Maciej Cegłowski, creator of Pinboard, writes a newsletter about Mars, Starship, radiation and space policy.
Commenters subscribe eagerly and say he could make any topic worthwhile; they also discuss his radiation vest and Starship cost claims.
It's kind of buried in the article, but it's worth noting that this vest is meant only to guard against solar storms, not cosmic rays; those remain a significant problem.
> The vest, though, does nearly nothing against galactic cosmic rays (GCR), which are the other major radiation source astronauts face. Unlike solar storm radiation, GCR arrive continuously at much higher energies, which makes them harder to shield against. “Using the vest against these rays would not be reasonable,” Houri says. “You’d have to wear it at all times.”
See for instance this article on how the cosmic ray problem would affect a Mars mission: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/radiation-tradeoffs-for-mars
> The distinction is kind of meaningless
Only if it helps you to call this "science", I would say.
> advancing our engineering capabilities in space is advancing the science
In this case, we are advancing our engineering capabilities to make humans survive in space, which is arguably completely useless.
Not only that, but we keep focusing on the easier and fun part for engineers. A real problem for surviving in space is life support, see e.g. this: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-long-duration-life-support.
But it is a lot less fun than sending humans around the moon in a ship that doesn't need them at all, isn't it?
Why should we believe that Starship launch costs will be that cheap when we don't believe Musk's other numbers? Where does that number come from? Has anyone looked into it?
It doesn't cover launch costs directly, but here's a bearish take on reusability of the second stage:
https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-starship
Maciej now has a Mars newsletter, which I obviously subscribed to immediately: https://mceglowski.substack.com/
I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.
from L'Affaire Siloxane? ( https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane )