Some ideas on preventing cryogenic propellant boiloff in Starship during long duration cruise or while operating orbital fuel depots. The usual caveats apply! One of the major concerns with using Starship for the Human Landing System is that propellant (cryogenically liquid metha … | Continue reading
California is by far the richest and most powerful polity led by Progressive ideals, and it has taken a beating of late. In this post, I discuss a practical roadmap by which California must reclaim its mantle as the shining city on the hill, an embodiment of the positive attribut … | Continue reading
As of today, it is 601 days until October 17, 2026, when the mass-optimal launch window to Mars opens next. While I don’t have any privileged information, it’s fun to speculate about what SpaceX could choose to send on its first Starship flights to Mars. (Spoiler alert: Rods from … | Continue reading
This post is a follow on from Powering the Mars Base. It’s an extended riff on the following thought experiment: What is the most electrical power you could extract from an integrated Starship-delivered nuclear reactor on Mars? The usual caveats apply. I have taught nuclear physi … | Continue reading
As part of my job running Terraform Industries, I get to build an amazing team of super smart people, and that involves interviewing hundreds of people. Over time certain patterns have become obvious, but I remember when they weren’t obvious to me on the other side of the table! … | Continue reading
[One from the archives, a previously unpublished short story I wrote c. 2017 on the theme of BASE jumping.] Why anyone thought a prison on the Moon was a good idea was beyond me. Remote, dangerous, inhospitable, to be sure. But certainly not impossible to escape from, as I was ab … | Continue reading
A quick note to formalize some observations on elite organization dysfunction. The Space Mirror Memorial at Kennedy Space Center in Florida commemorates the 25 US astronauts who have died in flight. Ron Dittemore is the retired former Space Shuttle program manager who was ultimat … | Continue reading
I don’t ordinarily write about events “in the moment” but for this I will make an exception, as I was personally affected. Caveats aside, my family and I are safe, we evacuated for several days, and due to heroic efforts by professional firefighters and psychotically brave neighb … | Continue reading
I wanted to gain better insights into the Salton Sea level, evaporation, inflows and outflows. Step one was to gather publicly available data about its level, and collate it into a single graph. Here we see that despite the continual formation of Salton Sea advisory committees, t … | Continue reading
Part of the Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary Series. Contains spoilers for this chapter and earlier chapters. Google Mars .kml. Literary commentary podcast. “Shikata Ga Nai” Japanese for “What else can we do?” “It is what it is,” “There is no other choice.” The final chapter of … | Continue reading
Part of the Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary Series. Contains spoilers for this chapter and earlier chapters. Google Mars .kml. Literary commentary podcast. [Edit: If you enjoy this kind of thing, you may find a career at my company, Terraform Industries, rewarding. We’re hiring … | Continue reading
Part of the Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary Series. Contains spoilers for this chapter and earlier chapters. Google Mars .kml. Literary commentary podcast. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since the last update of this – in that time I read my children all of Green Mars an … | Continue reading
President Trump’s recent sweeping electoral victory is a clear mandate for change. There is some urgency, and Trump has assembled the early stages of a team and coalition that can deliver it. It’s not exactly a mystery what Elon and Vivek plan for The Department of Government Eff … | Continue reading
A shorter version of this post was published in Palladium on 10/18/24. This version incorporates helpful feedback from a number of knowledgeable readers. With the recent SpaceX Starship orbital flight tests, it is time to commit to building the largest physically possible space t … | Continue reading
A brief note on using solar and batteries as generic power sources. Over the last few years of work at Terraform Industries, we’ve developed several useful heuristics to understand how rapid progress in solar and battery costs will change industry. This includes the bifurcation o … | Continue reading
This post is part of the series on space topics. A growing Mars base has a prodigious need for power. I’ve previously written two posts on powering the lunar base. The first explores solar power towers and thermal storage. The second reveals that beaming power to the lunar base r … | Continue reading
Why is there almost nothing on the left hand side of the USA? Water scarcity! We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing 30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We should do something about it! The western US is a parched opportunity to create millions of acres of … | Continue reading
Four years ago, unable to find a comprehensive summary of the ongoing abject failure known as the NASA SLS (Space Launch System), I wrote one. If you’re unfamiliar with the topic, you should read it first. It is hard to … | Continue reading
A quick note with some self reflection on the eve of my 37th year and after nearly three years of running a hardware start up. I never saw myself as a founder. At some point a few years ago I realized nearly all my friends were founders or managers of their own business, but I sa … | Continue reading
With the latest studies on GLP-1 drugs showing not just a drop in all-cause mortality but also an apparent slowing of aging, I thought I’d write a quick note on how I think this technology, if it replicates, can drastically improve our lives. It’s hard to believe I’m writing this … | Continue reading
I am routinely solicited for my technical opinion on new and interesting technologies and companies developing them. 90% of the time, my answer is “I don’t know” but it continues to concern me that aspects of technical feasibility are evidently not legible to financial types (and … | Continue reading
Part of the series on space topics. A follow up to my blog on atmospheres and terraforming (2018) and how to terraform Mars with cheap solar sails (2022). Unrelated (officially) from my work at Terraform Industries, where we’re making cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and … | Continue reading
Or, how to explore the solar system and be back in time for Thanksgiving. It’s no secret that I’m a space nerd. One of the major headaches of human space travel is that if you put the enthalpy of combustion, the melting point of metal, the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, and the esc … | Continue reading
Originally posted on the Terraform Industries blog. Terraform Industries is making cheap, synthetic, carbon neutral natural gas from sunlight and air. I founded Terraform in November 2021 with a clear vision of what this product would look like, how it would work, and a 95% corre … | Continue reading
