#earthsky

Monica Lenis was in Great Exuma, Bahamas, yesterday when she caught this image of Starship's explosion. Thank you, Monica! SpaceX's flagship vehicle, #Starship - designed to take humans to the moon and Mars - exploded midair late yesterday minutes after its test launch from a beach in south Texas. Other aircraft flying over the Gulf of Mexico were forced to alter their courses in order to avoid the falling debris, which was seen by beachgoers in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. Starship itself was completely lost. Meanwhile, the Super Heavy booster that had launched Starship successfully returned to the launchpad and was caught in midair. Read more at https://earthsky.org/human-world/starship-explodes-minutes-after-launch-planes-diverted/

EarthSky

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In what sounds like an attempt to hand over air traffic control systems to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system and his AI company, Trump today said—and here are his words, as Aaron Rupar transcribed them—“We’re all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based. Trying to hook up a land based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work. We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system one by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that’s all it is. They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all the kinds of things necessary for that. And it's very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment. And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems. And they would’ve, bells would’ve gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height. Because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like, just wouldn’t stop. Follow the line. But bells and whistles would’ve gone off. They have ‘em where it actually could virtually turn the thing around. It would’ve just never happened if we had the right equipment . And one of things that’s gonna be, I'm gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass where we get the best control system. When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I’m landing in New York and I’m using a sys— I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says ‘This thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete.’ And we can’t have that.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted today that “the DOGE team” is “going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system,” saying that “‘experienced’ Washington bureaucrats are the reason our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling.”

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton pointed out that “US airlines had gone 16 years without fatal crashes. Then MAGA fired the FAA chief, gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and threatened air traffic controllers with layoffs. Now there have been two fatal crashes. Hope your unvetted 22-year-olds fix things fast.”

Critics of the idea of Musk taking over the nation’s air traffic control systems note that his Tesla electric vehicles have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands in America. The average fatal crash rate is 2.8 per billion vehicle miles driven; Tesla has a rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven. On social media, “God” posted: “Thou shalt not let the foreign billionaire whose rockets blow up all the time anywhere near the air traffic control system,” an apparent reference to the January 16 explosion of a SpaceX rocket over the Caribbean that scattered debris over the region led the Federal Aviation Administration to lock down airspace over Turks and Caicos.

Happy birthday, Nicolaus Copernicus

February 19, 1473. Nicolaus Copernicus, a Renaissance astronomer and mathematician, was born on this day in Thorn, Poland. At a time when deeply entrenched beliefs placed the Earth at the center of the universe – nested within crystal spheres – he proposed the revolutionary idea that Earth revolves around the sun. Can you picture the leap of imagination required for him to conceive of a sun-centered universe? His book – “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”) – was published just before his death in 1543. It set the stage for all of modern astronomy.

Today, people speak of his work as the Copernican Revolution.

Copernicus wasn’t the first to conceive of a sun-centered universe. Early Greek philosophers also spoke of it.

It was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, however, who proposed that the heavens were literally composed of 55 concentric, crystalline spheres to which the celestial objects were attached.

In Aristotle’s model, Earth lay at the center of these spheres.

Thus Earth lay – fixed and enclosed – until Copernicus published his version of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe.

Read more: Copernicus’ revolution and Galileo’s vision, in pictures

Bottom line: Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the universe. He was born on this date, February 19, in 1473.

Image 1: This engraving by an unknown artist is called Empedocles Breaks through the Crystal Spheres. It first appeared in 1888 in a book by Camille Flammarion with the caption: “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch …” 

Image 2: Nicolaus Copernicus via Wikipedia.

Image 3: Earth-centered model of the universe via Aristotle. In the medieval world, people thought Earth lay enclosed within crystal spheres. Read more about about medieval astronomy here.

Image 4: This is Copernicus’ version of a heliocentric – or sun-centered – universe. Image via Library of Congress.