Frank Slazer

A very insightful spacesuit analysis.

@mkkrabbe @ThatEricAlper True but now there’s a LOT more competition!

@ThatEricAlper Beatles did it in 1/4 of the time.

The Rolling Stones' 'Foreign Tongues' debuts at No. 1 on the U.K. Official Albums chart, giving the band its 15th No. 1 and tying The Beatles for the second-most chart-topping albums in the ranking's history.

@PaulSchleifer Born in 1940 - fake post

Wow!

This went out to @NASA from @NASAAdmin today about @NASAMoonbase NASA Team: Building a permanent American presence on the Moon is a near-impossible task that only NASA is capable of achieving. To do so, we will have to rethink not just how we develop the necessary technologies but also how we work together to deliver them. Earlier this year, we asked the engineering teams at Kennedy Space Center to complete an ambitious 90-day sprint to evaluate what Moon Base relevant hardware could be developed on an accelerated schedule. The idea was to specifically challenge legacy processes, clear obstacles, and rapidly deliver flight-ready lunar hardware. The teams focused on two critical capabilities: - Dust Tolerant Automated Umbilical (DTAU): A dust-resistant connection system that transfers propellants and other fluids in the harsh lunar environment. - Mini Lunar Electrostatic Dust Mitigation (LEDM): A compact system that removes lunar dust from critical surfaces using a stream of ionized gaseous nitrogen. The sprint was intended to test a production-first approach that emphasized scalability and speed, and the results are notable. In just 90 days, the teams delivered flight-capable solutions, came in under budget, and established the foundation for further production. The sprint created, what we believe to be, a repeatable production approach that now enables the teams to build four DTAUs and 10 LEDMs on a further reduced timeline. I share this story with you because this exercise and the associated lessons learned have broad applicability outside Moon Base and KSC engineering. Congratulations to the Kennedy Space Center Engineering Directorate and Procurement Office for undertaking this exercise. And thank you to the entire NASA workforce. Your commitment and sense of urgency are helping safely take Ignition priorities and turn them into world-changing outcomes. Jared Isaacman NASA Administrator #Artemis #Ignition @NASAKennedy @brianhughes

@SummersJohns69 @DrChrisCombs Read the initial public offering for SpaceX; launch has lost like $30B over the years (some of which as Starship development). Disruptors (eg Amazon) often lose money for years while establishing market dominance. The question is, will investors support the uo front losses.

@FSlazer @DrChrisCombs From.. the ipo? So last month ? Lost billions on launches ?

the fact that a few people from boeing/ULA were mean to spacex engineers like 15-20 years ago doesn't negate the fact that it is a unique challenge (much more so than F9) to make the largest rocket ever also rapidly reusable (also note I have never said never) one of the big differences here being the tech they need doesn't currently exist, whereas F9 reuse was more of an engineering problem

@yFactr Buzzkill here - why would you need outdoor street lighting when people will be living underground and moving from place to place thru tunnels.

Soon

Well, at least it happened before the rendezvous with the telescope! Serious question - reaction wheels are a proven technology; how did these fail?

@arc_courier Or you could just get a dishwasher and a foot massager online for a lot less. And an online agent can help with the research - no need for a humanoid robot at a keyboard. This is starting to look like a solution in search of a requirement.

The first thing AI-powered robots will replace isn’t your job. It’s your Tuesday. Dishes. Research. The rough cut you keep putting off. The real flex isn’t a robot doing everything. It’s having the time and energy to do what only you can.

@SuMMeRFLi @NASAAdmin @JimWay @NASAWatch @NASA @adastra @rookisaacman To highlight the continuing damage from DOGE and the Administration’s effort to mindlessly cut government headcount - assuming civil servants are useless - without considering the potential impacts.

@FSlazer @NASAAdmin @JimWay @NASAWatch @NASA @adastra @rookisaacman Why did you bring it up? Instigating to engagement farm?

Agree @FSlazer. Predictable - and avoidable. Challenge for @NASA is to fill skill gaps and hire the next generation of #NASA employees, cross-train to prepare for this whole Golden Age of Science thing. @AdAstra @NASAAdmin

@StephenFleming Outside of partisanship dominating objective judgments in recent impeachments, what dysfunction stands out for you for the Senate versus the House?

