Author: Steve Walton

Are all artists doomed to make their impact (and income) post-humously? It seems so, in most cases — and even in the very father of modern art.  

The band Electric Light Orchestra was everywhere at the end of the 1970s, and few songs are as well-known as this one: That song, released in 1979, is of course very recognizable. But here is another, released in 1981 (well after their peak popularity), that I’ll bet not many of you remember:

These guys never give you much warning! Blue Origin readies reusable suborbital launcher for another flight

I woke up this morning feeling like this.

I just for the first time in my life pledged money to a Kickstarter project. I am still in shock about doing that, but this product is unique and looks to be an incredibly well-executed work of art. Ian McCollum maintains the “Forgotten Weapons” website. He knows his weaponry. He and two other folks got […]

This is just a really artistic image and I had to share it here. I didn’t take it, unfortunately, as I didn’t have the opportunity. But NASA’s Opportunity did and whipped out its camera to look back over its shoulder at a Martian dust devil chasing it through the valley below. The view looks back […]

Tomorrow’s launch has been postponed to no earlier than Friday at 3:11 a.m. EDT (0711 GMT). A problem with an electrical distribution system on the space station cut one of the two redundant power supplies to the robotic arm. NASA rules require both to be available for any operation, such as docking, that might require […]

(In this case, I mean the Musk “Starship”, which he just tweeted as renders on both the Moon and Mars.) There was a time the man didn’t want anything to do with the Moon. Dat man, he be maturing… I’m reasonably certain I don’t have to label these “Moon” and “Mars”. The audience at BW.com […]

A fascinating bit of history here that I had never heard. World War I was so much more complex than they teach you in school: Not to put too fine a point on it, but save for the radiation this was basically a low-yield nuclear-level explosion.

I can’t keep this site to myself. All you folks out there who might be interested in what Elon Musk is doing, including Tesla and SpaceX, should have this site bookmarked. The SpaceX section is comprehensive. I’m sure the other sections are as well, but I’m less interested in expensive electric cars. Carry on.

I just came across this video of an earlier pad abort test, four years ago, of the Crew Dragon. This is what it’s supposed to do when the SuperDracos ignite… Let us hope they figure out what went wrong last week, as quickly as possible.

This guy makes me want to go take some geology courses. I wish every lecturer had this degree of style. Enjoy! And, if you’re hooked, he has dozens of course videos on YouTube, found here (this is the future of education, by the way).  

As an engineer, and a systems engineer at that, I have a tendency to put on my metaphorical wings and soar up beyond “the 30,000 foot level” in order to look down and see the big picture, to try to grasp how a system works. What its inputs and outputs are, what forces govern its […]

Alyssa Ahlgren, writing in Minnesota-based AlphaNews, is a 26-year-old who just had an epiphany that, if we are lucky, will happen to the rest of her generation. Sitting in a hipster coffee shop, she “saw America” for the first time. [I]t dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous […]

Most people have seen a shorter clip of this video, but here’s the much longer version: Of course, the end result of this behavioral disorder is something like this: