John Clayton

@MorgothsReview I believe the correct word is now "cannons" according to J P Morgan.

You may not like it, but these Bulgarian bazookas just saved Europe.

@IterIntellectus There is an interesting experiment that has never been tried: Randomly assign half the states to only allow women to vote, hold office, and own property.

there is another variable that correlates at roughly 0.9 with the fertility decline but we are not allowed to talk about it

@daveguitarjones Ok, this is freaking hilarious. My wife doesn't get it.

It took me all day, but I finally finished. A pallet I made from an old coffee table.

@BuzzPatterson V97.33A.851606 This is the real ICD-10-CM external cause code for "Sucked into jet engine" (under air and space transport accidents). It's a genuine, billable code in the system—famous among medical coders and meme-worthy for how oddly specific it is.

Damn, that dude got smoked! Wow! He was obliterated.

@pronounced_kyle Elon would have caught that booster in his teeth.

Another entry in the test fire hall of fame! Although still a distant second place to the "not so static" fire test from China

@stevenmarkryan I would suggest the bottom of Chandor Chasma for the first city. Huge beds of Kieserite for water and magnesium, and Sorel cement. Steep walls for radiation protection. Depth for increased atmospheric density.

People will live here.

@charliebcurran This is the funniest thing I've seen this decade. Amazing work.

Marco Rubio finding out he has to run Spirit Airlines now too.

@martinth3rd @herbertong @SpaceX A one way ticket for a chance to establish a Mars Colony are you kidding me? They will have no problem filling 10 million seats

@herbertong @SpaceX Best of luck, but I'm not sure you could even find 1M people wanting to go to mars knowing there is no return ticket. Putting aside all the logistics, this goal is nutty - even or Elon 😅

🚨 SpaceX sets $7.5T valuation goal for Elon Musk’s pay Musk earns equity only if @SpaceX hits $7.5T and major milestones like a 1M-person Mars colony and space-based data centers. The plan includes super-voting shares (10x power) and also ties rewards to building ~100 terawatts of compute in space. Link: reuters.com/sustainability…

@elonmusk Spectacular videography. And a subtle reference to 2001 A Space Odyssey at 5:55 in the sound track.

Starship is the most powerful moving object ever made

Grok Imagine is amazingly practical. Such a time-saver when renovating: after/before. Maybe 15 minutes of work.

@orsonscottcard Meet "Ender" my Border Collie. Your books are great work.

You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts.  My short story “Ender's Game” was rejected by Ben Bova at Analog back when that was the top market for a sci-fi story. Ben gave me feedback. He thought the title should be “Professional Soldier” and he said to “cut it in half.” But I knew he was wrong on both points and submitted it to Jim Baen at Galaxy. He sat on it for a year, and responded to my query with a rejection. There was some kind of explanation, but I don't remember what it was. I concluded at the time that Baen's comments showed that he had barely glanced at the story. So … I got feedback both times, but it was not helpful. I looked at Ben's rejection again. What was it about the story that made him think it should, let alone COULD, be cut in half? Apparently it FELT long. What made it feel long? Now, post-Harry Potter, I would call it the quidditch problem. I had too many battles in which the details became tedious. So I cut two battles entirely, merely reporting the outcomes, and shortened another. In retyping the whole manuscript (pre-word-processor, that was the only way to get a clean manuscript), I added new point-of-view material to the point that I had cut only one page in length. So much for “in half.” But I already knew that my manuscripts did not need cutting — if it wasn't needed, it wouldn't be there in the first place. Even the battles were still there, but instead of showing them, I merely told what happened (so much for the usually asinine advice “show don't tell”), which kept the pace going. Those changes made, I sent it to Ben again. I did not remind him of what he had advised me to do. I merely told him I liked my title, and said, “I have addressed your other concerns,” which was true. I figured he wouldn't remember what his exact words had been. My answer was a check. That revised story was the basis for my winning the Campbell Award for best new writer. Did Ben's feedback help? Yes — but his specific advice was not right, and I knew it. On my next two submissions, Ben hated my endings, and I revised as suggested. The fourth submission he rejected outright, and the fifth, and I thought, Am I a one-story writer? I went back to Ender's Game and tried to analyze why it worked. Then, deliberately imitating myself, I wrote “Mikal's Songbird.” Ben bought it, and it received favorable mentions. I was afraid then that I had consigned myself to writing stories about children in jeopardy. But in fact I was writing character stories rather than idea stories. And THAT was how I built a career, not by self-imitation, and not by following editorial suggestions. I did get wise counsel from David Hartwell on my novel Wyrms, but that was on a book that was already under contract, and it was story feedback, not style. I got wise counsel from Beth Meacham, too, on various books over the years — but again, only on books that were under contract. I also received appallingly stupid advice from the editor of my novel Saints, which temporarily destroyed the book's marketability; after that, I was allowed to go back to my original structure and save the book — now it's one of my best. Editors don't know more than you about your story. They especially don't know why they decide to accept or reject stories. YOU have to know what your story needs to be, and take only advice that you believe in. Your best counselor on a story nobody bought is TIME. Let some time pass and then reread the story. Don't even think about why it Didn't Work. Instead, think about what DOES work, and then write it again, a complete rewrite, keeping nothing from the previous draft. Find the right protagonist and begin at the beginning — the point where the protagonist first gets involved with the events of the story. Be inventive — the failed first draft no longer exists, so you're not bound by any of your earlier decisions. THAT is how you resurrect a good idea you did not succeed with on your first try.

@elonmusk The cause for the drop in fertility rate seems clear - the introduction of soap operas:

This collective suicide of humanity needs to turn around!

"The full vision will happen..." The Starship architecture is close to the theoretical best of cost and cadence that can be done with chemical rocket technology and physics. SpaceX WILL succeed with this. Forget Starlink. It is an amazing money-printer, but pales in comparison to the opportunity convergence of low-cost-to-orbit and distributed AI in space.

I encourage every investor to do at least a little due diligence on SpaceX. Particularly on launch and reusability, what is and is not required on which time frames. Starship, super heavy and reuse are all important, some are more important than others within 2 years. The full vision will happen it’s just about when that happens. Starlink V3 capacity and related cash flows drive a large portion of the value, it behooves investors to understand which of these things needs to happen to help them realize the Starlink growth and which are about future growth opportunities.

These puppies need your support. No living creature should be tossed aside. BCSave.org is worthy, and I've adopted from them. facebook.com/donate/1626871…

Has anyone at any of the competing legacy aerospace companies that are having cost/delivery issues thought to ask SpaceX if they could license Starship and build additional launch sites and Starship factories? I'd bet a beer that Elon would grant that license for free because the added capacity goes directly toward SpaceX's real mission - a Mars civilization and beyond.

I understand some in the community have an affinity for specific hardware, but the focus should be on outcomes. With respect to SLS, the desired outcome is launching crewed Orion spacecraft at a reasonable cadence, rebuilding muscle memory, and buying down risk so we can land astronauts on the Moon. This is until such time as there are multiple crewed pathways that allow us to undertake lunar missions with even greater frequency and at lower cost, so that Artemis can live on for decades into the future. The idea that Artemis II was only held up by the heat shield is not correct. Administrator Bill Nelson stated in December 2024, two years after Artemis I flew, that we would refly the same heat shield design on Artemis II, yet the mission did not fly until April 2026. On a side note, if leadership knew at the time that Artemis II would not launch until April 2026, it probably would have made sense to replace the heat shield altogether. Even with as clean of a mission as Artemis II, it is hard to imagine waiting until 2028 to fly again and jump right to a lunar landing. SLS and Orion must launch with a reasonable cadence, and we need every opportunity to learn. That is why we added Artemis III, an easy trade against funding programs overbudget and behind schedule, in advance of a landing on Artemis IV. You cannot point to the ML-2 structure and a single EUS tank and say it was “pretty much done" and you certainly have no specifics as to the suitability of stage adapter. The Government Accountability Office has been clear on the timing and remaining costs for both ML-2 and EUS, based on a history of OIG oversight reports. Simply put, we would be committing billions more to troubled programs when we can work cooperatively with the OEM and its joint venture to leverage an in-production upper stage with decades of flight heritage and get very good at turning ML-1. Of course, we retain the option of working with industry on ML-2, converting it to the SLS standard, or harvesting parts. I am not here to favor companies or perpetuate underperforming programs. I do not want to throw away billions of taxpayer dollars, and time we do not have, on a flavor of a rocket that is not necessary to return astronauts to the moon. Those billions could go toward more Artemis missions or more science and discovery. Our focus must be on the immensely hard task of sending astronauts to the Moon with frequency and safely so we can land and stay. Above all else, I care about outcomes, and so does the hardworking team at NASA, focused on delivering for the American people and everyone around the world who eagerly await the headlines we all experienced this past weekend.

This is a huge understatement @NASAAdmin bet that EUS would’ve taken over a year to build- EACH while expecting the SLS core stage to beat that cadence (all under the same contractor) Note that SLS & EUS share the same production tooling between the core stage & EUS’ LH2 tank

@ick_real Faith

I'm looking for a ridiculously old-fashioned girl's name for our new born . Think great-grandma name. Very old and rare. Any suggestions asap pls?

NG is an excellent engineering achievement with a goal to win a percentage of the heavy launch payload market, using an architecture that cannot scale. StarShip's goal is to put a million-person civilization on Mars, with the side effect that it will dominate the heavy launch payload market.

Some video of our successful 19 second hot fire today.

@AlastairMayer @booster_10 Neither were anywhere close to orbital class, and thus were only insignificant footnotes. The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet was actually the first reusable rocket to carry a human, in 1944. And of course the Bell X-1A in 1954.

@booster_10 DC-X reflew on its second (and all subsequent) flights, although it wasn't orbital class. Pretty sure New Shepard did the same. Being able to refly pretty much defines the successful landing of a reusable rocket.

I don't think people understand just how insane it is that Blue Origin are reflying a booster on New Glenn's third flight. For reference Starship did it on the 9th flight and Falcon 9 on the 32nd flight.

@booster_10 @OV__101 New Glenn is a marvelous engineering feat. It just doesn't have a chance to compete on cost and launch cadence.

@OV__101 Yeah, it feels like my account litterally being named after a super heavy would tell them I like SpaceX but i guess they can't comprehend the fact a person can like multiple things lol.

@booster_10 Blue Origin picked the wrong architecture. There is no way to manufacture those at scale, and StarShip will leave them in the $10/kilo-to-orbit dust.