Part the First: Dealing with Scientific Misconduct. Trust in science has declined during my professional work life. Some, but not all, of this is due to misconduct by scientists, as it should be. The recent case of Sylvain Lesné is one of the more spectacular examples. We have discussed this previously. Dr. Lesné published a paper that became the foundation for subsequent research on the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease, which holds that since plaques of beta-amyloid precursor protein are found postmortem in the brains of AD patients, so these plaques are the cause of AD. Plaques are also found postmortem in the brains of people who did not have AD. We have discussed the amyloid hypothesis here. It may not be the most likely explanation of AD despite taking up most of the air in the room.
The original Lesné paper was published in 2006, when George W. Bush was president and the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) was a small cloud on the economic horizon to only a few people. I cannot say I knew what would happen, but when local banks were giving condominium loans to graduate students based solely on their employment as graduate research assistants (I was nosy and asked) making about $25,000 per year, something did seem “off.” Anyway, the paper in question was not retracted until 2024, and Dr. Lesné resigned his faculty position at the University of Minnesota shortly thereafter. There was no good reason for this to have taken so long.
This problem is addressed in an editorial in Science on 9 April 2026 by Michael Lauer, who was formerly the Director of Extramural Research at NIH from 2015-2025: More transparency needed on misconduct (no archived version yet):
Instances of misconduct stoke public mistrust in the scientific enterprise. Efforts in the United States to decrease inappropriate professional behavior in science have included enhancing institutional accountability. Yet, the moments often missed are those in which academic institutions land in precarious situations because newly hired staff are discovered to have a checkered history. The offending scientist might have quietly resigned from a previous employer during or immediately after a scientific or professional misconduct investigation. Needless to say, the candidate did not share that information with a potential new employer. Things become even more problematic when the new hire repeats bad behaviors, whether it’s research misconduct (fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism) or actions that deviate from professional standards (sexual harassment, bullying, or racist behavior, for example). Creating more awareness of misconduct involving such individuals could go a long way toward rebuilding the scientific community’s credibility.
Well, yes, it could. But employment practices have not kept up with the need, primarily because of fear of legal claims for defamation or violation of privacy on the part of a previous employer. This may be changing. Research scientists are not formerly licensed like physicians and engineers, but that should not prevent employers from telling the truth about former employers. Currently they might confirm employment, but that is all. Traditional letters of recommendation will most certainly come from scientists who remain in the dark:
Passing along employees who have committed misconduct to other institutions, in silence, violates accountability and does nothing to solve the problem. Through a national scientist databank similar to the NPDB (National Practitioner Data Bank; and also hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services or perhaps the General Services Administration), research institutions would be expected to report findings of scientific or professional misconduct and query the databank before offering employment. Discovering a previous behavioral problem would not bar an institution from going ahead with the hire, but at least there would be transparency so that preventive steps could be taken by the new employer.
Getting caught making “stuff” up will get a scientist cast into the outer darkness, even if it takes too long. My colleagues and I can and must do better. I have seen a few cases up close in which the right thing was done, in public. NIH has even begun to ask for the money back in recent cases. In the one rather heinous example I am most familiar with, that would have been more than seven million dollars. Had the university’s research foundation (the formal recipient of the NIH award) been held accountable, and gone broke as a result, that would have gotten the attention needed. Alas, NIH did not ask for the money back, and that is puzzling. I am not moved by the excuse that competition for scarce research support is a cause/reason/explanation for any kind of scientific misconduct. Sylvain Lesné lost his job and his career, as he should have. The former president of Stanford lost his position but retained his job.
As far as I know, the only banker who was convicted of anything after the GFC was the leader of a small community bank in New York that primarily served the local Chinese community. When an employee was found to have engaged in misbehavior the bank notified the authorities but still were prosecuted. The powers that be who run the economy could also do better, if they wanted to. Misconduct seems to be the way to go these days virtually everywhere. More’s the pity.
Part the Second: The Good in Biomedical Science. Pancreatic cancer is usually lethal. We have discussed pancreatic cancer “vaccines” that show promise, and the news has gotten better on this front. Recently a drug has shown remarkable efficacy against pancreatic cancer. When scientists are supported, solutions to problems are often found. When scientists are not supported, the opportunity costs are not calculable but they are large.
