Also for those who are new followers: Hi! I’m a former science diplomat at the State Department/OSTP/NOAA and a former OSTP policymaker. A quick thing to understand is that my role has, for about 14 years, been to stack the deck in order to get the best possible result for America and scientists. 🧵

And just to be clear: the LUCAS drones created by DoD to compete with the ultra-low cost Iranian Shahed drones are now shy of twice as expensive as they used to be.

We know how these companies operate and how Musk attempts to lock down and corner specific markets. I fear that a few short years will be enough for critical dependencies to deepen to the point where we’re even more deeply captured than we are today.

5) … While SpaceX appears to be poised to try to enter the wireless market after winning access to critical spectrum.

4) Several years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on spectrum sharing contracts SpaceX demanded of potential competitors…

3) And we’re watching SpaceX do what they did with Ukraine, which is jack up prices/demand additional financing when a dependency is established. They’ve also been using the position given them by DOGE to force their way into DOT, DHS, and White House infrastructure.

2) As the Trump Administration pushes to exit the TraCSS space situational awareness/space traffic coordination system, DoD is providing SpaceX, which just launched their Stargaze platform, giving them an edge over their competitors.

Couple of important data points, here: 1) SpaceX is retiring the Falcon 9 and the deployment mechanism for Starship appears designed primarily for Starlink. This is creating a launch bottleneck for all other space companies, while Starship is designed to primarily launch Starlink satellites.

This seems to be a total collapse of ethics review. There is a reason that experienced scientific and medical researchers review studies that involve human subjects. Another safety valve is usually the funding agency, which normally wouldn’t let this through. But, you know…RFK Jr.

This is a disaster. The ethics committee in Denmark that approved the Guinea-Bissau study which will withhold the birth dose of HepB vaccine “had never considered medical studies before but it changed the rules in order to vote on this one”. Four members of the committee have resigned in protest.

Also level of infighting also under appreciated. You can see evidence of it from the outside—some of the inside reports are fascinating. But it’s crazy how many things, particularly Natsec, are constructed to avoid the President’s involvement or to divert his attention. Unitary executive indeed…

Not sure that this supports crowd out. Simpler explanation is that the rest of the economy, and in particular the construction industry, is in deep trouble while AI investment remains bananas. Just as bad. How many general contractors building single/multi family residences can build data centers?

To be clear, as one-time aerospace engineering student, I still think a permanent science lab would be awesome.

We’ve been saying this since long before I was born. Lunar night/dust plumes/radiation are all are still a thing. (If we’re counting permanent technological presence that we can keep using, those laser retroreflectors are already up there so mission accomplished?)

Thoughts on the intersection of findings that the administration diverted $1.4B in NSF funds away from investigator-initiated research and today's New Golden Age of Science Summit showcasing the White House's preferred political priorities of what constitutes 'science'.

lol

🧪 This is fractally wrong. Wrong at all scales.

My comments in there as well