Alan Burchett

Run of the mill Canadian.

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@Shagarchist

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@Soph_astro Wrenches clanging together on earth are irritating.
However, in space, they sound like nice wind chimes.

[DAKKADAKKA @DAKKADAKKA1]

The Japanese discovering American sized restaurant portions is why the Internet was invented.

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@FortySacks

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@astro_jaz By playing ksp?

[NASA Artemis @NASAArtemis]

Earthset.

The Artemis II crew captured this view of an Earthset on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon.

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@FalconryFinance This is why you put grease in the bearings before leaving port.

[Prometheus @CaribbeanRythms]

There is no final frontier. The stars are waiting to be seized by those with the will to take them.

[Afroman @ogafroman]

Almost to 1m subs! Help a playa get to 1m today!

[Mayor Guy Fieri @GuyFieri]

He who controls the spice controls the flavor

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@AnotherHomoCon

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@FalconryFinance When you have nuts and bolts with junk in the threads, sometimes a love tap is all it needs to start turning again.

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@rickyberwick The shithawks strike again.

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@FalconryFinance Digital age gold mining.

[Mookafish @Mookafish]

I have two sides:

>I want to live a peaceful life in a little shack in the woods and live off the land.

>I want to master physics and accelerate Humanity into a glorious future in which we have conquered the galaxy and bask in limitless energy harvested from a billion stars.

[Andrew McCalip @andrewmccalip]

Data centers in orbit? Of course that’s your contention. Of course it is.

You just finished watching a Scott Manley video on radiative heat transfer and now you think you’re gonna disrupt AWS with a few solar panels and a rideshare slot.

You’re gonna believe that right up until next month when you crack open DeWitt and Incropera and start throwing around σT⁴ like you just invented radiation physics, quoting emissivity tables for polished aluminum like they’re forbidden knowledge.

Then you’ll finally open SMAD and realize your radiator isn’t some static plate glowing into the void. It’s a dynamic structure with a wicked case of thermal flutter reminiscent of Hubble’s arrays. You’ll be quoting beta angles and Earth albedo coefficients and wondering why your deployable array grenaded in vibe when the first bending mode clocked in at 38 Hz instead of the 50 Hz you promised in CDR.

After that you’ll get real ambitious, quoting Johnson and Fabisinski on inflatable polyimide PV structures, pretending you actually understand what happens when your 25-micron Kapton sail is tensioned off a Toray T1100G Cycom 5250-4 boom that has been sun-baked at 120 °C for six months in LEO. You’ll cite “areal density optimization” like gospel while your resin creeps, your modulus drops, and your perfectly flat film turns into a potato chip.

"Well, as a matter of fact, I won’t, because launch costs are about to fall another order of magnitude once Starship hits cadence. The cost per kilo will—"

Drop by tenfold and the economics flip.
Yeah, I’ve heard that one. The Wired 2012 quote, “You wouldn’t build a Boeing 747 and throw it away after one flight.” I remember. I even asked him about that over lunch once, whether the market was actually elastic enough to handle the supply increase from reusability.

Turns out it wasn’t. Non-Starlink launch mass in the United States grew at 13.7 percent CAGR from 2015 to 2023. Payload demand didn’t scale with flight cadence, so prices didn’t collapse, margins just swelled. That’s why they had to invent Starlink. When the market can’t absorb your rockets, you start building your own payloads.

Is that your thing? You read some Marc Andreessen “American Dynamism” manifesto and suddenly start ignoring the engineering realities?

You start throwing around a few buzzwords to impress the Twitter anons and earn some street cred for having a contrarian opinion?

One, don’t do that.
Two, you dropped a 500-thousand-dollar seed check on a concept that could have been debunked by a dollar-fifty worth of tokens from Grok.

"Well, at least I’m a capital allocator. We’ll be skiing in Hokkaido while you’re doing bolt preload calculations for some bridge somewhere."

Yeah, maybe. But at least I won’t be unoriginal or anonymous. I’m out here asking why the hell we’d melt the brains of a thousand aerospace engineers just to save four cents per kilowatt-hour on solar electricity.

First principles isn’t about getting nerd-sniped by a shiny-object problem. It’s about asking whether we should be solving that problem at all.

But hey, if you’ve got an issue with that, we can always take it up with E.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

The iconic Isengard theme from The Lord of the Rings.

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@Alevetto07

[Alan Burchett @burchett_alan]

@FromKulak Never expected a 40k reference from you.