Patients treated with an oral drug called daraxonrasib lived twice as long (13.2 months versus 6.7 months) as those who did not get the drug. It is natural to ask, “The patient still died, so what’s the big deal?” The same question was not asked when Sidney Farber began searching for treatments of childhood leukemia in the 1950s and increased survival by months, year after year. Virtually all scientific progress is incremental, and the advances begun by Dr. Farber led to the outright cure of several leukemias. In this case, regarding pancreatic cancer:
Pancreatic cancer has historically been a graveyard for drug development. Genetically targeted treatments and immunotherapies have done little to curb the disease. Five-year survival rates for pancreatic adenocarcinoma — the subtype that accounts for 90% of cases and the one targeted by Revolution Medicines — is just 8%.
Revolution Medicines’ pill blocks a notorious group of genes called RAS. Mutant forms of the protein — the most well known is KRAS — are present in roughly 30% of all human cancers, including over 90% of pancreatic cancers. But nearly all efforts to drug it have failed, in part because it lacks a clear pocket where chemists could land a molecule to block the protein.
Daraxonrasib works by binding to both KRAS and another protein in the cell to form a three-part complex that shuts down KRAS and cuts off a central survival mechanism for the tumor.
Members of the RAS family of oncogenes can be viewed as on/off switches for cell proliferation (an oncogene is a mutant form of a normal protein that contributes to cancer progression in one way or another). RAS and other similar “small G-proteins” are generally “undruggable,” largely because they are small. In this case, daraxonrasib mediates a strong interaction between KRAS and another protein called cyclophilin. When tied up in this tertiary complex, the mutant KRAS is no longer an “on signal” that drives cancer cell proliferation. Will this approach work in the long term? Who knows, but the various RAS proteins are mutated in many cancers, so the approach may be useful in treating any number of cancers.
Daraxonrasib, as important as this drug may be, has also made a splash for another reason:
When Ben Sasse, a former U.S. senator (R-Neb.), learned he had metastatic pancreatic cancer, he quickly chose action over comfort. Whatever he could do to save his life, for as long as he could, he wanted to try it. Perhaps his only option, doctors told him, was to enroll in a clinical trial.
“If we were to have much of a chance of living longer than the three to four months they were giving us at that point, we were going to need to get into an aggressive trial,” Sasse told STAT last month.
Senator Sasse has been treated with daraxonrasib, and we wish him the best. Still, the hype might be too much, and then there is this from The Wall Street Journal:
Revolution Medicines is running Phase 3 trials to test daraxonrasib as a first-line therapy for metastatic patients and as an add-on therapy for pancreatic cancer patients whose tumors can be treated with surgery. The company is also testing daraxonrasib in lung cancer and has three other RAS inhibitors in development.
The company has reportedly drawn interest from potential buyers. In January, The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reported that Merck was negotiating to buy the company for $28 to $32 billion, before talks fell apart.
Has the price now risen?
“I can’t really give you a number,” Goldsmith said, while noting that Revolution has been building out a commercial organization to sell its drugs itself. “We don’t really pay any attention to the noise around other companies,” he added.
If Merck thought Rev Med is worth ~$30 billion, what will be the price of a course of daraxonrasib when it goes global? Whatever the cost and whatever Rev Med did all by itself, this science was built on a broad public foundation as intended by Vannevar Bush when he organized modern American science to lead the world after World War II. And that should matter, too, at some level.
Part the Third: To the Moon and Back. NASA has had a good month, with Artemis II taking a trip around the moon. Of course, this was first done in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, and then six subsequent Apollo missions (11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) landed astronauts on the moon and “returned them safely to the Earth,” in the words of President Kennedy. Apollo 13 did not land men on the moon, but they were returned safely to the Earth when I was in the ninth grade and the whole world was watching in one of the most arresting parts of the space program. Failure was not an option! When considering the Artemis program, the question “Why?” is a natural response. This has been discussed at some length in Scientific American: The Artemis II mission worked – but should we really keep returning to the moon?
If the purpose of space exploration is to understand the universe outside of planet Earth, the answer is clearly no. Unmanned space exploration is almost infinitely less expensive and more productive, while the price of failure is measured only in money. If the purpose is to plant a colony on the moon, that is completely ridiculous. Star Wars and Star Trek were science fiction. If the purpose of that colony is to “mine” the moon and bring back the ore for processing, that is five exits past ridiculous. If the goal is to beat the Chinese to the moon, we already did that with the Russians and once was enough. If the Chinese want to go to the moon, the proper response should be, “How can we help?” and then “Congratulations!” when they succeed. Competition in such things is for stunted men (always men) with no imagination.
