July 10, 2026

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Let’s Trigger Lefties With Talk of a Third Term for President Trump. “I continue to marvel at not only how much President Donald Trump has on his plate, but also at the vigor with which he deals with it all. Yes, it’s true that presidents tend to have a lot on their plates, but this president has extra helpings because of the nightmare that preceded him in the Oval Office.”

Posted at 9:09 am by Stephen Green

IF YOU TAKE SIDES, YOU’LL BE A LOT OF PEOPLE’S ENEMY:

Posted at 8:54 am by Glenn Reynolds

STEPHEN CLARK BURIED THE LEDE MORE THAN HALFWAY DOWN ON THIS ONE: Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That’s finally changing.

A new report from the Aerospace Corporation helps elucidate why satellite companies are optimizing for Starship. It’s big and reusable, and once operational, it could cut the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into orbit by an order of magnitude from the Falcon 9. This means costs could come down from a few thousand dollars per kilogram to a few hundred.

Karen Jones, a space economist and lead author of the paper, said her research supports some of those optimistic cost projections. She outlines three scenarios, two of which assume an initial launch cost of $100 million for each fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster, with marginal costs of 20 or 35 percent. This is in line with the marginal costs of the smaller, partially reusable Falcon 9, which SpaceX can launch for as little as $15 million per flight on a dedicated Starlink mission.

This would bring the per-kilogram launch cost for a fully loaded Starship down to $133 to $233 after 10 reuse cycles. A more optimistic scenario with a $50 million initial launch cost and 20 percent marginal cost would reduce payload costs to $67 per kilogram for a Starship/Super Heavy launch at full capacity after nine use cycles. That’s less than it costs to fill the gas tanks of most SUVs. If SpaceX can make these more optimistic ambitions a reality, it would validate a claim made by Elon Musk in 2022 that a Starship flight could eventually cost as little as $10 million.

“I actually thought I would basically disprove that [claim], and on my first try, I got to $67 per kilogram after nine use cycles,” Jones told Ars. “It’s based upon some significant assumptions in the paper, but it’s not something that’s completely crazy. It certainly wouldn’t be something they’d reach on the first few times, on their first model; but over time, and with a learning curve, why not? I think it’s possible.”

As veteran aerospace engineer Will Collier reminded me recently, “These [Wall Street] analyst dweebs just have no clue what daily orbital access at under $100/kg means.”

Indeed.

Posted at 8:38 am by Stephen Green

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN WIRED WAS A LIBERTARIAN-ORIENTED MAGAZINE: Dimming the Sun Would Help Lower the Risks of El Niño. No, Really.

This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be among the strongest on record, and it’s set to create chaotic weather around the world.

A new study suggests that there could be a way to mitigate some of the impacts of future El Niños and global warming: dimming the sun.

El Niño develops naturally in the tropical Pacific every few years, caused by weakened trade winds that push heat from the ocean toward the coast of South America. This tilts the odds toward higher-than-average global temperatures, as well as droughts in some regions, intense rains and floods in others, and more cyclones in the Pacific. Piled on top of warming driven by burning fossil fuels, a strong El Niño can mean hundreds of billions in economic losses.

The new study argues that deflecting solar energy could cool the ocean and help moderate El Niño events before they become too strong, staving off the worst impacts.

“El Niño is one of these things where something happens in the tropical Pacific, and then it rearranges the way the entire global atmosphere is holding energy that year,” says Katherine Ricke, a coauthor of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and a climate scientist at UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s an ultimate pressure point in the climate system.”

Ricke and her coauthors looked at using marine cloud brightening, or MCB, as a way to dim the sun in the Pacific. The technique entails spraying seawater into marine clouds to enhance the clouds’ reflectivity. While some pilot projects and randomized controlled trials have tested the technique’s efficacy, they’ve only been on very small scales.

To boldly go to a place that even Barack Obama thought was too bonkers to implement during any of his three terms:

Still though, why bother with half-measures?

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

NOW THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR:

Posted at 8:22 am by Stephen Green

WHAT’S WRONG WITH BEING SEXY?

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

BEEGE: Bari Bruising 60 Minutes Egos Again, But I Like the Backstory. “The monster has emerged from her lair to once more interfere with a 60 Minutes assignment, and heads are exploding. An interview of Nigel Farage that was to have been conducted by veteran correspondent (and, believe me, partisan witch) Holly Williams was suddenly taken from her and reassigned to some new guy.”

Posted at 7:36 am by Stephen Green

HAHA, HOW ABOUT “NO APPARATCHIKS” INSTEAD? NOW THAT WOULD BE A REAL CAUSE TO GET BEHIND.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE NEEDS OF THE PARTY ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE, COMRADE:

Posted at 7:20 am by Stephen Green

#THEMTOO?

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

2026 PROMETHEUS AWARD WINNER:  A Kiss for Damocles: Book 1 of Shai (Tales From the Long Night).

The enemy is dead. Their guns still aim.

The Mutual Prosperity invaded Hesperides Colony centuries ago–dropped asteroids on the oceans, triggered a volcanic winter, killed millions. The invaders eventually died fighting. Their orbital artillery AI, Damocles, did not. It has spent three hundred years killing anything that looks like a threat: radio signals, powered vehicles, anything that might let humanity rebuild fast enough to strike back.

Seventeen-year-old Shaifennen “Shai” Roehe grew up in a mineshaft, scrounging salvage from the ruins of a dead civilization. Then she finds a crashed military shuttle from the Long Night buried in a highland ravine. It’s the biggest salvage find in living memory–and it comes with secrets. Traitors from the original war. A murdered alien marine who died fighting for humanity’s future. And enough battlesteel and fabrication equipment to turn her struggling homestead into something that scares the right people.

From there, Shai has to navigate a volatile trade mission to the nearest town, untangle a conspiracy that runs generations deep, survive assassination attempts, and figure out why every faction on Hesperides–the Riders, the Archive, the alien Imps, the new Trade Association that smells a lot like the old tyranny with better hair–seems to already know about a project she has only just stumbled into.

Shai’s universe is one filled with fallen empires, implacable war machines, lost civilizations, hostile xenos, the occasional ancient unspeakable horror, and she’s going to bring the ruckus to every corner of it.

A finalist for the 2026 Prometheus Award for Best Novel, A Kiss for Damocles is the first book in the Tales From the Long Night series. Post-apocalyptic science fiction with a ferocious protagonist, deep world-building, earned political stakes, and a genuine belief that humanity can take back what it lost — if it can stop fighting itself long enough to try.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

ALSO, THEIR MONEY WOULD DRY UP:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds