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Reading a Rock for Ghosts: On Defining “Life” and Inferring It from Mars
NASA’s news release reports that Perseverance cored a mudstone in Jezero Crater whose chemistry and textures may record potential biosignatures—not proof of life, but suggestive clues. What follows are my thoughts about why, if we struggle to define “life” at all, the attempt to infer past life from such clues is far more complex—and why…
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Flight 10, Starship, and the Art of Learning by Fire
If learning is doing, and doing spaceflight is doing really hot doing, then SpaceX is having a masterclass. The tenth integrated test flight of Starship (also called IFT-10) pushed a number of boundaries: new heat shield tiles, mock payload deployment, booster landing experiments, engine relights, etc. Many things succeeded; others revealed gaps (literally) – especially…
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The One-Hertz Challenge: Where Slow is the New Fast, and Ticking is an Art Form
Ah, the One-Hertz Challenge – a contest so delightfully absurd it makes you wonder if the organizers were secretly plotting to weaponize boredom against our hyper-caffeinated, scroll-addicted society. Picture this: in a world where your smartphone buzzes more times in a minute than a beehive on espresso, a bunch of madcap engineers and tinkerers decide…
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From Sci-Fi to Orbit: How the U.S. Military’s Latest Launch is Revolutionizing Navigation Without GPS
Imagine a thunderous roar piercing the night sky, followed by a sonic boom that shakes windows across Florida. That’s exactly what happened on August 21, 2025, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39A, carrying the U.S. Space Force’s secretive X-37B spaceplane into orbit. Now, nearly two weeks…