Last year’s post “You Should be Working on Hardware” was mostly targeted at people with established careers and financial security, but I was surprised to see it enjoyed much wider readership. Disclaimer: My own path to hardware has been personal, contingent, and path dependent. … | Continue reading
Solar is in the process of shearing off the base of the entire global industrial stack – energy – and the tech sector still lacks a unified thesis for how to best enable, accelerate, and exploit this transition. Modern humans evolved perhaps 200,000 years ago, and for the 10,000 … | Continue reading
It’s lucky I like solar power because it’s impossible for me to open the X app without seeing insanely great news about solar deployment progress. This progress is driven by consistent declines in solar cost, summarized in the graph below. Solar is on a fast track to “rounds to z … | Continue reading
As recently discussed on The Carbon Copy with Brian Janous, utilities are seeing major forecasted demand growth for the first time in decades, and almost entirely from data centers. These data centers are running the internet, serving videos, hosting blogs … | Continue reading
How much ancient text might we recover from the library in the Villa of Papyri in Herculaneum? How much was there to begin with? We know it was a huge luxurious villa filled with exquisite art works. Before the printing press, books were one of the highest value items one could o … | Continue reading
I recently completed an AI-driven interpolation of the 463 m resolution global MOLA altimetry dataset, using photoclinometry and the extraordinary 5 m resolution CTX collage by the Murray Lab at Caltech, down to a 7.2 m resolution global altimetry dataset. An example zoom over Je … | Continue reading
One from the archives, from an old (and not yet concluded) project to search for the origins of my name. What is this graph and what does it mean? It’s a kind of family tree, but the full explanation is below! Most genealogy is personal and pretty boring so I’ll skip that stuff. … | Continue reading
Originally posted on the Terraform blog. At Terraform Industries, we’re making cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. Among the list of the Terraformer‘s familiar attributes we include: In addition to these, it is generally underappreciated that Terraform’s synthetic … | Continue reading
This post is a follow on from my blog on optimizing resumes and my blog exhorting people to build more hardware! One part of my job running Terraform Industries is recruiting, so I’m privileged to meet, screen, and hire some of the best engineers who have ever lived. In my work l … | Continue reading
Mars Helicopter will fly no more. But there is work to be done and Mars helicopters to do it! We should build dozens and then hundreds as serialized standard spacecraft buses and run a global competition for the best instruments to fly attached to this bus. A fleet of helicopters … | Continue reading
Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agriculture on Earth, and the Salton Sea. Together with Los Angeles, this area uses over five million acre-feet (MAF) of water from the Colorado River ever … | Continue reading
Elon Musk is a divisive character. My intent here, as always, is to add some nuance and signal to a noisy, complex and/or obscure subject. Whatever your views on Elon, I feel that it is a worthy goal to move the conversation towards more meaningful engagement, hopefully without p … | Continue reading
Part of the Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary Series. Contains spoilers for this chapter and earlier chapters. Google Mars .kml. Literary commentary podcast. The second half of this chapter picks up with John at Acheron just after the onset of the global dust storm, marking a tra … | Continue reading
As a dubious public service, I humbly offer my translation and light editorializing to help inform less catastrophic space geeks what is happening with MSR. The usual disclaimers apply! I no longer work at, and do not speak for, JPL. I represent only my own opinions. Previously, … | Continue reading
Originally posted on the Terraform blog. Now that solar and wind are both significantly cheaper than coal, we should be accelerating deployment using every financial and regulatory tool we have available, right? Right?? Well, not exactly. [The same week I published this, Sammy Ro … | Continue reading
This is a follow on from my earlier post, now that the first letters prize has been won by Luke and Youssef, and we have this sort of data: A couple of years ago, this text was some ashy residue hidden in a charred, distorted scroll excavated from a destroyed Roman villa. Six mon … | Continue reading
TL;DR: The future of energy is solar+batteries+synthetics. As of Oct 2023, the global solar deployment rate is approximately one megawatt per minute. Over the last 2-5-10 years this has become increasingly inescapable. As of October 2023, this Nature Communications article report … | Continue reading
Originally published at Roots of Progress, based on this thread. Everyone knows the industrial revolution occurred centuries ago and involved steam engines. That was just the warm up. We are now a decade into the ~sixth and final industrial revolution. We are in the midst of a fu … | Continue reading
Part of the Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary Series. Contains spoilers for this chapter and earlier chapters. Google Mars .kml. Literary commentary podcast. The chapter is told from the perspective of John, and is quite long. Like the literary commentary podcast, I’ve split this … | Continue reading
Or, why Elon Musk’s impossible hardware businesses have succeeded. Audio version. “Why should I work on hardware???” I hear you cry. Not because I work on hardware, and I need you to validate my questionable life choices by repeating them. Definitely not because I find working on … | Continue reading
Originally published 26 June 2023. Terraform Industries is proud to publicly announce the Terraformer, our product designed to produce cheap natural gas from sunlight and air. The Terraformer is a carbon-neutral drop-in successor to drilling for fossil fuels. The Terraformer is d … | Continue reading
I’ve been putting this one off but no longer. Let’s talk about geoengineering. At Terraform Industries, we’re developing a carbon neutral supply chain for cheap, unlimited hydrocarbons derived only from sunlight and air. With this and similar technologies, I’m confident that huma … | Continue reading
Why? We believe that water should be unconditionally abundant. In the face of extended droughts, aspiring for greater usage efficiency is not, by itself, a sufficiently robust solution. The Colorado River, which supports $1.4t/year of US GDP, has seen annual flows steadily declin … | Continue reading
High Speed Rail (HSR) has been in the news, with a recent New York Times article listing some of the reasons that the California HSR project seems unlikely to ever be completed. Quite aside from Ca… | Continue reading