I seem not to have been optimistic since 2017; but really, life is better than that. The world is beautiful; I've made it out onto the rocks; and tech advances, when the idiot govt stands aside.And the immeadiate cause for this enthusiasm is Accelerating astrophysics with the SpaceX Starship. People are always being whingey about Starlink (see ATTP and note my comment; or here; or Sabine) but I've thought for a while that dumping telescopes into space, and having to pay rather less attention to their mass or size could make them a lot cheaper, which is what that discussion paper says.
Speaking of idiot govt, Auntie offers Inside the desperate rush to save decades of US scientific data from deletion but I am doutful the headline is accurate. It would be very strange if the data was actually deleted; I think it is just being removed from the wub, if that; though I could be wrong. The first easily-verifiable link is "On 16 April, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) announced that a list of datasets regarding ocean monitoring were now scheduled to be removed in early May". From that, there's ADT-HURSAT, which is just not being updated; Cloud Properties - ISCCP H-Series CDR, ditto; Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (RP's bete noire2), ditto; nClimGrid-Daily: mostly-ditto; at that point I got bored. If anyone knows of anything actually being deleted1, I'd be interested.
Notes
1. If that even means anything in today's world of multiply redundant backups and copies.
2. "Because the methodologies used by NOAA to generate loss estimates are neither public nor (to my knowledge) written down, it may be that with Smith’s departure the agency may have lost capacity to carry on..."
Refs
* "Europe Really Is Jailing People for Online Speech," by Prof. Yascha Mounk by Eugene Volokh.
* Dazal’d thus with hight of place - Upon Somerset's Fall.
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