Numlock News: April 29, 2025 • Rockets, Bayesian, Thighs

Apr 29, 2025

It’s Not Rocket Science

One of the most difficult and thorny questions in rocketry these days is “How do we pay less money for rockets?” Despite advancements like reusable rockets and a commercial launch industry that is more vibrant than ever before, rocket launches still cost more than they used to. A new study finds that, even after adjusting for inflation, the prices that NASA is paying for launch services increased at an average rate of 2.82 percent annually from 1996 to 2024. Even with the emergence of SpaceX, there’s no evidence that NASA is actually spending less money. Analysts think that the cost of a Falcon 9 launch is probably around $20 million per launch for SpaceX, but the company increased the price of a dedicated Falcon 9 launch from $62 million a few years ago to $70 million today. NASA and the military do pay more for launches than commercial customers — they get first bite at the apple and other priority services as a result — and they do tend to require other rockets, like the Falcon Heavy.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Bayesian

The Bayesian, a superyacht that sank off the coast of Sicily last year due to unknown causes, will be lifted out of the water by a salvage team next month. It’s currently lying on its right side at a depth of 50 meters off the coast of Porticello, which is near Palermo. A ship carrying a mega crane has already left Rotterdam. Once the ship reaches the wreck, it will first extract the Bayesian’s 72-meter mast from the water. Eventually, the 55.9-meter yacht itself, which weighs 534 tons, will also be pulled from the water. Right now, three crew members are under investigation for the Bayesian’s sinking, and given the lack of definitive evidence to assess the prior probability of their guilt, prosecutors hope to gain new evidence by surfacing the ship and analyzing the nature of the damage, information that will then allow them to produce an updated posterior probability of their guilt. Perhaps one day, someone will figure out a theorem about this.

Wladimir Pantaleone, Reuters

Flood of Blood, Glut of Guts

Horror movies have been the most reliable way to get audiences into cinemas, given the devoted fandom of the genre. That said, studios may have gone a bit overboard trying to ride that trend this year, as there may simply be a saturation of the genre at the box office. There are 29 horror films slated for wide release in 2025 (well above the 22 horror movies released wide in 2024), and four distributors — Universal, Neon, Sony and Warner Bros — hiked their output from 12 horror flicks in 2024 to 23 movies in 2025. In an appropriate twist, a sick and twisted maniac has forced these 29 contenders into vicious and deadly competition against one another, and not all of them are going to make it. Many will be forced to cannibalize the box office of their peers, given that there are only 52 weeks in a year and only so many weeks to go around.

Kaare Eriksen, VIP+

Games

The trade war with China has forced many companies to get contemplative about what they are truly selling, and none more so than the tabletop roleplaying game business. Ostensibly, the industry is selling games, which are tariffed at a rate of 145 percent when coming from China, where most are made. That said, many TTRPGs are sold in the form of game books — essentially instruction manuals for how to play — and books are not tariffed. This has required legal assessment in the past: while 1989 and 1991 rulings held that RPGs were games, a 2024 ruling from the U.S. Customs Service ruled that RPG books should be classified as books, provided they’re imported separately, while the rest of the materials (dice, maps, etc) are not covered and are games. That said, the status of RPG books may change in the future, and all this has prompted a suit from other affected publishers, including Stonemaier Games, to challenge the authority of the president to impose tariffs.

Scott Thorn, ICV2 and Milton Griepp, ICV2

Thighs

Word got out about chicken thighs being a more flavorful and cheaper part of the bird, and now thighs and breasts are often comparable in grocery stores. After decades of optimizing this animal to produce large muscles of white meat, it’s thigh time. While sales of chicken breast by volume are up 3.9 percent in the past three years, sales of thighs are up 15.9 percent over the same period. Beyond taste, the new accessibility of boneless, skinless chicken thighs is actually a more recent innovation; it was only in the 2000s that the industry made automated ways of processing thighs, with the Baader 632 Thigh Filleting System able to process 230 thighs per minute.

Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic

MTA

The New York City Subway system is piloting a plan to overhaul the subway’s antiquated turnstile system, which the agency tends to blame for lots of fare evasion. Turnstiles at this point are the archaic middle ground between the systems in place in high-trust societies (honor system, with in-train enforcement) and those gated platforms with more significant impediments to fare-hopping. At this point, New York’s just going with the latter, using gates that swing open to allow a traveler through. The pilot plan will install modern gating systems at 20 stations, and then another 20 by the end of 2026, with the 5-year capital plan eventually earmarking $1.1 billion to overhaul fare gates at 150 stations. It’s pricey, but the MTA says that it loses $700 million a year to fare evasion, so the new system is potentially worth it. This method of improving transit — or at least bringing the system up to the baseline level of performance acceptable in other rich countries — is great because with the World Cup coming to New York I have been dreading what happens when Europe and Asia find out how our train-centric metropolis has been managing, and specifically am trying to figure out how to explain the very existence of Secaucus to, say, a German person.

Ramsey Khalifeh, Gothamist

Industrial Geology

A new paper published in Geology found that industrial debris is becoming rocks even faster than expected. The study analyzed a two-kilometer stretch of slag deposits at Derwent Howe in Scotland, which was the site of massive iron and steel foundries. Over the course of their operation, the foundries saw 27 million cubic meters of furnace slag dumped. Those deposits of industrial waste have formed cliffs that are now being eroded by waves and tides. A detailed examination found that due to the high levels of reactive calcium, iron, magnesium and manganese, the seawater and air have begun to make accelerated rock formations. It is creating natural cements like calcite, goethite and brucite, and forming sedimentary rocks in as little as 35 years.

University of Glasgow

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