@FSlazer Could care less about Trump. I’m talking about the Senate’s dysfunction since at least 1970.

The Senate is not supposed to be (small-d) democratic. Changing or abolishing it would require (1) a constitutional amendment, which isn’t going to happen, or (2) armed insurrection. I would really, really like to avoid (2).

@StephenFleming Because the Senate won’t do what Trump demands? That’s not ineffective, it’s the institution reasserting its prerogatives: duckduckgo.com/?q=senate+corr…

@FSlazer That “corrupt” pre-1913 Senate was a lot more effective than what we have today. Repealing the 17th Amendment would be a good start.

@genejm29 @BaronDestructo Hopefully we are reaching peak AI facilitated absurdity but no guarantees…

@BaronDestructo Well, this is a new piece of silliness from the peanut gallery. As far as funding goes, NASA wishes it had $89 billion for ANY project... heck, NASA doesn't have that kind of money for Artemis. If we did, we'd be able to land on the lunar surface in 2028.

Among wild conspiracy theories, this is truly the wildest. Project Anchor is purportedly a secret NASA project preparing for a gravitational anomaly on August 12th, when Earth will lose gravity for 7 seconds due to the intersection of gravitational waves from two black holes. Prepare accordingly!

@NASAAdmin @JimWay @NASAWatch @NASA @adastra To be fair, most of the staffing reduction initiatives happened before @rookisaacman came onboard @NASA and he has made important efforts to improve the agency’s technical strength.

I would not read too much into dated news designed to needlessly elevate people’s blood pressure. For starters, those who took voluntary retirement do not represent 22% of NASA’s integrated workforce. NASA had roughly 14,000 civil servants and more than 42,000 full-time contractors. The voluntary retirements represented closer to 7%. For what it is worth, NASA’s history of programs running over budget and behind schedule, from Artemis to MSR, NEO Surveyor, and more, predates the voluntary retirement programs. A much bigger factor in NASA’s historic challenges has been taking on far too many projects, some externally imposed but many self-inflicted, while skipping the necessary building blocks for success that served the agency so well in decades past. That lack of extreme focus has been addressed in the President’s National Space Policy. All that aside, Artemis II was a great success, and we are moving on Artemis III, with every KPI, from Mobile Launcher recovery and repair to stacking, tracking materially faster than Artemis II (specifics will be released later this week). Nancy Grace Roman is ahead of schedule and set to launch at the end of August. We are back to normal ISS crew rotations with a full astronaut complement, flying X-planes routinely, and making major investments in a nuclear-powered NASA. We have been rebuilding core competencies across every Center, converting thousands of contractor positions back to civil service, and using NASA Force reach to bring in specialized talent, all while saving billions for more missions of science and discovery. We have a long way to go, but for now, things are tracking well.

Predictable: Workforce reductions have now registered simultaneously across 25 of 36 major projects.. understaffing drives risk-reduction cancellation, which drives schedule slip, which drives cost growth, which may ripple into neighboring programs techtimes.com/articles/32151…

@Cmdr_Hadfield @icao @UN Fares may be up but, despite predictions that many markets would be out of jet fuel by June due to the Iran war, markets remain resilient. (Aided, so far, by reserves that won’t last forever).

Our planet's airplane traffic this week - a new record. Over 153,000 commercial flights/day - that's almost 2 takeoffs & landings per second. No accidents - amazing! Beautiful work by @icao in Montreal, under the @UN. They should manage space traffic as well. Let's bump their max altitude from 60,000 ft to 600 miles.

@maxnerdlife @theauroraguy Ignore the cartoons and AI slop - life on Mars will be subterranean for the foreseeable future.

@theauroraguy Solar flares becoming the norm... wonder how future Mars colonists will deal with this stuff. Radiation shielding is gonna be the real nightmare

Impulsive solar flares appear to be the norm lately, as AR14494 delivers an impulsive M1.0 at 0727, 0243 UTC.

@SpaceComExpo This is what future habitats will likely look like!

What if the safest place to live on the Moon is underground? As plans for sustained lunar operations advance, engineers & architects are looking beneath the lunar surface for solutions to some of humanity's biggest challenges beyond Earth. Read: spacecomsecondstage.com/beneath-the-mo…