"Real life Tony Stark" gives zero fucks

I'm not entirely sure what I'd be doing if I was a tech billionaire with my own rocket and car companies, but whatever it is that I might do, given that chance, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be doing it as entertainingly as Elon Musk.

From Business Insider:

Instead of putting a standard "mass simulator" or dummy payload atop Falcon Heavy, Musk — who once launched a wheel of cheese into orbit — will put his personal 2008 midnight-cherry-red Tesla Roadster on top of the monster rocket.

In an Instagram post over the weekend, Musk also revealed that the car would carry a dummy driver, which Musk is calling "Starman," wearing a SpaceX space suit.

"Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring," Musk said in an Instagram post in December, adding that the company "decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel." 

Oh, man, I'd forgotten about the cheese...

Now, I'm not saying that everything Elon Musk does is necessarily wise, or good, or even (in some cases) entirely legal, but it sure does look like he's having fun doing it all, doesn't it? Seriously, I'm not sure that it would even occur to me to sell US$500 Boring Company-branded flamethrowers (in California, natch, and after the wild fire season they've just had), or to start digging a tunnel from my house to my office (whether or not local regulations actually allow for that sort of thing) just because commuting sucks, but Musk not only thinks of these things, he goes ahead and does them, and damn the torpedoes.

In a world of carefully-crafted PR strategies, where every aspect of everything a big corporation does is run past both PR and legal before daring to show its boring, homogenized face to the world, the sheer fuck-you exuberance of half of what Musk does is just so... refreshing. And fun, dammit. Selling flamethrowers because why not? and then launching your own sports car into space is just giddy, childish fun. Even if it is somewhat irresponsible. Musk has succeeded in making private-sector space launches a thing, he's succeeded in making electric cars a thing, he's helping to make cleaner energy storage a thing, and he's living like a comic book superhero's secret identity at the same time.

The race to Mars heats up

From Thomson Reuters, via CBC News:

Obama vows to send people to Mars by the 2030s

U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed to help send people to Mars within the next 15 years, pledging to work with private companies "to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space."

"We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time," Obama said in an opinion piece for CNN posted to its website.

Obama said some of the U.S.'s leading scientists and engineers will meet in Pittsburgh this week to discuss the plan.

He set a goal in 2010 to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. He said the next step is to "reach beyond the bounds of Earth's orbit."

In one sense, Obama wanting to go to Mars isn't news (he originally announced this goal in 2010, after all), but it's rather fallen off the radar since then, with most of the political oxygen, especially in the U.S., being consumed by the economy, immigration, counter-terrorism, and gun control. But with SpaceX declaring their intention to put humans on Mars, and Boeing announcing their intention to get there first, the idea of putting humans on Mars was back in the news, and with the U.S. government officially on board, too, the race officially becomes a thing... one that's likely to grow, as the likes of China, India, Russia, Japan, and the EU all get into the act. 

That all assumes that Donald Trump doesn't win the election in November and kick off the End Times instead, of course, but that currently looks unlikely. 

We live in exciting times, my friends. Yes, there are lots of challenges, and our way of life will almost certainly change dramatically in the coming years as we grapple with Earth's changing climate, instability in the Middle East, and the large-scale population migrations which will result and are already resulting from those causes, but in meeting these challenges, we can find opportunities to do some amazing things. 

In Space!

Some things really are worth getting hyped for.

The new space race: Boeing vs. SpaceX

Now this kind of hype, I can get behind.

From The Huffington Post:

Just when you thought Elon Musk’s plan for putting humans on Mars seemed ambitious, or even far-fetched, the world’s largest aerospace company has promised to get there first.

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg didn’t say whether his company planned to beat SpaceX’s target date of 2025, only that it would reach Earth’s planetary neighbor before Musk’s SpaceX does.

“I am convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket,” Muilenburg said Tuesday at aninnovation conference in Chicago.

And just like that, the race for Mars is on.

Hell, yeah!

Although neither Musk nor Muilenburg has any idea how they're going to win the race to Mars, Boeing helped put men on the Moon, and SpaceX has been keeping the ISS supplied, so both of these companies are talking from a place of some space-travel expertise... unlike, say, the Mars One "reality show to the Red Planet" project, which appeared to be composed entirely of manure and which currently appears to be going exactly nowhere.

Who will win? Who cares! After decades in which robot probes seemed to be the future of human space exploration (rather than sending, say, humans into space), we're suddenly living in an era when serious, well-funded, technically capable players are talking seriously about ambitious programmes of human space exploration again, and I couldn't be happier.

BTW, did I mention that I was a child of the late space race? I am.

The idea of seeing humanity finally taking our next steps into the solar system is incredibly exciting, and can pay scientific and technological dividends that are truly difficult to overstate. If the only way that happens is for Real Life Tony Stark and his much-more-corporate competitor to get into a dick-measuring contest over whose rockets are bigger, then I say have it, gentlemen! May the best team win... because we all stand to win, in the process.