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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Game: Elden Ring

    This year I decided to start biking to work and it’s been a complete joy. The commute is fairly long, but it’s beautiful and gives me time to reflect and turn my worry-brain off. I’m more productive at work, I feel better about my lifestyle, and my body is really happy about it. I’m lucky to be in a career and geography that allows this, and I’m grateful for all the work that people in my community have done to improve cycling infrastructure.

    Thanks so much for doing this!








  • Yeah, the concrete storm wasn’t great last time. They did have some engineering reasons to believe it would work for a single launch, but it seems like there was more subsurface damage to the concrete than they realized. As far as I know the only property that was significantly damaged was related to the company, but I’m sure there were some smaller residential insurance claims for the dust.

    Part of the reason Saturday’s launch was delayed was so that more environmental assessments could be performed. A few weeks ago there some government scientists taking samples at the launch site for a baseline measurement to compare against in the future, and the entire project was reviewed by environmental regulators. So, those agencies were very involved in approving the launch license and SpaceX can’t just do whatever the owner wants them to. I guess my point is that it’s not strictly PR-speak, there really are qualified people making these decisions. But I agree that it’s not great to have the facility in the middle of a sensitive wetland, and no doubt there was backdoor politicking. I wish SpaceX would do more to offset the harm they cause, but I still think the StarShip project does more good than harm.




  • They’ve been pretty transparent about their expectations for these early test flights, and today’s achievements match those expectations. For example, they didn’t bother securing all the thermal tiles because they didn’t really expect to survive re-entry.

    The rocket didn’t go to LEO. This was intentional, because they knew that this flight was unlikely to survive and they’re as concerned about space debris as you are. All the debris either burned up or fell into the ocean.