Nerds Rule

Tell me again - what's Elon for? What is he doing for us?

I mean, I realize we're taking a multi point approach - different companies doing different things - but other than some pretty impressive successes 15 years ago, they don't seem to be producing tangible results - just some splashy publicity stunts. So what're we getting for our money?

Just asking - Elon's running around playing Mr Efficiency Expert, looking under everybody else's skirt. We pay him billions every year, and I'd like to know: What exactly is he delivering?

Where are Elon's bullet points?

This is what I'm talking about:

Private Lunar Lander Blue Ghost Aces Moon Touchdown with a Special Delivery for NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth's celestial neighbor ahead of astronaut missions.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side.

Confirmation of successful touchdown came from the company's Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) away.

“You all stuck the landing. We’re on the moon,” Firefly’s Will Coogan, chief engineer for the lander, reported.

An upright and stable landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan.

A half hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the sun's glare. The second shot included the home planet, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space.

Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.

Blue Ghost — named after a rare U.S. species of fireflies — had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.5 meters) wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.

Firefly’s Ray Allensworth said the lander skipped over hazards including boulders to land safely. Allensworth said the team continued to analyze the data to figure out the lander's exact position, but all indications suggest it landed within the 328-foot (100-meter) target zone in Mare Crisium.

The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.

On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon's gray pockmarked surface. At the same time, an on-board receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.

The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.

Another lander — a tall and skinny 15-footer (4 meters tall) built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the moon Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the moon, just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.

Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines' lander put the U.S. back on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972.

A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15, taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.

The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.

NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realizing some missions will fail, said the space agency's top science officer Nicky Fox.

“It really does open up a whole new way for us to get more science to space and to the moon," Fox said.

Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.

Kim said everything went like clockwork.

“We got some moon dust on our boots," Kim said.

Li'l Marco

Then Trump comes on the scene and they all crumble.

Today's Pix

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Told Ya

Is this the waste fraud and abuse

we're so worried about?

Maybe what Republicans are planning on is the removal of millions of people who cost more than they produce. So guys like Elon just want them gone. After all, you're either an asset or a liability. Nothing more. Am I right?

They're working to bring about a final solution to the problems of overpopulation.

There's just too many of "those people".

Musk’s Purges Suddenly Take a Horrific Turn—and Wreck an Ugly MAGA Lie

We can now be depressingly confident that their mass cuts are killing people.

It has a dry, bureaucratic name, but Ready to Use Therapeutic Food has functioned for over a decade as a lifeline for countless starving children around the globe. Manufactured in the United States and distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s a paste made of peanuts, milk, and vitamins that alleviates a form of acute malnutrition known as “severe wasting.”

Now the Trump administration has officially terminated a number of current contracts struck by USAID for this lifesaving nutrition, contracts that had called for the paste to be delivered to hundreds of thousands of children, most in Africa, according to the Georgia-based nonprofit set to deliver them, Mana Nutrition.

Mark Moore, the CEO of Mana, says ready-to-move boxes of the paste are now piled up in a Georgia warehouse and may never be shipped abroad. “If these contracts are not reinstated, there is no doubt children will die,” Moore told me.

This comes mere days after I reported that these shipments had been thrown into doubt because Trump’s mass firings at USAID included employees overseeing the latest round of contracts.

The nixed arrangements are just a handful of hundreds canceled amid the Trump administration’s appalling decision this week to terminate 90 percent of USAID’s foreign aid contracts. As the details of these cancellations have started trickling out, one thing is clear. This latest turn has wrecked the narrative that Trump and his MAGA propagandists have tried to spin about these cuts—they’re targeting “wokeness” inside USAID, they’re about “waste and fraud,” they’re designed to achieve “efficiency.” All of it has been unmasked as absolute nonsense.

The full extent of the damage from these cuts—originally set in motion by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—is not yet known. But Atul Gawande, a surgeon who formerly led USAID’s global health initiatives, has established, via communications with partners that work with USAID, a list of contracts that were terminated. Among them are programs that offer natal care for mothers and children, that provide netting and other equipment to prevent the spread of malaria, that work to thwart the spread of Ebola and bird flu in dozens of countries, and much more. The cancellations will nix programs that helped tens of millions of people, Gawande notes.

“This is going to be a massive loss of life overall,” Gawande told me in an interview. “Children are likely already dying, and will clearly be dying in large numbers.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times has developed a long list of other terminated contracts, which include programs preventing the spread of polio, treating HIV and tuberculosis, ensuring clean drinking water in war-torn regions, and buttressing public health in many other ways. Tens of millions of people benefited; now they will not.

The details of the canceled Mana contracts illustrate the point. RUTF, the sweet nutritional peanut paste that Mana manufactures, is safe for ingestion by children who are suffering acute nutritional deprivation or are on the verge of starving to death. It comes in foil packets that don’t need refrigeration, making it easy to distribute in regions suffering extreme deprivation. RUTF is widely hailed as an extraordinary innovation in feeding children facing starvation and death.

According to Moore, the cancellation of Mana’s latest contracts will mean that around 300,000 kids, mostly in Africa, don’t get aid packets that Congress intended for them. But we, too, are the losers: This paste is manufactured by American workers, and made of peanuts and dairy grown by American farmers, in a spreading of American bounty and goodwill that has long had bipartisan support. Now it’s piled up in a warehouse in Savannah, unshipped and uneaten.

All of this lays waste to the spin that Trumpworld has employed to defend the dismantling of USAID. For instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed all along that “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” will be spared. By any reasonable standard, many of the contracts that have just been canceled qualify as just that.

What’s more, there is no longer any way to pretend any of this is about “efficiency” or “good management.” Aid like this is incredibly cost-effective. Not only does foreign aid constitute a tiny portion of our budget; things like RUTF cost a relative pittance, but they spread a positive image of the U.S. abroad and each treatment can save a child’s life.

Then there’s Rubio’s claim earlier this month that foreign aid is merely being reviewed to ensure that only “dumb” aid gets cut. In reality, this “review” process has been appallingly terrible even from a management perspective. Assuming it’s true that the administration does intend to restore some of these contracts—which is difficult to believe—then why did this review process require them to be suspended in the first place?

Even if some of these suspensions do turn out to be temporary, they will nonetheless have terrible consequences. Programs like these rely on complex supply chains, involving workers in the U.S. and abroad. They require continued delivery of supplies and sustained administering over time. But many people benefiting from ongoing treatments at this moment have now been “completely abandoned,” Gawande said.

“They’re pausing a plane in midflight, and firing the crew, then trying to tell us that it’s not going to be a catastrophe,” Gawande told me. “Terminating the contracts means we’re not investing in a wind-down at all.”

The fact that these cuts were handled this way—wantonly and recklessly—tells us everything we need to know about the administration’s true goal: To broadcast a clear message to the world that we are now shrugging off any sense of obligation to the global poor. As Awande put it: “They’re almost gleefully celebrating the destruction of these programs.”