
Lee Billings
Senior Editor, Space and Physics at Scientific American
Senior editor at @sciam. Author of Five Billion Years of Solitude, re: the search for Earth-like exoplanets. Opinions my own. Signal: @lee_billings.81
Articles
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3 weeks ago |
scientificamerican.com | Lee Billings
For several hours yesterday, an explosively escalating social media confrontation between arguably the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and the world’s most powerful, President Donald Trump, shook U.S. spaceflight to its core. The pair had been bosom-buddy allies ever since Musk’s fateful endorsement of Trump last July—an event that helped propel Trump to an electoral victory and his second presidential term.
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1 month ago |
yahoo.com | Lee Billings
During a briefing from the Oval Office this week, President Donald Trump revealed his administration’s plan for “Golden Dome”—an ambitious high-tech system meant to shield the U.S. from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile attacks launched by foreign adversaries. Flanked by senior officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the project’s newly selected leader, Gen.
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1 month ago |
scientificamerican.com | Lee Billings
A defunct spacecraft from the former Soviet Union that has been stuck in space for more than half a century is, at last, about to come home. Kosmos-482 was launched on a voyage to Venus in March 1972 as part of the Soviet multimission Venera program. Thanks to a rocket malfunction, however, it never escaped Earth orbit.
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1 month ago |
scientificamerican.com | Leonard David |Lee Billings
For more than four years, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been on the prowl within Jezero Crater, a site on the Red Planet that eons ago harbored a sprawling river delta, a large, deep lake and—just maybe—ancient Martian life. Since its touchdown in February 2021, the car-sized, nuclear-powered robot has traveled far and wide across this otherworldly terrain, dutifully gathering samples of rock and soil.
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2 months ago |
scientificamerican.com | Gayoung Lee |Lee Billings
The allure of quantum computers is, at its heart, quite simple: by leveraging counterintuitive quantum effects, they could perform computational feats utterly impossible for any classical computer. But reality is more complex: to date, most claims of quantum “advantage”—an achievement by a quantum computer that a regular machine can’t match—have struggled to show they truly exceed classical capabilities.
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RT @SpcPlcyOnline: Very useful charts illustrating the magnitude of the cuts at NASA from Casey Dreier at The Planetary Society.

RT @DrChrisCombs: Voyager launched in 1977 and still managed to outlive its Twitter account

RT @nadiamdrake: "You’re punching a generation-size hole, maybe a multigenerational hole, in the scientific and technical workforce. You do…