My response, and your mileage certainly may vary, is “Been there, done that.” If a biomedical scientist proposed doing something that already been done five years ago, much less fifty, the response would be a toss straight into File 13. And then there are social, political, and economic concerns:
Many Americans are struggling to put food on the table. The federal government has gutted health care for millions of Americans. With the war going on right now, people are struggling to afford gas, and then they’re seeing price tags like $23 million, I believe, for the toilet on Artemis. I think the Artemis mission through 2025 has been estimated to cost somewhere around $90 billion. And many people are asking, “Could we not be spending this money differently?”
Was that the toilet that did not work at the beginning of the mission? Anyway, good on NASA. The collective nervousness about the heat shield was just that (also been there, done that with John Glenn in Friendship 7). As for going back to the moon, someone noted the other day that we do not even have a lunar lander to go with Artemis, yet. They really need to figure that one out, too. It has been done before, so it should not be too difficult.
Part the Fourth: Archeology of Homo erectus. If the results hold up, human behavior during early hominin history continues to astound in Homo erectus’ tools include stunning geodes and fossils, possibly as a way to connect with the cosmos:
Archaeologists in Israel have unearthed 10 “extremely rare” prehistoric stone hand axes that were crafted to deliberately include geological features, including fossils and geodes, a new study finds.
The hand axes were probably made by Homo erectus between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago, likely because our human ancestors thought these objects were imbued with potency and cosmic significance, the study researchers suggested, although others argue further evidence would benefit the study.
…
These tools are “unique because until now such items were singularly found, only one extraordinary piece here and there,” Barkai, the study’s first author, told Live Science in an email.”
The discovery contributes to a debate regarding whether early humans recognized or consciously noted geological features and fossils, or whether their occurrence in stone tools was merely accidental. However, the new discovery of multiple tools with these features in the same area suggests it was a deliberate act, the researchers said in the study.
The tools are beautiful and remarkable in and of themselves, The speculation about the mental constructs our ancestors may have associated with them is unnecessary but irresistible even in the absence of information that probably cannot exist after several hundred thousand hears:
Other researchers note that while the findings are significant, more evidence is needed to further support the symbolic inferences. Sarah Wurz, a professor of archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa who was not involved with the study, told Live Science in an email that “these extraordinary hand axe finds are noteworthy and provide new evidence of the perceptive abilities of past humans.” However, she added that “further inferential scaffolding [evidence] would strengthen the interpretation of symbolic behavior.”
As a rockhound of sorts when in an area with interesting geology, like central Kentucky with exposed Ordovician limestone, I have found many fossils and geodes. None of the geodes have come close to being as interesting as these, but I do enjoy explaining to my grandchildren that the various Herbetella fossils I have on display are more than 400 million years old. Life is amazing! And biology is the most interesting science because it has a history that matters going back about three billion years (if I do say so myself). My favorite protein has a nearly 2-billion-year evolutionary history and is present in the link between animals and plants. A carbon atom that is 14 billion years old is still only a carbon atom. Apologies to my good friends who are chemists, scientists we cannot do without while we can probably do without my interest in evolutionary biology.
Part the Fifth will have to wait until next week because reasons, when I introduce a new feature that I have contemplated for a while, a mini-book review section. We shall see how that goes…
Thank you for reading. Be safe and don’t doom scroll too much, because that is unhealthy. Do what you can and sleep well. See you next week!
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Re the Moon–apparently they are only doing it because the Chinese said they were going to do it. Similarly the Apollo program was more to beat the Soviets (who didn’t try very hard) than for science to benefit “all mankind.”
So the recent mission was mostly pointless. Let the Chinese do it for a change of pace. Or maybe Musk can raise the Musk flag in the Sea of Tranquility. Wednesday’s Nova program on the mission said the rocket engines (from the shuttle program) and boosters cost 1 billion and will be discarded after one use. According to the show the similar Space X engine costs $500,000.
SpaceX, though, hasn’t gotten Starship to orbit without Rapid Unplanned Disassembly. Some didn’t make it off the pad.
SpaceX is very neat. Musk is perhaps as well acquainted with the truth as our dear leader.
It was touch and go whether the Artemis heat shield would fail and provide dead astronauts at a much costlier rate than Musk’s test shots. Musk has been making it to the space station quite nicely.
That doesn’t make him a good person of course.
I haven’t watched this yet, but I am already a fan of “recovering astrophysicist” Tom Murphy.
