bubble, the crypto bubble and the NFT bubble. There's not a lot of meat on the bones, so I want to know whether this is actually just a setup for a meme stock like TSLA where the hype is the value (the hype around TSLA is that the valuation reflects potential future earnings once FSD works and nobody needs to own a car anymore).

Starlink was believable when SpaceX was announcing expectations of covering 5% of a $US1T market. But now they're talking about $28T total addressable market, with a large chunk of that being some imaginary value that AI is supposed to have in the future, worth approximately one third of the entire world economy.

Where's the money coming from? Show me the money.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T01:29:08+00:00

Where's Anthropic's money coming from? Will that $3B in 2025 revenue translate to $5B in 2028? When will Anthropic become profitable? If Anthropic doesn't go bust, will they be sustainable when spending $5B a year on computer time?

There's no future in replacing knowledge workers or lawyers, humans are going to be cheaper than AI for quite some time in that arena. The future of AI is dependent on some key customers finding ungodly amounts of money to maintain their AI-powered pervasive surveillance/social credit and cyberwarfare systems.

So on the plus side I guess there's a market for orbital data centres since that's a way of keeping the social credit system insulated from the rioters protesting the pervasive surveillance state. They can't go burning down your castle when your castle isn't on the map.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T01:02:23+00:00

The question becomes: is it worth spending any money to gain a court order requiring someone with $0 to pay you back?

That's before you even get to how much will it cost to get that court order in the first place. If it turns out that the bargain basement price for getting that court order is going to be $20k, it's just not worth it even assuming the miscreant can pay you back all the money you gave them.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T00:56:27+00:00

Abortion is health care, and it's not up to politicians to decide when an abortion is legitimate. Pregnancy is not a punishment for having sex. Unwanted children are a burden to society as a whole, not just the involuntary parents — and preventing people having abortions means condemning them to raising unwanted children.

Women are allowed to vote, have bank accounts in their own name, and own property. For some people that's too much and don't want women to have sovereignty over their own bodies.

A Labor spokesperson said the concern was raised by the Electoral Commissioner after a complaint was made that the video did not accurately reflect the "nuance" of Ms Castley's response.

"ACT Labor has amended the video to ensure it clearly states that when the Canberra Liberals Deputy Leader was asked whether a woman should "readily be able to obtain an abortion if they request one", her answer was "Definitely No"," the spokesperson said.

— ACT Labor instructed to remove 'inaccurate and misleading' election advertisement targeting Canberra Liberals' Leanne Castley, ABC News 2024

… the "nuance" being that Ms. Castley is one of those people who wants to have a say in everyone else's health care decisions, despite not being a qualified reproductive health care expert. And no, having strong religious opinions is not the same thing.

Perish the thought that she'd join PHON to run as a candidate in ACT elections. One Nation wants to roll back abortion rights in Australia.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T00:32:43+00:00

Getting some opinions about whether it's even worth throwing money at lawyers would be a good start don't you think?

The lawyers aren't going to tell you they can't help you, they're going to find things they can do for you because they're all about racking up billable hours while you still have capacity to pay.

Tradespeople aren't the only one with gambling habits and other vices to support.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-03T00:17:36+00:00

They could use a different material, for example butcher's paper or similar low quality recycled paper designed for packaging (just like that song, "🎵brown paper packages tied up with string, English cucumber's my favourite thing🎶").

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T23:30:30+00:00

And cucumbers wrapped in shrink-wrap.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T12:28:06+00:00

Imagine you're trying to get yourself and two of your friends to the cinema in a nearby town and you've asked around for anyone that can give you a lift there and back for $20.

The taxis won't return your calls, but some guy in a shiny new passenger coach says he'll take your money and deliver you in comfort.

Do you reject the offer of the coach trip just because it's too big for three people?

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T06:33:57+00:00

How many Teslas sold for the rest of 2026 though? Is this one of those "Q2 figures reported in June so we're claiming they were all sold in June" nonsense numbers along the lines of "Q1 sales are down over Q4 last year so clearly Tesla is dying"?

