Snacking on Monday Sky Candy

As I threatened suggested Friday, I'm going to try a little Sky Candy teaser today. It's going to be a big day for a lot of things.

First of all, with a little luck, Starship will make its 11th test flight today at 6:15 p.m. Central Time.

Despite lights from the pad, I was able to capture the Milky way behind Starship on its last night on Earth

I strongly believe it is our destiny to explore the stars. pic.twitter.com/0ULRuRVdqM

— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) October 13, 2025

This is a very nice picture from orbit. Until we were getting these pictures from above, we didn't really know how many impact features — read "craters" — there really were on Earth. We grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood.

Orbiting 400 kilometres above Quebec, Canada, planet Earth, the International Space Station Expedition 59 crew captured this snapshot of the broad St. Lawrence River and curiously circular Lake Manicouagan on April 11, 2019. Right of centre, the ring-shaped lake is a modern… pic.twitter.com/bfWUPI8l9j

— Astronomy Picture of the Day (@apod) October 13, 2025

This is real.

One of my favorite NASA's Cassini shots pic.twitter.com/RJxc8GQMXy

— Curiosity (@MAstronomers) October 12, 2025

NGC 1512 is a barred spiral galaxy about 38 million light-years away in the Horologium constellation. It displays a double ring structure: a nuclear ring around the center and an inner ring in the main disk. The galaxy has an extended UV disk with at least 200 recent star-forming… pic.twitter.com/riZvbMMQtU

— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) October 11, 2025

Anyone who reads my regular Sky Candy column knows I'm very much an Elon Musk fan. He talks in this clip about what motivates him.

Elon Musk @elonmusk shows how his companies work for the benefit of humanity:

"SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company are philanthropy. If you say philanthropy is love of humanity, they are philanthropy.

Tesla is accelerating sustainable energy; this is philanthropy.… pic.twitter.com/vsJNYhEHZR

— Colene Copeland-Kruszynski👾 (@aerocopz) October 11, 2025

I think this is an essential point to understand: what Musk and many other entrepreneurs do makes life better for everyone. Whether you agree with Musk that solar power is the real solution to energy problems — I have my doubts — Musk is working hard to make it possible to use electricity to do many of the things we do with fossil fuels now. The fuss about CO2 in the atmosphere, along with sea-level rise, acidification, and all the other supposed consequences, may or may not be realistic, but what Musk is doing is trying to find a solution to the problem, rather than holding a gun to the heads of people to make them give up gasoline cars. He built Starlink to bring the internet to everyone, all over the world. What that means is that a lot of people will have access to education, news, and porn entertainment who wouldn't have it otherwise.

The Boring Company (you have to love the humor in Musk's company names) will make it possible to build new roads and new transportation systems. Combine tunnels for traffic, and self-driving cars, and in place of "mass transit" that is at best frustrating and often crowded, inconvenient, and unsafe, we could have a system where we call for a car, and the car drives us where we want to go, with freeways that don't take up land that could be used for other things.

In fifty years, we will take a rocket from Denver to Singapore in 45 minutes. 

And Musk is making a mint doing it. He's not asking for tax money; he's providing things people want. In the meantime, he's using that to establish human colonies off Earth, with the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species. 

And there are lots of planets.

NEWS🚨: NASA Has officially Discovered 6,000 Exoplanets — Planets Beyond Our Solar System. pic.twitter.com/CPk7wEfCAH

— All day Astronomy (@forallcurious) September 19, 2025

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