The Spaceship We’re Already On with Tom Murphy & DJ White | RR 24
In this episode of The Great Simplification, Nate Hagens discusses the impracticality of space colonization with astrophysicist Tom Murphy and conservationist DJ White.
Techno-Optimism vs. Reality: The guests critique the narrative that mining asteroids or colonizing Mars offers an escape from Earth’s resource constraints, calling these goals economically and physically unfeasible.
Ecological Distraction: They argue that the “space dream” functions as a convenient story that absolves humanity of responsibility for Earth’s collapsing ecosystems.
A Shift in Focus: Murphy and White suggest that the intelligence and resources currently aimed at the stars should be redirected toward preserving the complex, living systems of our home planet.
Tom Murphy: A retired UCSD Physics Professor and author of Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, focused on the ecological incompatibilities of modern society.
DJ White: Co-founder of Greenpeace International and founder of EarthTrust, known for landmark marine conservation victories and research into animal self-awareness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CmnQD3QHeY
I also follow Murphy’s blog. It’s worth adding to one’s reading list, I think.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
“Competition in such things is for stunted men (always men) with no imagination.”
My experience is that women attack each other much more often than men do. Tearing other women down behind their back seems to be a favorite pastime.
Seriously? What year is this? Sixty-four-year-old woman here and I’ve known both men and women who are gossip mongers. I avoid them when I can, and call them out when I know they are making stuff up. Gossip may well skew female, but those I call my friends don’t stoop to it.
I’m pretty sure murder skews male. Which expression of enmity and power tripping would you rather be on the receiving end of?
Thank you for this comment!
I am older than you. Women are viscous. Too many are experts at emotional sadism, passive aggression, and manipulation. And I have seen this in multiple cultures. (US, UK, France, Japan, Australia, and now Thailand). I much prefer dealing with men.
Regarding scientific misconduct, I have a question that commenters from the USA may want to throw some light on.
In Europe, upon leaving an employer every person receives a “work certificate” that states the exact dates of employment and the position(s), succinctly describes the work performed, and provides an evaluation of the employee. This document is a legal requirement: the employer is obliged to issue one. An employer is entitled to ask for the work certificates about the previous jobs of a person applying for a position.
Now regarding this:
“Needless to say, the candidate did not share that information [about leaving because of misconduct] with a potential new employer.”
I do not see how this is possible.
Work certificates are of course not allowed to be disparaging to the employee in any way, nor defamatory, or to violate privacy, but this has led to a whole writing style that communicates unsatisfactory performance, incompetence, or misbehaviour via roundabout formulations, or, importantly, by leaving out some crucial wording.
Want to warn that the employee was prone to sexual harassment, has an “alcohol problem”, or was a hassle for superiors? Yep, there are formulations for all that (involving “ease to establish contacts”, “conviviality”, “tolerant colleague”, and the like). That kind of coded writing is particularly present in Germany and other German-speaking countries.
I do not know what the formulation would be for scientific fraud (I never had to deal with such a problem), but there must be one; an experienced hiring person would immediately notice the issue — besides the obvious question of “you had such a good position, why did you leave it in the middle of a project?”
Doesn’t the practice of work certificates with their sometimes devious formulations exist in the USA?
The system in the US is much less formal. Businesses are required to keep employee records for tax purposes, but not to issue a work certificate like you describe. I general, I believe the only requirement for a company to provide any information about your employment is if you in fact worked there and the dates of employment.
They may choose to provide other information, but my former boss told me explicitly when I asked for a reference after years of glowing performance reviews: “We don’t want any liability coming back at us so all we will acknowledge is that you worked here and for how long. Anything beyond that and we don’t want to get sued.”
The Artemis program is an unfortunate set of bad decisions – wasteful non-reusable rockets like the SLS (a frankbuild reuse of the space shuttle rocket/infrastructure), the weird decision to go back to the Moon on the way to Mars (at least they ditched the space station around the moon), and just a whole lot of sunk-cost fallacy built in to the whole project.
There’s a lot of great science to come from building bases on the Moon, though – and maturing technology for that kind of space exploration. If we can just build a telescope on the moon for one, that will outdo anything a JWST successor can hope to achieve (the main benefit being able to see what our atmosphere blocks) – it’s even possible to build a telescope covering one whole hemisphere of the moon (like the Event Horizon telescope on Earth).