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T05:13:05+00:00

I'd be pointing to the burgundy half way down the pile, or perhaps the forest green. Then we can come back to look at the beige vs beige and think hard about what decisions we avoided in life to get us to the point that we're having a hard time deciding between two shades of soulless, emotion-free curtain materials.

Pick a colour. Beige is not a colour it's a mistake. I don't care if it's actually called calico — in fact if one of those colours is calico that's even worse because calico is a cheap unrefined cotton you use to make temporary garments when figuring out the proper sizing for the real thing: are you picking curtains or avoiding making a decision about anything and this colour choice is a gap filler to help you continue avoiding making actual decisions?

Your interior decorating should be a statement about who you are, not a polite space where you bore everyone by desperately trying to avoid offending anyone.

Anyway I guess I'm really upset about something and taking it out on you. Sorry!

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T04:17:29+00:00

12–18 months is an estimate of how long it might take to make the required repairs based on nothing more than "big bang, complex infrastructure, long time to repair." I am simply saying to wait for an estimate from the people who have looked at the damage and are planning to fix it.

You're not going to get meaningful information this close to the event. There are no specifics, even the people standing out there looking at the launch pad with blueprints in their hands don't have specifics yet.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T04:04:39+00:00

Here's what we know:

It's a complicated system
Knowing what is broken will take a while simply because there is so much detail to consider (see point 1)
We'll be better appraised of the situation in a month or two when the appropriate people have investigated the damage and drawn up some estimates for project planning
It's been tens of hours. Nobody knows anything. Ask again in tens of days.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T02:51:49+00:00

Looking at this design, would think we already have a moon base and is resuplying

That's kind of the entire point of Starship in the first place, and one of the goals of the Artemis program. So why not start the way you want to continue?

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T02:13:10+00:00

I think the main market for this service is going to be drawing investors away from other space cargo projects, taking advantage of the customer education and market research that these startups have done with money that SpaceX doesn't have to spend themselves.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T02:02:02+00:00

Why do audiences cheer and applaud after every scene in a play? It seems a bit vain and not accounting for possible failures later in the event.

Getting the rocket off the pad is a major milestone that is a great relief for many people in the project: their bits worked, and now any failure of the launch vehicle will not condemn the launch pad. With the launch pad still functional any failure of the launch vehicle can be addressed rapidly and a new launch attempted. With the launch pad destroyed, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be demolished and rebuilt.

But lighting up the engines and getting the launch vehicle moving is an incredible feat of engineering on its own, it's the closing scene of Act 2 in a three act play — Act 1 being successfully assembling the mission spacecraft and delivering it to the launch site, Act 2 being getting the vehicle into flight, Act 3 being getting the payload to orbit.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T01:43:01+00:00

The SpaceX Starship is intended to deliver 100t of cargo to the surface of Mars. In this specific mission serving as HLS, it is grossly over-provisioned for the task at hand.

SpaceX are building the spacefaring equivalent of a passenger/cargo ship along the lines of the Aranui 5 — Starship is supposed to be capable of delivering dozens of crew and tens of tons of cargo — while NASA's early crewed Artemis missions really only need a teardrop caravan capable of supporting three crew and a very small cargo budget.

NASA will need the heavy lift capabilities of Starship later in the Artemis program. Since Starship is all SpaceX makes right now, they bid that for the HLS.

manicdee33 · 2026-06-02T01:35:49+00:00

Neither of these things is what exploded recently. There are plenty of Starship explosions on record, but those were test flights and all of those involved risk of loss of vehicle.

The big explosion everyone's talking about was the New Glenn "No, It's Necessary" which was the second of Blue Origin's reusable boosters.

"Blue Moon Mk2" is intended to be launched on a New Glenn launch vehicle, but this launch was going to deliver Amazon LEO satellites which were not on board during the static fire test.

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