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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Thanks! I see it was also already a cheap and high risk mission (an $80m mars mission instead of $1B, with a new Blue origin spacecraft that had barely flown at all), so NASA are ok taking chances on it.

    This part I think might be a big reason for launching instead of delaying, they found an opportunity to test a proposal for staging rockets in the future when we might want to launch many but there aren’t enough launch pads to get them all up in the launch window:

    The upside of the tradeoff is that it will demonstrate an “exciting and flexible way to get to Mars,” Lillis said. “In the future, if we’d like to send hundreds of spacecraft to Mars at once, it will be difficult to do that from just the launch pads we have on Earth within that month [of the interplanetary launch window]. We could potentially queue up spacecraft using the approach that ESCAPADE is pioneering.”





  • Flying in on helicopters and expressing sympathy for stricken families and communities is pointless if your policies are failing to address climate change, and making matters worse.

    Very true. Rolling back climate change targets really make any sympathy pointless, but flying in on a helicopter really is just salt in the wound.



  • Marae are very common hires for large groups - it’s basically like hiring a hall, but with the additional benefit of subtly exposing people to Māori culture. As someone who has attended many marae functions, I stress how subtle it is. Most people don’t even take their shoes off (and are not expected to). It’s just like going to a hall.

    They don’t say how many people attended, but realistically $2.5k is couch cushion change for almost any council, and if there were enough people to hire a marae then that is likely to be a tiny amount of money per head compared to the cost of their time.

    The weirdest part of this article in my view, is not that the council held a planning day at a marae, but that this guy opposes going because of his Christian faith. The thing is, Māori have historically been very Christian. Many of the common karakia are translations of bible prayers, and many customs have roots in Christianity. He doesn’t oppose going to a marae because of his faith, he opposes it because he doesn’t want it in another language.

    It also doesn’t sound like he wants religion out of government, he just wants to make sure it’s in the original Christian language: modern New Zealand English.