It’s a very poorly designed program, but I think it’s too easy to dismiss the scientific benefits of space exploration – including manned exploration – it’s definitely technology we should make 1: More economical (SpaceX, as bad as Musk is, is achieving this), and 2: Keep well practiced in (and that’s going to mean a certain consistent base level of spending/launches, or skills/abilities rot).
But in a robot age do you need to send humans to do that science? Perhaps in this case humans should definitely be “working from home.”
Plus robots won’t need the smelly toilet.
Having human habitability is a key/essential tech for expanding space exploration. We’re certainly quite near the point where a lot of it can be automated and later (decades) AI can overtake the requirement for human oversight – but we’re not there yet.
Once AI automation becomes advanced enough to be truly autonomous, then what we have to do is plant the seeds for self-sufficient space exploration (an economy in space, with resources derived from space) – which is an enormous (but acheivable) technical bar – and then there will literally be no limit to economic growth (vs the very finite limit on this planet).
I do not believe the bar for kicking off that seed, is so high as to be not worth doing.
I think that building a telescope on the Moon would be an excellent idea. But you can count on Elon Musk suddenly deciding to orbit a coupla thousand Starlink satellites around the Moon which would spoil that telescope’s observations there as well.
For what it is worth. I work in physics, more applied than basic, I guess. Whenever I read articles like this, I am glad I do not work in climate or biomedical fields. We are driven by producing reliable results, mostly because whatever we work on is almost always not a “dead end” in a sense that these results will almost immediately be used in further research, so any mistakes, errors or actual intentional misconduct will be noticed rather quickly and your reputation is going down the drain. I am talking about national labs, but I have many colleagues and friends in academia – it looks similar there, to me, but I can only vouch for physics and chemistry. So, I do not see a problem with misconduct, but this is all of course from my perch. Whenever I read articles like this, I am shaking my head in disbelief, not because I do not believe what is written, but, I guess, because I praise the Lord I do not work in those “hot” fields – things are much calmer in my field, and the pressure to produce ground breaking results is a little less, I guess. The main requirement is that we need to get things right – it is very hard to build something tall if the first a few courses of bricks are shaky.
“As far as I know, the only banker who was convicted of anything after the GFC was the leader of a small community bank in New York”
Not the only one:
Local news outlet Fréttablaðið has calculated that in the past few years the Icelandic judiciary has sentenced 36 bankers to a total of 96 years in prison. All of the criminal cases are linked to the notorious crash of the Icelandic banking system in 2008.
https://grapevine.is/news/2018/02/07/36-bankers-96-years-in-jail/
What exactly is “misconduct” in a scientific pursuit? Is it just fraud (fudging data or diagrams) and undisclosed obvious bias (like being on the payroll of a drug company whose product you claim is beneficial, or maybe not harmful when that’s in dispute)? A lot of what seems to be getting published now are studies where the scientist just throws a bunch of data at the computer with no real hypothesis being tested and takes whatever “statistically significant” correlations show up and publishes the results as if those were being looked for from the start. And since we all jump to the conclusion that there’s a causal link, even after writing “correlation does not equal causation” twenty times on the blackboard, the popular science press repeats the results as something with explanatory value. Is this misconduct? Is it misconduct when finding the meaningless (probably never to be replicated) correlations being bandied about involved the torture and death of hundreds of laboratory animals? Does anyone care?
Thank you! Yes, many people care, Lefty. I am currently working on a post that once again addresses what is wrong with current science and what might be done about it.
Wow, so much lunasnark it’s hard to know where to begin.
Well first, Scientific American? Srsly? I haven’t considered SA to be authoritative since the 1990s. Against my better judgment I clicked the link, and it’s as bad, if not worse, than I expected. I had to nope out when the MC said they preferred their space fictional. So what the F are you doing leading a panel about a scientific mission in a “scientific” journal, FFS?
“If the purpose of space exploration is to understand the Universe outside of planet Earth…”. Strawman much? That If is carrying a lot of baggage there. What if the purpose of space exploration is to make the resources of the Universe available for the benefit of humanity? How ’bout them apples? Humanity could vastly improve its lot by tapping the energy and resources of the Solar System. We need but reach out and grasp what we’ve already touched.
Not a popular opinion to those who would have humanity trapped on this rock so that we can fight increasingly viciously for the increasingly marginal stocks of resources and energy here on Terra. That path can only lead to more warlordism and tyranny as Earth’s cornucopia is subjugated by Man.
