Part of my series countering misconceptions in space journalism. Starlink, SpaceX’s plan to serve internet via tens of thousands of satellites, is a staple in the space press, with articles appearing every week on the latest developments. The broad schema is clear and, thanks to filings with the FCC, a sufficiently well motivated individual (such as your humble servant) can deduce a great deal of detail. Despite this, there is still an unusually high degree of confusion around this new technology, even among expert commentators. It is not uncommon to read articles comparing Starlink to OneWeb and Kuiper (among others), … Continue reading Starlink is a very big deal

Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. SpaceX has been working on some variant of the Big Falcon Rocket for almost a decade, with a publicly announced architecture for three years. The target performance figures are on the Starship website, endlessly dissected on Twitter, Reddit, and NASA spaceflight forums, and there’s even a livestream of construction. Yet none of the oft-published mainstream articles seem to capture the magnitude of the vision that Starship embodies. Starship prompts superlatives, but by the end of this post the reader will understand not only how big Starship is, but also that … Continue reading The SpaceX Starship is a very big deal

Part of my blog series on common misconceptions in space journalism. As far as popular riffs on space exploration go, “the sky is falling” is one of my all time favorites. Space is hard, and analogies are almost always wrong. Collisions between satellites do occur and they are a really big deal. It is hard to accurately convey just how energetic satellites are. When they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, they mostly burn up, as though they fell into a fire. But the atmosphere isn’t especially hot. Instead, the kinetic energy of the satellite is dissipated by boiling the metal that the … Continue reading Space debris, probably not coming to a backyard near you

Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. “With no magnetic field, Mars has no defense against harsh solar radiation. If I were exposed to it, I’d get so much cancer, the cancer would have cancer.” ― Andy Weir, The Martian “The Martian” is one of the hardest science fiction novels ever written. In a previous post, I gave its technical accuracy an A+. Andy is a smart person who takes the trouble to do the research and get things right. That said, there is a common misconception that humans traveling in space will have their faces melted … Continue reading OMG space is full of radiation, and why I’m not worried

Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. Rigor is the underpinning of success when designing any kind of technological application. Throughout my career I have found myself on the frontiers not only of my own knowledge, but human knowledge in general. There is no handy reference or list of answers to check my work, so I was forced to develop my intuition for detecting problematic reasoning. I routinely employ these skills both to defend my own work against errors and to constructively critique the work of others. In this vein, I have previously I discussed the dangers … Continue reading On reasoning backwards from architecture to implicit requirements

Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. Humans evolved a rare symbolic reasoning ability during our emergence over the last million or so years. As running apes, we lacked the usual evolutionary features such as sharp teeth, claws, spines, poison, and armor. Instead, we deployed social structures and intelligence to bootstrap science and technology from stone tools to synthetic elements. Symbolic reasoning, and indeed much of scientific progress, is the process of understanding things in terms of other things. By creating abstractions, humans are able to quickly solve new problems, predict the future, and ultimately pass on … Continue reading In space, no-one can reason by analogy