I spent much of the afternoon working through a long read that is probably best shared on its own.
I’m not sure when I first came across Maciej Cegłowski’s work. I know I used his Pinboard bookmarking service a several times, although never as a primary collection tool. At some point I discovered his writing, which is often amazing. I kicked in a few bucks for his Antarctic adventure, too.
He doesn’t write often – his most recent post before the one I’m sharing was 17 months ago – but when he does, you can guarantee it will be worth the considerable effort it takes to read it. His site features the tag line of “Brevity is for the weak,” which should be a warning for readers with short attention spans.
His new post is a scathing takedown of the current NASA/private partnership to return US astronauts to the moon. I don’t know shit about the science of space travel, but if even some of what Cegłowski writes is true, I struggle to believe that we’ll put a human on the moon anywhere close to the current timetable.
While this piece is deep, heavy on science, and long, Cegłowski fills it with sly, hilarious lines like these. He is a master of the simile.
Flying SLS is like owning a classic car—everything is hand built, the components cost a fortune, and when you finally get the thing out of the shop, you find yourself constantly overtaken by younger rivals.
What NASA is doing is like an office worker blowing half their salary on lottery tickets while putting the other half in a pension fund. If the lottery money comes through, then there was really no need for the pension fund. But without the lottery win, there’s not enough money in the pension account to retire on. The two strategies don’t make sense together.
So, like an aging crooner transposing old hits into an easier key, the agency has worked to find a ‘lunar-adjacent’ destination that its hardware can get to.
He can be funny without using similes, too.
And SLS is a “one and done” rocket, artisanally hand-crafted by a workforce that likes to get home before traffic gets bad.