By contrast, it had been noted that there are 2.5 Earth’s worth of resources in the Solar System (some UN report from a while back, probably from OOSA). We know that the Moon contains myriad resources, from oxygen (~45% by mass), REEs (typically associated with the mare regions [basically the Lanthanides have sufficiently large electron clouds that they don’t fit well in crystalline structures and so tend to get shunted aside during solidification crystallization of the material it’s in, in this case the lunar magma that was later extruded into various crater basins, and so is laced through mare materials]), thorium (ditto), silicate materials (useful for solar cells), metals like aluminum and titanium (useful for building structures), vacuum (useful for many industrial processes), cold traps at the poles (with temps hovering around 40K from what I’ve seen, and you just have to dig a hole to make a cold trap), peaks of eternal light at the poles, which will a prime piece of real estate for power towers (of far greater height than could be achieved on Earth for the same amount of materials, and then you put parabolic mirrors on the top to focus sunlight and you’ve got a 10,000+ degree (C? F? does it matter?) furnace available for use), SWIEs (where the He-3 bagatelle may be found), and so much more.
Heck, you could ship bags of raw regolith back to Earth and you would absolutely 100% have a buyer, maybe a Japanese garden afficianado who wants a Lunar Garden, maybe a farmer who wants the trace elements in the regolith for his crops, maybe an artist who has a project in mind.
And in spite of what I just said, space development advocates are not talking about mining the Moon to bring stuff back to Earth. Anyone who says otherwise to you is lying to you. The point of tapping lunar resources is to provide materials to build out infrastructure in cislunar space and pave the groundwork for further expansion outward to start tapping the asteroids (which is when we’re actually going to start shipping stuff back to Earth) SO THAT WE DON’T HAVE TO LAUNCH EVERYTHING FROM EARTH! You think space advocates aren’t aware of what a rocket launch entails? You think space advocates don’t love their planet and want it to be better?
The author is five exits past ridiculous, and might want to do some homework.
Thank you for letting me vent. FWIW I am not a disinterested party, having been a youth delegate to the UN’s UNISPACE III Conference, have a Master of Space Studies from ISU, served in various capacities in the National Space Society including co-chair of the 2007 ISDC, worked at the NASA Academy at GSFC, created the annual Moon Day event in Dallas, even experienced lunar gravity on a Zero-G flight. Mine is not an unconsidered position.
Ken, you clearly know your stuff.
Question, why are NASA and others looking to put a base on the moon not considering using the regolith as a thermal wadi, heating it via parabolic mirrors. The Moon’s vacuum and 14 day extreme heat to 14 day extreme cold creates a perfect thermodynamic possibility. The stored heat in the thermal wadi could be either used as the power source of a Stirling engine or other heat exchanger.
This would be safer, cheaper than fusion being proposed ?
One thing to remember is that NASA doesn’t really want to go to the Moon, they want to go to Mars. And NASA has a very…particular way of doing things.
I do remember the idea of thermal wadis being presented at a LEAG Conference years ago as a way of protecting equipment during the bitter lunar nights. My guess is that NASA is focusing on the South Pole, which is a much more ‘benign’ thermal environment with much more consistent and de minimis swings than the multi-hundred degree temperature swings of the normal day/night lunar cycle. For those areas where it is a consideration, folks have been looking for lava tubes to set up shop, which would again have a very consistent thermal environment. Bitterly cold, but consistent and therefore adjustable by humans.
If I had to form a hypothesis in answer to your question, it would be that thermal wadis would be considered kind of a niche application and tool, while a nuclear powerplant offers much more in the way of operational flexibility, and would be considered more of a priority in planning.
Many thanks, much appreciated explination.
I thought the idea of crushing regolith for it 10×50 times increase in value, and at the same time produce a stable byproduct for dust free roads or building material would have been value enough.
Thank you for your comment, Ken Murphy. And on behalf of the moderators, you’re welcome.
Until this evening I was unaware of the National Space Society. I look forward to your detailed article (Scientific American will do) explaining how mining asteroids and hollowing then out to build homes inside will really work. Good luck!
I have considered a follow-up article to my seminal Cislunar Econosphere article over at The Space Review, but there is no way I would write something for Scientific American. As I noted, I haven’t seen them as an authoritative source since the 1990s. Were I to write something it would be at Nature level, at least. But I’m not paid to sit in a lab and cogitate about this stuff, and I really don’t want to give the Chinese more free ice cream.
Don’t really have much to say regarding asteroids, as I’m focused on the Moon. Although once we get settled into Ceres I’ll bet it’d be a really cool place to visit.